No emergencies arrive that would warrant interrupting her holiday. Some of the psion and mage kids stayed behind; they seem to have settled into Tirion all right.

Isabella is gone for a week and comes back cheerful and with some extra Christmas cookies.

Yum. Results are in from some of the ways-of-spending-money-to-improve-Earth they tried and were collecting data on.

Money shuffles around. "Elf" is a musical genre. Treaties are treated. Eclipsed meditate. The Internet exists in defiance of Elf handwringing about maybe finding a way to moderate it.

They're definitely going to decide on a way to regulate the Internet, but at a sedate and Elfly pace; it'll be a few Years at minimum. Humans, on the other hand, negotiate treaties so efficiently! Progress can be made in a single weekend! Maitimë finds human treaty negotiations so energizing and is very enthusiastic about them. The Valar continue not to make anything way worse, and some of the Maiar have actually moved across the country to meet humans and hit it off with some of them. Though she's yet to meet one she'd recommend to Isabella as a partner in independent-kingdom-in-Endorë management. 

Eventually an occasion arises to introduce Isabella to the Queen.

"What do I need to know about meeting queens, or this queen?"

"Ah, be courteous, don't talk about my dead grandfather? Not that I can imagine it coming up. You can look ahead if you're really interested but I expect she'll be perfectly happy to just talk about Endorë and kingdom-building complications out there."

"That I can do."

"I think you'll get along fine."

"Cool, let's do this."

The Queen is in fact not easy to offend and perfectly friendly, though her advice about a kingdom in Endorë is not to do it.

"Why's that?"

"There're - things - out there. Things Melkor set in place during the war, loose orcs, loose things worse than orcs -"

"I'm hoping psions will be able to de-oath the orcs, after which they may be less threatening. What things worse than orcs?"

"So keep in mind that Melkor operated almost entirely by secrecy, even most of her prisoners never saw her, and the same for most of her creations. 'A place where, if you go, you won't come back' is scarier than whatever monster was enforcing that. But lesser Maiar, probably."

"They weren't rounded up when she was?"

"Pretty much impossible to round up. I imagine she has the means to find them, if she's now cooperating."

"That hadn't made its way to me; I only heard about the orcs."

"It's sort of a problem with a lot of moving pieces. The hearing was going to try to lay them all out but it got - interrupted -"

"I apologize for the timing, I hadn't known there was anything to mention, earlier."

"The Valar said three hundred Years ago that she would be imprisoned for three hundred Years but I guess they - snuck up on us."

"Three hundred Years is plenty of time to get sidetracked."

"And plenty of time to repent even of horrifying things. But."

"But."

"But if we're somehow wrong -"