Tell him to come here, says the King. 

If you like. He steps out to do this.

Leareth waits, and thinks. 

He brings a chair when he comes back. 

Nelyafinwë says he has urgent business de-escalating arguments in the city and will join us once he's done, he tells the King. And he hasn't told anyone about a planned departure.

Leareth sits. He's pretty sure that isn't the main reason Nelyafinwë is stalling on coming, and also that it's currently in everyone's interest for Nelyafinwë to be allowed to stay away. :De-escalating arguments seems important: he acknowledges. :I do not think I have urgent need of his input, since he was the first person here who I spoke with: 

He's the best at keeping Fëanáro and Nolofinwë communicating productively, though, says the King. 

:I have considerable experience in mediating tense conversations. If it seems that it is not going productively, we can choose to pause things and summon him: 

Finwë thinks this is a strange thing for Leareth to feel strongly about, most people find Nelyafinwë trustworthy. Maybe the unrest in the streets is worse than expected? It seems like the sort of thing a malicious actor might intentionally stir up...he can talk to Nelyafinwë later and get the whole story. First, he just has to get his sons to agree to work together.

Leareth does find Nelyafinwë trustworthy. More so than anyone else here, in a very significant sense; he's the only one who knows about Leareth's mindreading. Leareth would prefer not the give the King a false impression that he doesn't trust him, but he's also concealing information here, and that makes it delicate to navigate. He decides against saying anything else. For all he knows, Melkor is stirring up unrest in the streets. 

Nolofinwë, and his entourage, arrive a few minutes later. Nolofinwë is darker-skinned and more sturdily-built than Fëanáro, and otherwise looks much like him; he's accompanied by a dozen quiet people with swords. 

The King is privately worrying that that's provocatively many. Fëanáro thinks it's probably about the right number if they want to kill him. 

The half-brothers glare at each other. 

"Nolofinwë," Fëanáro says, "this is Leareth, a visitor from another world."

Leareth is not intending to let anybody kill anyone else. He rises, bows politely to Nolofinwë (might as well be courteous, it's not costly to him), and sits again, saving his energy. Checks the privacy-barrier.

He gives the same speech as before; it's getting quite smooth now. His world's background; his perceptions of where a political situation like this one is headed; the level of bad luck and mislaid communication that hints at enemy action, and particularly bears the signature of a god's work. His suspicion of Melkor.

He keeps a close look at Nolofinwë's thoughts the entire time. What sort of motives does he have; what are his priors about the situation? How is all of this landing with him? 

Nolofinwë is pretty sure you can't interact with Fëanáro for ten minutes without noticing that he has no business being King so hopefully that has already been noticed. It seems unlikely that it'll come to fighting in the street; even the most belligerent young people he's talked to on both sides were horrified by Fëanáro's stunt earlier today, and are retreating from him over it. Surely they won't do the same thing themselves to their friends. Fëanáro might murder someone, but Fëanáro is different than most Quendi and the fact he might doesn't really suggest anyone else might. 

Of course, Melkor could manufacture provocation - make it look like the other side attacked first - and then you could perhaps drive people to violence, defending one another. 

I think we ought to ban swords in the city, he says to his father when Leareth is finished talking. Without them, no provocation could drive people to violence faster than we would hear of and resolve it; with them, it would be easy for Melkor to impersonate someone and start a fight. 

The King immediately looks to Fëanáro.

Sure. Starting in a week, when we leave; it's hamper logistics in the meantime. 

Leave? In a week? Nolofinwë says disbelievingly.

So far, Leareth finds Nolofinwë's reasoning on the matter to be adequate, at least. He's perhaps too confident in his people's disposition against violence, but it's hard to blame him for that, when there hasn't ever been counter-evidence and he might actually be right. 

:I think that depending what we learn of them, a major expedition to the Outer Lands offers a way to get ahead of Melkor: Leareth explains. :It would be valuable to know if he has wrought anything there - and it will offer a place for some of your people's restless energy to go, that is not violence. I am not sure that a week is the correct interval, however, I do think that my arrival makes speed feasible, and that we ought not waste that advantage. In the meantime, I think that measures against rapid escalation would be a good idea: He tries to convey in the overtones that he's a little impressed; he didn't think of it himself until it was mentioned. 

Leareth turns to Fëanáro. :Why do you think banning swords would hamper logistics? The argument is not clear to me: 

We need more of them, assuming people in the Outer Lands will want some, and we need to train the people departing to use them. We can do the latter just outside the city limits, if that's easier, but lots of the people who forge them work within the city, and if we want to do the training somewhere inconspicuous we'd want to do it within the palace.

:Ah, yes, a straightforward ban would not make sense. It would seem advisable to ask your people not to wear swords in the streets. The blades might be stored in a particular room, handed out for training and then collected again; those who forge them can deliver them to the staging area by some means other than wearing them. Does that seem workable?:

Leareth checks again what Nolofinwë is thinking, whether his reaction to the planned expedition is still one of disbelief. He sort of wants to convey that yes, he has noticed that Fëanáro isn't very suited, personality-wise, to the position of King – though him leading what is approximately a military expedition and colonization seems more reasonable. He's not going to say that to Fëanàro's face, though. 

Nolofinwë does not like the plan to leave at all. Maybe Leareth is imagining that sending Fëanáro off to the Outer Lands is a good way to get him to stop angling for the crown, but actually Fëanáro can do far more damage in the Outer Lands (and most of the damage he could conceivably do in Tirion would be done by persuading or ordering people to go to the Outer Lands), so this plan is not an improvement at all. 

A request not to wear swords in the streets seems fine.

Meanwhile this person is thinking about a lot of things!

- Maitimo was lying, most obviously, that his father knew it; he can't ask why because of the magic shield but none of his top guesses make a whole lot of sense! Nothing Maitimo has done for the last Year has made much sense; presumably at some point you just have to admit to yourself that you never really knew someone; especially if the someone is Maitimo and 'they couldn't have been lying that whole time' is a ridiculous thing to be tempted to say to yourself. But even presuming Maitimo to be a hostile stranger working for Fëanáro, why that specific lie - one he couldn't possibly keep up for very long - unless he was planning to make it true soon - actually, yeah, that almost had to be it - and then the interworld stranger had some kind of suggestion that Fëanáro and his close associates leave for the Outer Lands right now -

- a man finds a venomous snake on the ground dying of the cold, and cradles him in his shirt and brings him back to his home and sets him by the fire to recover. And the snake bites him. And the man cries out in pain and anger, why - when I cared for you - and the snake says, you knew what I was when you picked me up. Except it would be nice of the snake to at least say that.

What kind of expedition are you considering? Nolofinwë asks the King. 

      We discussed sending a thousand people. From all parts of the Noldor, so it's a unifying project. 

It has the wrong leader for that. 

       Finwë sighs heavily. 

...Leareth is distracted from Nolofinwë by this other person's thoughts. He's almost certain it corresponds to Nelyafinwë's secret flaw, and he's not certain, from what he was able to skim of surface thoughts while attempting to multitask, but he has a suspicion of what that "flaw" is. And that it's not, in itself, something that bothers him in the slightest. (His assumption had been much worse – that Nelyafinwë had murdered somebody in secret, or something of that shape).

–the other person's thoughts about Maitimo - he's confused about how names work, but pieced together that this is Nelyafinwë's other name - indicate something potentially a lot more frightening, though. A campaign of misinformation and mistrust doesn't necessarily have to be about politics alone. 

Damn the gods – could it be one thing at a time instead of ten? Leareth knows that's an unreasonable thought. Reality doesn't care about how much he can process and deal with at once. Nor do enemy gods. 

Focus. He can try to address the mess with Maitimo and this new person...later. Somehow. 

:I know little about your leadership politics: he sends to Nolofinwë. :Ultimately, this is your King's decision, as he has the context for it. But - in my eyes, Fëanàro's qualification as a leader for this is his passion for the entire project: Pause. :However, separating out the question of who leads it from the expedition itself – in isolation, do you agree that it would be advantageous to explore the Outer Lands?: 

Advantageous for what? For the great glory of the Noldor, conquerors of all the world, certainly. For the locals? I am uncertain. For our children, inheritors to a vast mess instead of a relatively contained one - no.

This has been debated, Fëanáro says. Extensively. For decades now.The overwhelming conclusion was that exploration would be beneficial to the locals. Mandos won't tell us at what rate they die of accidents or monsters but it's substantial, and right now those dead are sundered forever from their families; we can change that. Literacy, crop productivity improvements, fabric, magic artifacts, domesticated animals - we can offer all the benefits of Valinor, but theirs to pick and choose instead of being forced to accept or reject the whole package. If the locals don't want us in a given location we'll settle elsewhere; there's lots of wide-open land. I would ask your purpose in resurrecting an argument you lost so soundly, but I know it. 

Leareth sighs internally. He stands up. 

:If I am right, Valinor is already under threat. There is already no guarantee that your children will inherit the world you have now, instead of one much diminished and marred by violence. And outmaneuvering Melkor, gaining resources he could not reasonably have predicted your people would have, is a way to combat this:

He isn't sure if honesty will land. But, part of the problem seems to be that he doesn't make sense to Nolofinwë. And, to some extent, that Fëanáro as a person doesn't make sense to him either. Leareth may not approve of everything about Fëanáro, or think that he has the skills and experience to achieve the vision he's aiming for, but he understands why. 

:I will tell you my personal reasons for supporting this: he sends. :My world is much, much worse than yours in every way. My people grow old and frail with time, and die within ten of your Years, and they do not come back. And many, perhaps a majority, do not last that long; starvation or disease or violence kill them first. There are countries where a third of all infants die before they are this tall: He gestures at about the size of a five-year-old. :I have been trying to fix the troubles of my world for - a long time. And now I come here, and find a land that is already a paradise, and a people who, growing and flourishing in paradise, have attained remarkable heights of scholarship and success that my world has never seen. And – I rejoice for this, and I am also afraid, coming at the time I do and seeing these signs of unrest and violence to come, and my suspicions that a clever and powerful adversary is behind them:

Leareth looks down at the floor. :But, most of all, I wish for the people of your Outer Lands to benefit also from such a paradise. They are your cousins, but even were they not, they are still people. They experience joy and suffering just the same; their lives, I argue, bear the same value as yours: He closes his eyes. :I would argue the same of the people of my own world. And someday I hope that the fruits of your world will benefit mine as well. I do not think that this ought necessarily involve any conquering, but even if it did – I would take Quendi conquerors, if it meant that no child in my world ever died of hunger again. Perhaps that is my bias, but I hope it is one you might find understandable: