The King looks tired and lonely and oddly apprehensive but of course none of that is really information, nothing about Maitimo has ever really been information about anything but what he wants. When he sees him he can barely remember why he wanted to see him.

"Hello," the King says. "We're besieging Angband; the continent is safe. We just need to hold the siege, now, until we invent something that can kill him. Do you hate me?"

" - yes," he says, half because it is true and half because the sentence felt like a clumsy manipulation towards the other answer and if he's here so that Maitimo can manipulate him he's at least going to have enough pride to make Maitimo try.

But Maitimo half-smiles, instead, as if this was the answer he wanted, or at least the only answer he'd prepared the rest of the conversation for. "I knew you would. I knew you would but I thought very hard about it and this was the only move I was really sure of. I don't know if I can do it but if I can we'll win and - that really is the only thing that matters, I keep distrusting that thought and double-checking it and it keeps being right."

"It doesn't sound quite right, but maybe that's just the person speaking."

"I knew you'd hate me," he says plaintively, as if this absolves him of something.

"It takes a real visionary to predict how people will feel about you when you murder their parents."

"I'm sorry."

Aren't you going to fix it, Maitimo?

He doesn't say that, barely even thinks it so it'll be a fraction harder for Maitimo to read it off his face. "Why didn't you let me talk to you sooner? Why did you send a threat for your guards to read if I asked?"

"I was scared that I would make a mistake if I spoke to you. I was scared you'd just talk to me, permission or no, and then I'd - I love you, you know -"

He flinches. He's angry, now, and he's embarrassed that he's only angry now. There are guards within earshot. Maitimo shouldn't have - what was he playing at - "I cared for you, once, too."

Maitimo nods. 

Fix it, you idiot, Maitimo, fix it - 

- why did he even want that -

"You can go. Don't train an army, don't represent yourself as part of this government, don't tell the locals anything about what happened in Valinor, don't do anything that might make your precious loyalists think you'd welcome some news of a tragedy here. I will kill you. I will kill your family. Go away with Turukáno, he wants to found a city for civilians somewhere guarded so he can raise his baby away from the war. Don't - no, you can get married, but only have daughters, I don't want to wrangle more contestants for -"

"Maitimo, what the fuck are you talking about - are you all right -"

"No!!!!"

"Then - then maybe we should have this conversation sometime when you're all right."

"That's a good idea. If everything goes well - if everything goes well then we'll win the war and then I will look you up and we can have this conversation again, all right?"

"I swore you my allegiance."

"Yes. And that's all - go away."

"Your grace," he says, and turns, and leaves, and can't complete the calculation about what his face would look like if - if they'd merely been very good friends - so he mostly succeeds at keeping it rigidly indifferent until there's no one around and he can attempt instead to claw it off.

Three hundred years pass. People worry about the King. They try not to, because it seems disrespectful. There's a rumor that he had a secret girlfriend who was among those killed in the fighting. It is hard to imagine why the King would have a secret girlfriend but it fits, otherwise. If it's so, he never gets over her, which everyone considers very romantic. 

One day, an unconscious human covered in soot and blood appears spontaneously in the middle of a street.

There is a team of people there who are not as surprised by this as by rights they ought to be; they close off the street, put him on something comfortable, towel off the soot and blood and move him inside. They tell the King, who is also not as surprised by this as by rights he ought to be.

Eventually the human wakes up. Sits up, takes in his surroundings.

The room he's in has stone walls and a soft bed and tapestries depicting happy people - some human, some not - playing. There's a tray of food. There's a little music box playing something remarkably pretty. 

It's a big room. It also has an empty space on the floor with a bucket of ash and one of pig's blood standing against the wall. 

At the door there's a woman, who stands when he wakes and murmurs something into the hallway. 

