For pretty much everything after 'I was captured', Leareth is...not really absorbing the story on an emotional level. It's too much pointless stupid tragedy, and he has no anger or indignance to spare for it. 

:Why did the Valar wait for centuries to do anything: he says at the end, tonelessly. :- I am tempted to ask also why Eru bothered to create an evil god at all, but...I have not found it productive, in general, to ask those questions of the gods: 

Maitimo has, of course, been telling Leareth his entire life story on a thin pretext mostly because he expects his reactions to tell him if Leareth is someone they can work with.

His reaction to Finwë's death is noticeable, and Maitimo can guess that he suffered some deep grief in his past—long before the Snap, he would guess.

He flinches at the Kinslaying less than most Elves would, but more than some Men he's met. That's good. Maitimo regrets Doriath and Sirion deeply, but he can't, rationally, bring himself to regret Alqualondë—on balance, compared with what Morgoth would have done had they not arrived to stop him, the First Kinslaying probably saved lives.

He sees Leareth start to dissociate, at roughly the same point, interestingly, that his own memories seem to do the same. Something has been redacted from every memory he has from after Angband—something that feels extremely important, but also as though he would really rather not know what it was.

Our philosophers have been debating that since before the invention of writing, on the assumption that Eru is benevolent, he says. I find it simpler to—dispense with that assumption. I doubt that we are...real enough, to him, for benevolence to have any meaning; he is certainly not optimizing the universe for our happiness. I think he is telling a story, one that we all happen to be caught up in, and a story without an Enemy is very hard to make interesting. My family has tried to—be interesting in ways that involve less violence—but in the end our lives didn't turn out to involve much less than the Enemy's.

Perhaps, by some people's measures, this makes Eru evil. I—don't consider that a meaningful concept. He is what he is. He is responsible for the world's existence, and I think that...most people, at least, would rather exist in this world than not exist at all.

Leareth nods along. He approves of this analysis, and feels even deeper appreciation for Nelyafinwë Maitimo; it feels like he's very rarely met people who - were trying to reason through this sort of complicated ethical-philosophical question from a framework that made sense to him and didn't seem completely stupid? 

He's...impressed, that the Elves had philosophers interested in such abstract questions before they had writing. He's pretty sure the humans of Velgarth didn't. Maybe it would have been easier, for them, living in a place like Valinor, where scarcity and the accompanying constant pressure to focus on survival wasn't a meaningful constraint... 

:- Honestly, I feel that even applied to humans and equivalent sentient species, 'evil' is...less useful as a concept than many believe. ...I am not sure what your gods are like, but ours are very, very alien. They perceive the world in ways that we cannot even make sense of, and so of course Their concepts are different, and to the extent that values are built out of ontology and concepts...: 

....

If Nelyafinwë Maitimo were a Velgarth Mindhealer, there would be quite a lot of information here for him to perceive directly, both about Leareth's general underlying traits and his current emotional state. 

Leareth is almost two thousand years old, and for approximately that entire time, has mostly thought of himself as, in some key sense, alone in the world - more accurately, alone in the mission of achieving the goals and values he cares about. His mind is set up accordingly, and would look incredibly bizarre to any Mindhealer used to examining standard human minds. The intense grief and loss, that Maitimo saw echoes of as Leareth reacted to Finwë's death, is deeply and inextricably tied into this. 

After the Snap, for weeks, Leareth was holding onto his sanity by a thread. There were certain assumptions that were built into the self-stabilizing mental architecture that he pieced together over his long, lonely life. One of those pieces was...a fundamental assumption that he could, and would, investigate - and with sufficient effort come to understand - anything that happened in Velgarth. And then fix it, if it needed fixing. But he didn't see the Snap coming and neither did the literal gods of his world. Some of whom were, Themselves, subject to the random coin-flip deaths of the Snap... 

Leareth didn't give up. He made a vow on the stars, a long time ago, that he would never give up. But after weeks of throwing everything he could at understanding the disaster and preventing any future recurrence, he still had nothing. He did his best to go on taking the right actions, to save as many people as he still could – even when every assumption behind his core sense-of-self, behind his vow that held him together for millennia, had just been invalidated. 

By the time Captain Marvel arrived, Leareth wasn't, really, capable of immediately making and propagating all of the updates that her existence and the news she conveyed demanded. He tried to take all the right actions anyway, despite feeling helpless and overwhelmed and despairing and a dozen other emotions that he isn't used to feeling EVER and thus has relatively few functional coping mechanisms for.

This is still, mostly, the mode that he's operating in. He's had some time and space to start wrapping his mind around the new-resources side of the update as well as the scale-of-tragedy, and the driving sense of purpose underlying everything else is stronger and more coherent than it was during those early days in Velgarth. It's not especially fragile or in danger of breaking under strain. 

Leareth is nonetheless in significant emotional pain and mostly dissociating from this because he has no idea what to do with it and there's work in front of him. He's trying very hard to take all the right actions here, which include mental actions such as 'curiosity' and 'strategic planning', and he's starting to get some traction on this, but to a Mindhealer it would be clear how much this is costing him. 

...

Nelyafinwë Maitimo, of course, is not a Velgarth Mindhealer, and Leareth has millennia of practice at controlling his facial expressions and body language and minimizing those leaks. He's well outside of his comfort zone, though, and Maitimo is also immortal with all the life experience that allows, and from the perspective of someone skillfully paying attention and trying hard, Leareth's nonverbal signals and Mindspeech overtones give away quite a lot. 

Maitimo has begun to suspect, already, that Leareth is much older than any of the Secondborn ought to be; he might be even older than Maitimo himself, although he has, actually, no idea how to calculate his own age at this point, between time spent in Valinor, Endórë, and Mandos, the last of which has a particularly ill-defined relationship to time, and in which he spent the first several—probably millennia of Endórë time—trying very hard not to exist at all.

He understands, in some measure, Leareth's particular pain, for he once spent centuries continuing to take actions against the will of every fiber of his being—but he did it for his family, and his people, and this is the only framework in which he can characterize such motivations. He inevitably wonders who Leareth is loyal to in this way. He will not guess that it is all people, on all worlds.

He notes Leareth's deepening respect for him and guesses that it's partly because he sees the world in a way few others have even dared to. However, the fact that Elves were doing philosophy before they invented writing doesn't mean much. They are all immortal, telepathic, and have perfectly eidetic memories. Writing was actually, in many ways, a significant step backward in the quality of their communication. His father, who invented their current writing system, regarded it mostly as an aid in the study of spoken language. The Vanyar, from whom most of the philosophers hail, borrowed the invention from the Noldor and probably never would have invented it on their own.

The orthodox definition of evil is the absence of good. The orthodox proof of Eru's benevolence is that there's no suitably abstract definition of good other than 'what Eru is'—most of the dubious arguments are made trying to reconcile this definition with the innate sense of goodness that was designed into them for participation in a society of other people. Maitimo's innate conscience was a casualty of Angband, and he wasn't particularly good at being a normal person before that, and he has little use for either definition.

He doesn't know what Velgarth's gods are like, but the Valar are, he suspects, much more alien than they pretend to be. They exist half in the universe and half out of it, Eru's puppet-strings by which he pulls on his creation, and the illusion that they have desires and motivations comparable to those of the Children is just that, although they themselves may not even realize it.

Maitimo is not even bothering to distinguish public from private thoughts at this point. Leareth can hear all of this, albeit not in a way that's particularly directed-at-him.

Calanáro approaches Leareth cautiously, seeing that he's probably in the middle of a conversation, though he isn't saying anything aloud.

"Uh—the computers came up with a solution to the spacetime geometry problem."

Leareth has his Thoughtsensing open again, more out of an abstract sense of 'all information is worth having' than because he wants to or can muster any curiosity about Maitimo's thoughts. This also makes it a lot harder to even parse what Maitimo is thinking, though he notes what he can and files it away to think about later. Someday. Maybe.

(Lately it's been feeling a lot less clear that there will be a later.) 

Despite Calanáro's careful approach, Leareth is startled by the interruption, though he tries to hide it. 

:- Oh. Good. I can come look, if you wish - is there any update on the particle accelerator experiment -?: 

"You'll have to ask Fëanáro about that, and I don't think you ought to go over there at the moment," he answers. Fëanor and Tony (the latter of whom is in full armor) are both somewhere inside the particle collider assembly where they probably shouldn't be, messing with something that's emitting a lot of light, and probably a lot of harder radiation, even behind a solid foot of darkened, lead-infused glass. Bruce is keeping a safe distance.

(Elves aren't harmed by high-energy radiation and in fact need to absorb it to power difficult magic, is the concept that Calo throws wordlessly at Leareth, preempting his concern.)

"Unfortunately this lab was built before anyone appreciated the concept of a thoroughly non-magical holo-display. You'll need to touch the palantír, and it will osanwë the visualization to you." He points to a round, black—stone?—sitting on a base to which Calo's—small computer terminal?—is attached by a cable that looks hand-made.

:Yes, of course: 

Leareth reaches for the black stone, with an apologetic glance back at Maitimo for the interruption. 

(He can tell that Maitimo isn't finished learning - whatever it is he wants to learn - about Leareth as a person. He's not sure how to approach that. Usually he would have more actual plans, that would affect how he wanted to be perceived by potential allies, and thus what was strategic to reveal. He...doesn't really have plans, right now. Which is an uncomfortable realization in itself.) 

He touches the black stone, waits for the visualization to reach him. 

The visualization of the solution is projected into his mind. It's an inverted Möbius strip a shockingly elegant eleven-dimensional cellular automaton that expands to produce the breathtaking complexity he saw earlier.

...It's beautiful. 

For a glorious ninety seconds or so, it captures Leareth's full attention, as he tries to wrap his mind around it or at least around a few fragments of it, enough to sanity-check the general shape against the intuitions he's formed over a couple of days of intensely studying the relevant math. For those ninety seconds, his mind is too full to leave any space for emotional pain. 

