"...the thing?"

"You know the gender-swapped Arda? Ithil?"

"Yep, haven't been down there yet but I saw the notice -"

"Sibyl met her you, unlike most Bells who do not wind up encountering yous... but she was one of the people the Melkor grabbed on her way out of Valinor for some reason and got obliterated in the eclipse that killed the Melkor."

"Oh no. That's the kind of dead we can't make any progress on - wait, how long was it between the Melkor grabbing people and the eclipse -"

"About a decade. Sibyl tried talking to her early on but she said not to so she stopped."

Nod. 

"The Maitimos think even when we can fix that kind of dead she wouldn't want to come back."

"No, I don't think so. Are you okay?"

Hug. "Mostly."

"Now everyone who ever gets out knows that they'll go out of their way to get us back if they ever get a chance, if they possibly can -"

"That's why she did it, has to be, I wasn't doing anything important in 1400, I have a history of what I did with my life from my Millennia alt -"

"It'd explain it, yeah. ...Our Valar had better get a move on catching the Telperion Sauron, Sibyl found out how they can communicate with Melkors in lockup..."

"How?"

"Valar know the content of oaths sworn to them."

"...ah."

Snuggle.

"They want to destroy people. I don't want to have let them. But - sometimes that's hard."

"Ours is still locked up and the Valar know not to let him out but Ithil's didn't even do that - they need to catch the Sauron, he has wizardry available, I had Elspeth run them an update but they still haven't actually budged -"

"Is he even still around, with wizardry he could have left -"

"...if the Shadow one and their Melkor are in the Materia cluster after all they could have met -"

"Is there any way to check -"

"I could rule it out if I have Sibyl report on what happens if I earwire Telperion's Sauron, and if he's in Telperion or Materia proper - or Warp I guess - then I'd reach him and if I didn't he'd have gone off some other direction..."

He closes his eyes. "We should have - actually I don't know what we could have done but - let's do that, let's at least check -"

She starts writing Sibyl a note - hasn't been replied to yet, maybe Sibyl's not checking her messages for the next hour - "I can't actually distinguish between 'in Telperion', 'in Materia', 'in Warp', and 'went through Warp to somewhere Warp-adjacent' - I could go to Telperion and try from there to triangulate but we do actually from a triangle with it and Materia so that's still several places he could be without it being distinguishable..."

"If he's reachable from Revelation he's in Warp, there's that -"

"Yeah. I guess in a pinch we could ask Joy to find some boring off of Telperion and triangulate from there too."

"Once we find him -"

"We do have the automaton army for the Shine Silmarils set to go, or maybe there's something figured out with the four Silmaril set that'll do for a Maia even if they don't have it up to Vala-killing yet..."

Shiver. Nod.

"And you can go sit in Sibyl's palace where she can kill any unauthorized Ainur visitors having spotted them coming an hour in advance while all of this is going on." Squeeze.

"I"m not going to fall apart, don't worry."

"For my peace of mind, then." Squeeze.

Squeeze. 

"I love you."

"I love you too."

And he holds her hand until Sibyl gets back to them.

Kicks me out, but based on when I drop, he's in Warp.

"Fuck."

"Kicks her out - what does that mean -"

"Some things interfere with her precognition - other precogs, Erus, worldleapers, Gem's wish granter - but Maiar aren't one of the things - so he's using wizardry that does antidivination, directly or by doing divination of its own -"

"...and he's in Warp."

"Yeah." Squeeze.

"Do we have another way to narrow him down? If he's using wizardry that does antidivination -"

"When he kicks Sibyl out of precognition is a clue but right now the earwires are indifferent to spatial location. Joy maybe if his antidivination doesn't block her targeting. Demons likewise."

"Let's not risk Joy unless the antidivination covers demons - which'd also mean he knows about the peal and is being careful of us in particular, instead of just being broadly careful -"

"Yeah - I don't think we've run into anything that looks like his handiwork -"

"Haven't."

"He might have just independently parameterized for Warp, I don't know what he would have been looking for -"

"...lot of people, maybe, that'd probably get you Warp. We could go there - only once we've done everything more urgent - and check if that does in fact take you to Warp - if it's not that I don't know what, it's not impossible he followed us -"

"But he didn't land right on us or obviously nearby, he could've landed on any planet, in any galaxy - in intergalactic space, he's a Maia, he doesn't need the same habitability standards we do -"

"He would probably want the resources to do more damage before he tried anything."

"Yeah. We don't know when he left, though, the Valar haven't seen him recently - I think they'd have bothered to mention it -"

He might be trembling a little. "Does Cam work - can Sibyl check whether Cam works -"

She wraps her arms around him. She does not need her hands; she can just levitate her crystal ball where she can see it. "- Cam works," she reports when she's opened Sibyl's message. "Okay, so he can narrow down where he is. - Do you want to go park in Space, Sibyl wouldn't be able to see him coming but Loki's stuff should still work fine in the Edda neighborhood -"

" - do you need me for anything -"

"I don't think so and I definitely don't need you to be here in particular for anything, it's okay."

Pop.

...and if he could confirm to her over the network that he arrived safely that would be great for her peace of mind -

- okay.

Sauron turns out not to even be in the Milky Way galaxy. He's off far away in another galaxy that is in fact too far away to have its own name according to any Milky Way species of which the Alpha Quadrant's common knowledge is aware; it has a number in Federation records. She tells Rúmil as soon as Cam gets back to her on that.

So probably not following you - does the wizardry teleport, parameterized for population from Telperion, land you in Warp?

Checking that next, I want to narrow down the spatial targeting so I don't land wherever he did though.

Is Space Rúmil on the network, he was at that one party...

Yep.

He can get a message while she starts figuring out how to best handle her teleport parameters. Space Elves were always brought back from forks after capture - You're really really sure you're not in Utumno, right?

As much as anyone who wasn't captured, which I think in Space should probably be 'less than completely certain' but we try not to dwell on it.

Can I ask you something that would be an obvious scenario setup if you were not sure of that.

- is he okay -

He's fine, but there is a loose, wizard Sauron in Warp. And in Ithil your alt got recaptured and then psionically obliterated and it is unclear if we should even try getting her back once Loki has generic resurrection, and I do not have a specific reason to expect anything to happen to Scroll but if something did would I ever get him back -

- he would probably want you all to be damn near omnipotent but yes, once it was actually safe -

Okay. Thank you.

Of course. Are you all right?

Just nervous. And upset about Ithil Rúmil.

Is there a reason we can't do the equivalent of rolling back the flat ones?

Me or a psion could delete the memories. I'd do it if somebody asked but without asking it seems different.

All right. Please do find Sauron.

Working on it.

She finishes her parameters. She goes to Telperion.

She lands in Warp.

She tells her own Rúmil that parameterizing for population does in fact get Warp.

Then that's likeliest what he was looking for - can the demons check if he's been to our planets -

Theoretically but it'd be a lot of freezeframing.

Probably not the priority, then. 

If anything happens I would just prefer not to remember it. Just so you know.

Okay. Do you want to know about it if you don't remember something?

Yes. Thank you.

You're welcome. I love you.

Sauron has a teleport, the automata army solution won't work.

And he won't run out of mana and he might not even be material enough for it to be theoretically possible to hop him to Space even if he somehow couldn't react to trying it, yeah.

Where is he - a planet, or -

Planet, looks inhabited.

Now that we have Sibyl it'd be safe to try teleporting whole star systems, seeing if they keep momentum okay -

Check messages - They don't. I'm not actually sure he'd come along if he happened to be immaterial anyway, I'll go check that with Olórin.

"I don't know - would you like me to check -"

"Yeah, we can go find an asteroid and put it in Revelation and see if you go with it."

He does, not that this helps while the Sauron is on an inhabited planet.

Wonder if the Valar could make themselves useful here somehow.

I suppose it's worth asking.

I think I'll ask Elspeth to do that for me, considering.

Yeah. Good skill.

Elspeth travels to Telperion and hey Valar remember how you were gonna arrest Sauron well he went to Warp.

That's really bad! Do they know where in Warp, arresting him could be attempted in Warp too, maybe. 

...maybe they should ask Eru.

They ask Eru.

"Eru declines to intervene."

That does not really surprise Elspeth, for reasons. Anyway they could maybe help arrest him in Warp without Eru's assistance?

They ask Eru about that too! He thinks it's a great idea but declines to give guidance on how.

Well that's worrying. How would the Valar go about trying it?

Uh - given enough time they could set up somewhere else the way they're set up in Valinor and then tell wizardry to stop working the way they broke the necklaces. But they don't want to have too many of them away, lest Sauron attack. 

(They shut down wizardry in Valinor, as a precaution.)

They could try talking to him and asking him to surrender?

...they should probably announce the wizardry shutdown so people know why they suddenly have to go back to doing their laundry by hand. Also time might not be infinitely available, especially time-while-Sauron-is-on-this-one-planet.

So asking him to surrender sounds like the best plan?

No.

What if they offer to release Melkor in exchange for him coming back to Valinor for the parole hearing and then, get this, are not even actually planning to parole Melkor?

...they can keep "hope Sauron doesn't think of the possibility that Valar might have learned to lie" in reserve.

They will consider other solutions. 

They consider for a while and then remember to inform Elspeth that they are considering and that it might take a long time by human standards! To avoid a disconnect in expectations caused by Elspeth being an incarnate!

Okay, ballpark how long?

...as long as it takes to come up with a good solution? This is a hard problem. It might take a really long time to come up with a good solution.

Well, they could discuss things with the peal on the network but they disabled wizardry so actually now they can't.

They are not enabling wizardry again, Sauron could break Melkor out.

They can't be more selective about it? ...And this might not even stop someone from being summoned out of Valinor from elsewhere.

Well that's terrible what can they do about that.

They did manage to stop Elspeth from teleporting by sorcery that one time, that thing might work.

They are already doing that thing really hard at Melkor so learning wizardry himself doesn't let him leave but they're not sure it works against summoning, is there a way to check?

They could do it to someone else and Boots could try summoning them.

Okay! They'll ask for volunteers.

If that takes a while somebody from the peal can just do it, it won't take long.

It might take a while, how about someone from the peal comes to do it.

Okay. Elspeth will be right back, since she can't summon somebody from here since they disabled wizardry.

Pop pop okay they're going to try to summon Elspeth in ten minutes and the Valar should try to stop that but only until Elspeth says to let her go.

They can do that!

The summon doesn't work.

The Valar are pleased! It means Sauron will not be able to fetch Melkor who is very locked down. They let Elspeth go.

She pops in to inform Warp that the Valar have not e.g. decided to keep her forever or something, then comes back. While they are thinking of their good solution there is a wizard Sauron in a science world on an inhabited planet, so the peal is probably going to do something fast if they can think of anything, even if the Valar can't help that quickly. Do the Valar have, like, relevant resources of which the peal should be aware.

If they bring Sauron back here they can try to keep him from leaving again. That's about it.

Yeah no if Sauron proves portable he's gonna die.

Has he actually done anything?

Well, "ran off to Warp, while Sauron" is not super reassuring by itself, but unfortunately most of the people they could quiz on the timeline are also Sauron and therefore dead now. They could as a formality ask a Thuringwethil or something when Saurons start doing things.

The Valar think that you are supposed to verify people have done things before you kill them, but they can ask Eru if it's really important.

Eru is sort of the last person Elspeth would ask about questions of morality. If they want his timeline input it's probably fine, though, he does not have a timeline related deficit of which she is aware.

Eru declines to comment on whether Sauron has done anything worthy of death yet. 

Yeah they'll ask a Thuringwethil just to be clear on stuff in the event that he hasn't done anything horrible to the planet he's on so far.

The Valar cannot be of further assistance unless they happen to think of a way to act in Warp efficiently!

Well, Elspeth appreciates their help with keeping Melkor firmly in place.

She goes and reports to the network.

So what is he in fact up to-

Well, maybe there's something published on the subject in the last couple decades.

(Thuringwethil gets a visit and a question.)

"Oh, hey, princess."

"Hey. Sauron-related question."

"One of them loose?"

"How'd you guess."

"Little bird told me."

"Anyway, yeah, one's loose, we're sort of academically curious how evil he is at this point, when does that start?"

"...he was at least apprised of everything that went on in Utumno. It wasn't, like, his thing - orcs were Melkor's passion project - but he, like, had a go at seeing if you could get Elves to have half-Maiar children, that kind of thing..."

"...did that fail in spite of Lúthien as proof of concept or are some running around?"

"Can't get the Elves not to abort, I think? I was not involved, because the fuck."

"Congratulations. Why couldn't they abort when it was orcs?"

"That's a normal pregnancy, you just make the mother forget."

"Ah. Anyway. Thanks."

"Yeah. Have fun."

"This one's not looking like much fun but we'll try."

"Need help? On anything except deciding if you can murder with abandon?"

"You any good at murdering with abandon?"

"...yep but, like, worse at it than Sauron, unless you've got a way to surprise him and assuming he hasn't picked up new tricks."

"Oh well. Thanks anyway."

And this information is propagated to the peal and Elspeth takes a moment to earwire the Telperion Valar in case they were curious.

They think that's terrible, thank you Loki for checking.

...Boots starts working on an anti-teleportation spell that could be cast on Sauron and is specific to wizardry teleportation so he can still be moved by other means.

Good skill. How long -

Few weeks, but we can't move the planet and can't guarantee being able to catch him inclined to stay substantial so it's not a complete solution.

Can we move everyone else off the planet and then black hole it?

Don't have a way to target the people over the whole thing in one go, not-in-one-go would constitute warning, and anyway if Vulcan and Afterlife are anything to go by they'd probably object to losing their animals and stuff.

Probably. I suppose we can still find him if he does leave between now and then.

Yeah, and he doesn't know we know he's bad news, or that we can find him.

And he is a Maia, he's not aiming to do harm on a short-term scale or he could have already done a lot of it -

He's not even being particularly corrupt as politics goes far as we can tell.

Didn't the Space one get elected orc president without even rigging it? Maybe they get off on at least one thing that is not inherently evil.

Maybe. I suppose if we get him safely pinned down in Loki's neighborhood we could ask about whether he can settle for nonevil political ambitions here on out, wouldn't that be nice.

Is there anything he could conceivably say that would convince you?

Probably not.

Yeah. Even if we met one before Utumno I don't know.

I would feel worse about killing one of those. I mean, if you leave Ardas alone long enough lots of people we like do not acquit themselves very well.

I know. But - I would in fact feel uneasy about trusting Fëanáro's family if they later-years turned into sadists bent on causing as much evil as possible. They don't.

Yeah, "would feel worse about killing", maybe "would consider stashing in a neighborhood where we're nigh-omnipotent for suspicious observation", not "would let him go do whatever".

Fair enough.

I can do spell development anywhere, are you someplace Bell-friendly in Space?

What makes a place Bell-unfriendly? Well, I know one answer to that but I have detected no hostility to either science or hubris.

I would feel awkward about showing up on Afterlife even if they don't all know what Cam's girl alts look like.

I would feel awkward in Afterlife because it has Valar and their alts did something unforgivable, so I guess I can relate. Anyway, no, Ambaróna.

She goes to snuggle her Rúmil while she works on her spell.

This is a good decision. They can do it while listening to acceleration songs, even. 

Tireh pops into Shadow.

Shadow is pleased to see her, how can they help?

There is some mildly privileged information afoot, when is a good time for her to talk to the King.

A good time is found.

She shows up then.

"Tireh! What's going on?"

"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."

"How much is that -"

"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 -"

"Experiments not yet undertaken."

"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 -?"

"Yeah. 'daeva are only contained by the fact they're either incurious enough not to have followed up on the multiple clues they have at this point or altruistic enough not to have made it apparent they can' is a disastrously unstable situation. There's got to be either a wizardry or a spellbinding or an eclipsed or at worst a wished-on way to contain them. Develop it. Then recruit harder, there are a lot of security measures you could take if you weren't constrained by only having one and a half demons. Have a couple dozen; have people checking hourly for anyone outside their native dimension; know about it before it even happens every time; develop a procedure that also catches people who aren't conjurable. Don't trust the Valar to do anything more complicated than 'speak in complete sentences'; as soon as you land on a world and before its Sauron and Melkor learn interdimensional transit is a thing that even in principle exists, summon them out to an uninhabited planet and hole it."

"Most Ardas are found after they find that interdimensional transit is a thing that exists."

"That's why you have to kill them as fast as you possibly can."

"And just clean up after it if there are more deadman switches?"

"Sibyl should be able to tell you, but - yes. A million people dead is less of a disaster than a loose Enemy, especially now that you can bring them back. He's in Warp, now, imagine if Warp hadn't been the Telperion neighbor with the most people and we hadn't been able to find him at all and he was now in some other dimension with several trillion people in it, with wizardry and an apparent agenda of getting them all to destroy each other as entertainingly as possible."

"Sibyl can't see this one."

"Can she see, like, the future life of some random citizen on his planet?"

"Only if he doesn't affect them in that time."

"So if they vanish from her view when we form Sauron-related plans, he has a deadman's switch."

"If they do it inside an hour. And fifteen minutes."

"You might consider hiring some longer range precogs."

"Fair enough, but we're not actually sure how he's knocking her out. He can't have been expecting her in particular and Maiar don't do it by default, so he has some kind of wizardry defense which could be misleading in other ways."

"Yes, it could. Can anyone do spell cancellation? What's been tried -"

"Counterspells are possible in principle but Boots doesn't want to count on it especially versus a Maia wizard; antimagic fields likewise. She's not even positive her anti-teleport spell will work; Valar can forbid wizardry on their turf, specifically or in general, and didn't need a lot of prep time to do it so a Sauron could replicate the trick."

"And he might not have teleported with wizardry - or, even if he did, he might know another way to do it, Shadow's did. Though Ithil's didn't and they were highly motivated, so that at least seems to require some prep time. What about wished on or spellbinding anti-wizardry, what about the rings of power -"

"Some magic rocks have some potentially relevant powers but Sibyl can't tell how they'll interact and Gem can't reset time outside her neighborhood. Spellbinders are working on it but keep hitting blind alleys since a spell can click just fine as long as it works in the context of Hex whether or not it actually has the desired effect on other magic systems. Rings of power I don't actually know..." What does the network have to say about rings of power these days.

Reconstruction of Sauron-proof ones is proceeding apace but that's Elf pace, it'll be at least a couple years. Elrond and Galadriel and Gandalf have the existing Sauron-proof ones though Celebrimbor thinks he can do better next go round. When done they should effectively make the bearer a Vala, and therefore probably work for wizardry cancellation because Valar can do that but it kind of depends how much of the 'acting within a specific area' and 'everything very slow' constraints are actually part of the magic compared to being part of Vala personality.

...okay, do the existing bearers maybe want to loan them out or make a housecall.

I can drop by and ask. None of them are indestructible - well, actually, I think Gandalf's a Maia?

That would probably, you know, help, I was not super looking forward to having to approach a Sauron to teleport him against his will.

I will drop by and ask. Want to come?

Do I add anything to the expedition?

Elves that age will probably drive you nuts, honestly.

I'll pass then.

And he bounces over to Atarale. Hey, Dream -

Mmmm?

Want to do all needed Maitimoing in the worlds where we're not exactly welcome because of the whole war crimes thing -

And you guys cover it in the worlds where my face is infamous? Yeah, fair. What -

If rings of power can do wizardry cancellation, whoever of Elrond, Galadriel, and Gandalf is most persuadable and likely to actually follow instructions would be useful for handling the loose Sauron.

Okay. 

How do you cope -

They wouldn't do fewer bad things if we were all dead and safe.

I was hoping for something a little less - self-sacrificing.

Then ask Midnight.

She sighs.

"Lovely?"

"We kind of don't have many resources in Millenia because usually mes do that and the male mes are not welcome. Swift was wondering if I'd go figure out whether any of the people in possession of a ring of power would loan it out or help us use it to catch the Maira -"

"Oh, that makes sense. D'you need it checked before you go for real?"

