"..." He pulls an omnibus out of his bag, offers it to her.

"We were eight chapters in to 20,000 Leagues."

"You should like write up the alternate endings and put them online, it'd be sort of anthropologically interesting."

"I can do that."

"What've you even been doing, do you mostly just lie around looking at the walls. At least they're pretty walls, I guess that's important."

"I've been faking a recovery trajectory for people who need to believe in one, and oohing over my mother's Silmarils - have you seen them? They're astonishing - and trying to sort of wean everyone off emotional dependence on their belief that I'm resilient and stuff."

"Haven't seen the Silmarils, just came straight here, I'll make a point of touristing at 'em. Is the rest of it, like, an activity? It sounds sort of like a thing that you'd do while doing other things..."

"Little bit of reconstruction work. I'm not at the point in the recovery trajectory where I'm expected to manage much. Elves're patient."

"Suppose that's convenient."

"Yeah."

(Alex is subtly keeping an eye on his sister, gauging her tolerance for More Of This Sort Of Thing.)

(Isabella hasn't noticed.) "I'm not even totally clear that reading you things was a good idea but I never came up with anything better."

"If nothing else Maira wasted lots of time emulating it. If I'd had to plan in advance 'something expensive for them to imitate' would be what I'd have wanted."

"I was a little worried that it'd somehow become obvious it was all things I'd read before and I wasn't reading any new human literature and couldn't be on Earth. Conveniently my actual taste in literature is mostly 'written by dead people'..."

"And conveniently I didn't know enough about Earth literature to put it together - though she must've eventually guessed, why else flee to Earth -"

"I assumed she fled to Earth to escape the catastrophic eclipse and terrorize the populace but I guess that could've been operative too, I did get different reactions when I said hi before and after I refreshed your memory."

"The human kids-"

"Died. I'd talked the mages into learning teleportation and they could get eidetic memories and talked into getting that Melkor was bad news without getting rolled back - Liz if I got far enough with her Maira just deleted the conversation - but they didn't have it and we couldn't postpone the eclipse, not for two people. We'll - we'll figure out resurrection eventually."

"...yeah."

"I kind of copped out on telling their families, there's a form letter for apologizing to people whose relatives die in your covered area during an eclipse..."

"I should -"

"They're not expecting to hear from you, I don't think. It's - I could see why you'd think they might but it's not customary to assign people's recruitment personnel particular responsibility for what happens to them after that."

"They were my responsibility, even if no one was assigning it to me -"

"By the time anything happened to them you were not in a position to discharge that responsibility."

"Doesn't matter."