"Then we will do both of those things."

...Edie starts talking in a demon language.

"Helps explain the security shifts. If usually no or very little time passes in there one person who can take daeva can sit a shift through some very long-term resident daeva."

"We talked to the guy who can take daeva in case he could help with our Melkor. His magic's limited to his dimension, and he doesn't have anything for verifying information so even if we bring him Melkor he is understandably reluctant to murder him."

(Fëanáro starts echoing Edie and rephrasing sentences and asking questions.)

(Cam switches helpfully to the demon language.) "Inconvenient."

"We'll come up with something. He also wasn't sure he could actually injure daeva, just temporarily stop them from making things that'd inconvenience him in his vicinity."

"If it comes up I made the bluer of my extremities without nerves in the attaching joints and don't mind being a test subject, but it sounds like that's not necessarily the bottleneck."

"Not yet, at least. Do one of the two of you want to make me a bunch of sailboats, I was entirely serious about dragging all twenty of them out to the lake for a regatta - two months - that wasn't even enough food for two months -"

"D'you have a sailboat design in mind?"

So he goes back to the starship-design project they'd abandoned in a corner and pulls up a whole fleet of sailboats - "if cost of materials is no object I can totally make ones faster than this, though -" and he starts fiddling - "here. Thanks."

"No problem." Cam goes and makes a fleet of sailboats in the lake.

And he goes and drags the rest of his father and his brothers' forks out of the room and did any of you even have a change of clothes did it occur to you that there were helpful daeva right downstairs and then out to the lake for a regatta.

"Are either of you participating?"

"Don't know how to sail," Cam says.

Well, that's not "I am performing miserable self-abnegation for the next indefinite period of time because my war sucked so much" so he's going to beam at Cam like it's a brilliant answer. "Edie?"

"I don't know how to sail either but I'd love to learn!"

"Bet you can cheat by creating air, so you'll be able to keep up once you've gotten the barest of a handle on it." And he starts explaining.

Eidetic memory is so convenient! She will cheat just enough to make up for the delay caused by inexperience and even then only because she has implicit permission.

Sailing faster is more fun and it's not like who wins is the point, the point is three of his father's sailboats piling up because they can't stop distractedly practicing the language and one of them getting pitched into the lake and Curufinwë reluctantly indulging a competitive streak he'd quashed as childish centuries ago and teasing them all about the fact they've been for convenience calling each other 'zero' through 'nine' - "what kind of linguists are you" -

- and letting the boats spiral lazily around the lake while everyone eats treats he remembers from Tirion and lets their clothes dry on the shore...

"No nudity taboo?"

Cam eavesdrops a little on the sailing lesson but doesn't wind up sailing.

He flies, though.

"No, sorry, are we bothering you? You can conjure me clothes if you want me to wear clothes, I am too lazy to go get mine right now..."

"You are incredibly hot and I come from a culture where nudity is almost always meaningful so you'd have every right to feel--taken advantage of--by my looking at you naked but if you don't care I'm not going to object."

"I am feeling so terribly taken advantage of, help, a girl thinks I'm pretty."

"I--I mean--I don't know if you have an equivalent, but, um--it would at the very least have been wrong and creepy not to let you know that nudity is almost always. Sexual. In my culture." She's blushing so hard.

"Hair! We have that around hair! Wearing my hair loose around you would be terribly inappropriate. But it's all nice and braided so you are entirely welcome to get adorably flustered - or, like I said, to put clothes on me if you want me to be wearing clothes..."