"Sounds good. If they want to move to our cities we can make sure they don't starve or get eaten by wolves, too."

"I would offer to do a permanent Gate terminus as well, so they can have easier trade from the current location, but perhaps that had best wait until we have the safer modification. Vanyel thinks it will be much more irritating and time-consuming to modify the existing Gates than to make new ones with the change built in from the beginning. Just a moment..." :Vanyel, are you free to meet and talk about artifacts we could make to give the human locals? Some of them are getting killed by the wildlife and I would like that to stop happening: 

:In half an hour?: Vanyel suggests. :Stef and I are listening in on a concert right now: 

:Of course: 

"I will meet with him in a little while," he tells Maitimo. "I suspect we will want to plan the trip in about a week's time?" 

:Stef's decided he wants to drag us both on a bit of sightseeing too: Vanyel adds. :He's going to come anyway, of course, being on opposite sides of the ocean is very un-fun: 

Sure, a week from now sounds good.

:All right: Leareth agrees to both of them. "Maitimo, was there anything else you wanted to cover now?" 

I don't think so especially? 

"All right - I will go for a walk before talking to Vanyel, then." There's a place near the cliffs where he especially likes sitting down to think. 

Leareth spends most of the next week working with Vanyel, their time split between making basic protective artifacts for the humans and researching the Gate modification. They accumulate a good-sized number on the former and make limited progress on the latter. 

And then they can go see Vinyamar and talk to more people?

Sounds good! Leareth helps Vanyel pack up all of their artifacts for transport. 

And Stef will tag along. 

Vinyamar is much more like Tirion before the Darkening than Tol Eressëa is; there are carts with food on the streets, and everything is spotless without anyone spending lots of their time cleaning, and the Quendi wander about singing elaborate songs with eight different vocal parts while they work on construction and fishing and, outside the walls, farming. 

Stef, as usual, knows nearly all of the songs and jumps in on various harmony parts and greets nearly everyone. He reminds Vanyel that he should peel off when it's a good moment for it and check in with Macalaurë, who hopefully has a new song for him to test in combination with Bardic Gift, and really there are a lot of people he ought to drop in and catch up with.

(This happens every time they visit Vinyamar, and Stef has given up on dragging Vanyel, who is resolutely introverted, to any of his social calls.) 

Well, Vanyel and Leareth should at least drop in on his father while they're here, they are both wearing endurance and memory artifacts he made them and he will be interested in their Gate research.

That makes a lot of sense and Leareth always enjoys chatting with Fëanáro anyway. 

Fëanáro is pleased to see him too! "I hope the necklace suits because I might not get to the next batch of improvements for a while, we are going to see if we can get anywhere on humans first now that there's all these local humans too to deal with."

"It suits very well, thank you. And I agree on that prioritization. Now that I am able to work on this again, I have been helping Vanyel with some artifacts so that at least fewer of them will be eaten by wolves. No kinds of death are good but death-via-wolves is particularly stupid. Anyway, I had a list of additional artifact uses that I drafted with Vanyel earlier, I am curious what you think..." 

Stef will tag along with them long enough to say hello and then go accomplish his other social calls, since he's not very useful here. He should track down Finrod as well and catch up, since he's here anyway. 

"Stefen! How was the trip back to Velgarth -"

"Went smoothly. We rode all the way down south to Jkatha - have I told you about Jkatha? It's a really incredible bustling place, but their main trade is in mercenaries, they've got all these little armies that other countries can hire..." Stef can say quite a lot of things about Jkatha if Finrod is interested. 

He is always interested in humans and what they are getting up to. He has a reasonably good memory for it, too. 

Stef is delighted to oblige! He can provide updates on political events in Valdemar itself, which is fun because Finrod remembers the last round of updates enough to have any commentary. (Whether or not it's sophisticated or nuanced commentary, Stef is going to act as though it is.) It was a longish trip this time and he has quite a few hours worth of gossip, but will have to cut it short so he can fit in his other visits. Definitely they should talk more when he's next in town though. 

They should! He might not be in Vinyamar full time by then, don't spread it too widely or anything but Elu has been suggesting that he start his own kingdom, and he thinks it's a great idea, really, and Elu has some territory in mind.

Huh! Stef is intrigued and asks a couple more questions and promises not to spread it too widely.

(It goes without saying that he'll tell Vanyel when it seems to be a good time for that, he and Van don't have secrets from each other, this is known.)