"And Sauron could have removed the memory of important conversations anyway. Hmm."

"I think probably he would not have guessed we could do it in a small number of days if necessary. He would certainly have told Sauron it was a plan I had, but - I think he did not know enough about the details to suspect it could be compressed so much, that being the only reason it is feasible at all as a response in wartime. Which is very much not how I had hoped it would go, but." 

Nod. 

"All right, next actions," Dara says finally. "Van goes back to Velgarth and talks to the Star-Eyed. We flesh out a plan to ask for volunteers and transport them if we end up needing to go that route. Telumë talks to Fëanáro's researchers and figures out a timetable for the emergency version, as well as feasibility of doing the initial stage here in Arda and checking it now. And - we need a plan for talking to Fëanáro about you and Nolofinwë running Vinyamar and also being briefed on the Quendi volunteers plan, so we can do that before Maitimo does it in a worse way. Am I missing any?" 

"I don't think so."

"All right, I'll take point talking to Treven and ideally Stef about the telling Fëanáro part. And run whatever we come up with past you. ...Oh, and Van, can you talk to Rolan before you head back to Velgarth?" 

"Yes, of course. I might stay here overnight so that I can do the Gate myself, it seems unfair to Jisa to make her do it twice." Smile. "This room is very comfortable." 

"That sounds good. Thank you, everybody. If governments-in-exile need any setup help here in Vinyamar, my office is -" he sends it.

There are nods and thank-yous exchanged, Dara darts around talking privately with almost everyone, and they disperse. 

Maitimo settles down in a small village in the south of Valinor. He tells his father he's a little worried he might get bored. 

He is not the slightest bit worried he might get bored.

He needs osanwë range and this place is deliberately out of osanwë range of everyone he knows. He eavesdrops. Lots of people, having osanwë conversations, don't take much care to keep them wholly tucked away where only the person they're speaking to can hear them, for the same reason as people have conversations loudly in cafés; he suspects that over time you can get to 'know' someone this way without ever meeting them. It'll take weeks, maybe months, of obsessively stalking the same people until his range on them is long enough for what he needs to do. The war might be lost by then. He stalls his father as long as he can, makes him promise to write letters. 

He founds some biology research institutes. He gives his staff permission to watch everything he is doing there very closely; it's all theory, no practical applications whatsoever. He tells them he needs to stay busy, keep his mind off things.

Every hour he spends five minutes on self-injuring on the off chance their marital empathy bond works fine across worlds and this will disrupt Telumë's sleep. It disrupts his sleep too, of course, but Quendi need less of it, and anyway any move that drags both of them down in glorious flames is a win for him. 

He tries to learn how to talk to dinosaurs. Tyelcormo can do it. His theory is that it's about being able to distinguish between sensory input that to other people looks indistinguishable; Macalaurë can tell notes of music apart with more precision than him, and presumably Tyelcormo can tell animal thoughts apart with more precision than him, and he just needs to learn how to do it. Dinosaurs are desirable because if you eat people it doesn't matter if they have an amulet giving them a mage-barrier. He needs to assassinate his father and Stef; his father is a higher priority target, not least because assassinating Stef is likely to be the last thing he ever does, and some other things need to happen before his interests are best served by being murdered by Vanyel in front of half this sleepy, small town in Valinor.

He tries to arrange to hook up with people but his guards object, on the very reasonable grounds that no one has any idea how Quendi marriage works these days and what if he ends up married to half of Valinor, with useful sensory blessings galore from it. He tells them that's a good point. He blasts Telumë with lonelylonelylonely and boredboredbored and wantwantwant and he starts to make sense of how dinosaurs think.

Telumë is initially in Beleriand, talking to Fëanáro's people, but the fact that the marital empathy bond is at least slightly attenuated across worlds, and is barely attenuated at all by being a continent apart, is a reason to head back to Velgarth as soon as he possibly can. It's still not good for his ability to sleep undisturbed, and he's chronically more tired than he would prefer, but - part of that isn't even about sleep, or physical at all. He wants this to be over. 

He asks Melody for help with sleep. Melody has some ideas, and also knows the sleep song well enough to get it to work at all, and can try to teach it to others although Telumë's staff are not exactly filtered for musical talent. Vanyel can do it when he's there, of course, but he prefers not to be a world apart from Stef for very long at a time. 

(Telumë wishes he didn't have to be a world apart from Maitimo. But, there are a lot of things he wishes were different, and just wishing isn't going to get him there.)

He focuses on the research prioritization for the god, laying out multiple different timelines depending on what exactly happens when. It's a useful distraction. Magic and math are both concrete and verifiable, and still make sense even when it feels like everything that matters is falling apart. 

Vanyel visits k'Treva Vale. He stays there for a week, because he needs some recovery time after communing with a Heartstone to have a (frustrating, pointless-feeling) conversation with the Star-Eyed Goddess, and in order to spend time with Brightstar and Featherfire, his children by blood. Brightstar is coping surprisingly well with having lost two out of three parents who actually raised him. He's actually kind of on board to help with Telumë's plan, if things come to a head. He needs - meaning, Vanyel thinks, a way to fight back against the forces responsible for his fathers' deaths.

He heads back to Arda and gives a report to Findekáno and the Valdemaran and Karsite governments-in-exile. The Star-Eyed is stretched thin, trying to prevent Vkandis from gaining ground on Her territory, and unwilling to commit to any aid now, but he comes away with the impression that it's at least worth checking again later if conditions change. Assuming there's time. 

