"All right, they purchased one. Someone will fly it out to us."

"Mkay." She has her computer handy; she updates the letter to Cam.

Eventually a little drone flies them a funny little headset thing. The Elf retrieves it and hands it to Loki.

"Thank you." She pops it on and sound-baffles herself so Rando Elf doesn't hear.

Rando Elf is heading back in. 

"Hello," says another Elf on the Dwarf phone. "Who's speaking, please?"

"Larya, is that you? Hi! My name is Loki."

" - hello. I don't think I know a Loki."

"Oh, you and I have never met. Where do you want me to start?"

"What do you want, how can you help us, you do realize how much you're unnerving people, don't you -"

"Yeah, I'd be doing this differently if I had all my resources at the moment but I don't and can't finely predict when I'll get them. So. One of the resources I currently don't have is a magic rock from another universe - be very careful with the 'other universe' fact, if Melkor finds out about it he can probably learn to dimension hop and Sauron might be able to do it on his own too. Universes can be next to each other or not next to each other. Most ways of getting from one universe to another only work between universes that are adjacent. I had an accident which flung me at least two steps away from where I was, which means it will take a while for my people to find me but they could at any time. Follow me so far?"

" - yes."

"So, I was flung into one of this universe's neighbors. They are currently having a problem with a maniac who acquired a full set of six magic rocks and used them to murder half of the population of the universe, some trillions of people. A precognitively vetted plan to make that not have happened with timefuckery probably is in progress and might want reinforcements, so I decided to see if a world I had previous experience with and knew how to find friendlies in might be adjacent. There's lots of Ardas. Does that put some of my behavior into better context -"

"I think I'm following. Does our universe have trillions of people?"

"No. Well, uh, it has however many people are on servers at the moment, I guess that could be trillions, and Ardas vary, but we have never encountered an Arda that came with aliens running around that you wouldn't know about at this point in time."

"That's good, at least. What affects the wait time until you can help us?"

"We're waiting on two things, whichever comes first will let me kill Melkor. One of them is one of the set of rocks the maniac has. My universe has a similar set of magic rocks - sometimes things are similar world to world on a smaller scale than 'the entire place is an Arda' - and I can use my instance of one of them to kill Melkors within one step of my home world, no problem. Ability to use infinity stones, that being this kind of magic rock, depends on the rocks liking you - an infinity stone is an inanimate object in sort of the same way Huan is a dog, if that makes sense - and this one doesn't know me yet but I convinced it to talk to me and it told me to do something interesting. If it decides I'm interesting enough, and I'm hoping 'go to an Arda' is interesting because the first time I went to an Arda it was because mine sent me there, I should be able to use it like the one at home and I currently expect it to have a similar scope of power.

"Second thing is my various alternate universe versions and various Ardasfull of Elves and so on, who collectively form a multiversal organization. I have an alt who can portably destroy Melkors; he'll have to come here, so it waits till they've found a path from the known map to this world, but after that he can bang it out in a few hours."

"All right. Can we assist with either of those?"

"Second thing not at all unless something more time sensitive than I expect is in progress here right now and I should tell them they need to throw more resources at finding me ASAP. First thing potentially, I can put you into contact with my native guides in the universe with the maniac and you can talk sending some help. A regular Elf isn't much versus the heavy-hitters in play there but Huan could be if he's handy, I don't actually know how good their FTL is and a lightleaper might beat it - uh, if you, still have any, I don't actually... know... maybe you don't... anyway, that kind of thing."

"It would not surprise me if Huan was interested in fighting some other evil being. ...there is one lightleaper. We were relying on it for evacuating some survivors if that became necessary, but if you can teleport other people then perhaps we'd no longer be so reliant on it."

"Yeah, I can teleport people. Unfortunately I don't already know a good habitable planet to expect to exist nearby, so I can't just pick up all your civilians and drop them somewhere, although if you've got one scouted and can show me a picture..."

"We're not ready to tell you where all the civilians are but we'll keep in mind that that's an option."

"Sure thing."

"You can take a copy of Lord Maedhros to your allies in the next dimension over, if you care to, and we'll discuss the situation and get a sense of how it makes sense to involve Huan."

"Copy of - uh-huh. That makes sense."

" - I am somewhat confused about what you're familiar with about our world and what you aren't."