And they're at Curufin's. No point in knocking.

"Hello. Thank you for leaving notes; I made some progress with them -" and he launches right in to discussing it.

Malak points out a couple of places where he got a concept slightly wrong - usually due to incomplete or bad notes, oops. When Curufin's done updating them,

"I've been thinking it's probably best for you to focus on Kalziran spellcraft, for a couple of reasons. First, it's what I know best apart from my own techniques which are optimized around working for me and may not generalize well.  Second, it's scalable, easy for you to share new spells with each other or have two people working together on a single spell. Also, my enemies in my world know it already so sharing it does the least possible harm there. On that note, though I'm playing along for lack of anything better to do or a reason not to, I don't believe either of you are real, apparently you have some experience with this?" And Malak explains about being probably dead or maybe just unconscious in a high-security Kalziran dungeon.

He doesn't react at all. "I have no objection to focusing there - how far does it scale, could we have a whole army working together on something -"

"Actually casting together is really rare, I don't know very much about it but it should be possible, telepathy should make the coordination easier... I'd be surprised if you could get a whole army casting together, even so. The biggest group rituals I know exist have seven, but I don't know enough about ritual magic to know if that's because of coordination issues or because of some theoretical hard limit or because the marginal benefit of added casters falls off very quickly... I was more thinking that for inventing more complex spells, it's easier to split them into parts and have people working on it in parallel. After a certain point, spell development can only really scale as well as group casting can because any spell that needs fifty people to develop probably needs, not fifty, but five or ten to cast. You're much better positioned to look into ritual casting than I am, this is all I know..."

And Malak explains the little that they know about group rituals.

"Oh, it sounds like you did alright learning the spells I wrote down before," They hand over a sheet of paper, "Encrypted, in case anything happened to me on the road, anyone who you are teaching my magic or who gets involved in spell development should memorize this but not practice it, I Kalziranized a suicide spell. I don't have enough information on the Enemy's capabilities to be sure but I think it should work even from inside a simulation - if the memory of it isn't erased of course - and it seems like a good precaution if we want the Enemy to know as little as possible about this sort of magic, which we should since we have no reason to believe he or his servants can't learn it."

"Most people choose to carry several methods anyway but I will tell them there's one more. Thank you."

"Its main virtue over other methods is probably-working-through-simulations. Also there are some Kalziran techniques to cast spells without words or gestures. I don't know them but you or I might be able to rederive them and then it's also a suicide method that can't be physically prevented.

"Have you found any interesting interactions with your own magic? My magic-detecting spell couldn't pick up Lúthien singing so I'm guessing there won't be many... We have auditory illusions, depending on how your music work's it's faintly possible that those could work really well together. I suspect we won't be able to find things to directly counter the Enemy's magic but might have some workarounds. I think True Seeing works by showing you what's there rather than directly contesting illusions so that could be really useful but I don't actually know the spell myself..."

"... and doing all the spell reconstruction and invention falls to us, probably. We should check if auditory illusions can have magic song effects, artificial means of producing sound can count for that."

"Most of it, yeah. I think I'm unusually quick to figure out how to put a new spell together but I don't have the ability to store all that many spells in my mind, and trying to compress them to take up less space or format them for external storage slows me down to 'merely very fast'. Oh, spellbooks are important. You probably noticed how even if you followed the directions precisely spells wouldn't work the first few times? Not until you actually got the workings of the spell memorized and practiced a bit? I don't know why that is myself but I'm sure someone does. Spellbooks are magically created, there's a simple spell for that that imprints another spell on paper. Spellbooks aren't immediately intelligible to anyone besides their creators, but you can cast spells by reading them from your spellbook without having them memorized. Makes spellbooks very useful as a backup, and you can put any number of spells in there even though there's a limit to your memory. They can be deciphered eventually, though, so best not carry them into battle if that can be avoided.

"I can get an auditory illusion tomorrow to test if songs work through illusion, so you don't have to spend time developing an illusion spell that might not work - you'll still need to develop one for yourselves but I can at least figure out if it's worthwhile first. If there are any other things it would be useful for me to test like that I can do those too, limit one or two per day though and that uses up most of the resources I'd use for other spell development, I'm hoping to get short-range teleportation figured out and oh right if you're real then I have very important information for you - 

"I assume you've gotten through my notes on the planes? The important part is that my plane is paralleled by the plane of shadows and apparently so is yours because I managed to shadow-step here and that relies on being parallel to the plane of shadows. I didn't realize the implications until later, and I have been assuming it was just an oversight on the simulation overseer's part, but in case this is real this could help with developing plane shift. Alternately, you have your own plane of shadows whose relation to this plane almost exactly matches mine."