Stef hops between Vinyamar and Tol Eréssea and occasionally mainland Valinor, always on guard, always wearing magical protections. He collects not-very-informative gossip on Maitimo's activities. Suspects there's a lot more there that just isn't producing any visible effects yet. 

He has an idea, and goes to Dara with it. 

"...Huh," Dara says when he asks. "I hadn't thought of that, but - just a second..." 

:Rolan, what's your Thoughtsensing range here in Arda?: 

"...Not as good as in Valdemar with the Web," she tells Stef, "but...three or four hundred miles, he thinks, and he - still has a mind built for filtering a lot of inputs." Almost more like Quendi than humans, really. "And Maitimo shouldn't have much osanwë range on him at all. Not sure they've ever exchanged words." Except for Yfandes, the Companions still alive and in Arda haven't really tried to, well, make a point that they're people. 

"He won't be able to do it from Tol Eréssea, then. Or even Alqualondë. But he's pretty magic, right? Even more than Yfandes, and she's really fast when she's pushing it." 

"He's a bit less magic here, the Web was part of it, but yes. He can gallop at fifty miles an hour for a while. Especially if I'm not with him." 

"Well, you really shouldn't be, so that works out. Hmm. Try to arrange a solid diplomatic reason to be in Tol Eréssea, just so that's not suspicious. Indoors, it'll make it less obvious that he's not with you if anyone's paying the least amount of attention which I doubt, but, overkill. I'll arrange a boat in secret for him. Maybe Van can make an artifact that does an illusion over him..." 

A couple of weeks after Maitimo reaches his destination, a small nondescript boat pauses nearish the shore, a couple of miles away from Alqualondë. The disturbance in the water isn't all that noticeable, certainly not from more than half a mile away. 

Rolan runs for many hours, stretching his mind out ahead, skimming unguarded surface thoughts - ignoring most of them, he's used to that, he could read minds in Velgarth for a hundred miles in any direction after all.

Finds the village. Stops, searches for Maitimo in particular. Listens. They can't spare a lot of time, can't risk it becoming conspicuous that Dara is there without him; it's possible Maitimo is arranging to hear news from Tol Eréssea and it would be very, very bad if it occurred to him to make Dara's Companion a target. But Rolan can stay there for four hours, listening. If there's anything especially of interest he'll risk a tiny bit longer.

(They promised no mind-control including Truth Spells, after all, but Rolan isn't doing anything and wouldn't be able to if he wanted... Still, Stef doesn't intend to mention to any Quendi how he came about the information he learns this way. Let them think he's just absurdly good at spying in general.) 

He is listening intently to a married couple fighting over the layout of their garden and a couple of twenty-five-year-old girls out on a camping trip, making up their own stories about the constellations, and a small group of flowering-plant researchers in the plains just north of the village he lives in. Every hour he stops what he is doing to give himself nerve pain, which he can do without visibly moving at all though his face tends to be still with concentration and he has to brush off his staff if they ask him any questions. 

And he is thinking about what it's like to be a dinosaur. He doesn't feel like he's making progress as fast as he hoped, and he's wondering if he should've started with corvids, which are smarter - he's working with them in parallel now but he's annoyed with himself he didn't think of them sooner. He is still making any progress. He can send images; he knows that because they'll startle if he sends the image of a predator, or a fast-moving shadow. He can detect strong emotions - pain, fear. He needs more than that but he might not need much more than that, depending how convenient the circumstances are.

Rolan doesn't especially know what to make of this but he listens until he doesn't think he's learning much new, and skims some other nearby thoughts because why not, and then gallops back to the coast and Mindspeaks a person waiting on a nondescript boat pretending to be fishing, and rides back to Tol Eréssea. 

"Got any ideas what he's up to?" Dara asks Stef a few hours later. 

"Hmm. He's - getting to know people, I assume? Since we dropped him somewhere without anyone he knows well, and all his strategies rely on knowing people. But I don't know what he's doing with that. We can make a note of the particular people he was eavesdropping on, I guess, but we can't have Rolan there all the time and I bet he's doing it with a lot more. We'll just have to stay really on top of the gossip train. Um, the hurting himself thing is obvious. We should check on Telumë but I'm sure he's already noticed." 

"And why does he want to talk to dinosaurs? In order to torture them too?" 

"N..o... I don't think that's right," Stef says slowly. "He's planning something - thinks he can pull it off maybe by startling them– Gods. I bet he's trying to discreetly plot some murders without it being traceable to him. We'll - hmm. If we let on that we know, he'll realize that we're mindreading him, this isn't something that could get out via gossip. But I guess I need to talk to Van about all the important Quendi, and us, getting equipped with some sort of mage-weapon artifact that can take down a dinosaur in an emergency. Without saying it's for that - if possible he should make it nonlethal, so we can claim that we're worried Maitimo might incite a mob to attack us, not that that's very plausible at all but so far people are humouring me on precautions..."

And Stef slips off later and quietly updates Findekáno, the Quendi he trusts most - to not get upset over this, to successfully keep a secret, and see something that he himself might've missed. 

" - huh. That's ... you could get it to work. We've gone travelling in that region and you want to be very cautious, and he could maybe prod them to move out of where they're normally encountered. ...probably if anyone dies in Valinor this year we should assume it is him, for the record, most years nobody dies in Valinor. Equipping people with a countermeasure sounds like a good idea. Can you do just a big shield that they can huddle under until rescue comes?"