" - well, let's find a Balrog and try it."

"Even Melkor will probably learn after we try that once, so we should really try to get a mass of Balrogs. The next time he tries a concerted attack, though."

"I agree, I would want to save this for when I could do a great deal of damage at once – one assumes he has a limited number of Balrogs – and if it fails, I can still use the previous method. Anyway. Ideally we do need weapons against Maiar that are not me. Mages from my world, or something using the Silmarils that Quendi can wield, I am not sure but there are possibilities." 

"The Silmarils won't be very - wieldable. I'm considering things like - suspending the area of his fortress Angband in time, so nothing within it moves - or maybe destroying all life within it - or all magic within it -"

"Are those things possible? How long would it take you to design the method?" 

"I think they're possible. It'll take me - Years, maybe longer."

"I see. Then one of our top priorities should be securing the area where you work, I think. It ought take me much less time than that to re-establish contact with my own world. I am not sure if any of our magic will suffice to take down a Vala," though Vanyel with the Silmarils might well manage it, "but likely we ought to be able to hold off his Maiar that way, even take back some ground." 

"What options do we have for securing the area where we're working? Secrecy, obviously, but beyond that -"

"An escape plan to somewhere even more secret – ideally a few places, the location of each of them only known by one of us. So that if any of the important players here are captured and questioned, or mindread, then that will not lead Melkor to the backup place. Also, I can shield the area very thoroughly, if we are going to be here for a long time and I spend an hour a day or so on it. It might not hold off Melkor personally attacking, but it would delay even him long enough to bolt." 

"I think you should do that. Higher-level question, why didn't you suggest these things earlier, were you assuming we already knew what you can do on this front -"

"I have already been putting time toward shielding the area; if they give us another month, it will be very thorough. Mostly, though, I have been focused on the project of reaching my homeworld to bring aid, so I had not been tracking your existing strategic plans." And he's talked a lot more with Maitimo than Fëanáro about what he can do. 

"Hmm." He's trying to figure out whether this conversation should have happened sooner or whether everyone was prioritizing correctly already. It seems like too convenient a coincidence if everyone was prioritizing correctly already. "Is there anything else we should know about -"

"I feel I am not entirely calibrated on what things you do not already know, and keep making assumptions there." They're older than him and honestly smarter than him and they're very knowledgeable about some things, but there are gaps. "I do not wish to direct too much of my time away from research until I have contact with my world again, but I could review notes on your plans as they are made, this would not take too long and would enable me to notice places where I can help. I could also meet with you more regularly if you wish to ask advice with whatever is on your mind." 

(Fëanáro manages to be suspicious in ways that are almost cute. Maybe he'll tell Maitimo that thought at some point later.) 

"I can make sure you get a copy of everything. I don't like - wasting peoples' time they could be spending on research. But it seems of unusual importance we research things in the right order."

"I agree entirely. Given that, please do feel free to speak to me whenever you have a question about my magic – or my other experience. I will inform Nelyafinwë if I intend not to be interruptible for a period."

"Sure. Go away, we're both busy." This is a very complimentary dismissal; the standard one is of course "go away, I'm busy".

Leareth smiles and nods to him and heads off to keep working. 

Maitimo starts making plans to move the rest of the Noldor across the ocean. "We want to spread out and kick the orcs off most of the continent. Right now the Enemy has a lot of ability to poke around and ideally he'd be in hostile territory as soon as he leaves Angband."

Does Maitimo want Leareth to Gate them, or to wait for boats, or something else? 

"Gate's better if you can do it. The boats are very vulnerable in the middle of the ocean, right, and they still don't have enough of them, and they can't get horses onto the boats and the horses are doing very important work for us out there."

Then he needs to talk to Fëanáro and Curufinwë about how to tie the Silmarils into a permanent Gate-terminus, because there is no tractable way to Gate that many people the standard way. 

Both of them are happy to work on that, "though we can remove the Silmarils once they're through, right, without anything exploding?"

"It would be very bad if the Silmarils were permanently stuck to it, so yes, I will make sure the design allows for that."

Leareth has some diagrams he's drawn up and can explain how permanent Gates usually work in his world. The issue is that nodes, the main source of energy in Velgarth, are turbulent and also not at all intelligent, and there's no way to link a spell directly to them without a mage in the middle. Or a lot of complex magic serving that purpose instead. The Silmarils might actually be easier – there's a way in which they're helpful, they want to be used – but they're also different, which means he needs a new design, and to understand exactly how they behave when in contact with a mage-artifact that can't use human intuition to work with them. 

That sounds like a magic engineering problem which means it sounds like fun! 

Both Quendi apparently need very little sleep and less when they're doing interesting magic research.

Leareth continues to need a normal human amount of sleep, but he can mock up the beginnings of a terminus for them – he had already been playing around with it – and let them test things with it while he's resting. It seems like it won't be long at this rate, though, so he's willing to put off further Void exploration until they're done.