That's kind of them. Leareth eats it. :Nelyafinwë? Did we learn whether the Maiar I sensed are supposed to be here?: He's been intermittently remembering to do sweeps but not reliably every hour, when he's this deeply focused on artifact work. 

We did! They're all here by invitation, participating in or enabling research.

:Good. Thank you: And back to work. The freezer-spell is higher powered but it's also a lot simpler. He can do one every half-hour once he's in the zone with it. 

The Quendi get ready to leave. They'll be down a little bit of food, compared to what they planned, but they should still have enough not to starve before they can harvest crops. They won't have armor, but the people their scouts talked to said the Outer Lands weren't so full of horrible dangers after all. 

And in the worst case scenario they can return to Valinor. 

They notify the thousand people of the intended departure date.

Leareth makes artifacts. He does occasional sweeps of the city for unexpected magic; he checks in about whether he ought to ward any additional storage areas they've started using. He finishes the food-preservation set, starts on the much larger and higher-powered camp wards. He eats, sleeps for a while, keeps going. 

He's not going to have time for anything too complicated, here, but the fact that osanwë can interface with his kind of magic enough for the Quendi to control the wards themselves means he can put in a few options. As a default, they'll detect approaching magic, trigger an alarm if a Maiar-sized magic source tries to cross them, except Huan who he can key into the wards now; he'll ask Nelyafinwë about any other approved Maiar who are accompanying them. That part is low-powered; he can fully power the wards now, and they'll run for a week before they need maintenance. 

In an emergency, a simple osanwë command from Nelyafinwë, or from someone else he trusts and wants Leareth to key in as well, will raise an impassible physical and magical barrier around the warded area. Well, probably not impassible to a god, but breaking it down won't be quick or silent even for Melkor. The emergency level is, unsurprisingly, very costly in terms of mage-energy; it'll run the wards down in less than twelve hours. Hopefully any emergency won't last that long. 

:Nelyafinwë, is there somebody I might speak to who is an expert in your existing magical artifacts?: he asks eventually. :I had the sense Macalaurë is knowledgeable here. There may not be time to do it now, but I wished to investigate whether it is possible to directly tie the two kinds together, so that mine will not need my direct work to re-power them: 

Macalaurë does our songs, he doesn't like artifacts especially, but I can find you someone good with artifacts. We should also test how your magic interacts with songs, actually, but I think that's a lower priority. 

:Thank you. ...How long has it been since I spoke to you when I woke up?: He has the curtains pulled shut and was deep enough in trance that he's not sure he would have noticed a Mingling passing. Time is starting to feel very hazy. 

Nineteen hours. If you want daily updates on our preparation progress, the people who get those will get them in three hours more.

Huh. That's...a lot of hours of consecutive repetitive work, and Leareth barely noticed them passing. He's a little tired but not in the way he'd expect. Odd. He mulls on it for a moment. 

:Thank you. I will wait for that and then rest. Also – does Valinor have some kind of effect that causes time to be experienced differently, perhaps similar to the effect against decay?: 

There are lots of magics in effect on Valinor to make it a paradise. Some of them are usually characterized as - making people less rushed? Making it easier to live in the moment? I don't know if that's what you're experiencing, though, I've never had anything to compare it to.

Leareth does not like the idea of some ambient magical field affecting his mind and thinking. He doesn't like it at all. :Perhaps. I am curious if you will notice any difference when we depart: 

He keeps working and waits for the daily update. 

Daily update: they have about twenty pounds of food per person, in grain or insulated boxes that can get freezing magic added. They have informed all thousand people chosen for the initial expedition. There are a couple interested Maiar in addition to Huan; that seems good, unless Melkor has subverted some Maiar, in which case it seems potentially very bad. The current plan for when they arrive is to travel to the coast in the lightly inhabited area the locals call Lammoth, and set up there; it's much colder than Tirion, and many of their crops might not go, but that seems solvable in the medium term with magic of one flavor or another and the more temperate coastline is reportedly densely populated. Once they've taught the locals farming the land should support a hundred times as many people but they don't want to strain it until then. They've made urgent requests for fishing equipment in Alqualondë but Olwë has his doubts about the expedition and might not agree; if not, hopefully the locals will trade them. 

Leareth unfortunately isn't sure how to check if a given Maia has been subverted, mindreading them seems both risky and hard to interpret, so it seems like the best option here is to keep a very, very close eye on it. 