"Sure, can't hurt."

So what does she hear from her lovely if she goes -

"Elrond's willing to help, doesn't naively know how he'd do it, would need someone with a wizardry teleport to come teleport around so he can get a feel for it, would definitely need to be nearby and probably nearby for some period of time, so Gandalf might work better, no one's sure where Gandalf is, how does he respond to being earwired -"

...if she gets someone from Warp to ferry them an earwire and then she goes -

Gandalf is very concerned there's a loose Sauron and happy to help. He would also need someone to come teleport around to get a feel for what he's trying to stop.

If she sends Boots with then -

- "Huh, Gandalf is an alt of Olórin."

"Wait, really? How did we not notice that?"

"Don't look the same. But Boots can recognize alts, at least alts who haven't had whatever happened to Shadow Rúmil happen to them."

"So this is ...good news for use of Gandalf to fight the Sauron?"

"Promising, anyway. You could bring Olórin."

"Will do, where's he at?"

"Warp, I think he hangs out in the wizardry school."

"...kind of reluctant to go to Warp."

Hug. "Can ask him to meet you in Millennia."

"That'd be great."

Request goes through the network.

Olórin would be happy to meet her in Millennia.

"Thank you," she tells Sibyl. "Do we still need someone to teleport around or can he do that, too..."

"Nah, he can do that."

"Okay. I should head over."

"...I would offer to accompany you for moral support but it's probably not a good idea for me to go out of neighborhood. Do you want to borrow Alex or one of my alts or something?"

"- you can just check how it goes, right -"

"Assuming you're disposed to tell me about it when you come back yeah."

And how does it go -

Checking -

"They get along fine, they don't have magic system interactions down yet and both expect it to take a while but should know in a day or two if it's doable."

Bounce.

"Okay. I don't think I need backup, then, thanks - did we actually tell Boots that her Maia tagalong does some interesting stuff in the standard trajectory or did she just learn it in precog, she'll probably want to know -"

"She just learned in precog, I'll send her a note."

"Okay!" And she goes off to actually orchestrate the meeting and is back an hour fifteen minutes later to tell Sibyl about it.

"Welcome back, lovely."

Hug. "I asked Swift how he coped with Saurons being loose."

"What'd he say?"

"They'd be doing terrible things anyway so it's not like fewer people'd be horribly tortured if we were all safe and dead and it's not like it's better for other people to be horribly tortured."

"...that is a perspective."

"I said I'd been kind of hoping for something different and he suggested I ask my evil rapist alt."

"...is that as rude as it sounds, alts are sort of a weird ettiquette case."

"It's not exactly rude but it's exactly as unhelpful as it sounds."

"When did you get around to reading that section, I didn't actually know you had..."

"Tireh asked about taking evil Fëanor to meet his family and I had to know what the fuck had happened such that whether that was a good idea was in question."

"Ah."

"Midnight clearly does have some coping skills the rest of us lack but I am nonetheless not going to ask after or adopt them."

"Wouldn't recommend it. Tireh seems to have decided he's her job now since nobody else knew what to do with him."

"She does?"

"No, but she's coming at it from a perspective such that she thinks she can productively pick it up, with a little bit of 'yeah the peal was gonna let me die I am a suitable sounding board for resentment of the peal' and a little bit of 'I am literally three, he hasn't done anything nefarious since I hatched and I view sexual assault as an obscure old-person misdemeanor'."

"- I guess if it works."

"Seems to be so far."

"Maybe the genderflipping helps but I have a hard time seeing any of the terrible things my alts do as - anything other than very distant disasters that I can fathom having happened under completely different circumstances but - so different that I only sort of recognize myself -"

"Well, I'm glad it doesn't upset you as badly as it does them."

"I'm also not dating my cousin, I bet that helps."

Nod.

"How's the new planetary governor settling in -"

"There was a hiccup with one of the timocrats but it smoothed over -" And there are details on that to be had.

