you took your time with the call | Glowfic Constellation

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.

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from_scratch

"Yeah I didn't actually ask that question - they have a very low crime rate, maybe it actually literally never came up, but as described it did not metaphysically discriminate."

"I think people will be sold on not doing that to their kids."

from_scratch

"Hopefully."

More sightseeing! It's such a pretty castle.

from_scratch

And when she has had her fill of castle and Elves he will look up demon-assisted fertility clinics.

There are twenty-three of them! Four are in L.A.; they're also popular in China and Korea.

from_scratch

He doesn't have Korean. He starts with the ones he can talk to first.

"By law we're not allowed to use DNA from a living person without their written and notorized consent," says the receptionist at the first clinic, "and we were advised by our legal office to stop using DNA from dead persons as well, once the whole afterlives thing came out."

from_scratch

"Great, that's very good to hear. In the unlikely event you get ahold of an Elf willing to notarize consent please be exquisitely clear about what parental rights they can expect, they will expect more than a comparable human by default."

"I'll make a note. Thank you for calling Miracle!"

Next four places have the same policy. The one after that says "our clinic provides a safe environment for new families to arrange for fertility assistance. The arrangements are between the families and the daeva involved."

from_scratch

"There are potentially serious negative externalities associated with the possibility of Elf children or Elf hybrids," Cam says.

"I'm sorry?"

from_scratch

"If somebody wants Elf kids that has more serious ramifications than if someone wants Einstein's kids."

"There are a lot of people concerned about the implications of letting people have Einstein's kids, too."

from_scratch

"I would be very sympathetic if Mr. Einstein chose to complain. But that's not what I'm calling about. Elves have different afterlife outcomes from humans; if humans can have Elf children at all that will be part of the result. Half-elves have special cased characteristics selected by divine intervention. Inviting divine intervention is a bad idea. And any specific Elf whose genes are used will find this much more violating than a comparable human."

"...do you want to speak to my manager?"

from_scratch

"I would love to speak to your manager."

There's a pause. "Uh, Bob? Revelation's on the phone and he's talking about Elves and inviting divine intervention and -"

"Revelation?"

"I mean, I suppose anyone could say that. Bit more coherent than most of the eugenics doomsday callers, though."

Sigh. "Hello? This is Robert with Love and Life Family."

from_scratch

"Hello, Robert, I'm Cam, if it would help in any way for us to work out a way for me to prove that I'm happy to do so, I'm calling to advise that you write into your demons' bindings that they are not to make Elf DNA."

"I was not aware that Elves even have DNA."

from_scratch

"It's possible they don't! There are so many reasons not to try finding out that I have avoided doing so, and while I understand that there are also lots of reasons to find Elfhood tempting for one's offspring it is a very bad idea to let people go for that."

"What sort of problems might arise for the families doing that?"

from_scratch

"If they get full Elves, well, for one thing they take fifty years to grow up, but apart from that if they die - still possible for them to die of accident or violence - then instead of going to a daeva afterlife or Limbo they will float around as a disembodied soul until they find the Vala of the dead, who might choose to leave them disembodied indefinitely or reembody them and forbid them from leaving Valinor at his unchecked discretion. Additionally, Elves whose genes are used will take even more exception than nonconsenting human genetic relatives. Half-Elves have existed in the past but many of their characteristics are inconsistent and seem chosen through divine intervention, which it is deeply unwise to invite."

"...I can tell people that we don't think attempting that will produce healthy babies?"

from_scratch