He can make a quick trip out of his room to show people the freezing artifacts and how to activate them once they've crossed over, place one with each box and then cast some good solid wards around the area against theft. Then sleep, then finish the camp wards (the strange time-affecting-magic-field is unsettling but it's convenient for his current work), then check how many hours left until departure. 

One hundred eighty four. Olwë is still being stubborn about the fishing equipment, is there any chance Leareth has the bandwidth to Gate a diplomatic party over to Alqualondë to talk to him? This isn't ideal because it'll give Olwë's grandchildren a lot of independence, once they reach the Outer Lands, but that's not a battle Nelyafinwë is in any mood to fight right now. 

Horses fed exclusively off Outer Lands plants don't seem to be sick, so that's good. Does Leareth's magic do temperature or should they be scrambling for warm clothes? 

Leareth can Gate the party over, that's fine – should he plan on Gating them back at a specific time, or is there a way to stay in communication at that distance? Leareth's magic does temperature, he's working on a set of weather-barrier foci now that he's done the camp wards, but he doesn't think they should rely on it if they can avoid it, it makes his work too much of a single point of failure. 

He can stay in touch with his cousins at that range; Tirion and Alqualondë are a couple hundred miles apart. 

Does all of your magic fail if you die? If you decide to cancel it? If we lose contact with your world somehow?

:Any spell I am personally maintaining will fail if I die. The artifacts will not, but currently rely on my ability to re-power them. If I can figure out how to tie my artifacts to your existing magic, that would no longer be true. I am not sure what it would mean to lose contact with my world, but I suppose I cannot rule out that it is possible and might result in my no longer being able to use magic. It seems unlikely and I am unsure whether there is anything we could do to prepare for it: 

Nod. And other people can't be taught your kind of magic?

:I doubt it. It is not something everybody in my world can do – it relies on possessing a specific Gift. I suppose I could test some of your people for the potential, but it would be odd and surprising if it existed here: 

He thinks for a moment. :If I can figure out how to Gate back to my own world, and the power requirement is tenable, I could perhaps bring more mages here. I suspect this would take some amount of experimenting, however, and I would understand if your people preferred not to bring in more untested foreigners: 

(Leareth tried testing it briefly, earlier. An ordinary Gate-technique just fails; the Void is there but his world isn't findable. It may be that he has to follow the same route through the additional planes as his experiment did, but in reverse, which means he needs to find where they 'are' from here. And he's not actually sure what the power requirement is; he was doing it from a permanent Gate-terminus in his own world, with its own energy link, and it still left him exhausted.) 

We'd be delighted to have more help, but it's probably not a sensible immediate priority. That does suggest getting the artifacts to function without you ought to be. I'll send Curufinwë, I'd expect he can figure it out if anyone can.

:Thank you: 

Curufinwë looks strikingly like Fëanáro, and this is not the only similarity. He has a notebook and a couple dozen pieces of magic jewelry and wants an explanation complete with sense-impressions of what Leareth is tapping into. Can he sort the jewelry by which is the most powerful to Leareth's magic? By which replenishes the fastest, if there's a noticeable difference?

Leareth likes him immediately. 

He can do that, and show Curufinwë his mage-sight, trying to go deeper in it to notice any fine details he hasn't explored so far (not that they mean much to him, yet). All the jewelry pieces seem to replenish in the same length of time, which means a faster rate of energy-flow for the more powerful ones. 

And are they equally easy to tap into? He has someone send for a bunch more artifacts to test a theory about what makes artifacts have more energy of the type Leareth can detect  "conveniently I think it's nearly orthogonal to how difficult they are for us to make, except at real extremes of power - I assume the Silmarils look like they'd have a lot of it?"

"Yes. Much so. And, convenient." Leareth is trying to make a habit of speaking out loud in Quenya when he's in the same room with someone, so he gets actual practice with the language. 

–Speaking of that. :Nelyafinwë? Where are the Trees located? I ought check that I can in fact draw on them and the power is sufficient for a Gate of the magnitude we need. Also, I am guessing they are not conveniently located for this purpose: Brief internal sigh. :If your father would allow me to draw on them through the Silmarils, that would obviate the need for me to be physically near the Trees themselves, but...he seems reluctant to allow anybody else to touch his work. Which is understandable, I suppose: