"I presume this to be all my fault, I'll go."

"And spend six months picking up the language?"

"Yes, we should go," Finis says, bounding up and down, "if we're this far from home the language might be etymologically unrelated to any European ones -"

"Clearly a very important feature of the situation." She kisses Minor on the cheek.

Kiss. Shield charm. "We shouldn't Apparate across the lake, it'd probably scare them - Accio broomstick -"

"Be careful. I love you."

"I love you." 

The gate opens. They fly out.

"Listening in on them I think it's more than a superficial resemblance."

"The fuck is growing on their faces."

"It is obviously hair. Maitimo, can I - Father -"

"The Enemy has a gift for illusions. Ones so convincing you can inhabit them for years without realizing, even. But - yes -"

The strange nonhumans lower their longbows. One of them walks forward to greet the broomstick riders where it appears they mean to land.

They land. 

"Um!!!"

      "Yes, I noticed. If they're nonhuman then it wouldn't make sense for them to be nearly human either, maybe their real shapes are very strange and they're inhabiting ones close to ours for some reason - or maybe there's some kind of time travel involved, or maybe the mysterious spell works by reaching into parallel worlds, or -"

"It's uncanny. He doesn't look quite real. Uh, hi," he says to the uncanny him.

You'll have to give me a few minutes for the language, he sends, and says aloud in Quenya as well. Finis lights up with delight. I am Curufinwë Atarinkë of the Noldor. 

"I am Finis Eleazar Way," Finis says immediately in Quenya. 

           "I am Minor Finis Way," Minor says. 

"Of the - British." And switching to English - "where are we -"

"Where are we?" he says in Quenya. "This is Lake Mistaringë - Mithrim in the local language - in Beleriand, which our tongue has no word for, not knowing the place until we met its people. I have never heard of the British."

"Mistaringë," says Finis thoughtfully, "Mithrim." And then he guesses four more Thindarin words off the Quenya ones. He gets three right; Curufin corrects one. (Curufin is staring at him a bit fixedly.) And then, switching to English, "I think we are very far from Britain - and we shouldn't have miscalculated the size of the world so grossly that there were large landmasses we missed - we've circumnavigated it - not us personally, but I follow the march of progress -"

       "Circumnavigated."

Finis conjures a globe, demonstrates. "Circumnavigate. Circumference. Circumstance, circumvent - from the Latin -"

     "Latin?" 

Finis repeats what has been said so far in Latin.

Please do not be too distracted to ask why he's got a sphere for the world.

I'm getting to it. He's not; he's carefully repeating back the Latin. "British, Latin - we have Thindarin, Quenya -"

          "Oh, I also speak Swedish and Danish and Italian and French and Greek and Igbo and Mandarin -"

"We have - not as many -"

          "In the whole world? How far have you explored -"

"Haven't - circumnavigated - can't circumnavigated, no circum -"

          "Primitive people think that before they learn math."

"We learn math. Can't circumnavigated, no circum."

         "Can't circumnavigate, it's not round," Minor offers him. 

"It's not round."

         "Can show you with the angles off the sun."

"By all means."

          And a flurry of conversation later - "okay, yours isn't round. And your sun is close and dim -"

"Not that dim -"

         "Ours is very very far, and very very bright, if it were closer everything would boil and die -"

"Ours is drawn on a chariot by a Maia."

        "Primitive people think that before they learn math, too."

"Does your kind of math make you wrong."

         "Our world works on math! Yours might not."

"Our world works on fate."

         Finis and Minor look at each other and make a face. 

"- my father felt that way about it too. He's dead."

         " - is he me," Finis says.

"Yes. I think so. Yes. Only - moreso -"

        "Well. I don't have resurrection yet."

Curufin starts crying. 

Finis awkwardly offers a hug and now Curufin is crying in his arms.

"We just got rid of the first one," Nolofinwë mutters.

        "He didn't introduce himself with any titles," Maitimo says.

"He doesn't need titles to make spectacularly bad decisions - though they don't help -"

       "I understand your reservations," Maitimo says. "But it looks like you get two of all of us, so -"

Nolofinwë sighs. "Win the war with them."

       "Oh, I mean to."

Curufin explains the war! "- so the plan is just to invent until we can kill him."

      "We can perhaps kill him."

"Well, that would be spectacular."

      "And we can help with the inventing, you haven't invented many things. Do you have voltaic piles -"

"No -"

      Minor explains them!

"What are they doing out there -"

Timothy is holding an enchanted glass to the windowpane. "By all appearances they have met and befriended a local alien who looks strikingly like the both of them and are learning the language at due speed -"