"It's a long story. He did a good job, though. I do not know if he personally tortured anybody, I just felt like it would be incomplete to say I didn't work with any torturers without mentioning it."

"I don't work with any torturers."

"Oh good."

"You are both noninheriting princesses of isolationist force-field-surrounded nations! Isn't that a fun coincidence?"

"Where are you from?"

"My homeland is called Wakanda."

"This is Doriath. You're not allowed to come in because my mother will worry."

"Her mom is the deity parent, the other one is an Elf," Loki supplies.

"You are the first Elf I have met who isn't a computer."

"Elves aren't computers."

"Loki's friend is. A gloomy computer."

"We're running a swiped Angband upload for intel. He's sane as they go, his people rummaged."

"That doesn't sound terribly healthy for anyone involved."

"Oh, it's really not, but he can worry about that when the war's over."

"That'll be the day."

"There's actually a prospect on the horizon - alternate universe has some superweapons. The bad news is, a bad guy has them right now."

"Oh?"

"There's a set of six. He collected them all and then decided that the thing to do with them was kill half the population - this is far away, which is why you won't have noticed any effect here. We're working on a plan to get them away from him, and could use them against Melkor likelier than not if we managed it."

"Huh. That sounds like a better plan than anyone else has had."

"I think it'll work!"

"That'd be something. Then my mother probably wouldn't worry about letting people visit."

"Maybe! Do you wanna help?"

"Um. How would I do that? I can't do the forcefield thing, that's just my mom."

"I'm operating on fairly thin information but - do you by any chance have some sort of ability or thing of some kind that would let you put Ainur to sleep?"

"...where are you getting your information?"