SNAP.
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.
Nayoki is with him.
"- He is doing better but wants to not Mindspeak," she explains to Tony, in reasonably fluent English; she's been practicing. "If you have to talk, I can translate?"
"Then I suppose he's in no shape to be doing magic research with an Infinity Stone," he says to Nayoki, glancing at Leareth for confirmation.
"Oh, right, that."
She translates this into Valdemaran for Leareth. "Sorry, it came up before but I forgot to tell you."
Leareth nods. "I should not do any actual magic yet. I can start working on the theory side? I could have you or Vanyel look at it with mage-sight for me."
Nayoki Mindspeaks Savil to ask about this, then makes a face.
"Sorry, Vanyel is out of commission again."
Shrug. "Something went wrong on their mission to retrieve the Time Stone." Savil's explanation had more detail than that and a lot more swearwords, but she doesn't think Leareth needs to worry about that right now.
Leareth rubs his forehead. "Ask him what is known about the Space Stone? And whether Fëanor can learn anything by examining it."
Nayoki nods and relays this back to Tony.
"I want to make sure he does not push himself too much," she adds. "But he is right, it will go faster later if he can start some of the non-magical work now."
"Not a whole lot is actually known about the Infinity Stones. At least, not by me—Strange probably knew a lot more. They've supposedly been around since the creation of the universe, though I'm not sure if that refers to the actual rocks or just to the singularities that they contain. The Space Stone can...do anything you like that's related to space, if you have the strength and control to wield it—if I picked it up and told it to do something, it would probably just teleport me randomly into intergalactic space. I think we'll have better luck trying to integrate it with your existing magic system, like we did with the Time Stone in New York, although—under more controlled conditions and hopefully with fewer unpleasant side effects. I'll ask Fëanor about it, but the Fëanor we have here just learned to smelt iron fifty years ago, so if we really need his input we'll probably have to just risk going back to the present to talk to that one."
He goes to get Fëanor and the Tesseract.
I couldn't really tell you anything about it, Fëanor tells Tony and Leareth-via-Nayoki. It's obviously very powerful, but the power doesn't really seem to have any structure—it's like someone took ten thousand times the power of the Trees and compressed it into a point.
(Nayoki relays this.)
This is not exactly among the more helpful explanations that Leareth has ever heard.
"Noted. I suspect that Velgarth mage-sight would be able to see more detail and structure. Nayoki, could you...?"
Leareth nods.
...Then makes eye contact with the local, younger Curufinwë Fëanáro.
:- I would like to speak with you, if that is all right: he sends, privately. (It takes a lot of willpower not to wince visibly. Mindspeech hurts.) :Privately with Nayoki, that is, she can translate for me:
Yes, I've been wanting to do the same, he replies. Then, seeing Leareth's wince at the mental contact, he says aloud in broken Valdemaran, "If osanwë hurts you, know-I little of language-yours. Would-like-I more learn." He has no accent whatsoever, and his command of the language is shockingly good for his very limited exposure to it, he's just, clearly, substituting his native language's grammatical constructs where he doesn't know the Valdemaran ones. "Or osanwë-my may-translate-she," he adds, pointing to Nayoki, "if understand-not-me-you."
Leareth would like to speak to me alone, he says to Tony.