She'll just.... go thataway?

Thataway is a cave system, apparently. It has big glittering crystals and stunning cave formations and absolutely no light. Nerdanel seems unbothered.

"Um... not to be a pain but I can't, like, see in here?"

" - huh, not at all? The path's heated."

I can't see infra red. Shades between violet and red only, over here.

All right. I suppose I could carry you?

...I guess. If you can and don't mind a lot. Or I could just, uh, hold your hand or something. Unless there are rocks to trip over.

There are a lot of rocks. 

She lifts Karen up easily and keeps walking.

Well that's fine then, probably, wow Quendi are kind of alarmingly strong.

She walks for another fifteen minutes. The air gets notably cooler.

Then suddenly it's adequately lit. They're in a cavern that stretches on for a long way in every direction. The ceiling has towering stalactites. The ground is mostly covered in sharp, stunning crystals taller than them. On the path ahead of them there's a very large, very wide, bearded man. 

Nerdanel kneels. My lord, we have a petition.

She'll just also kneel, that seems like the thing to do here, she should probably have asked earlier what was going to happen at this point.

We believe that we ought not to act too much on Earth. This is the world that we were charged with. But I can take Karen to get her sister's children.

Nodnod she is not super sure how to speak right now.

Would you like to go now?

Can I come right back?

Yes.

OK. Then yes. Thank you.

He walks over in two large steps and picks her up in one hand and now they are standing in the middle of a street in Florida.

Oh boy OK that sure is a thing.

- don't think too hard. Just deal. It's like when someone kills somebody in front of you, or apparently when you find an alien child in a closet in a room full of corpses, you don't think too hard, you just deal.

She hops off Aulë's hand and ignores the cars that are stopping for him and rings her parents' doorbell.

Her mother comes to the door. She's in her fifties now, hair greying a little. 

"Karen?" says her mother, like she's grown a second head, even before she sees the giant standing behind her. "Karen, we tried to get ahold of you, you cannot just drop the children off when you please and then ignore us, you have to - what is that?" And oh, yeah, now she sees Aulë.

"He's a... Vala," says Karen, lamely, and briefly looks back at Aulë to see if he would like to say anything slightly more enlightening than that on account of her brain is not super working right now.

Hello, says Aulë, tilting his head to look into the door of their house. Karen sought assistance with protecting her family.

"Harold, call the police," says her mother, after a moment, turning to face the kitchen.

No point in dealing with that. " - look, Mom, it's - I need to get out of here before someone calls an air strike on me personally, or whatever, but - it's not safe here, for the kids, or for me. It wasn't safe in LA, and it's honestly probably not safe anywhere in this dimension, so - "

"Auntie Karen!" shrieks Zana, charging out the door to tackle her.

Karen scoops her up and hugs her. "Hey. Sorry I took so long. We don't have a lot of time, OK? Can you be good and get your suitcase?"

Nodnodnod. "You're not REALLY gonna have a doctor cut my horns off, are you?"

"No, I lied through my teeth. We're gonna go live in a forest in a dimension with psychic aliens, OK? But you have to hurry up and get your things."