Loki doesn't need to commit this one to strictly physical medium; she jots out an illusion letter in Quenya on the hard drive itself in little letters. She drops it in the field and comes right back.

"Do you know people in charge of countries or planets back in your universe, are they gonna mostly be the same people?"

"A few ambassadors, and they might, but they might know my local whatever the fuck he is."

"Yeah, they might. Also pretty busy running around keeping their societies from collapsing. I figure we should use the firepower of more than two planets for this, but I don't know who we'd talk to about getting anyone else on board, and we can't leak it."

He isn't running around keeping his society from collapsing. He could. He'd be pretty useful in New York right now, clearing the streets of abandoned cars and putting out fires and, well, boosting morale.

But it doesn't matter. It's never going to have happened anyway.

And it would suck. 

"What does Elf on the shelf need to get up to speed with English?"

She looks at the Elf on the shelf. "Can I basically model you as a regular you on this one or does being uploaded help? Would being fed an electronic dictionary help?"

"On this hardware I don't have significantly more attentional capacity than I had when I had a body. I could make a great deal of use of an English-Quenya dictionary."

"We have those but I didn't bring them with me, this was an unplanned excursion, but I'm sure they have all-English dictionaries, all-English text corpuses..."

"I will see what I can do with those. Thank you."

"My pleasure. Shuri, you're our hostess, what have you got in the form of English for him, dictionary and corpus and so on, so nobody has to stand around correcting his grammar for quite that long -"

"I can give him books for English-language learners?"

"...if they're starting-language-neutral somehow, sure, load him up." She translates the suggestion for Maedhros.

He finds it unobjectionable. And spends about ten seconds thinking it over, before saying hesitantly in English, "what a human language."

"Okay, that's cool. How does one get in on the brain-on-a-computer, if they happened to be interested?"

"Elves are computers. Humans aren't."

"Not yet we aren't."

"Feel free to work on it but the chips were designed by an omniscient creator deity and nobody's gotten them working on anybody who doesn't develop them in utero yet. There's lots of nice upgrades available on wetware, you just have to use more magic."

"You made it sound like all the other Earths were missing both me and Wakanda, though. So - who does that even leave to work on it?"

"I dunno, whoever invented the chiplocked computer? Different kind of chip. I think it was a demon. I wish I had mine, those are great."

"Demons?"

"Demons are a species with principally cosmetic relation to the religious concept of the same name. One of me is a demon, and also my boyfriend because we're narcissistic like that, and he's the one who's been conjuring my letters; demons can create arbitrary material objects. This has the obvious infosec problems, so a demon invented a little brain implant that can encode information with the way your brain works while you brain-computer-interface the information onto your device, and to let you access the encoded information checks that your brain continues to work that way many times a second. The information is never recorded unencoded, the encryption is breakable only by you operating your brain as the chip is trained to understand it. Demon-proof crypto."

"Clever!"

"So is the 'running out of finite resources' thing just completely false in your universe."

"Oh, yes, absolutely. There exist finite resources? Like, 'one wish per person' and 'we don't have that many subtle artists and can't overprioritize them in the Materia evacuation but we're trying to see if we can convince any of them to donate gametes to Amentans' and 'if too many precogs are doing things at the same time they bump into each other and don't work any more' and stuff. But space and matter, those we have."

"If you'd showed up an hour earlier maybe you could have taken Barney out for coffee and a lecture about demons."

"Barney?"