"If it doesn't bring presents from Santa I don't think it really counts as an Elf. Last time I ran a baby computer program hoping it'd be a good guy it wasn't. Shuri, do you know -"

"I can set up hardware that's isolated but if we're accumulating allies we're likely to at some point give it more resources, we shouldn't do that at all if we think it's dangerous."

"I am reasonably sure this isn't the evil kind, and if he was the evil kind it wouldn't be in an existential threat way. He's not actually here to help directly, though, you don't really have to network him, he's here because he knows all his people and can tell you about what reinforcements they can offer."

"They don't have anyone who comes with a robot body?"

"I'm assuming he's been solely software for a few hundred years now."

"Okay. We can set up the Elf. I hear you're trying to convince the space rock that you're awesome?"

"Yes."

"What kinda stuff does the space rock think is awesome?"

"Well, last time it sent me to an Elf world and I was stuck there having a war with their evil god till I invented a teleportation spell but that took a really long time and I'm hoping that having already invented the spell gets me some points and I can just be myself for a few weeks for the rest of it."

"Still don't feel like I know what thing might happen that has the stone over here going 'that was awesome'."

"I'm not going to do anything reckless or stupid; if this stone likes those things this isn't gonna work out anyway. But I don't know exactly what about my previous adventures interested my Tesseract so I can't tell you precisely how I mean to woo it, I'm just going to be myself slightly more emphatically than I might if my stylistic tells weren't likely to help in and of themselves."

"All right, works for me. So Fury's stuff is all encrypted, but encryption works on some assumptions about how fast computers can cross their zeros and dot their ones, and it turns out Earth is in the galactic boondocks doing all our computing on a Windows box from the nineties. If we borrow some fancy stuff from our spacefaring neighbors then Fury's stuff will soon be unencrypted. That does not take a genius, let alone two geniuses, so the mystery engineering problem that is the reason I'm alive is still a mystery, but it seems to be step one."

"Okay, you want to ask locals or see if Elves can do it?"

"I guess the Elves have the advantage that they're not all having a Very Bad Day today."

"They've been having a very bad day for three hundred years, this one's still mid-war-with-evil-god, but they'll require slightly less explanation to run errands now that I've already introduced the situation. If you can wake up Maedhros he'll be able to tell me who to go to."

"Working on it. How does he want to interface with us, does he want a screen -"

"I don't know, a screen's a reasonable bet."

She hums to herself and alters things on her holographic viewscreens.

Loki updates her letter again.

And eventually Shuri says, "all right, one Elf, no internet access -"

"He gonna speak English?"

"No, but Elves are really really good at languages, especially his family, and I can translate - or, hm - where's Thor -"

"Out looking for Asgardian survivors of this afternoon."

"Any chance you have a picture of where he'd be doing that? Maybe somebody brought an Allspeak wand."

"Don't think so, sorry."