What. Why is there ash and blood right there. Did he miss? Is this not another planet at all, fuck - no, if he'd missed that badly the stumps of his feet would presumably hurt - maybe they just have the same magic everywhere in which case he supposes he can warn them -

Someone else walks in. "Hello," he says. "I'm Maitimo. I'm sorry to frighten you. I really wanted to make your arrival less jarring, but I think we'll save the most lives this way. This world is called Arda. It's inhabited, but we know of an uninhabited one you can safely use. We were able to foresee your arrival, which is why I know your language and your mission. We've tried to arrange for you to be able to complete it faster. Though I'd be greatly relieved if you'd foist it off on someone else, now that the method is demonstrated safe and now that we have a location for your people to target. There's an emergency here, too, and we would all have died if you hadn't arrived. - I really want to congratulate you on saving two worlds but I guess that should wait a week, technically. It's just that I've been waiting to say it for three hundred years."

"I... had not even been born three hundred years ago?" says Cor. "- why do you speak Senserke? You said because you foresaw but like... - sorry, uh, what's your emergency -"

"I - foresaw isn't even exactly right." He takes a deep breath and looks at Cor intently and then looks back at his hands. "As far as I can tell, I time-travelled - from a future where we won this thing to three hundred years ago. We have no records of that occurring otherwise. We don't know why it happened this time. But I've met you before. You saved my world. And yours."

"Ah-huh. Um. Are you confident that's not just going to happen again?"

"Nope! If you want to write a letter for potential Cor Number Three I'm happy to memorize it, and I've been paying much carefuller attention to our engineering advances this time around so I can usefully speed them along if I have to endure this again. If it's triggered on a specific date we have about four months. I'm really really hoping it was only the once, though. It's been a long three hundred years."

"I'm sorry to hear that. I assume I save my world by telling them how to evacuate, how do I save yours, what's going on?"

"My world was co-created by fifteen exceptionally powerful beings called the Valar, at the direction of an even more powerful one called Eru. I have met most of the Valar; I have only their descriptions of Eru. Fourteen of them are ineffectual, easily angered, and inclined to alter peoples' minds to make them more cooperative; they live on the other continent, and we escaped them, though not undamaged. The fifteenth is obsessed with torture and murder, bred an army of magical slaves which he used to attempt to conquer the world, and is currently at war with us. He is confined at present to a fortress spanning forty square miles due north of here. He has prisoners. He tortures them. He uses magic to cause them to experience time faster than we experience it, and he's been at it for three hundred years. Occasionally he releases someone to us, so broken and so dangerous that we have to kill them. On occasion he tries to break our siege. He hasn't succeeded yet, but we think he would have, eventually, if not for -"

"Have you got copies of my artwork notes or anything -"

"I replicated it as best I could from memory." He hands over a package of notes. "I have a better-than-human memory but I don't know if it's close enough for this. There's also notes on our conversation about what you were trying for."

"If there are pictures or sketches in this can you redact them before I read them? The notes are good but if there... isn't an artistic convention yet because of time travel... then it wouldn't be a good idea to be contaminated by imagery that I still need to fully understand as though brand-new."

"Yeah, that's fair, I don't know how artistic conventions interact with time travel." He takes the notes back, removes some pages.

"Thanks. Uh, for the notes and the warm reception."

"I missed you. Please let me know if you need anything else."

"- you missed me?"

"Yeah."

"Do you maybe feel like elaborating on that or should it... wait?"

"It's not every day interdimensional travelers drop in on you! It was an eventful four months - we saved the world - "

"- okay. Were - nevermind.

Do you have somebody standing by to get sent back with a letter, that would be, uh, par for the course..."

"Yes." He gestures. "This is Larya. I trust her, she speaks your language -"

     "Hello!"

"Hello, nice to meet you, learning a language from somebody who remembered four months of hearing it must have been trippy."

"It's nice to meet you too. He didn't explain about the time-travel until last week, I actually thought the language was a hobby project."

"If the Enemy had found out he could have found some way to intercept you. I went around being eerily prescient with no explanation whatsoever."

"He did that kind of thing before the time travel, too, though," she says. 

"Oh, how'd that work?"

"You know, that's a good question."

"I hated the Valar. Then they did terrible things which were more widely recognizable as terrible, and I looked clever. And I got us out."

"This wasn't previously a widely shared opinion? Should I be hearing from their fans as well as their detractors?" asks Cor. He sloshes the bucket of blood to see if it's fresh enough. "This is mammal, right -"

"Pig, yeah, not an hour old. The Valar correct thoughts such as disapproval of the Valar so disapproval of the Valar wasn't a widely shared opinion until it started happening faster than they could fix it."

