"Elves," mutters Isabella, and she composes another email. I mentioned what you were working on and your father guessed without being told that it was gems that shed white light and advises you not to make them gems for vague fate reasons. What does Maitimë think of this wording -?

"Probably not going to do better than that, given the -nature of the problem -"

Nod. Send.

What's the nature of the problem, is it specific to them being gems? Are there other ways to protect them - can we just check in with a year-out precog annually -

Isabella writes down that segment of the conversation verbatim - I assume if he knew more details he'd have said but I can relay questions if you like -

I really don't have much sense of what to do with the information. 

Me either, but passing it on seemed better than not doing that.

Definitely. Thank you.

You're welcome.

Have you told anyone that they're going to do more than lighting -

Maitimë's the one who suggested talking to your grandfather, mentioned to her in the course of discussing the results, otherwise no.

Okay. Thank you. I'll - consider appropriate safety precautions short of 'don't acquire immense power'.

Sounds good. Lemme know if you need to ask somebody a question without them knowing you asked it or anything.

Will do.

And to Maitimë, Well, she's contemplating safety precautions.

If it's your sincere advice she stop entirely I bet we can convince her to, just -

I don't have nearly enough information to confidently advise that.

Exactly.

And I want the arbitrary-light gems, they sound pretty great.

Yeah, even without knowing what else they're supposed to do they're neat.

And apparently eventually a disaster. There have to be ways to mitigate that risk.

Even just making them not-gems would demonstrate in principle that local lousy precognition can be interfered with...

True. Might be worth it for that reason alone, actually. I should probably talk to some people who actually get lousy local precognition, see if there are other disprovables -

I wonder why it suddenly stopped being lousy...? Is it because by default nobody would have been able to talk to your grandfather -?

...might be, actually, yeah. He could foresee anything since he wasn't going to be able to act on any of it -

But theoretically he could've told Mandos and Mandos could've told whoever.