Me neither. I'm hoping for winning the war quickly and worrying about it then, but that might be just a little bit optimistic.

We still don't have any promising avenues there.

We've got a couple. Maybe eventually we can weaponize the mind control more directly, or we summon a really powerful Other. And if we get through the library without anything coming together, there's always that other avenue.

Pretty much whatever happens would be "quickly" by some standards.

That's true.

For now we're getting more information faster than the Enemy possibly can be; once most of what we're learning is original that changes. So I do think we should do our best to end it with whatever we've got then, and it'll be soon.

Human societies must be fascinating. If what we have at that point is something that gives us reason to expect we can win, sure.

Human societies?

Hundreds of thousands of people who think on the time scales you do.

Much faster, definitely. There are civilizations younger than you.

This isn't that, though. At least, not just that. It's also when things that might work have the best chance, since this is the only time we can be sure we're improving faster than his people are.

Your reasoning makes sense, it's just that - if we have sixty Years, if we may lose, it is tempting to just buy fifty-nine of them, wait for the confrontation until the point where it's coming anyway -

And this– inflection point, is going to be in a fraction of a single Year, when the Enemy still isn't looking very threatening.
But if we're gambling on him not having a counter, and we wait, we're also gambling on him not stumbling across one in fifty-nine Years.

I know. I don't know if it's much worse to lose quickly. But it goes against my instincts.

Maybe the people working on divination will get it to where we can tell what directions the Enemy's researching. Then we wouldn't need to guess when time's about to be up.

Or maybe we can research faster than him, if we're distracting him effectively and he hasn't yet figured out how to do the same back.

Also possible. I think we have to assume he has more practitioners than we do though.

That doesn't necessarily mean faster research, and karma will be making their life harder. Hopefully.

Ha, if they advanced enough that research gets dangerous maybe they decided magic squishes people who try to analyze it.

That would be a very satisfying resolution, until they conclude that they need to capture our practitioners.

That'd be a disaster. Several disasters. Do we have any way to prevent that, or is it just relying on the karma tricks to not get unlucky–

We do not have any way to prevent that. We should probably prioritize it.

Finding a way to prevent capture isn't exactly pretty, but turns out to be simple enough they don't even need the library for it.

Untold numbers of orcs died when the Fëanorians retook the continent. They were in the act of trying to kill Elves, and ghosts aren't nearly aware enough to tell who they're negotiating with. If practitioners carry a discreet nonweapon magic item, they can die of the same thing the orc did on their own command. Exactly like with the magic weapons, except pointing at the other side. Amber has to phrase hers differently since "might get a chance to kill an Elf" won't work, but she's unambiguously working with Elves so just needs a ghost lucid enough to understand the concept of an ally.

Maybe eventually they'll run across mention of a way to teleport practitioners to safety. Absent that....

It's an excellent solution. Good for morale.

The fact that walking around with a suicide switch is good for morale is intensely counterintuitive, and itself not that great for Amber's morale. But it's definitely better than not having it.

Well, Elves also don't die for real. It'd be more of a loss if Amber had to use hers. But still. Angband. 

(They bully Angband with five thousand people at a time.)

Five thousand is a lot of people. Some unpleasant rounds of testing on themselves show that it takes something like a tenth as long for a human or Elf to to shut off the contact as it does to re-establish one. The Enemy has on the order of hundreds of times as much attention and an unknown amount of time speedup, so he might not be actually stalled yet. But they're getting there.