"But you hated the Valar before it was cool -? Need paper to draw the diagram on, don't trust a verbal description -"

Paper. "I had a workaround to the mental editing." 

"Mm?" Cor asks, sketching in the charcoal parts first.

"Elves can swear permanent, binding, mind-altering oaths. We can also swear temporary binding mind-altering oaths which are phrased so you won't remember them. I'd edit my head before they did, it'd expire a few weeks later. It - it still did damage, but not deliberately sculpted damage."

Cor's drawing pauses. "What kind of damage?"

"The first time around I made a lot of awful mistakes. This time I avoided them but mostly by spending three hundred years being so miserable everyone worried themselves sick. I think - I don't know for sure but I think if I'd had my head to myself all along I could've done better than either of those things."

"I'm going to want so much more detail on everything once I'm not juggling a couple world-spanning crises. You said you knew an empty world -"

"Yeah." He sends it. "Uh, yes the telepathy power can be used to read minds, no I haven't, no one else has either, yes I'm very certain, there's a way to block it out entirely so you aren't relying on our goodwill which takes most people months to learn but you're a quick study. There's a page of notes for it."

This neatly forestalls all of the questions Cor just flinched about and prepared to ask. "...okay."

He shrugs helplessly. 

Draw draw draw draw.

Cor blows on the blood marks to dry them out so they won't smudge. He annotates his drawing with details about how to reproduce it at scale.

And he hands Larya the drawing and then starts doing a big version on the floor.

Larya holds it and waits. Maitimo watches him.

"- uh?" Cor asks Maitimo. "- I keep thinking I was probably more eloquent in version one, but what I have to say about how you are looking at me is in fact 'uh'."

"I was also more eloquent the first time around! There was the mystery of your presence here and the necessity of explaining our war to you in a way that might inspire you to help, and - I thought about clever ways for us to get to know each other but they all would have been inexcusable, really. It's good to see you again. I can stop looking, if it's very terribly 'uh'."

Larya is staring between the two of them wonderingly.

"It's not a problem or anything if I'm that entertaining." Draw draw paint paint.

He keeps watching.

Towards the end, he asks Larya, "What's your understanding of your job here, directions to where you're going, etcetera -"

"Appear at a somewhat unpredictable location, ask for a moonshot project, ask for a Ranary, get her your documents and transmit the location for them."

"...yep that's pretty much everything I would have told you, that and that the city I'm sending you to is geographically distributed so you might have to go through some portals. Do you want a redundant copy of the drawing or anything in case something happens -?"

"That's probably safest, thank you."

He draws another one with an eye on the moisture content of the diagram on the floor. He touches up a few things. He paints Larya. He chants about how destructive he is, and she's gone.

"And now we're off the charted course. For the better, hopefully. Should I let you read through the notes?"

"Your emergency does sound pretty emergent for all that it's kept three hundred years - I'm sorry -"

"It was pretty thoughtless of you, not being born centuries sooner. This is - the important thing is winning, with Elves almost everything else is reparable eventually."

"Well, I assume the prisoners will still appreciate it if I'm a little quicker."

"Yeah."

"But - thanks for everything, this has been really good to land on compared to most possible things."

"I'm really glad."

Cor smiles at him, then turns his attention to the notes.

The notes explain in more depth what the world is like, where the Enemy is, what they know of his fortress, what they know of his history, what they know of the capabilities of the Valar and Maiar, everything else he presumably used the first time.

Anything very unambiguously indicating that Cor himself was involved in this alternate timeline?

Nope, these are things anyone using Cor's magic system and trying to kill this guy would need to know.

Hm.

"I'm not sure this is dense enough to work with. Last time this Thuring-wethil person helped?"

"Yes. We can try to get her attention again, if you don't think you have enough." He's frowning just slightly.

"Is something wrong?"

"I mean, I hoped we could make do without that because it's the riskiest step. If it's needed, it's needed."

"I could try without her, maybe use the sketches I had you take out, but trying to destroy something based mostly on strategic information is risky too."

Nod. “We can try it, and have the sketches as a fallback if it goes badly wrong. It didn’t, last time, I just don’t know to what extent that could have been because we got lucky. You think you can do the de-oathing?”

"Yes, that looks a lot easier assuming this is all accurate and complete."

Nod. “All right. Let’s start there, then. Thank you.”

"You're welcome. Can I get some scratch paper?"

“Of course.” 

When it arrives, Cor starts sketching. It doesn't look exactly like the version he did last time, but there are resemblances.

It’s not surprising that that’s not identical; he has after all shuffled the situation quite a lot. 

"Do you have," he wonders after about an hour, "an orc handy for me to test this on before I do a remote version?"

“It happens I do.”

"You're very thoughtful like that, it seems." Cor goes back to his sketching. "I hope the orc isn't too dismayed, I guess you haven't been able to explain much to them."

“They hate being around us. They’re slightly happier about humans but that just means they have the mere centuries of war and propaganda to hate them for rather than literal magic compulsions. I think they cheered up relatively quickly once we undid the oaths, last time.”

Cor nods. He studies the notes and he draws.

Eventually he is ready to paint an orc.

Maitimo takes him to the orc, which is chained in place for painting and not happy about it.

Well that makes Cor kind of uncomfortable but not enough that he can't do what he came here for.

This orc is now 100% certified oath free.

The orc collapses, shaking, a bit confused. Maitimo gestures for one of the guards - human - to unchain him.

Cor backs away a bit, gives the orc some space. "I assume - she? - doesn't speak Senserke."

"No. They don't have the telepathy either."

"Okay. I guess my advantage here has elapsed. Bye orc." He turns. He trips on the way out.

- he has something for that but will maybe wait until Cor seems satisfied he's done the urgent things he can do right now.

Cor picks himself up. He goes back to his work, designing a remote oath removal for Thuringwethil; before he's been at that for very long it occurs to him to ask after food arrangements.

"I'll have someone bring something in." It takes about ten seconds.

Cor is initially unsurprised by the instant food, then remembers that they didn't chant about fire over a pre-plated dish of things to get it hot - "That was fast."

Shrug. "They're making things all day, they just take them out to someone else if you don't want them."

"Huh. That's an interesting model of restaurant - shouldn't get distracted, sorry -" Eating, reading notes.

The notes include instructions on how not to be mindread and short explanations of local politics, for context. Apparently Maitimo is the ruler of this continent with the exception of an enclave protected by a Maia. 

Cor pauses a moment to arrange not to be mindread. He glances at Maitimo then looks away, self-conscious. He keeps reading and designing by turns when he's finished his food.

Maitimo remains just outside the room where he can be accessible without lurking over Cor's shoulder. 

"Do you not have Kinging to do or are you just doing it all telepathically?" wonders Cor, tapping his pen on his paper thoughtfully.

"Some of the latter, but also this is really our highest priority right now."

Even if what Cor's doing is high priority that doesn't entail personal royal supervision but - yeah. Okay.

He comes up with the remote version. Spell development is faster when he has renderings of his work from before.

Then he can take out Thuringwethil's oaths from a distance with a reasonable expectation that, like last time, this will intrigue her enough she'll come say hello.

And he can go sit on a balcony and wait to be found, yep.

It takes a little while.

Is there still a king lurking nearby?

He didn't follow Cor to the balcony but said he could just ask the guards to fetch him - "or think at me -"

Testing

You got it! Supernaturally fast, by the way, the training program for local humans takes three months and lots of people do it twice. 

It doesn't really seem that complicated but I suppose that might be what I'd expect to see if I were super good at it.

I seem to have a wait here, what else should I know?

I've mostly played things the same way as last time aside from managing a situation that threatened civil war three hundred years ago a little better. I'm hoping that was the thing I was supposed to fix - I went back to right before it. Your magic system works for Elves too if we get hooked into it. We were exploring for additional worlds but hadn't found any by the time everything started over.

Okay. Thanks.

Of course. I'm happy to answer anything you're wondering about, too.

I mean, I don't want to pry.

I wasn't sure that you'd arrive like last time. I'm glad you did.

Me too.

What would've happened if I didn't?

