I'm going to go bring him home.  

Uh - his husband. 

Yeah. 

What do I say to him?

That's a very reasonable question and I don't know. I think probably, uh, look to Maitimo for cues on that?

They have his osanwë disabled so he can't be evil.

Sometimes people who don't even have osanwë still cue each other about how they want people to react? 

I guess maybe we should have invented a blinking-based language for communicating in front of Maitimo's alien husband about how I should act around him in the case that Maitimo's osanwë was disabled but we didn't invent that so what do I do now.

- I sort of feel like maybe I should come but I'm several days' travel away. 

I don't want to mess up Maitimo's marriage badly by reacting wrongly to something but I also don't really want to wait several days. He was - scared, he really wanted me to bring him home. 

He is a prisoner until we can convince Leareth that we have taken adequate precautions to house him here and that makes breaking bad news to you more fraught than it'd ordinarily be. - you could have Vanyel go now to communicate that we want him returned immediately and are figuring out those precautions now and that you'll be there in two days. 

You can't make the trip in two days. The Companions can do three but I think they're magic or something.

So is Aulë, and I am going to ask him. And maybe you can have Vanyel tell Maitimo that you are sorry you didn't fight the gods when he was ten, so he doesn't spend the two days worrying.

"Can you contact Velgarth," says Fëanáro, "and tell Telumë that we want him returned immediately and are figuring out precautions now and that his mother and I will be there in two days to pick him up and, uh, meet Telumë, if that seems appropriate, and maybe try to pick up, uh, cues, about whether we should be getting them wedding presents. And also I guess communicate that I didn't particularly expect mathematical ability and romantic sensibleness to be correlated among humans because as far as I know they are inversely correlated among Quendi so he shouldn't worry about our changing our strategy on that account. Though if he did hurt Maitimo then I don't know how to get my son divorced - yet - but I know how to widow him."

"Of course." Vanyel hesitates. "Do you want me to go in person? If I Gate it's going to be very tiring and I won't want to Gate back and then Gate you again, so it'll end up being harder to coordinate - though you do have the communications artifact. And they sort of did ask me to come too. Anyway, you want me to try to figure out about, er, whether the way Maitimo feels about it indicates wedding presents?" Great. Perfect. He is so unqualified for that duty. 

"I agree that it sounds ridiculously difficult since his osanwë is disabled! You could Mindspeak at him, though, while I don't have any way at all. Nerdanel seemed to think she could do it even without osanwë but ideally by the time she's here we'll have the wedding presents. I guess I could get them and just not give them to him if she gets the wrong cues. - we can easily coordinate so we can step through in two days if you're still there, but if you'd rather do it with the communications spell that seems reasonable too."

"I suppose I could just ask to talk to him privately! I'll do my best. Anyway I assume they'll unblock his osanwë before sending him back, it was mostly a precaution against his being able to mindread un-Gifted humans who don't know how to do private thoughts, or somehow having some way to contact Sauron with it and get snatched back again. Significantly more a moot point if he's in another world. I do think you and Nerdanel should put a lot of thought into precautions to take given the terrifying oath - you got the wording of it, right?" 

"Yeah. I - think in Valinor the worst thing he could do would be murder some people but probably we should have Huan on him all the time so he can't even do that. And he shouldn't interact with anyone who's checking the math, or with any of the humans with potential mage-gifts, but I think in Valinor there's not anyone I worry about him just talking to. If he has convincing arguments for evil then maybe he'll convince some people but I don't actually know that Valinor currently has too many evil people who are in it, if that makes sense."

"I think it's pretty important that he have no avenues of influencing the war effort, including social avenues, like - even talking to someone who knows someone who has information on it or is helping with plans. I do think Telumë is going to do a reasonable job on information security for his actual forces, and as a general precaution, not even against Maitimo specifically, I think the people working on math ought to be doing it in secret. This is a thing humans have learned about fighting wars. Spies maneuvering to get information and influence plans is a strategy that gets used a lot in Velgarth and we know that's one of Maitimo's strengths." 

Shrug. "I think he probably can do some damage by talking to people in Valinor, even if they have no way of knowing anything about or influencing the course of the war. Maybe you could assign some of his old staff to him again, so we at least find out if he's, oh, trying to start a civil war the way Melkor did, and if it's much smaller-scale than that, then at some point we just let it be. Valinor does have a bit of unused slack for absorbing more evil, I do kind of know what you mean?" 

"We can throttle communications between Valinor and Tol Eressëa pretty aggressively, tell people they have to write letters not osanwë unless it's a personal emergency and check the letters to make sure they don't have war-related information. Then I don't think there's much avenue for things to leak all the way to him."

“Huh - is that verifiable, people not using osanwë? A thing about wartime security strategies is that we can’t necessarily rely on everyone to cooperate in good faith, or to not just lie. If there is a way to check that seems good.”

Frown. “If it were me I’d impose some traffic controls on the Gate, keep the terminus under guard, and having anything really sensitive happening in Vinyamar. And involving the minimum number of people possible, of course, that would include researchers not telling their spouses what they’re working on because that’s a potential leak...”

"There's no way to check if people are using osanwë but I do not think they'd do so if it were disallowed. Even if Maitimo could convince the ones in Valinor to break the law I don't think the ones outside Valinor could be similarly persuaded on the first try. I guess it makes sense to restrict movement through the Gate, and everything sensitive is happening in Vinyamar, or in secret locations on that continent in some cases. I think researchers talking to their spouses is more likely to cause us to catch a mistake than to - what, their spouse tells a friend and the friend goes to Valinor and tells another friend and then Maitimo hears and is able to convince someone to assassinate the researcher? Maitimo probably already can guess who they are from guessing which smart mathematicians would agree to work on it."

“That is exactly the kind of thing humans and our governments and organizations get up to. Er, the evil ones. Valdemar doesn’t do assassinations, um, usually, I did sneak past a border once and kill a mage from the other army who was terrifyingly competent and had taken out thousands of our people. Using Healing. And information gathered by spies. I do think this involves some amount of social practices built up over time that the Noldor in general have less of, your people are more - honest and cooperative. Which could make it harder for an adversarial actor to do something, if people won’t disobey orders for them, but could also make it easier.”

" - we could tell him he has to live in Valimar or travel west of there? Then he doesn't have osanwë range to Tol Eressëa."

"I think that would be sensible, yes. With that and with some precautions on Gate-traffic from Tol Eréssea to Beleriand, that's two layers of protection, and if in addition the people working on the really important math are in secret locations rather than Vinyamar, then - I'm feeling a bit less like he would successfully interfere with that element even if we do let people talk to their spouses, you make a good point about the upsides. I'm concerned he might guess what we're planning and - try to interfere with getting Quendi to volunteer for the blood-magic fuel part, I guess, that's the obvious place, it kind of is a monstrous idea so he wouldn't have to work to make it seem that way. Hmm. I think it might be good to have some humans keeping an eye on it, just because we do come from a world where there are very bad people up to schemes as a background fact about reality."

And he smiles slightly, for the first time. "In fact, I think Stef would be a useful person here. Some of his background is very directly relevant - he caught one of the lords on our council in the middle of betraying Valdemar by supplying rebel forces from the pretty nasty priesthood we defeated in Karse. It's actually how we met. He did it when he was twelve, and our entire actual government had missed it." 

"It certainly seems good to have more expertise pointed at stopping Maitimo from interfering with the war effort and we don't have experts at it. So that'd be great.

I haven't been counting on getting people to volunteer, for the blood-magic part. It would be nice but - I know how to use the Silmarils to hold a city still."