"I don't think Liz had enough time to learn much besides what I know to have been her precognition range and maybe a little of one or two other things. And she was insulated from the really overtly unjustifiable stuff, whenever I managed to convince her it happened Maira deleted the conversation out of her head."

"That's actually very encouraging."

"Well, sure, if she buys that Liz didn't have very long sidereal, but one time a few weeks went by and she had twenty fucking years of memories -"

"...they can't do that, they can do some serious dilation but not like that."

"...yeah, that's - either a lot of psionic help or something else going on -"

"Liz didn't have enough time to do that at all, that would be intensely complicated - I haven't even picked up thought acceleration in spite of how stupidly useful it would be because it just takes so damn long to get even if the psion has a knack for it! And we have to do our own detail work, she would've had to compose the twenty years of memories to just put them in, and she didn't have time to do that. I can't chalk that up to Liz. Did I have a nonstandard Melkor...?"

"Only nonstandard Melkor so far is the one that produces evil Ardas - uh, did you see that note yet, it is an upsetting topic - most Melkors are not trying that hard to kill everyone, but I don't have much reason to think they were holding back on the torture -"

"Skimmed it. Okay, why else would she turn up in a dream with twenty years of memories -" Bounce.

"I mean, maybe Sauron can do a sloppy job? Insert memories directly without the interim having been lived - which would require composing them all and disguising that there aren't twenty years worth of them -"

"...I guess that would explain why she'd refer to people as 'somebody' and 'some Earth musician'?"

"It wouldn't hold up long but if you were always there as soon as she fell asleep it wouldn't have to in order to serve some small sadistic purpose? And normally they wouldn't do it that way but you were dropping eidetic memory on her all the time and the usual hallucinations rely on a lot of backtracking."

"Sauron doesn't actually do a very convincing Bell until he's had lots of practice."

"So Maira may have invented twenty years of fictitious memories just so I'd have to be the one to tell her they were fake and so she'd wake up prematurely?"

"Wouldn't be out of character."

"I guess I'll recalibrate how smug I should be about making her come up with Shakespeare fanfic."

"I mean, I much prefer Sauron spend all her energy torturing me, she's dangerous when she's doing stuff more strategic than that - in Millenia she arranged for Eru to sink a continent -"

"Fucking Eru. I can't even precog her, she kicks me out as though I'm trying to backchain."

"We've had conversations with one secondhand through Elentári's Aule. It was not especially encouraging."

"I can't imagine what, consistent with observations, could possibly have been encouraging."

"Well, the Valar don't understand what they're doing wrong. This seems not to be Eru's problem. Anyhow, Eru thought that the Space Valar should stay dead because that was delightfully tragic, and the Luster Eru thought that Yeerks should come live in Luster because it would make a great story. - the latter has not yet been a disaster, although I was half expecting one -"

"Maybe it'll take a while."

"Seems entirely plausible."

"Did you read my war writeup, the part where there were suddenly humans during an eclipse -?"

"Yep. Puts 'em in when the Sun rises, never mind whether that makes any sense. Sauron's usually right there to catch them and indoctrinate them, too."

"Well, at least we avoided that, instead Earth anthropologists are having the absolute time of their lives through the portals."