"So," says Bella to Rúmil one afternoon, "a few weeks ago I told myself that if in a few weeks I had not come up with an actually good way to bring up a thing I would just mention it anyway on the grounds that if it came up somehow later and I had not done so that would be weird."
This is a good decision. They can do it while listening to acceleration songs, even.
There is some mildly privileged information afoot, when is a good time for her to talk to the King.
"So the peal told the Telperion Valar not to release Melkor, which they agreed not to do, and to arrest Sauron too, which they were planning to do but apparently on a 'whenever convenient' basis, and it turns out that at some point unbeknownst to them he used wizardry to leave Telperion and is now in Warp being the president of a random planet in a galaxy distant from peal-related Warp operations. Thought I'd warn you, it's moderately likely that he'd be able to pass through Materia if he so chose and that'd put him next to here."
"Thank you. - on the one hand they should be way more paranoid and proactive than they are, on the other if they were I'd be dead - what's the plan now -"
"Boots is working on a spell to keep him from wizard-teleporting around, but if he's insubstantial sorcery teleport won't work without bringing the whole planet, which would wreck its orbit, and it's inhabited. Mage teleporters don't work interdimensionally at least so far. So I'm learning lots of random things so I'll have the juice to take him three hops into Loki's range, or, well, first I'll test with a friendly insubstantial Maia but if that works I need three hops with a passenger plus emergency extra."
"Kind of a lot. The multiverse is full of irrelevant facts, fortunately, and the eidetic memory lets me learn them pretty efficiently in the first place even if it won't let me keep what I burn."
"How irrelevant can they be, is it irrelevant-to-you or is there some objective parser of significance -"
"They can be almost completely irrelevant to me, but not completely irrelevant to everyone. Vocabulary in obscure languages yes, excruciatingly detailed rainfall data not so much. Names of people I will never meet and wouldn't bother talking to yes, number of leaves on trees no."
He shivers at the idea of forgetting names. "Huh. I guess hypotheses about what it's checking for exactly will have to wait for Sauron to die?"
"I can do smaller tests by going for small effects and seeing how interesting the fact is according to the magic system."
"Do you get a boost for additional interestingness or is it just a matter of whether it meets some threshold -"
"Boost per interestingness. If I sing up a raincloud with a boring fact it'll be smaller. Assuming I'm trying for the biggest cloud I can get, anyway, I could spend interestingness on duration or not use it all instead."
"Duration and size - and targeting, for the teleport - what else do you get to choose -"
"Targeting for everything, I don't have to make it rain directly on me. Customization in general, I could sing just the same for a cloud or wind."
"Do we know if it's 'born in the dimension' or 'born on the planet' or that but for some other developmental milestone - or if it's the species -"
"I suppose they'd take a while.
Has the peal figured out what they need to do in order to prevent one of these dimensional escapes from being an actual, irretrievable catastrophe, more than my Sauron and Melkor escaping were -"
"There's a portable Melkor-killing solution; the problem is your set went somewhere anticausal - or can't be found without risking dropping people there - and the solo escaped Sauron is a wizard. Do you have an idea -?"