Things to check: can sorcery teleport an immaterial Maia? (No.) Can Tireh teleport an immaterial Maia? (Yes.) If an immaterial Maia is tipped off and leaps to a world the peal hasn't discovered yet, can they be summoned back to Warp from there - that one works on Olórin, turns out, but they're not confident it will work on Sauron because he has the antidivination/anti-magical-finding up. Can they stop Sauron from himself teleporting (Gandalf and Olórin are still working on it. Either the work requires occasional explosions or they're just having a lot of fun.)

Do Edda and Warp have any neighbors in common such that they can avoid having to teleport Sauron as far (they set some teleporters to jumping for new Edda neighbors). 

Can Tireh incorporate her notes into her indestructibility so it's less easy to separate them from her? (Tattoos work but don't have anywhere near the needed surface area.) Are there other ways to make sure Sauron can't separate Tireh from her notes? (Spellbinders are working on it.)

If they intend to kill Sauron who else goes blank in Sibyl's precognition? (can't check that until they're ready with everything else).

Edda and Warp share no neighbors.

When they're ready with the teleport blocker and ultraminiature tattooing and everything else, she can't see reports about it, but can see all-clears from uninvolved personnel on standby in passthrough worlds.

That limits the scope of the catastrophe, at least. 

Gandalf appears immaterial in the middle of a stunning glass auditorium where Sauron appears to be presiding over some kind of legislative session and applies the anti-teleportation and tells Tireh -

Tireh appears. She disappears, several times, forgetting everything in the Maitimos' names file and a lot of math on the way, and lands in Space -

And the Tesseract finishes the job.

And Sibyl already confirmed that relevant planets remained intact but they check anyway. 

Sibyl was right!

"If only we could drag him out of Materia as easily. I'll assign a couple people to keeping an eye on the planet he was, ah, involved with - track down what he was doing and notice any kind of delayed-reaction disaster -"

"And any more straightforward repercussions of teleporting presidential assassination."

" - right, also those."

Snort. "There might be some! It would probably be polite to explain, but..."

"I am not sure I would believe the outrageously powerful aliens who teleportation-assassinated the President if they claimed it was only because his alternate universe versions were sadistic psychopaths and he'd be hard to contain later."

"This one was psycho too, we checked the timeline."

"Oh, trust me, I'm not worried he didn't deserve it. But to mortal species 'a couple thousand years ago' might as well be forever and he hadn't done anything recently."

"Yeah. It'd make for an unusually accurate conspiracy theory if we explained, probably no more than that."

"And it wouldn't really serve to reassure the public - I'll send a couple people to keep an eye out for the place falling apart but only a couple, we're going to be really busy cataloguing and priority-ranking all Edda's new neighbors -"

"I have cultivated some of the frost giants to the point where I'd be reasonably confident in having them do stuff, although they'll be conspicuous anywhere..."

"I mean, Elves are only particularly advantaged among humanoids, that's only about eighty percent of the new places, if you'd like to send frost giants to the other ones they'd be much appreciated. It's kind of frustrating to be capable of killing gods and still hard-pressed to keep children from starving."

"Yeah. I'd like them to be supplementary at first before they're soloing new places, does that still help -"

"I mean, even if training them takes up as much time as the work they're doing, we're going to want to train them at some point and 'fifty new dimensions with three hundred new worlds to map' is as good an occasion as any for that."

"I'll send out proposals."

They get to work. The planet whose president they just assassinated carries out an earnest and thorough and scrupulous investigation which turns up absolutely nothing.

And three days after that if Sibyl checks what will happen to her in the next hour what will happen is one of the Elves monitoring them appears in front of Sibyl without knocking and says "thesungoteatenbygiantspiders'.

"- what sun. The one Sauron was president of -?"

"Yep possibly also others we're checking"

She doesn't wait for them to check; she has to drop the precognition to alert the network.

Are giant spiders conjurable -

Magic.

Surroundings.

There's this planet, where they seem to be chilling at home; there is unidentifiable vacuum unless he zooms out way far and then there's stuff -

"And they can teleport. Fantastic. Anyone have teleporting sun-eating giant spider containment strategies or do we need to find and tag every single one of them -"

"Are these the same thing as Ungoliant? What usually happens to Ungoliant?"

