"Let's drag the geniuses downstairs and teach 'em some more language and make them get fresh air and request appropriate science textbooks."

"Good idea." 

It takes a fair bit of dragging, despite the fact they admit it's been more than subjectively-two-weeks.

Oooof course.

Hey, at least science textbooks, right?

Can they have textbooks explaining the FTL engine from every civilization that's developed it, can they have math textbooks containing proofs P != NP, can they have biology textbooks that assume good protein assembly methods, that seems like a good start.

They want only non-magical FTL engines, right? ...Some of these places have different physics and Bar cannot evaluate actual physics only published discoveries about physics. She's similarly unqualified to evaluate any of her proofs of and of not P≠NP. Biology's even more of a crapshoot than physics, although Bar has slightly more domain knowledge what with having to be able to feed all these people.

Yes, only non-magical solutions there, they can't assume they'll have access to magic systems more useful than the local one. She doesn't need to evaluate the books, they can do that.

........no they can't just narrow them down themselves that's not going to work.

They do not understand how many books she has.

She has all the books.

They have all the time. Do they need a hundred of each of them.

"See," he says to Edie, "now's an instance of a thing we want a Maitimo for."

To convince them not to do that?

Yeah, I'm not going to get anywhere.

Yeah, okay.

She sticks her head out the door again. Maitimo? I need you to come convince your dad not to make inadvisable life choices.

He's there a minute later. What unadvisable life choices - where are we -

She hands him the explanatory napkins.

"...okay. Your majesties," he says to the assortment of his father at the bar, "we seem to be all set if this is amenable to brute force and rather poorly equipped if it's not, and getting better at brute force will save us time but I don't think it increases our odds of success and it introduces quite the set of coordination problems - I trust ten of you not to miss something one of you would have noticed, but a hundred - 

- we have tools other than making copies of you at our disposal, let's use them to figure out how to get the books you actually want -"

"Do you have suggestions?"

"Of course not, I just arrived here and need a while to even process what's going on. All I have is confidence in you and a long list of mistakes learned from in personnel management -"

"Worlds whose reported physics are consistent with our own," says a Fëanor -

" - and who have published work on all of some fifteen topics that are still exploratory in our world, if that constraint's too narrow we can relax it -"

And Maitimo, relaxing slightly, looks around the room and takes in Edie and Tyelcormo and Cam and - "okay, now may I have a more complete explanation?"

"So I arrived here, was briefly confused, and got that stack of napkins. Then Cam" she gestures at him, "came in. He's from my Hell but was summoned by accident in a world similar to yours except that the Valar and Maiar were weird magic things and they didn't naively have summoning and there are humans on Endore instead of having a separate Earth and he only showed up after Alqualonde. And from him I learned that his Melkor had been uploading people to torture them at a significantly accelerated subjective time. And checked to see if ours was doing that. He is."

"Fuck."

"So now we're staying in Milliways until we have a way to take care of him once and for all with brief resumptions-of-objective-time solely to import people who are likely to be helpful."

"Even assuming my fathers develop something completely perfect we're mid-leap, we will likely have to wait out a couple more days anyway. I guess you could write your alt and give her instructions on what to do, if it can be done from Endorë, so we don't lose that time..."

"The other major resource Milliways offers besides stopped time and All Of The Books is access to inhabitants of other universes some of which have other kinds of magic."

"Well. That's tremendous. There might not be a way to destroy daeva within physics, but maybe it can be done with outright magic..."