That's right, Maedhros says. If you don't go to the Halls of Mandos Melkor can get you, but he can't give you a body - and not en masse, not remotely, even if he's found a way around that - they are, for whatever it's worth, probably not alive at all -

Zombie orcs. Grand. Catch some to study them or just cut them all down and burn the bodies this time as long as we've got a smoke diversion system underway?

A few to study would be very interesting but I assume he can still see through their eyes.

I never actually bothered to take the darkness off said eyes...

In that case, sure, bring a few. This city does not have prison cells. His tone is a bit clipped. Silly oversight, I'd say, but it wasn't.

He comes out to meet her. The orcs don't answer questions, but could have been ordered not to do that.

She makes herself a little ice cube to rinse the smoke taste out of her mouth. Let me know when you're done.

You going in?

Do you need me here for something? Are they going to morph into something worse than zombie orcs? I'll come kill them when there's nothing more to be learned but I don't have any avenues of research of my own here.

We do not require you for anything, no.

So she goes in and waits to be told they're done with the captured zombie orcs.

And a while later - We're nearly certain that they're not sentient. Just being moved externally. You don't have to come kill them if you'd prefer not to; we can do it.

We also have fire songs, you know, he says. You do not have to bear personal responsibility for this.

I have the easy prepackaged version. Besides, I want my string back. She dispatches the zombie orcs. They burn. She collects her string.

Destroying all the orcs takes longer than killing them did.

If the smoke doesn't stop, Maedhros says to her a few weeks later, we are going to have a food shortage. We've cut all the Elves to quarter-rations, which will mean it takes longer to be acute.

And turning it invisible won't help because the real light won't actually hit the plants. Ugh. I can try putting more whirlwinds around but this might already be pushing it. Is there a 'light song'?

In the works. Maglor may make song development seem effortless but it actually takes several decades ordinarily, and we didn't exactly have any need for anything that'd be a building block of a light song in Valinor.

No one will actually starve to death while I'm here. I can heal a lot of people if they can line up and walk by. I can probably even multitask it. But it's hardly ideal.

How far out is larger cargo loads?

I was coming at the problem from a better-final-result, fewer-interim-milestones perspective. At this point switching tracks on that probably wouldn't even gain me time. At least four years, maybe more, but then to about the same scope as I can illusion things I'll be able to move them around, and people too, although I could not teleport this entire city to another continent without some injury to the plumbing et al.

All right. We'll import food. Thank you.