For now...we're continuing with what we're doing but nothing looks like a very final win condition. "Forgotten god out of the Abyss can help and wants to" is basically the length of the long shot here.

Noted.

So when she goes back to the Nolofinweans, she can report that they definitely were doing the bootstrap plan but don't have many serious prospects of an actual win any time soon.

Did they give an estimate -

Too much depends on the inside of the Abyss, which no one knows. So the best guess is more just based on things like the fact that practitioners who deal with the Abyss exist, aren't even necessarily limited to a human lifespan because information gets inherited, and I've never heard of this happening.

So, not good. What about prospects for recovering the Silmarils -

Also not good. More doable, but they think the single one would only buy time. And time's not on our side.

How much can you actually decipher without any translation to work from - 

Your cousins did it while reading over our shoulders. Which I'm still surprised was even possible, but he has other advantages they didn't—

My cousins have Fëanáro, who traded all his interpersonal and strategic and ethical reasoning skills for language ones, what does he have beyond being a Vala -

A civilization's worth of minions, which probably doesn't include any Fëanáros but could have any number of lesser language geniuses once he starts filtering for them.

He can't have that many orcs surviving -

I hope not, and wow did that sentence taste terrible on its way out, but if he picked which to send here he had some criteria he was using to do it.

Also, how much would being a Vala help? Because he could also have any number of Maiar.

...we should take some orcs alive, get names from them, then if the Maiar are practitioners we can paralyze them too -

At the cost of detracting from the Enemy less. A list sounds good to know anyway, whether or not spamming them is worth the tradeoff.

And we can bring my cousins in on spamming them, now that they've made it quite apparent they knew what we were doing -

Nod. And– I don't know if we can spare more people to be practitioners. But if so it'd almost be nice to eventually get rid of the presumption that it's secret...

I think we can, at this point. Nothing else matters that much.

And the Enemy's got to be being pretty overwhelmed, so maybe he doesn't need all of them. Do you think the orcs would say any names? Even if I'm the one asking, that's cutting close to strategic information.

Might think them. Might be able to come up with a way to frame it that isn't obviously strategic -

Sounds doable. And there's no shortage of orcs to ask. Yet.

They go and get some.

If interrogated about Melkor and those like him who serve him? Someone's got to oppose the Elf gods, after all, and there's a shortage of deities who don't follow them. This is a reason for asking, definitely.

They don't give names, but they think of them. But not the names in the Elven tongues.

They don't strictly need the true name as used during the awakening ritual. But that might be this one anyway. Maybe. Do the Maiar speak Elf languages ever, that could be something the orcs might know. Either way, identifying characteristics and reputations plus a name they're known by should work.