"...he awake?" Vanyel is saying. "Oh, good. Telumë, is that working?" 

Stef's painblocking isn't getting all of it but it's enough that he can think. "Yes." He sits up, with some effort. "Have we made any progress on finding him?" 

"Some," Nayoki says.

"Side benefit, he's giving us a much stronger signal to follow now," Vanyel says wryly. "We've got it covered. I think we can narrow it down within the next day or two." 

Elrond would be happy to arrange his guests longer-term accomodations in Imladris, if they think they'll stay a while. He asks Belrun whether it has been communicated to Leareth that he absolutely may not have sex with any Elves regardless of the extenuating circumstances. "If he murders them we can forgive that, that's fixable."

"I can tell him to extra special not cheat on me, yeah." She relays this admonition to her lifebonded.

:I cannot even convey the extent to which I am disinclined to do that, though I suppose I cannot blame them for worrying:

Leareth spends a bit poking at the communication spell, without success, and then instead transmits a message by dint of opening a very tiny Gate, just big enough to drop a letter through to where Nayoki will see it pretty soon. She can pass on to Valdemar that they are, in fact, somehow in another world, and also the situation is weird and complicated and he may not be back right away.

And Belrun keeps trying to pick up the language because she wants to work her way through Elrond's library, considering how cool everybody who could just tell her about things telepathically is being in spite of their excellent material hospitality.

They are reasonably happy to answer any of her questions, even if they're still a bit pointedly distant around Leareth. And they're happy to teach her either Sindarin, which is spoken these days, or Quenya which was spoken among the High Elves long ago and is the language some of the more interesting science, magic and history texts are written in.

She mostly wants it for reading, since the speakers are all telepathic, so she'll go with Quenya.

She can have Quenya lessons for as many hours of the day as she'll tolerate them.

Leareth will keep working on the communication spell as well as exploring the area more thoroughly with his mage-senses. 

He would normally try to pick up the spoken language in a foreign country by mindreading everyone a lot, but he doesn’t even need to ask to know that would upset Belrun. It doesn’t seem like a dire emergency, anyway, since they can communicate with the locals via their various telepathy.

Imladris has less ambient magic than Velgarth, but not none. There are magic lights and magic swords and magic jewelry, and the songs, when the Elves sing them, leak magic in a very recognizable form. The whole valley is shielded, in many layers; it shows up to mage-sight but is obviously not something achieved with Velgarth magic. 

Elrond's ring is very magic. 

The Elves are civil, if not exactly friendly to him.

When Telumë still hasn't showed up by the next afternoon, Leareth checks to see if Belrun is done with her language lessons. 

She has dismissed her Elf tutor and is writing out sentences. "Hi, Leareth."

He glances at her paper. "Maybe you can give me the quick summary later. Anyway, I have given some consideration to your hypothesis that this entire bizarre scenario is the gods attempting Foresight." 

"Mm?"

"It is a rather alarming concept. I am not sure how well it fits. It does not really match my understanding of magic in Velgarth, and I would have thought that if our gods did have the ability to run this kind of scenario, they would be more precise and accurate in Their interventions, and I would not have slipped nearly so many things past Them. I suppose it could be a collaboration with the gods of other worlds, but that does not feel as though it explains much more than 'other worlds exist, sometimes multiple versions of the same world, and transit is possible between them'. I need to give the matter more thought." 

"Russandol's timeline sounds awful and possibly worth pulling out stops to avoid. Can they use - seeing things coming as a way to crib notes from their future selves, like when I tried reading my notebook only actually useful because they're gods and do this all the time? That might make 'seeing contact with another world coming' a very special case somehow."

"Hmm. I think They can glean more useful information from Foresight than we can, anyway. My understanding of Foresight in Velgarth is that it is a process internal to our world, and so by default would not see something coming from entirely outside the system, which the gods would not like at all. I could imagine Them being very motivated to - expand the system, I suppose, if They were surprised and unfortunate consequences ensued. Perhaps that could involve running a vast number of different interworld-contact scenarios. I would still be somewhat surprised if making those predictions involved conscious simulated beings; if I had thought this was possible in the Velgarth style of Foresight, I would be far more reluctant to create a god that depends on Foresight to function." 

"I mean, I'd hoped you would be but when I originally had this hypothesis I wasn't actually sure if that would be an out-of-model behavior for you."

"That is fair. I am not sure I would rule out creating a god if that were the case, since the other gods all exist anyway and are various degrees of bad." 

"I guess if yours was strong enough it could still make the baseline from which simulated futures vary sufficiently better that it would be an improvement on net but it would be so fucked up. Anyway, if that's not how it works are there just multiple Velgarths several years off - and it seems like also multiple Ardas, more years off than that? Which I guess makes it likelier that world-duplicates that aren't synced up in time is just a thing."

Leareth nods. "Knowing this, I suspect there are a great many more than just the four we know of." 

"For one thing there's wherever the snake monster came from."