"I could try lying to her about how postcogs work and pretend it'd just save us a little time -"

How's that go?

Same response, though she prefaces it with 'in that case it's probably not worth trying to get exact dates, it will take a long time.'

"So maybe that part is legit - might make sense for it to be anyway, we could have asked other Valar about their timekeeping habits -"

"I bet she's better than the other Valar at keeping time - which means that if they could do it it'd discredit her - she also might not know you don't have lie detection, might be being careful to keep to technical truths..."

"Ooh, might be."

"If we go over things she's said in that light -"

"Nothing sticks out to me; you?"

"Not especially. There are a couple questions she doesn't answer but she usually says something that'd suffice as an answer at another point, and it doesn't look forced -"

"I'm probably getting all of the manyfold attention she has, might make it easy to talk circles around me."

"It's certainly an impressive show of what a Vala capable of comprehending incarnates is like. If she didn't have the mass murder and torture track record and she sought us out to offer to help I'd be delighted."

"Yeah. The upside potential of paroling her looks upsideier. If she's legit."

"A fairly urgent if. Is there any way to use the postcog without specific dates and times in mind?"

"Some of them might be able to pan really efficiently or by other criteria or something..."

She puts out a request.

There's peculiar postcogs out there who can find things by other criteria, but none who will be able to do quite what they'd need to verify Melkor's story.

Oh well. And no one with the delightful package of significant-length-of-time precog+long distance communication+good lie detection?

Not advertising, at any rate. And Isabella knows a lot of precogs' skillsets from eclipses and doesn't recall any with that intersection.

There's not much besides conversations with imprisoned evil gods that you'd need it for. 

They hire someone and go ahead with exploration of Endorë.

It goes both better and worse than hoped. They would hypothetically have managed with some nudging to find and talk to some of the Elves; it turns out that Finwë's old best friend is alive and ruling a kingdom in the center of the continent, and that there are nomadic tribes of Elves in much of the rest of it with no particular objections to new neighbors.

...and that they shoot every orc they see on sight, because orcs are all evil and intractably want all Elves dead, it'd be just like Elves in Valinor to have forgotten that - 

- there are no signs of non-orc monsters, but there are stories aplenty - 

- they try a dozen iterations of conversation with orcs and none of them get anywhere, though they have enough samples of the language to try to send Fëanáre some. Talking to the orcs in their own language doesn't work any better than talking to them over osanwë. 

"...well, we can just overpower orcs as they come, pretty easily even, but it is in some ways more appealing to wait on de-oathing being available."

"Yep, and it's not like we'd have to wait that long, we're waiting on my mother's perhaps-not-gems and the new infrastructure anyway and you thought if it were possible someone might turn it up inside a Year -"

"Yeah. Although we could possibly also get somewhere by just having humans interact with orcs, it's just Elves they're not supposed to tolerate..."

"Good point. Okay, next imaginary expedition we'll send some humans who we've taught the language."

"We could also imaginary-hire an omniglot."

"Oooh, yes, that should be faster. ...can that one be given out, my mother will offer up her firstborn child -"