Well, that explains the supernova. Good to know whoever did it is at least plausibly friendly.

She has galactic peacekeeping to get back to. She says a quick goodbye to Leareth and the Avengers, and is on her way.

Leareth is having so many thoughts.

Each thread he tries to start, keeps getting disrupted midstream by an ENTIRELY NEW set of thoughts. 

No one knows where they came from, they've been around since the beginning of time.

Someone has been failing SO INCREDIBLY HARD at being curious - which would be understandable, if their only opportunity had arrived after the Snap, but one, he's fairly sure that isn't the case, and two, that would be an indictment in itself - 

Make you basically God, if you get all six and they don't kill you.

What. 

(There are half a dozen layers of emotional reaction that Leareth COULD have, here, if there were space for it, which there isn't -)

Anyway, I had one, before Thanos took it.

What.

He leaves out the part about giving it to him voluntarily, that's a little high-context.

(Leareth sees this thought, of course, and leaves it aside for the moment. More importantly, so does Nayoki, who - understands "high context" and reads as much as she can and then moves on.)

The Time Stone. I used it to look into the future. There wasn't any way to stop him then and there, but we could undo it. 

That's...understandable? Good strategy, given their constraints. Also. WHAT.

So he got all of the Stones. Snapped his fingers, half of everyone died.

....Vanyel, dissolving into dust no he has to NOT think about that right now, there's work to do - 

Including me.

What. What. WHAT.

I ended up in the afterlife and the god of death, who was kind of pissed off by all of this—his wife got Snapped, among other problems—sent me back to finish Thanos off.

Leareth....is so confused about what the locals even mean by 'gods'. 

I woke up in a paradise populated by other gods and this semi-magical immortal species called elves, who are featured in a popular fantasy novel here that none of us knew was actually true.

....He has officially given up at making sense of anything, anymore. 

Leareth can, operating almost entirely on automatic, give a summary of what mage-gift and all the other Gifts represented here can do. It doesn't take much thought. His mind is mostly elsewhere. 

The moment Leareth mentions Thoughtsensing, he throws up a shield to block unauthorized access to the inside of his head, leaving open only deliberate communication. And then he does the same thing to the rest of the team's, with alerts if anyone tries to breach them.

:I realize that you have probably been reading our minds. I understand this, given the unfamiliarity of the situation, but you will find yourself unable to continue. If you have questions, please ask.

:Your 'mage-gift' appears similar to my own abilities, although its internal workings may be different. We should conduct experiments to determine if I can learn your spells and vice versa.: He demonstrates a portal and a shield. :However, your world's mind-manipulation magic is more powerful than anything we have. It might be useful for incapacitating Thanos before he can use the Infinity Stones, which render him invincible but do require deliberate effort to use.

:Our current hope for time travel involves a technology which allows a person to be shrunk to a scale where the structure of space-time is no longer smooth. However, the creator of this technology is dead and we are dependent on a very limited supply of a necessary resource. If your magic could replicate this shrinking effect, that would also be extremely useful.:

Then, as an afterthought—:If you have Mindhealers to spare, there are a lot of civilians on this planet who need help processing what's going on. No more than those on your own world, of course, and more than you can hope to help, but we would nonetheless appreciate it.:

Shavri is startled by the sudden shields! She backs off immediately, though, and shows very little reaction. 

Leareth is unsurprised by Doctor Strange's reaction to the Thoughtsensing revelation; he just nods in quiet acknowledgement. He's already prodded Nayoki to back off. By this point, she knows what she needs to. 

He nods, again, at the proposal of conducting experiments. His eyelids flicker at the mention of their world's mind-manipulating magic being unprecedented -  

- and he goes completely still, for a few seconds, when the shrinking technology is mentioned. 

Well. The stranger seems to be done with his speech and Leareth doesn't seem to be answering so Melody might as well go ahead. 

:I'm, er, a Mindhealer. I assume your world has never heard of the Gift for it and the thing you mean is - different in some way - but I wouldn't mind helping people process what happened. As long as it's people here and not back in Velgarth: 

:One moment: Leareth interrupts, lifting a hand. 

His mind is spinning, trying to follow half a dozen trails at once, all equally useless because he's still lacking almost all of what he would need to make sense of this. 

The ability to shrink someone. How? 

A scale where spacetime is...no longer smooth? What. 

