"I look forward to it. Anyway, Maedhros wasn't okay but it didn't take him very long to get okay enough to fake it. And when he did he threw himself at my father's feet and apologized for the burning of the ships and ordered returned to us everything that had been stolen and named my father the rightful ruler of the Noldor and relinquished forever his family's claim to the crown.

His brothers, uh, disagreed. With the decision, that Maedhros was in a state to make it - he wasn't, not exactly. He didn't believe that this was real, any of it. And I can't even say with any confidence that he was doing what he would have been doing if he'd been confident this was reality - his not believing this was reality was one of the things that, to his mind, disqualified him from the Kingship - but he knew how he wanted this scenario to play out, and he knew what he was doing, and there was a coronation and then the reunited Noldor started building the fortresses to fight our war."

...Kib glances at Island.

I had you and Findekáno to offload the things I shouldn't be looking at and to catch me if I was subtly damaged. Without that, yeah, wouldn't have chanced it. Must have hurt, though. 

Yeah.

"My cousins on the Telerin side hit it off with Elwë -" he nods to Lúthien - "and he gave them permission to settle in inhabited parts of the continent. The rest of us had no such permission, so we settled far north. Maedhros moved his cousins and their host across the continent east, to minimize, mmm, interpersonal friction. 

The Enemy didn't start striking back in earnest - real force, Balrogs and his Maiar all deployed - for several decades. When he did we were ready, we won, we surrounded and besieged Angband. They called it the Dagor Aglareb, the Glorious Battle. 

We built a hidden civilian city in the mountains, with Ulmo helping. We encountered Men, fleeing wars that the Enemy'd been provoking farther east. There were more battles. We won them. There was a dragon - did he have dragons in time for any of your wars -"

"No dragons."

He sends the memory -

"Dragon. Lovely, isn't he? I drove him back to Angband but we didn't know how to kill him."

"Lovely," agrees Cam dryly.

"...I'm immune to osanwë by default and will be missing anything delivered that way, so please don't rely on it too heavily."

Cam hands her a little figurine. "Not actual size."

"If he did an Elf next to it for scale you probably wouldn't be able to see the Elf, unless whatever makes you the temperature and texture of stone also improves your visual acuity."

"It does. You've got slightly longer distance vision than me and I can't see infrared but close up it's the same. And my peripheral vision's better."

"Then you would be able to see the Elf-for-scale; it would be very tiny. It was an ugly fight. 

The Enemy was getting stronger. We knew it, and knew we should attack sooner rather than later, but we didn't have anything that could kill him - didn't even have anything that could set him back dramatically - so we just held on, and waited, and hoped the Dwarves or my cousins would invent a miracle in time. And they were inventive, but no miracles. Nothing to kill a god with.

And that's where we hand the story over to Bella, I think."

"So, I got hit by a van and I was very nearly dead and somebody with magic powers came along and saved me at the behest of a fluffy alien. They're adorable - Lúthien, bounce 'em the fluffy alien? - and they granted wishes to teenage girls with magical potential. Anything you want, within certain power limits if you're the sort to try to maximally exploit the system but the average teenage girl can get the first thing she asks for. You get your wish, legit, you get magic powers, also legit - something themed around your wish plus a standard package of teekay and transmutation and conjuring a signature weapon and healing and stuff - and in exchange you turn into a magic rock," she taps the jewel on her hand, "operating your body by remote control, and you have to recharge your magic by fighting these horrible despair monsters that drive people to violent crime and suicide if left unchecked. Sounds like a good deal, right?"

"Are the horrible despair monsters not legit in some way?"

"They're exactly what they sound like, except the explanation of where they come from is incomplete. Yes, if you charge up your magic off a witch byproduct and then leave the byproduct lying around, it may hatch into a witch; yes, witches bud off smaller monsters that can turn into full-blown witches if left alone -

- no, they have not just kind of always existed, they're what happens if a magi runs out of charge. By using too much magic - or by getting too upset - charge level is a ratchet on mood, it's very easy for most people to fall into a spiral -"

"So the people they're recruiting to fight these monsters turn into them, if they slip up. And they're - teenage means 'human under the age of twenty', right? - very likely to slip up..."

"It means thirteen through nineteen, and sometimes it was even younger, eleven or twelve - they filtered for a certain volatility of emotion that they found most often in teenage girls, occasionally boys but they decided they could get more marginal girls signing up by advertising it as a girl thing than they could get boys by letting them participate. In my world there's plenty of alien life but humans are it for species with emotions. They're a power source. So the aliens grant you a wish, and how strongly you feel about your wish defines your soul gem capacity, and then they run you around managing the witch ecology and helping recruit other girls and occasionally defending other fluff interests, and eventually you screw up your dosing your magic use, or have a run of bad luck witch-hunting and run out of fuel or a witch kills you, or something you can't fix with magic upsets you a little too badly and you witch - or another girl kills you outright over the right to hunt in a certain neighborhood because we can't even just stop using magic, using our bodies is using magic, we need witches and witches need prey and prey is people and people mean territory - or you just live for hundreds of years, being a good example of a happy fulfilled magi for the fluffs to introduce to anybody on the fence about whether to wish - and every time you recharge you give the used-up witch byproduct to the fluffs and they use it to fuel their civilization."

"How long did it take you to figure all this out?"

"Embarrassingly long, considering - the fluffs don't lie, they don't even refuse to answer questions, but they give answers that are designed to close off curiosity without telling you the gory details, at least until they decide it's time to drive you into a depression spiral so you can contribute to the ecology from the other end!"

"Why don't they lie, do they have some sort of oddly orthogonal ethics..."

"It's not exactly ethics - and it's not that they don't understand the concept, either - it's just - not a thing they do? I don't really have a satisfactory explanation for that." Sigh. "Anyway. So one of the good-example magi swings through Forks, her fluff tells her that I'm magically potentiated, she comes and heals me, I think this whole receive-wish-and-magic-powers-and-fight-evil setup sounds great and the alien is so cute and fluffy - fuck, I was a moron - and I dither for a month about what to wish for, I don't have the oomph to eliminate any of the major diseases, resurrection's one to a wisher, fluffs have a policy against giving suggestions or telling you what anyone else has wished for -

- and I dither long enough that a witch gets big, really big, usually people who aren't magically potentiated can't see fluffs or witches but this one doesn't hide, she looks like a huge fuckoff storm to regular people and like the most watched-a-horror-movie-marathon-nightmare scene of torture and mayhem ever to anybody who can get a look at her actual moving parts -

- and I blurt out a wish to the fluff that was calmly watching her destroy the Pacific Northwest as an appetizer -

-and I wake up in the hospital in perfect health a month prior."

"...if you reset across dimensions that's big and if you don't it's even more exploitable..."

"I know it rolls back time within one step of my homeworld; I would be surprised based on what I have learned today if it affects things past that, especially since a snake demon managed to get into our Arda. I have substantial qualms about unnecessary use of the reset even now that I have a floating reset point and Lúthien looped in with me, but maybe you've got a compelling reason to use it anyway. Well. So I was in a time loop; I could reset back to the hospital at any time, which didn't recharge my gem - cost some magic to do, in fact - but did restore me to health and get me a fresh start.

"So I had as many Februaries as I needed to figure out how to kill the biggest witch of all time and then bootstrap from there into breaking the emotion-harvesting ecology. The big witch was such an efficient source they were going to call the extraction project a wrap after she ate everything, they didn't care even instrumentally... I reset deliberately, I found out accidentally I reset if I die, I did not find out what happened if I witched.

"So I was working on that and then one loop I wake up in the hospital and Lúthien turns up out of nowhere!"

"A snake thing like the one Kib apparently met showed up in Doriath and it - I guess you could say it ate me -"