She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
They reach the fellow in the cell. Ambela makes introductions. "Would you mind describing your Arda, Cam?"
"Uh. Couple inhabited planets, one of them embroiled in war, I accompanied a contingent from the other planet who wanted to go fight the bad guy and I supplied them and did consulting. Lots of Elves lots of orcs some very secret number of Dwarves who shot me a lot and made a really good impression otherwise. Orcs answer to Melkor -"
"If they ever figure out how to pop us hither and yon as they please I should swing through then."
"Well, then you might get in trouble with the oath clause on self-defense, that having been a dealbreaker."
"If you might disappear in five days and Cor is planning to if possible come kill your Melkor after some kind of magic development project that could conceivably take longer than that, then it seems ideal."
"- yeah okay fair point. So I was helping the Elves, and, like, he noticed, kept offering deals. He didn't really care much about the theater of war on Endorë. It was sort of just for kicks. I'd noticed the tech levels were pretty artificially matched - they had, like, guns, and were about to invent the nuke, but also there were engineered prion diseases in people's water, that's really hard and no one was even using prerequisite biotech, but it looked to casual observation like the water was just poisoned or something, he was keeping it even to avoid the Valar swooping in to save the day. Follow?"
"He offered deals. For me, for Maitimo. We kept turning him down. Even with an oath they could be doing audio illusions, which, frankly, with that ability on the table I'm not sure why they got in the habit originally of trusting oaths, but anyway we didn't fall for it.
"Turns out I can verify oaths though."
"Relies on magic that doesn't work in here. I can make stuff. I can make stuff I don't know all the details of based on what's called 'conjurable parameters' - title and author'll get me a book. A recording of an oath counts as a different medium than a recording of an audio illusion of spoken word. Tested it with Melian. Did not tell her what we were thinking of doing with it, she would've - anyway.
"Held out for a better deal. Picked at the wording for a real long time. I think we had it right.
"He wanted the Valar dead."
"Well, I'm not sure if it would have changed anything, but one thing Melkor didn't know was that I could put Elves back."
"Why didn't he know that - if you can make things, he must have noticed -"
"Demons can't make minds. If I make a snail it'll act like a snail. If I make a bird or something it'll act about as dumb as a snail. And so on. The Silmarils I mentioned back up the minds without my help though. Iverindo in particular is just some guy who I happened to be about to reembody on - on the replacement Valinor I made, when I turned up here."
"Oh, I suppose you don't. The ability to conjure objects entails the ability to destroy planets."
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