"As far as we could tell she settled down, spawned lots of baby spiders, and then starved to death in the forest - but that's when they can't teleport -"

"Are they Maiar, do they do the infinite mana thing?"

"How would we tell -"

"...sneak up on one and tap it? Could also work to stop them if they don't have infinite mana and we have to go with a tag-each-one solution."

"Probably worth checking - who wants to go tap a giant spider -"

"Not me I'm nonreductionist -"

Loki goes and returns without incident and says the one she tapped had a lot of mana but not infinite.

"How many spiders are there how feasible is tapping them all -"

...billions but in very assorted sizes.

"Ugh."

"If they were reductionist I would at this point propose genocide - eating suns in Warp -"

"We could call in some Valar, we do want to save the sun not avenge it and we don't have long to think."

"We don't know how many suns are potentially affected - but sure, if they can move fast enough -"

Elspeth nips into Telperion and updates them real fast.

They are pretty sure they can keep all the spiders on the spider planet. Is there a hurry.

Yes, unavoidable, sorry, precog with a range limit.

Spiders can stay put. The Valar would like precognition is it on offer.

It is from this one world. It can be hired, if they'd like to favor trade with Sibyl or attempt to interact with currency for longer ranges. It isn't portable per se.

That's too bad. All right. Spiders going nowhere.

"Did we get to it before any suns got eaten -"

"- no," says Elspeth before Cam gets conjuring. "Four suns, three in use, were already eaten -" And she knows what they look like.

"...shit. We don't have anything in the neighborhood good for - haul the planets entire into Space and I'll set them up around empty stars."

"Why not Edda?"

"Crowded. I don't want to inflict neighbors on these people they wouldn't have had in case they're not friendly; Space Arda's all alone in there."

"And has summoning. How recently eaten - sending people for them now -"

"- it didn't break gravity just light, they've had hours more night than they should but only that."

"Can we cheat the search for nice similar stars, ask Sibyl which ones we'd find -"

"Tesseract isn't too much of a pill to do that. They'll be set as soon as they're here -" Blue crackling. "- they're set, just with different constellations to look at and a misaligned day cycle because it seemed important to have the chilly side warmed up first."

"We should maybe drop by and explain what the fuck and also don't draw on the floor please -"

"Yeah. Here they are -" Images.

"Okay. Aaaaand they've got emissaries."

If anything else catches fire it takes longer than I can see.

"Well. Hooray."

Cam flops dramatically on Loki. "Hooray."

On three abruptly relocated planets demons are summoned to make it rain little letters in the appropriate language saying 'we learned of the destruction of your sun. We've put you back around a similar one in a protected zone where incidents like that cannot occur. The protected zone has some important features we will discuss with you shortly. Persons killed as a result of the destruction of your sun can be a priority for resurrection.'

This will probably be very helpful for the two of the three planets with a significant literacy rate.

The third one can assume the gods are angry at them while the emissaries figure out enough cultural background for more useful responses.

Such angry gods! Aieeeee!

The powerful gods are running through a checklist. Local longevity, political institutions, tech level, governance structures -

Sixty years at bronze age tech levels (surprisingly good place for low infant mortality, though). Queens (there are three sexes and only the incubating-females, not the large-gamete-females or the males, take to politics at least at this stage of history), some large empires in progress that are not yet capable of reaching one another and some smaller nations more or less squabbly.

They're gonna have to be literate to get much out of summoning. It gets handed over to Vanda Nossëo to get folded into things. The other two planets are literate, and can have a summoning rollout immediately - "Cam, do you want to handle that, I seem to recall it's a specialty -"

"One time," Cam says. "...okay, twice. Allspeak covers them fine?"

" - first's planet the languages are all fine though they don't have the Internet yet, second planet has Internet but there's a major language that'd be, ah, you could at least read and write? Spoken, it's presently more glitch than translation, though we're tinkering to fix that - oh, I guess you don't have to wait for us, do you -"

"I have to wait for at least one of your dad! Or for a Flat Elf to make telepathic friends with a native and get them to do it."

"Oh, one of my dad has it already, that's the easiest way to figure out why Allspeak's glitching."

"Right then. Language summon time."