"I'm not allowed to leave Doriath. People have just been - fighting and dying - and I'm supposed to stay home and be inspiring. And I felt so useless - and so small - like my whole life I'd just been sitting on a shelf for people to admire - and Beren told me about a hundred battles he'd fought, battles that mattered, battles that slowed the Enemy, and I was just so - embarrassed, I had so many more resources than him and what had I done with them - I tried to explain it to Beren but he actually wouldn't believe it, he was convinced that I was great, and -"

Nod, smile.

"We don't have to talk about this."

"If you don't want to you can stop, I'm finding this the cutest thing I've heard in about twenty years."

"Okay. Uh. Anyway. We talked about the war and I felt so - inadequate - and he trusted me so much and I knew that it only felt like the most important thing I'd ever done, healing him and talking to him, because I'd never done anything important at all, but. Still. It did. And anyway after a while I wanted to kiss him so I - did that? And he said he loved me and I thought, well, this was going to feel horrible when he died like mortals do but - it mattered, nothing else did - and once I'd decided it wouldn't be a disaster to fall in love I noticed I already was..."

Awwww! "That's sweet and adorable and I really hope you guys are real so that you can be happy together."

"What do you get out of saying that all the time, exactly?"

"It has a small chance of persuading Nerikross' mindmage or Alfirin to give up on the simulation and is the way that my thoughts are forming right now. I'm sorry, I'll filter to avoid saying things like that from now on. I hope we can get him out and he recovers quickly."

"Thank you. Me too."

"The situation is going to be tricky. There will probably be more than one prisoner, so I can't go in alone and bring them out invisibly. So, even supposing we manage to get in undetected I think we'll have to fight our way out. This is going to be a problem if Gorthaur can just kill me and all the prisoners with a thought. Or even if he can't, but it's an especially big problem that way."

"I might be able to distract him or draw him out? He's expecting me and he'd love to get me. And - there might be more than one prisoner but we could do one at a time, right -"

"We can do one at a time once and then they notice someone's missing and make it a lot harder the second time, and maybe we get another but I doubt we get three that way and there's twelve. The King and Beren are probably the most strategically useful but I'm not sure how I feel about condemning the others to staying. I could maybe kill everyone left on the second extraction but I'd much rather find a way for them to get out. If you can distract Gorthaur and draw him out there's a decent chance I can fight my way out with the captives, but that gets a lot harder if I don't have weapons and might require more spell development time."

"We can probably get weapons somewhere."

"Silver? The werewolves are the main concern, I suspect large numbers of orcs I can handle with effectively negative effort for secret reasons."

"I would think yes but on the other hand my first experience of the Noldor was them being even worse than rumor had it, so -"

"From what I've heard the rumor is pretty bad and I'd consider that to be a good deal worse than imprisoning you, your situation just happened to remind me of the circumstance that got me here."

"What rumors have you even heard-"

"Well, you mentioned Kinslaying and Curufin did his very best to gloss over the details but he did explain the potential breaking points of this alliance and it sounds like there was one massacre over boats and one indirect massacre over the same boats later and they bindingly swore to go to war with anyone who holds their shinies. I don't know how much of that was in the rumors you've heard but it's all a good deal worse than keeping one political hostage no matter how much I have personal issues about that."

"That, and the shuffling around of civilizations of mortal vassals."

"How so?"

"Ladros - where Beren's from - should never have been settled on the front lines of the war anyways, he's probably the only survivor and they could have just settled them anywhere at all but there - also Beren's family is called the House of Beor, meaning 'House of Vassals', they don't remember what they were called before that - the Noldor reportedly sometimes keep mortals they like as pets -"

Oh, so they're the ones who would have the ridiculously caricatured Jade Dragon accents. Though obviously whoever's running this apparently has that much subtlety at least, kind of surprising given how things have been so far. They don't say any of that, instead,

"Tearing civilizations down is never as good an idea as it seems, but if we somehow managed to defeat the Enemy I'd be really tempted. There is something sort of like that going on back in my world but I'm powerless to stop it, here I might be able to do something."

"I don't know if they're actually that bad, it's all thirdhand in Doriath."

"Yeah, I'd confirm it all first. But the massacres I have firsthand from the mouth of one of the perpetrators and while he swore everything he said was true he didn't swear to completeness and I get the sense they were probably less justified than he tried to make it sound, I wouldn't exactly be surprised. Maybe we'll win this and get the opportunity to put them on trial."

"I'd like that a lot."