Obviously.

He had a thousand years, he was able to do a damned good job of it. And when he was ready he put out the Trees that lit Valinor, burned down the library, stole all my father's notes and most of his prototypes and instruments - my father was brilliant, he invented writing and he invented the enchantments we use for modern weaponry and given enough time he'd have invented a way to kill the Enemy -

- and assassinated the King, of course -

- and the Valar sat atop their holy mountain grieving their dead Trees. For twenty years.

The Valar are an enormous disappointment on nearly every conceivable level. I would make such a better god.

I know, right?

He grins. That is a pretty excellent thing to hear from Maitimo.

Okay, so what was the next horrible thing?

The King had remarried after my grandmother died and the Valar refused to reembody her. My father had two half-brothers who he'd never liked and Melkor'd spent the last couple centuries planting evidence that they both were plotting each others' murder... There were spontaneous outbreaks of fighting in the streets, my father tried to convince his half-brothers to announce they had no claim on the throne, they wanted the same thing from him, things disintegrated, people declared themselves, my half-uncle had my father assassinated -

That's awful, I'm so sorry.

The thing is that I could have ended the war before that, I knew what to do, I just - wasn't ruthless enough, wasn't in the habit - I am now - and Findekáno is my half-uncle's son, I was worried he'd never forgive me and I knew I needed him -

- I had twelve people assassinated in one night and ended the war and crowned myself the King of the Noldor and requisitioned some boats and arrived here just in time to stop orcs from overrunning every settlement on this shore. I won the war for Beleriand in three weeks. And then we settled into a stalemate that eliding a lot of back-and-forth has lasted for four hundred years.

...well, now Taliar kind of wants to give Maitimo a hug.

A hug would be nice.

So Taliar goes and hugs him.

He's sure Maitimo doesn't need to be told that assassinating a bunch of people is not a good solution to most problems. Taliar likewise does not need to be told that sometimes it's still the best one available. And all of these people are Elves so Taliar is reasonably confident he will eventually be able to steal them from Mandos, so it's even fixable, someday the war will be over and they can deal with all the secondary problems piled up behind it and build a real actual paradise where no one is forcibly deprived of their criminal thoughts and no one is incentivized to assassinate each other...

That'd be lovely. 

Won't it just?

Hugs.

Since then I have been very focusedly doing exactly what was needed to win the war and stay sane while I did, it'll be - a strange transition -

Yeah, I can imagine... well, I'm here now and I'm going to win your war for you. And if I mysteriously vanish again I will find my way back and then win your war for you anyway.

Thank you. And in order to do that, you need to meet more lovely people, so I should let you do that!

Yeah, probably.

So Taliar should probably stop hugging him. For valid strategic reasons. Even though he has not even come close to the amount of hugs he feels like that story requires.

Okay, there, he lets go. Self-control: it's a virtue!

And virtue is apparently how he wins this war.

Yes it is.

He attends all of his afternoon introductions. He gets along very well with all of the people thusly introduced. Maitimo made the right call in choosing to populate the list with unusually extraverted and idealistic people, but he also made the right call with that one engineer who's very shy but a lovely person once you get to know her; they hit it off right away. Taliar is in his element. He starts turning the conversations more toward the people he meets, the things they're passionate about - they're Noldor, they're mostly passionate about engineering, which is awesome because it turns out that Taliar loves talking about engineering, almost as much as he loves talking to people about their passions. All in all, it's a wonderful afternoon.

He can arrange eight months of those, if necessary. He meets Taliar for dinner. What a useful way to grow stronger and develop new abilities. 

I like it a lot! It suits me really well! How was your afternoon?

Productive! Humans get the next ten years off, then a couple decades of training and integration - see, part of the motivation for the old system was that humans really couldn't be useful except at menial tasks it seemed unfair to make them work a life at, most Noldorin specialties expect a century of experience and lots of it is built for Elven schedules and abilities. Now that can change.

A century of experience, really? Wow.

Magic items are hard - he sends the context, briefly, learning the mental resonances you can learn to write the laws of the universe and the ways to handle them into a piece of metal - and with magic music use for agriculture and construction, precision and consistency are very important,  and most of the logistics of the empire are handled telepathically - we have yet to figure out how to give humans native osanwë...

You mentioned that already, it's terrible, I want native osanwë so bad. Which reminds me, in the meantime, I'd like to learn a local language or two at some point, I feel like only being able to talk to people who themselves have native osanwë is an unnecessary limitation...