We have native magic. It can't do anything as powerful as this but it can do some stuff, we're trying to invent what we can. Valar are really, really slow, it's possible we'd have something by the time he has his counterattack, whatever it might be. We looked into getting out of our world but we haven't gotten anywhere with that, yet. We have a lot of people down south in places that might be beyond his reach. Some people want to petition the Valar to reconsider their decision not to intervene. - I prohibited that, but I'd have reconsidered if you hadn't arrived.

Is there a reason you're avoiding talking about why you missed me so much, I don't want to dig into it if it's going to upset you.

I did in fact spend a month sulking but that was a while ago. We were dating. I don't want - that's a lot to throw at you, when we've barely met, and I didn't want you to worry that you needed to make sure it worked out again, or anything like that. We can talk about it if you'd like but it can also wait until fewer things are on fire and you've accepted all the honors your world wants to throw at you and Angband has been knocked to the ground and replaced with a playground.

We were dating for I presume less than four months and it's been three hundred years for you.

I think Elves and humans are different in this way. 

How so?

Uh, the Elven concept of romance involves a lot of waiting for centuries. The human concept really couldn't, you'd go extinct. 

Yes, that does seem like it'd be the obvious result.

Okay. I'm curious but maybe it is in fact so complicated and strange that I should wait till I don't have anything important on my plate?

I think the worst-case scenario if we talk through absolutely everything right now is that you decide you want nothing to do with any of this and then I have someone else liaison while you work on the important things. I don't think you'll get too distracted to deal with the war. It is pretty complicated and strange, though.

Would it be bad to interrupt in a place not of our choosing if Thuringwethil has bad timing? - How long did she take to show up last time?

The next day. Seems like the kind of thing that could be highly path-dependent, that. I would be less than delighted to be interrupted in the middle of explaining everything, but the worst case scenario is still just that you want nothing to do with this and get a different liaison, so if you'd like me to start I will.

Yeah, if you don't mind.

All right.

Elves do not consider relations outside a marriage between a man and a woman acceptable. In Valinor they corrected it; here they'll just think that's kind of terrible, and that's after centuries of effort to convince everyone to calm down. I had someone, for about a thousand years, secretly back in Valinor with both of us doing all kinds of mind-editing to ensure the Valar couldn't do it for us.

The civil war was arranged by Melkor. He posed as certain people to pass false information to other people, he planted lies, he arranged for people who'd previously trusted each other to end up suspecting each other, and then he killed the King. My boyfriend and I ended up on opposite sides of the civil war. Ended up leading opposite sides of it, actually. In this timeline I won, he left, and I - well. I accomplished all of the things I set out to accomplish and waited here for you to come and end the war.

In the first timeline, I didn't expect outside help, and I didn't think I could win the war alone, and I didn't want to be alone, and so instead of breaking up I kept him. As a prisoner. When I met you I realized - that there was actually something to being a good person that wasn't the thing the Valar were doing and trying to make us do. And I - fixed it, mostly, because I had something I could draw on to show me how. I'm good at predicting people. I hadn't told you, but I knew what you'd think and more importantly than that I knew what you'd have done instead. He left, and I explained everything to you, and - 

- everything would make more sense to me on some level if you'd said you were leaving and then I'd had the chance to do it over. But that wasn't what happened. You stayed, and we fixed things and started exploring universes, and then I had to do it over. I had everything I wanted, last time. But - but it wasn't that I changed because you'd wanted it, it was that I'd changed by knowing you, and so I couldn't just - retrace the steps that I remembered making me the happiest man in the world. 

That's a lot to take in; Cor doesn't answer right away.

This isn't surprising, and he's not in the same room so he can pace anxiously without that making Cor feel rushed.

I feel like this is a lot of hope to pin on what you remember of a less than four month relationship.

It's the person, not the relationship.

A person you knew for four months. I mean, I think I'm great, but...

But not in ways people'd notice inside four months even if you saved two worlds in that timespan?

I don't usually think of world-saving as the sort of thing that gets - deep genuine personal regard? Fannishness, sure, maybe I'd never have to pay for my own dinner again and I'd have to sign a lot of autograph books, but you do not strike me as fannish.

