Accept our Terms of Service
Our Terms of Service have recently changed! Please read and agree to the Terms of Service and the Privacy Policy
At the End of All Things Elves in Revelation
Permalink

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls.

 

Yes. It should be possible to summon a demon and, depending how their powers work, either get a Silmaril from them or get the location of the patch of ground closest to the Silmaril from them or at worst do binary search over conjured models of parts of the planet to find the Silmarils. Yes, it should be possible to summon an angel to then dig the thing out of bedrock. And then they won't live life walking against the currents of fading, they will be whole again, they can summon some more for spaceship plans and head away from Earth much sooner, and much more powerful, than they imagined.

 

Also, the curious demon might go back to Hell and conjure some more Silmarils, if their powers happen to shake out that way, and might start handing out Silmarils to anyone on Earth who wants one, because why not, and the oath might still be in force, the risk is unimaginable - 

 

- they can of course get a Silmaril and then, if it turns out they can be conjured, not let the demon go home, that is merely incredibly rude and might strand someone a dimension away from their family for centuries. It at least does not risk unleashing the oath on this innocent world that has, at last, left the scars of the last time that happened beyond the reach of living memory.

 

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls because he is childishly frightened, because his well-polished coping skills are fraying, because if he feels the tug of that oath on him again it will be too late to kill himself and therefore he wants, very badly, to do it now. For three months he wavers.

 

And then he answers the calls, and takes some vacation, and goes home for a Fëanorian planning session. He doesn't remember what loving them felt like but he remembers that he loved them, that it was once very important to him, and he knows he would do this for someone he loved. They plan and they read and they learn and they practice - without summoning, because daeva get the languages you speak when you summon them and so the first daeva they summon will know, if observant enough, they're not of this society - 

- he gets two weeks vacation a year, they plan very very slowly - 

 

- and six years after Revelation they have a binding and a few possible options for payment and a plan for the case where Silmarils turn out to be trivially conjurable and conjurable ones oath-relevant. Maedhros is terrified, and miserable, but no one can tell. He prides himself on that. 

 

Curufin doesn't want to do it because he speaks Khuzdul and the Dwarves who taught him it in confidence did not give him permission to share it. (They did give him permission, when it came up one optimistic night, to share it with his father should his father ever return to life, and so Fëanor speaks Khuzdul too.) Maglor's pretending to be a currently-dead pop star and that invites its own host of complications. 

Maedhros does not speak Khuzdul. He speaks the Black Speech in addition to a few human languages and Thindarin and Quenya, but the language won't scare daeva in itself (if they get his exact vocabulary, they might be frightened.) Maedhros picks a place in the castle in Canada that could be a room in an unusually wealthy human's house, unremarkable, and he painstakingly copies all but one bit of the circle they decided on together, and he calls in everyone to look and make sure he did it right, and he dismisses them all - one Elf alone is not obviously inhuman, two or more together raises suspicions -

- and he completes the circle.

 

Total: 3233
Posts Per Page:
Permalink

"With telepathy? Yeah."

Permalink

"Or songs. You don't want to bribe them in case there'll be more - what about bribing one to snap a carefully selected daeva's binding and then the daeva causes nonlethal havoc and people get scared off zoos?"

Permalink

"You'd have to carefully select the daeva, and they're not letting them talk. I suppose perhaps you could telepath them, does that get more telephone-like if they know it's happening?"

Permalink

"Yeah but listening just to what people want to send varies by person how easy it is - I could tell them how it works and they could signal if they agree to communicate like that. But we should probably get Matt if we're doing things that depend on snap character judgments with lots of lives at stake."

Permalink

"Noted." Cam notes it. "Are any of you a lawyer or is that not one of your collected occupations?"

Permalink

"None of us are a lawyer. We should probably pay some, if they aren't all over this already."

Permalink

"I suppose the telepathy would let you ask the exhibits what they would like in the way of help."

Permalink

"Yeah but if they say 'get us the fuck home right now' I am going to be kinda reluctant to wait five years for a Super Court case."

Permalink

"Supreme Court."

Permalink

"That either."

Permalink

"I sympathize." Sigh.

Permalink

And they book a flight.

Permalink

The powers that be have not shut the zoo down yet. It is attended but not thronged, and people are mostly not petting the daeva except for one angel who is supposedly really soft.

Permalink

Hello, he says to all of the daeva including Cam once he's seen them all, and no one else. I am a telepathic alien. I have been pretending to be human but don't want to be associated with them any more. I am here to ask what you would like me to do about this horrible fucking place. 

Permalink

I want to coordinate a thing, says one of the demons, all of us take our wings off and look really boring, can you relay that -

Permalink

Yeah for sure - and he bounces that to everyone -

Permalink

Soft angel turns her wings to air immediately. The others follow suit; the fairies wince more but still do it.

Permalink

If it helps I can summon you later with a demon on hand and put 'em back for you. If that's faster than - whatever you normally do - and to Cam - can the fairies even get them back -

Permalink

They can heal them back if they want, or there's a plant that'll roll the dice on new ones back in Fairyland.

Permalink

Oh good. Anybody need anything else -

Permalink

Gigantic thermos of green tea please, says a fairy.

"You wanna go deliver it? The strike thing they're doing might work by itself, I don't think we should introduce rogue daeva elements yet."

Permalink

Yeah. He delivers the fairy a gigantic thermos of green tea.

Permalink

You're the alien? You just look like a runway model, says the fairy, downing the thermos.

Permalink

It wouldn't be very much fun to pose as an ugly human, he says, taking the thermos back. I am thirty thousand years old and did not look like this for most of it. 

Permalink

Thanks for the tea. Can't float in my sleep, can't lie down, can't float another fairy and get them to return the favor...

Total: 3233
Posts Per Page: