He can see the Ring. It's a simple golden band, alone in the drawer it's in. It's hard to believe that so small a thing could have such power.

....Okay. Focus. He's going to try to do this without using mage-sight at all, which is a terrible way to have to distance-cast a Gate, but he's worried that opening his shields at all will let the thing talk to him - 

- why is he even trying to avoid that, all information is worth having - 

He takes a slow deep breath. Lets it out. Reminds himself that he can't trust the Ring, or assume that it's not still affecting his mind in some way. 

He grits his teeth, summons all his concentration, and builds a Gate-threshold from the bottom of the drawer, and then reaches - searches - it's taking all of his strength and focus and it hurts and he keeps not being sure why he's even doing this at all... 

The search finds its destination, the hole in the ground by Mount Doom. The Gate snaps into place. 

The Ring was designed to be immune to all forms of spatial non-locality. Normally, absolutely nothing would happen. But it can still pass through a Gate if it wants to, and right now, it actually does want to be Gated. Just not into Mount Doom.

The other end of the Gate appears three feet in front of Vanyel's face. The Ring falls out, and hangs in midair for longer than it ought to before it drops.

Vanyel doesn't move. It's taking every ounce of control he has. He is not going to catch it. Catching it is the sort of thing that if this were a ballad would end in disaster. He's so confused but he doesn't even have the spare attention to notice that, let alone to Mindspeak Tony and clarify that he didn't mean to do that - 

Th Ring falls, unimpeded by Vanyel. 

This wasn't anywhere on Tony's list of things that could go wrong, and wouldn't have been even if he had made such a list. Nonetheless, the thought occurs to him, even in his panic, that "any craft that we here possess" probably didn't include a lot of crafts that he does, in fact, possess.

He dives below it, so he'll be shooting into space if he misses, and fires as powerful and as tight an energy beam at it as he can generate.

Direct hit. Nothing happens.

Damn it that would probably have worked if he still had the Silmaril—

Wait.

He winks back to 2018, flies to where Thor is waiting at the Avengers Facility, gets the Silmaril from him, integrates it back in his suit, flies back to the random field in the English countryside where he'd emerged, and winks back to a millisecond after he'd left.

He fires again, with the full power of the Silmaril in his shot.

Where once there had been a ring, there is now a small cloud of very energetic gold atoms.

The magical shockwave punches into Vanyel as though he'd run full-on into a stone wall. Tony, not being Gifted, barely feels it.

Tony overrides the controls on Vanyel's suit, winks them both back to 2018, and sets him on autopilot to the Avengers Facility, then follows him.

Vanyel's Gate, tethered to the bottom of the drawer in the house below, had still been up at the moment Tony fired on the Ring. 

He's still conscious, barely, as Tony takes over the suit. He kind of wishes he weren't. 

Tony monitors Vanyel's vitals on his HUD, and decides to hold off on asking what the fuck just happened until Vanyel feels better.

They meet up with Thor, who Bifrösts them back to Valinor, and then the three of them go back to Y.T. 1250. The suit can float Vanyel back to his bed and then stow itself away, while Tony calls for a Healer.

"I, uh, destroyed a powerful magical artifact slightly too close to him," he explains to the Healer apologetically. "While he had a Gate up, if that matters."

:You - what - how did that even come up? Did something go wrong, I thought you weren't expecting a fight:

Savil comes running. She reaches Vanyel's bedside, takes his hand, and then glares at Tony. 

:What happened? I thought this mission wasn't supposed to be dangerous!: 

"It wasn't. We got the Time Stone out almost immediately. But we were in a time period that I was, uh, familiar with, and there was something that had to be destroyed to stop Sauron from taking over the world, and the way things originally went, this involved a war in which tens of thousands of people died, and I thought we could do it faster and with less collateral damage. We were going to Gate the Ring directly into a volcano, but something happened and it popped out right in front of Vanyel. My first thought was he was trying to steal it—I wouldn't have blamed him, it's extremely mind-affecting, but it would have been really bad if he'd ended up with it—so I blasted it with Silmaril-light before things could get any worse. I, uh, didn't realize it was going to produce a magic shockwave and knock him out. I'm sorry."

:Gods. I...really can't imagine Vanyel would've tried to steal it. Not like him at all!: 

Vanyel starts to open his eyes, groans, and thinks better of it. "...S-Savil? Wha... Y'not s'posed t'be here?" 

"Huh? ...Nevermind, don't try to talk right now, ke'chara. You're safe. Everything's fine, you're back in Valinor now." 

Vanyel ignores her. "Th'Gate, I don't– did I...make it do that...? I, I wasn't, I thought..." He trails off, coughing.  

"Van, please. Shhh. Just rest." 

:He's - asking if he made the Gate, er, go to him instead of wherever you'd meant to put it: she explains to Tony. :I think he doesn't remember. Gods! Did you warn him it was mind-affecting like that?: 

"I don't know what he did. I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume the Ring did the Gate fuckery itself. Wouldn't be surprised if it could do that. I...I should have warned him, and I didn't. But I also didn't expect it to get to him so quickly or from so far away—in the story I was familiar with, it takes like months of carrying it for it to really corrupt you. But it talked to him. From half a mile away."

Savil doesn't like the sound of that at all. She shivers. 

:...What, you mean, it had Mindspeech? Did it talk to you too?: 

"I'm not sure exactly. It didn't talk to me, but I could tell it was...communicating with him somehow. It's definitely intelligent, it had a bit of Sauron in it. It, uh, liked corrupting powerful magic users with promises of unlimited power, that was kind of its whole thing."

:Great. Vanyel doesn't even want unlimited power - in fact, he doesn't especially want the power he already has - so I suppose you got lucky on that front, and thank the gods it wasn't Leareth with you. Anyway, next time you decide to haul my nephew off on some heroic side mission, I'd appreciate it if you took better care of him: 

Savil turns her back on Tony, before she has a chance to snarl anything at him that she'll really regret, and goes back to stroking Vanyel's hair.

Tony, for once, doesn't suppose that anything he can say will make the situation better, and goes off to check on Leareth, who is supposedly the one with the best chance of devising a technique of using the Space Stone that will get them to Vormir and Morag.

Leareth is awake, sitting up in bed and very halfheartedly trying to eat soup.