A mechanism for time travel - a limited resource... 

(It's not like it takes a lot of insight, here, to notice how desperately curious Urtho would be, if he were here, if he were still alive - if he hadn't died two thousand years ago in a desperate final effort to stop his former student - 

- Vanyel, speaking against a backdrop of ice and snow. You were his best student - because you cared too much -)

Leareth is not going to think about EITHER OF THEM right now. 

:- Until this moment, I would have placed very low odds that time travel were possible, or - this shrinking you mention... I cannot help directly. But our mage-gift comes with a sense for magic, and I would be happy to examine the 'resource' you use for this, and see if I can help: 

:Leareth explained your world's various Gifts to me,: he tells Melody. :I wouldn't know where you should begin, but your Gift would definitely be helpful.:

Then to Leareth—:I'm sure time travel is possible. Certainly with the Time Stone, but we don't have that. I saw the shrinking thing work in one of the futures I visited. The limited resource is called Pym Particles, they power the shrinking tech. I have no idea how they work—I'm not a physicist, but I'm pretty sure they don't work on my magic, anyway. The researchers are in the lab, which is down the hall that way—: he gestures. :I realize a lot of this is very confusing for you, given your world's limited knowledge, but they'll do their best to bring you up to speed.:

:I am following just fine so far, actually: 

Leareth is not deliberately being snappy but it's slipping through a bit anyway. 

:I will go talk to the researchers. ...Oh, speaking of our world's mind-Gifts. Nayoki, my second-in-command, is a Mindhealer as Melody is, but - substantially more experienced at using the Gift in combat. It is rather flexible that way. You two ought speak: 

And he turns and heads off in the direction that Strange pointed. 

....At some point later - much later, probably, once it has a chance of being funny again - Nayoki is going to slap him for dumping this on her. 

She nods to Doctor Strange. 

If Leareth is following this just fine he's doing much better than Strange is. (He lets his shield falter as he thinks this, in such a way that Leareth, if he's still paying attention, might think he didn't actually intend that thought to be heard. He really didn't mean to be condescending—it's just the reality of the situation that Leareth and his people are missing a lot of context here and failing to acknowledge that is going to cause a problem.)

:Could you—incapacitate someone nonviolently in such a way that they couldn't take any action to deflect it?: he asks Nayoki. :This may prove to be critical to our eventual fight with Thanos.:

When Leareth reaches the lab he'll find it occupied by two men and three of the nonhumans with foreign magic that he sensed earlier. One of the nonhumans appears to have a non-organic body.

One of the men, who's wearing tight-fitting red-and-gold armor from the neck down, greets him in a language he can't understand, though he can read just enough of his thoughts to get the meaning of the words.

"Hey. So you're the new wizard. I'm Tony Stark." He holds out his hand to shake.

Leareth tenses slightly - he's been generally on edge, and thus especially isn't in the mood to touch strangers who he's just met - but he follows Tony's lead and shakes his hand. 

:To clarify, I do not actually speak your language. Yet. If you deliberately think words at me then I will pick them up: 

He would normally be so curious about the nonhumans and their alien magic, but curiosity is very tiring right now. 

Tony recognizes Leareth's discomfort with the handshake, and makes it a short one.

"I know. I'm saying things aloud while thinking them at you to help you learn English," he says-and-broadcasts. "It worked really well for the elves. Don't let them know you speak a new language, though, they're easily distracted enough as is.

"By the way, I didn't catch your name—I can't just call you 'wizard' now that there's more than one of you—"

It's too late; the elf with the non-organic body hears "new language" and his attention is immediately caught. He turns toward Leareth, and Leareth notices—he doesn't know why he didn't notice this before—that the elf has three extremely powerful magical artifacts apparently—embedded in his chest?

"I promise not to annoy you with questions about your language if you'll speak it aloud while thinking things at me like I'm doing now, instead of just saying everything over osanwë," he says-and-thinks the same way Tony did. (The last word carries a mental connotation of basically-but-not-quite-Mindspeech.)

"I'm Curufinwë Fëanáro, by the way; Fëanor for short," he adds. He doesn't bother attempting a handshake. "This is my son Curufinwë Atarinkë, and Calanáro Imbírtan, who isn't related but probably wishes he was." He gestures to the other two elves as he introduces them.

The other elves look briefly at Leareth as their names are mentioned, then go back to their work.

Having to learn an entire new language, on top of everything else, sounds so exhausting. Leareth tries not to look too visibly weary at the suggestion. Maybe he can throw Nayoki at the problem, she's faster at picking up languages since she can cheat with Mindhealing. 

"I can do that," he says out loud in Valdemaran, while echoing it in Mindspeech. "My name is Leareth." He's not going to bother unpacking the difference between Velgarth mage-gifts and whatever it is that Strange does. "Doctor Strange said that you could explain where your research is at right now, with the - shrinking, and time travel, and the limited supply of particles that allow this?"

Being socially graceful is going to take more energy than he has right now. "Fëanor, I cannot help noticing your powerful magical artifacts - what are they?" Vague gesture at the elf's (artificial?) chest. 

"Okay. Quantum Physics 101 for Wizards." He starts typing on his computer terminal as he speaks, bringing up visual aids on the holo-display. "Space and time are different dimensions of the same fundamental thing, which can bend—for example, this normally happens if you travel really really fast, although not in a way that's useful to us. However, at a very small scale, twenty-something orders of magnitude smaller than an atom, the structure of space-time is...naturally twisted, in a way that we could potentially navigate."

He holds up a tube of some kind of red fluid. "These are Pym particles. They can...somehow change the scale of matter, potentially down to the scales where we could use the natural twisting in spacetime to travel into the past. The problem is that we don't have nearly enough of them, and their inventor is dead, and we don't really know how they work."

(The Pym particles aren't magical, except in the very basic sense that magic involves manipulating the universe at a more fundamental level than ordinary physics, and they're...something very fundamental that should not be existing in isolation, but they definitely weren't made by any Velgarth Gift.)

"There's another aspect of this problem, as well. The geometry of space at this scale is...extremely complicated, and navigating it without getting lost is a very difficult mathematical problem. The computers are doing most of the number-crunching, but they can't produce creative solutions—you might be better at math than physics, it requires a lot less context."

"These are the Silmarils. They capture the Light of Valinor, which is—an energy field that our gods created to slow the negative effects of time—we're immortal, see, and living in a world where everything else dies quickly is unpleasant. The actual light, as in radiation, is actually a side effect. However, it turns out that the principles the Valar used to make the energy field were quite general, and so the Silmarils are...quite a bit more versatile than is usually believed.

"Also, since I see you staring—no, this isn't my original body. I was resurrected by an unconventional method, and Earth didn't have the technology to produce a new organic body, although this is superior in most ways anyway.

"I've been operating on the assumption that Pym particles are something...in the same class as what the Silmarils capture. The stabilization medium is certainly similar to silma, although fluid and inferior in durability—the red color is just a dye added for presumably aesthetic reasons."

Leareth's head hurts. He can't tell whether this is because the concepts are genuinely hard or just because he's running on three weeks' worth of chronic sleep deprivation. 

"- I suspect I could work on the mathematical side of the routing problem, sure." It would be easiest to just do this, find a concrete problem he can absorb himself in and not think about any of the larger context, but that would be stupid. "The Pym particles - do not show up as directly magical to my Othersenses, at least not in a way that points at how I could make them, they are simply...odd, they ought not be stable and storable like this... The Silmarils do appear as very magically powerful. I might learn something from examining them more closely. Did the inventor leave any documentation on his research–"

Wait. Pause. He wasn't being nearly confused enough about the middle there -

"- Fëanor, you were resurrected? Was that - only possible because of your species' pre-existing immortality, or could it be done again - for example, to contact the inventor of the Pym particles...?" 

"Pym destroyed most of his notes after his invention killed his wife."

"If they're anything like the Silmarils, their design may not be the sort of thing that can be documented, anyway. But I will allow you to examine a Silmaril, under my supervision. They can be—extremely dangerous if tampered with badly.

"Normally the souls of mortals pass beyond the world and cease to exist within it; if they are preserved in some other place we do not know where or how. However, my understanding is that Mandos, who keeps the Halls of the Dead that are within the world, is holding Thanos' victims specifically here, and is willing to resurrect anyone who can contribute to the fight. I'm not sure how we'd contact him, though."

Tony shows Leareth the basics of how to use the computer and loads up the spacetime geometry simulation for him to experiment with.