No. I think you have a very strong sense of what you care about and how to use yourself to get it done. When you run across something important enough to risk yourself for you do it, but not because you've embraced the idea of dying heroically somehow, which is what I see a lot more often. You're not done, you didn't even particularly care to take more than a month off, as long as there are problems to solve somewhere out there and resources here that we could use on them you want to do it. You're a very careful thinker. You're smart. You're really, really principled. You handle pressure well. It's hard to disentangle from the saving the world - it wasn't a coincidence that you saved the world - but if I'd run across you in some random human village here I'd have put you in charge of something important and I'd think just as highly of you. - I wouldn't, ah, not if you were one of my subjects, that's different -

Is it? I'm not particularly familiar with monarchy. - you're saying you would have noticed this about me if I were a random human in a village, what do you do, give them all screening quizzes?

They get drafted, smart ones get promoted, I meet them at events. I meet ten thousand people every year, it's easily the best use of my time, finding the right ones for the right problems. Ten thousand is just enough to meet everybody who thought they themselves were promising or who anyone else thought was promising. I've met about a quarter of my humans and all my Elves.

I do not think I would distinguish myself well if drafted.

I have a magic ring for the clumsiness! I should've given it to you already, I'll have someone bring it over. But not all the work we need done is physical anyway, disabled humans who don't get themselves any magic do accounting and logistics and espionage and policy and research and so on.

Humans can do your magic?

Yes, though Elves are typically better at it, it works through singing and through making artifacts and making artifacts is slow, tedious detail-work in all cases but especially without telepathy. There are some songs you'd like. I can - someone can teach you once we have a bit more time.

I realize that I may be disappointingly unromantic or something but I don't in fact feel a need to actively avoid you, if you'd like to teach me songs and don't have other things you need to be doing.

You are not disappointing in the slightest I just don't want you to feel - worse off because you are wonderful. I'll come teach you songs tomorrow, maybe. There's one for walking on water! It's fun!

That will go nicely with the ring for clumsiness!

That should have been with the welcome presents, really.

I am not going to blame you for forgetting one thing. If it turns out to be seventeen things I'm going to be a little puzzled.

Yes, that'd raise some questions about at least some part of my story here. 

Just a bit.

Someone arrives and hands him a ring.

"Thanks." On it goes. He paces experimentally on the balcony.

He is remarkably steady on his feet!

Keen. He twirls a little. This is really neat, he eventually remembers to remark.

I'm really glad! It's fancier than the one you had last time.

What makes it fancier? Was the prior one only rated for walking not running?

It was designed for Elves.

How's that affect the design process?

There's really only a couple small tweaks but they can't be done after the fact.

Well, I love it. Thanks.

You are very welcome.

Dance dance dance. He probably looks silly but doesn't especially care. What other magic stuff is there?

Songs do wind, growth, speed, luck, illusions, healing, things in that genre. Artifacts do light, improve weapons, warn of nearby enemies, persistently improve strength, reflexes, or memory...

Ooh. - how is "luck" a thing, how does that cash out -

Arrows will be more likely miss you, if you're good with it you can influence the roll of dice, if you reach into an urn and are trying to get a certain color you can do better than chance... nothing non-local and nothing long-lasting.

Not quite what I mean - I mean - in this world is 'luck' a thing? As opposed to just an abstract gloss over a whole lot of different things to do with laws of physics and causality and such mundanities?

Music magic works more by concepts than artifact magic, which tends to need to be precise about which bits are getting moved where. I don't think there's a unifying force of luck except in our heads, and I think it only works on things that involve imprecise physical effects.

Huh, okay, I can buy that.

I'm glad to know that Eru's work meets muster. 

Oh, it doesn't.

Last time we talked about - whether your magic could destroy something like that - but it seemed too dangerous to try.

Yeah, best done standing outside the universe at the time if at all.

I wonder if the time-travel was his intervention. I don't know who else could have done it.

What would he be getting at?

I'm not clear on what he's getting at with the whole universe in the first place!

Nothing that interventionist, usually!

It could have been something else. Very little research has gone into this, because I didn't want to tip off the Enemy.

Yeah, makes sense.

All the time in the world once he's gone.

Until we find another world with an evil god, anyway.

Even then! We can delegate if evil gods seem to be everywhere.

I guess, but then I don't get to make my numbers go up.

Good point. Okay, you can call dibs on evil gods if your magic system consistently handles 'em.

It does seem very well-targeted.

I don't know how big a spell this is. I'd like to wait till they've put a new point on the new planet, and hook into that, before I do it. I gather last time spell development took long enough that this didn't come up as a concern since everyone was well on their way out by the time I had a draft, but still.

Yeah. That makes sense. I assume we'll hear back from Larya and your friends once they have things moving there.

That's my guess, yes.

Guards inform me there's a Thuringwethil at the entrance of the city.

"A" Thuringwethil?

The person at the gates of the cities swears they're 'Manwë in drag'.

Well, I suppose they could be a cunningly disguised human...

She has a flair for drama but she didn't give us any trouble last time.

You're the expert. I'm ready.

Thuringwethil does not show up on the balcony.

We're not sure where she is, he says unhappily after a little while. Went invisible.

...Cor listens intently, feels for odd air currents.

If she's on the balcony she's hiding it very, very effectively.

Excuse me, Thuringwethil? Can I have a word?

One.

Please?

Apparently you can send wordless amusement and impatience through the telepathy thing, because she does that. And then the image of the door to the balcony.

He goes inside.

She's sprawled on the bed in his room, picking her fingernails which is more disturbing because she has claws. Can't let a girl have any fun, can you?

Sorry, I wasn't sure exactly how you like to be played along with.

What's your dog in this race?

I need to know a lot of detailed aesthetic information about Melkor and Sauron so I can assassinate them.

And why do you wanna do that?

Because they are very evil. If they are secretly not very evil then I will fail to destroy them with a spell that presupposes that they are, so there's that for a failsafe.

They're totally very evil.

And she sends impressions - favored forms, how they move, where they live, lots of sex scenes, vague nebulous things that can only be conveyed over telepathy...

He grabs his paper. He takes notes furiously, spare token reminders more than anything intrinsically meaningful.

Loooots of sex scenes. Memories from the beginning of creation. Conversations from this afternoon. Sauron's sophisticated setup for torturing prisoners; Sauron explaining to the actors what their responsibilities are.

Eventually she's done, which she makes known by dissolving into a puff of smoke and reforming perched on the dresser. 

Thanks, he says, scribbling final adjustments before memory fades too far.

Take care, honey. You ever need anything, you know where to find me.

Thanks. - wait, I do?

She turns into a flock of black bats and flies off.

Okay then.

He goes back over his notes, fleshing things out, adding little swirls and shapes as an idea takes form.

Got it, he eventually remembers to tell Maitimo.

Oh good. 

She slipped past me and was in my room, he adds. But answered when I osanwëd and then gave me an... earful. Brainful?

You okay?

I'll be fine but she considered it important to show me a truly revolting quantity of rape.

Well. Soon we win.

Coming right up.

He brings in a tray with dinner a while later.

"Ooh, thanks." He's hungrier than he'd noticed, having been absorbed in art; he goes for the food.

It was chosen by someone who remembered what he liked. 

Yummy. "How're you doing?"

"Good. I've wanted them dead for a long time. May it stick this time."

"Hope so. I still had all my toes last time, right, that means I can't have accidentally destroyed the timeline or whatever."

"Every last one." He'd kissed them and insisted Cor look out for them.

"So it isn't my fault, it's probably Eru but who knows what he wants - anyway. Yeah, I hope it sticks." Nom nom.

"You should write that letter for yourself in case it doesn't but - yeah."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. I can probably have that by tomorrow or next day."

"Thanks. I'd be - very surprised to reset sooner than a week after we win, that wouldn't follow any consistent principles or be interesting."

"The spell might take me a bit longer than the letter, there's a lot to incorporate."

"Yeah. I'm glad you have enough to work with."

"Thuringwethil was helpful."

"I'm glad that's reliably true, I wasn't totally sure."

"Yeah, I was concerned when she did not appear to have shown up."

"Last time she surprised us with the balcony trip, I guess maybe that was an important ingredient.'

"I will include this in my letter, I suppose."