- eventually he drags himself back to his physical surroundings. :To the extent I can understand it, the solution seems adequate to me: 

"Okay."

He sets to programming the little navigational devices that Tony had made back on Earth, in anticipation of when they found the solution.

A little while later, Fëanor emerges from his work, and makes an announcement.

"My theory on the nature of the Pym particle was correct, and I have been able to create some and trap them in silma." He holds up a small crystal glowing with red light (which is an entirely unrelated magical effect used solely to distinguish finished jewels from raw silma). "I have enough silma remaining to create a total of ten infinitely reusable jewels. I could, at need, create more, but the crystals take the better part of a Valian Year to grow, and while it's possible they would grow faster on Earth, I think it more likely that they would not grow at all.

"Calanáro, if you are done programming the navigation beacons, we can begin the test now."

Calanáro is done programming.

"I know you said you'd like to observe the trial with your magical senses," he says to Leareth. "Is there anything you need to do to prepare for that?"

:I do not need any particular preparation, just - warning, so that I am watching: 

Leareth would really prefer to have a couple of hours - or maybe a couple of years - to absorb what he's just learned from Maitimo and get all the emotions out of the way, but he doesn't have that. So it's fine, for the moment he can keep distracting himself from the inevitable reckoning by watching a different fascinating experiment. 

Calanáro dons the shrinking suit they'd made back on Earth, attaches the Pym-particle crystal to it, straps the navigation beacon to his wrist, and taps a few buttons to complete the programming.

"I'm going to go forward five minutes," he says, then presses one last button and vanishes into thin air.

The space around him—breaks—as seen to Leareth's mage-senses, when he does this. Briefly the space where he once was is filled with random noise, then, within a second, it returns to normal.

It's very disorienting to watch! 

Leareth stares as intently as he can manage until everything finishes returning to normal and he's pretty sure the show is over, then glances around at the others, waiting to see if they have observations to make on how they think it went. 

Everyone is staring at the empty space with bated breath.

Five minutes later, the dead body of Calanáro appears and crumples to the floor.

I TOLD YOU THIS WOULD HAPPEN, says a booming mindvoice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere.

Leareth is pretty sure that no one warned him that this would happen! He flinches, throws up shields around himself, reaches as hard as he can with mage-sight at the source of the mindvoice - 

:Who - what - was that?: 

The mindvoice is coming from several thousand miles to the west, where there's a region where space, time, and matter themselves seem ill-defined. At the center of that region is a god, the lone anchor of moveless reality in a place where so many of the usual rules of the universe seem not to apply.

Fëanor is panicking, but not because of the dead body—that's easy enough to fix; even in the old days Mandos was always pretty lenient about accidental deaths. He's panicking because, in the back of his mind, he half-expected this result, and it confirms all his worst fears about the true nature of his species and their relationship to the fates of the world.

Tony didn't expect this result; he thought there was a good chance that they'd end up aging or de-aging the test subject instead of sending him through time, but that would have been pretty harmless to an elf anyway. He definitely didn't expect to kill him. Luckily, death seems to be cheap for them.

"It's probably the god Strange met while he was dead," he answers Leareth. "He did mention him saying something about time travel being impossible, but he also had a vision of it working just fine, so I didn't put too much stock in it." 

Leareth's head is currently pounding from the mixture of extending his mage-sight past its limits in an attempt to track down that mindvoice plus the sheer blazing quantity of magic involved. 

He shivers. Takes a deep breath. :If Mandos is the god of this world, but not of Strange's world–: 

Wait. 

- no, wait, damn it, he should have made this connection days ago, and he only failed to because he can't, currently, really think about that entire area. 

:- Strange is human. From Earth. If he went to Mandos, then - then...: 

Leareth trails off, and -

- and then reaches directly for the god-mindvoice, because at this point, why not. 

:Do you have the dead of Velgarth - of my world - as well: 

SOME OF THEM, PERHAPS. MY CALL IS MEANT FOR ALL THE CHILDREN OF ILLÚVATAR, BUT YOUR WORLD HAS OTHER GODS WHO ARE—NEARER, AND HEARD MORE LOUDLY BY THE SPIRITS OF ITS DEAD. HOWEVER, IN LIGHT OF RECENT EVENTS, THOSE GODS MAY NO LONGER BE AROUND. IS THERE SOMEONE IN PARTICULAR YOU WOULD LIKE ME TO CHECK FOR?

I AM GOING TO SEND BACK CALANÁRO, he adds, after a moment. NORMALLY I WOULD GIVE HIM A LONG SAFETY LECTURE FIRST, BUT I AM MUCH TOO BUSY.

A large number of Leareth's people are dead and arguably he should be properly making a list, but in fact there's only one name at the top of his mind right now. 

:Herald-Mage Vanyel Ashkevron - also called Demonsbane and Hero of Stony Tor -: