It's dark out, aside from the brightly-shining stars, and the ground is grassy and gently sloped. It's quiet.

He looks up at the stars.

(And simultaneously-) 

Alllllright, let's take it from the top! I'm MaginiTheGenie, and I'll be doing a speedrun of Arda Isekai (Glitchless, Hard Mode, No Sharing Meta-knowledge). New viewers, feel free to type !rules in the chat for the category specifics!

The most important thing to know immediately about Hard Mode is that we spawn at a random time and place in Arda, so the first thing to do is orient!

As you can see, it's dark as shit, which those of you familiar with the game will know means we arrived after the Trees have been destroyed (Fs in the chat for King Finwë) and before the Vala have worked out the replacement lighting. 

So that's the when, approximately. As for the where-

He crouches down, grabs a handful of grass, and starts chewing, thoughtfully. Does it taste like food?

Yep! Sweet and fragrant and herbal.

-the sweet sweet taste of what looks like ordinary grass tells us that we've spawned in Valinor, home to the 14 major deities who aren't interested in torture! This is potentially a pretty good start, though we'll need to see when exactly in the timeline it is. Fortunately, it's pretty safe to do that here; we can try and attract local attention ASAP to get things rolling!

He whistles, extremely loudly, then starts walking downhill, listening for a response.

Quendi have really good senses, so whistling loudly is the best way to get their attention from afar. Of course, we won't be able to see or hear them at the same distance, but they'll almost universally reach out with osanwë.

However, Valinor is pretty big! It's likely someone would come across us if we waited here, but waiting is rarely the right move in a speedrun, so we're going to head downhill at a brisk pace, and then head east when it levels out, keeping an eye out for landmarks. Our primary goal at the moment is to make contact and figure out when exactly we are in the timeline. In particular, we're really hoping to have arrived in time to avert the First Kinslaying, a tragic and horrifying atrocity that also makes it much harder to keep the Noldo factions from splintering, which is a huge headache. 

The First Kinslaying also triggers the Doom of Mandos, which -- well, actually it is deeply unclear to what extent the Doom has direct causal effects on the Noldor's ability to do things that do not turn to evil end etc etc (the devs are notoriously tight-lipped about this kind of thing), but in practice it has massive morale and diplomatic consequences and closes off a lot of possible strategies, and so we would really rather like to avert any and all of those things, and do something else which is not that, basically by any means possible. 

:Are you all right? We heard a sound from your direction!:

Ooooh, that was fast! Now, the category rules require us to convincingly emulate a human with no prior knowledge of Arda, which means no familiarity with osanwë, so-

:-Uh, I'm all right physically? I wasn't expecting to be here, or to have other people's voices inside my head. That is not how communication works where I am from, and the colloquial wisdom is that hearing voices inside your head is a sign of insanity.:

(In this person's public thoughts: this doesn't feel like psychosis and he doesn't have a family history of it, but "this doesn't feel like psychosis" is probably a quite common internal experience among people with psychosis, so maybe he shouldn't put too much weight on it...)

: - sorry, where were you expecting to be? Are you alone? Are you in any danger?:

:I was expecting to be in Seattle, Washington, which maybe means nothing to you, because the stars above us are nothing like the ones I'm used to, but maybe you get lots of people like me around here and know all about Seattle. I'm alone, and do not know myself to be in any danger, but I know almost nothing about this world.:

(public thoughts: This seems way more interesting and exciting than another week of high school! ...oh, hmm, is this telepathy also mind-reading?)

:I've never heard of Seattle! This is Valinor, and, uh, usually you're safe in Valinor, but....right now it's under attack. I don't...know where you should go to be safest. Probably to the Valar?:

:I've never heard of Valinor! ...is that the name of this region, landmass, hemisphere, planet, solar system...:

(Public thoughts: More questions! What're Valar, who's attacking Valinor, is this speaker also going to the Valar, does this kind of thing happen often?)

- Some viewers might be wondering why I'm bothering populating the public thoughts of my avatar like this. Although it can be tempting to just show up having the mental motions for private thoughts instinctively, the humans native to Arda won't, when they spawn in, and the discrepancy there is a point of suspicion we'd much sooner avoid if it comes up! Luckily, Quendi are incredibly prosocial; whoever it is we're talking to will almost certainly bring up the public/private thought distinction within a few minutes.

:Valinor is this continent! Our world is called Arda. I don't know what a hemisphere is. Do you ...want someone to come and find you? And help you get somewhere safer? The Valar are the gods, they - well, usually they keep Valinor safe, but it's not totally clear if they can do that anymore, but I can't think who else you'd go to instead of them, though you could come with us? I am - able to read your thoughts, but only the thoughts you want me to read, if you - keep them split, in your mind, from the ones you want to keep private, like by drawing a curtain over some of them, then I won't read the ones you don't mean me to read.:

:Oh! My world is called Earth. (Can I share mental images with you? I am trying to share one of my world, it looks like this) A hemisphere is... half of a sphere (though Earth isn't exactly a sphere, it's fatter around the equator; we should really call them hemiglobes). I would appreciate help being found! It's too dark for my eyes to see anything. I don't have enough context to know if I'd rather go with you or to the Valar. My world doesn't have gods, at least not the kind of gods that are entities who take actions with obvious observable effects, which it sounds like yours are? Would it be okay if I went along with you until I learned enough about what's going on to make a more informed decision?:

(Public thoughts: that's a really neat way to do telepathy! Lets see, public thoughts can be tweets, and private thoughts can be... journal entries. Tweet-thought; is this working? can you tell if I've made any journal entries or not?)

So in this initial contact conversation, we're juggling a few different things at once. There's been a ton of excellent routing work done here, so a lot of the things we're saying are serving multiple purposes. This game has a ton of unavoidable RNG, so there's a ton of variance in what we want to do, which is part of what makes this run so fun; you have to stay on your toes!

We want to demonstrate that we have the kind of open-minded curiosity that Noldor tend to recognize and value in others, lay out that we're coming from a very different world than Arda (and are a different kind-of-being than they are) but are comfortable pivoting quickly, and also "learning" how to interact with osanwë. 

While all that's going on, of course, we can look for context cues to get more information about our current location (both in time and space); a surprisingly reliable one for tracking major events is how trusting the people we talk to are. Valian Quendi are by default extremely open; after the FKS and Doom, they become a lot more reserved, and as Melkor pulls more and more covert shit during the war in Beleriand, they have to become more and more paranoid to survive.  

So far, the person we're talking to seems pretty unguarded, which is a good sign. Even better, they're with a group of people who are travelling away from the Valar! If we're really lucky, this'll be the combined Noldor host leaving for Beleriand! If that's the case, we'll be able to try for a brand-new strat I've been dying to show off in a run: Fast Doomskip Mk IV.

Yes, absolutely you can come with us! I can come and get you, if you think you'll have a hard time with the unfamiliar territory! I can see your world. It looks - round? Ours isn't round.

Thank you! I can try and meet you partway; I keep heading downhill, is that towards you?

Huh! All the worlds we know about are round like Earth is, I think because of gravity.

...My name is Magini, by the way, he adds as an afterthought.

So, there's a lot of speedrunning history behind Fast Doomskip Mk IV, and I do want to give a brief overview of it now, because while it's actually happening I'm going to be focusing a LOT on managing social interactions, and having the context behind what we're aiming for and why we go about it this way really adds some important layers to the viewing experience, IMHO.

To start with; "doomskip" is a term for a category of strategies, all of which share a common goal: getting the Noldor to Beleraind in more favorable circumstances. As a term, it technically applies to any strategy that skips the Doom of Mandos event, but because that is almost always triggered by the First Kinslaying (along with the splitting of the two Noldor hosts and the burning of the boats), every major doomskip focuses on avoiding the FKS. (Though I gotta give a quick shoutout to SendMoreBees for her 2B4D "cause so much chaos in Valmar that Mandos is Too Busy For Doom" strat, which is not useful in any speedrun route but is extremely funny.)

The original version of Doomskip was found really early on, and that's because it's kind of obvious; you just teach the Noldor how to build oceanworthy boats, and sail over instead of letting them try to cross the ice or bother the Teleri. Building enough boats for everyone does take a lot of time, but it's both safer and faster than strategies that take you over the ice, and the extra time it takes does give you lots of time to befriend the various members of Finwë's family and also demonstrate your competence, and in the early days of the speedrun, we were a lot worse at both of those things, so the extra time spent making the boats wasn't actually wasted! But as we got a lot better at navigating conversations, especially with the Feanoreans, the time we were spending on construction actually started to matter, which is what prompted more serious research into faster doomskips...

:I'm Erdellë! I'll walk towards you. Gravity is the force that makes things go down? Why would it make them be round?:

 :Cool! I will see you soon, then.

Gravity (as it is known by the scientists in my world) is more generally a force that pulls things towards other things, with more massive things pulling harder, and the overall force weakening with distance (I think it's one of the inverse-squared with distance things? My physics teacher likes to point out that a bunch of stuff is inverse squared with distance). The Earth is the biggest thing nearby, back at home, so the force it applies to people and things on it is downwards. When you have a very large amount of mass all pulling itself together, a sphere is the most stable form, I think because it minimizes the ratio of average radius to volume? - I think I have my textbook with me that has the equation for gravitational force between two objects, but I don't have it memorized, it's one of the ones with a very specific universal constant in it. If physics works the same ways here as it does where I'm from, then gravity probably gets very weird near the outer edges?:

He continues walking downhill while chatting, breath unencumbered by the conversation. (Telepathy: very convenient for speedrunning!) His tweets public thoughts indicate that he's curious about whether physics mostly works the same here as it did at home, or if "gravity" is being translated as "the force that pulls things to the ground", which here is Just Magic. This feels like an odd thing to be uncertain about, but it's not like he has statistics about what most worlds people get randomly Isekai'd into are like, and translation-telepathy is the kind of thing that really does not happen just by physics.

The Fast Doomskip Mark I is a strategy I actually helped develop, along with some of my BFFs in the community, ArdaEnthusiast42, GourdGamer, and FeanorsBiggestStan. We'd gotten to a point with our early-social optimization where it became really clear that time building the boats was slowing us all down, and the four of us were shooting the shit at last year's AGDQ, talking about the route, and Gourd pointed out that it's very likely that we could do a better job asking Teleri to let us borrow their boats than Feanor does in canon. We went down to the computer room and started testing right away; we have a massive folder of post-darkening early game saves and a little tool to pull from 'em randomly.

We already knew that it's not at all difficult to convince the Noldor that the Teleri's swanboats are the fastest way across to Beleriand; it always comes up if you follow the conversation-paths we use to advise against trying to cross the ice and suggest a water crossing instead. Someone typically brings up borrowing them, and what we used to do was worry aloud about the possibility of Melkor having sown distrust for the Noldor among the Teleri the way He clearly did between the Noldor factions. Then when Feanor picks up on that (he's really not hard to convince to be more paranoid, especially in his current mental state), we'd suggest sending a small delegation to the Teleri to ask (they always say no) while everyone else start building boats (we help and to continue befriending people). We briefly tried just taking the entire host to Alqualondë, but negotiations go much worse if Feanor's there, so we eventually settled on what was basically the existing plan, but we go along with the delegation, leaving the rest of the Host to start gathering wood for boats, and leave our textbooks and calculator for Feanor and Curufin to play with. 

Convincing the Teleri to lend out their swanboats is extremely difficult. They're frightened by the darkening, they're aware that the Noldor are defying the Valar, and they do not approve. Having Feanor there makes it worse, obviously, and it does help to have Finrod there to make an impassioned appeal re: the lives of the Teleri still on Beleraind, but it still takes a lot of extended complicated diplomacy. And as long-time viewers of my channel know, doing extended complicated diplomacy during this part of the game is always playing with fire, because it's basically impossible to do without Maitimo's help, and doing with Maitimo's help means making some very dangerous opening moves in the inevitable MSS, which, if we're not very careful, ends up sowing the seeds for an unavoidable MSL.