"Is there a way to distinguish between the latter two?"

"If it's the former that makes plane-shifting to my plane much easier, evacuation of all your people would become feasible and probably the best course of action unless the Enemy also figures this out. I can't think of any way to test which it is besides trying, unfortunately. Possibly the most likely explanation is one you mentioned when we first met, that we're still in my plane but very, very far apart, another planet maybe? I don't think interplanetary teleportation is any easier than plane shifting, and this would make transit through the plane of shadows inadvisable."

"It doesn't help much with long distance?"

"If we're a long distance away we're on another planet - Uh, how advanced is your astronomy?  I'm pretty sure apart from mine they're all empty lifeless rocks, but I studied astronomy even less than the planes so I could be wrong. It's faster to travel long distances by going into the plane of shadows and doing the travelling there, but interplanetary travel is really really far, and the space in between planets doesn't have air so unless elves here have an incredible ability to hold your breath...?

"Also, the space between planets is full of terrifying monsters, and the inhabitants of the plane of shadows tend towards more terrifying and monstrous versions of what exists in the material plane so I think interplanetary travel on the plane of shadows is quite likely worse than staying here. Unless what you're looking for is a quicker death than the Enemy will give you, but there are easier ways for that."

Nod. "We hadn't heard of other planes or other planets."

"...Oh!  I should explain astronomy just in case. If we're not on the same plane there's no reason to believe that any of this applies here, but maybe if I teach you you'll be able to think of a way to confirm if we are.

"So, the sun is a really really big portal to another plane that's filled with the sort of energy we use for healing magic. Planets are big-but-not-as-big-as-the-sun round objects that move around the sun in circles. My planet is mostly rock, I think others are different? Moons are really small - comparatively - planets that go in circles around bigger planets instead of the sun, my world has one, you seem to have one, some planets have more apparently. Some of the stars are not actually stars, but other planets, you can tell because they move around and if you look at them in a telescope you can see that they're different. I don't think anyone is really sure what stars are.

"If you've ever had a time when the sun goes dark in the middle of the day, it's usually just the moon moving in front of the sun and blocking it out, sometimes it's a space monster getting close and blocking out the sun. Mathematicians can predict the former, and they're necessary for some very powerful rituals, the latter are unpredictable and usually accompanied by a lot of bad luck and nightmares."

"...our planet's not round and doesn't rotate its sun, the sun is a recent addition and is towed through the sky, so's the Moon."

"...OK, so the 'towed through the sky' thing is actually what a lot of people on my world used to think, also that the world was flat instead of round, these are common mistakes to make but might actually be the case if the sun and moon are recent additions, how recently were they added?

"A lot of other planes are flat so that's the most likely option conditioning on this being real. Lúthien was uncomfortable with me mentioning that last part, should I avoid it with you too?"

"Used to it. With Nelyo I tried suggesting different lines of evidence and he took them less seriously on account of my having suggested them than he would have if they had eventually occurred to him to check on his own, so I'll avoid that. The sun and moon were added four hundred sixty three years ago, the moon twelve days before the sun. Melkor had destroyed a couple of earlier lighting schemes for the world."

"If things like the plane of shadows come up again, would you prefer that I tell you or keep it to myself? "Things like the plane of shadows" being things where keeping it to myself lets me keep testing if this is real, but the information would be useful to you if it is real. If I do at some point become convinced that this isn't a simulation, I'd be willing to do more spell development, right now I will not work on anything that Nerikross and Alfirin don't already have access to. Also, I will try not to think of any ideas on how to actually kill the Enemy, for the same reasons, I don't want either of them with the capabilities to kill a god."

"Depends how much of an advantage you think you have over us in spell development, then."

Nod.

"When working in spellbooks I have a moderate advantage over other people in my plane - 90th percentile maybe? - in terms of speed. How much of an advantage that is over you depends on how fast you are. Unless everyone here is well below the average for my plane, it's probably better for me to tell you when these things come up, especially given how I'm willing to work on basically every spell that exists back home. My personal preference would be to keep it to myself but it's not that important, I can put that preference aside when it seems like it would do good just in case this place is real."

Nod. And he pulls out pages of annotated notes and spell development questions.

Malak answers questions until they start to get tired and ask where they should sleep tonight.

They can arrange a room. If Malak gets the impulse to leave they can just say to the gate guards "I am leaving" and then they will open the gate.

Convenient! Malak will be sure to do that if they find any more political hostages.