They're also welcome to ask me if they have questions relevant to their new eclipsed or anything like that.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

If you or anybody has other ideas about things I should try counterfactually saying to Liz - or Taylor or Ahmad - or, hell, Melkor or Maira - I'll entertain suggestions. Last time Liz suddenly dropped out of the conversation, not sure what happened...

Hmm, can you send me what you've tried?

Sure -

Except not the part where Liz casually remarks on Maitimë being hers, not because Maitimë seems likely to care very much at this point but because Isabella is the only psion with trained-up skills in Valinor and people need to not discount her as some kind of degenerate.

...she's probably just letting Maira read her, why wouldn't Maira insist on that -

Yeah, I've been assuming the conversations are probably Maira-supervised.

So then what are you hoping for, making Maira nervous enough to kill her?

At least then the Enemy wouldn't have a psion. But no, ideally I'd be able to time it somehow so Liz kills Melkor -

That would be fantastic and I very much doubt Maira'd let the conversation get to the point where there's even a chance -

Yeah. Unless I can think of a way to distract her. And I should have started working on this last week and I didn't and now she has functional precognition range so I don't have very long to figure out where to poke Liz.

A way to distract Maira? What does happen if you try talking to her?

Haven't tried that yet. Liz did suggest it once which makes me wonder if it'd be a good idea - she has to know I'd precog it first -

Presumably, yes - this right now is a real conversation?

Yeah. I am doing a lot of magic these days, I'm not wasting calories on a friendly information exchange that I'd then have to go repeat in real life anyway.

It seems like distracting Maira or somehow convincing Liz to leave her range is going to be necessary.

Getting Liz to travel three hundred miles would - I don't even know how to try that - maybe if one of the Elf mages picks up teleportation but that's years off and Melkor might be able to nope it within Utumno. And I don't think I can saturate a Maia's attentional capacity with a conversation.

If the mages pick up a teleport then Liz can come back here and finish the rest of the Valar off. And - no, probably not, plus if you were talking with her you wouldn't be talking with Liz.

I can actually do two conversations at once, I concentrated enough on attentional capacity for that, I just assume Maiar have even more than I do. I was imagining teleporting her to some third location, not within range of the Valar.

I can suggest to the mages that they work on it. Though it sounds like Melkor's speeding up Liz more than we can speed up anyone.

It's not so much that I can't talk to her, but yeah.

Did you try my niece -

Yes. She - doesn't consistently answer me.

Okay. I'll let you know if I think of anything.

Thanks.

She gets brunch and resumes trying to figure out an angle on Liz.