"...has anyone explained to you Felix Felicis because maybe someone should do that -"

"What about it -"

"It's a luck potion, it's a really good luck potion, and I've seen my father make it and I think I can do it though it's terribly complicated. We can't get most of the ingredients new here, but we have enough of most of them stored. The ashwinder eggs are going to be out of date in a year and the potion takes six months, I need to find out if I can substitute for unicorn hair now."

He winces. 

"Okay. I'll send you some."

"It doesn't have to be fresh or anything, off a hairbrush would be fine, the unicorn hair usually gets found on bushes and stuff."

"Elves don't usually let hair fall out, then you have to regrow it."

"...okay. Still."

"I'll do it." Sigh.

"I'm sorry."

"I am not upset with you."

"I'm sorry anyway." Someone has told her about the hair thing and she has it in a simple plait. "- uh, I'm going to run out of hair potion and can't justify the ingredients to make more and it's going to kind of. Floof. Do I need to just copy Miranda at that point to be - polite -"

"More decent than polite but yes probably."

Sigh. "Okay."

"Thank you for figuring all this out."

"You're welcome."

And after she has left he braces himself and curls up and pulls out some hair and shivers violently for twenty minutes, stuck with memories that might not even be real, and then packages it and has someone convey it across the lake.

He gets an apologetic note the next week indicating that it works pretty well. She has enough for as much Felix as the ashwinder eggs will stretch to cover but it would also be good for other stuff. She doesn't need it pulled from the root; trimmings as short as a cubit would be okay.

He asks Curufin what a cubit is. He asks Karen what other stuff.

Uh, the birth control the young marrieds are currently desperately rationing, some healing stuff, memory potions, Wit-Sharpening if she can find substitutes for six other things. Veritaserum, if that would be useful for anything.

He'll see if he can find anybody comfortable with more hair donations. He appreciates her work. 

Macalaurë's latest project has been something that makes you think faster, and he solicits Michael's help, which Michael provides whenever he's not working on refining sound-recorders to a high enough fidelity to do magic music. 

Theodore comes back from scouting with his broomstick and a palantir and reports that there are Dwarves way east, who are not very friendly to Elves because Thingol's people apparently hunted them for sport but who liked Theodore fine after he immediately offered to go murder Thingol all politics be damned. They do not want Thingol murdered.  They are interested in trade relations with the Noldor and with Earth if possible. "They said that specifically, 'trade relations'?" says Aaron. 

"We had no languages in common and they're not telepaths, but 'trade' is a word they were very insistent on getting across, yeah."

Off Aaron flies. 

Miranda may or may not have picked apart the Muggle-Repelling Charm enough to try developing an Orc-Repelling Charm or, more ambitiously, a Maia-Repelling Charm, but this would be trouble for the orcs and the Maia who live with the Quendi.

"That also means we can test it, though. Go for it."

"Even given the opportunity cost -?"

"I don't know, what's the opportunity cost look like - if we had them we could place them on Angband from broomsticks, see, cause a distraction when we needed one especially -"