"I have being unreadable by default, but if someone's trying to implant a memory or something I'd sooner notice."

"I suppose there's a case to be made..." She waves tentatively at scary Quendi Timothy.

"He says "hello"," Minor translates, "and he doesn't know a you but is very happy for me and do you both care to come in and sit down."

She wonders vaguely if she should conclude unflattering things about her opposite number. "Thank you," she says, and she sits.

"How much has Minor explained about the situation here?"

"There are duplicates of some us - not me, apparently - and there is a war and you are no longer contemplating shooting at us and you're telepathic and lower-tech?"

"There is a war. It's a pretty horrible war and I don't want to lean too hard on the 'duplicates' thing to earn your trust in the things we're doing to win it. Minor thinks your technology is more advanced than ours, and you don't have our kind of magic or vice versa - yours seems nicer -"

"Nicer?"

"Ours takes - " there's a heated discussion about lengths of time - "decades or centuries to get anywhere with."

"...ours is faster, yes."

"And it sounds like it also might do more and have more combat applications, which would be good."

"Well, for one thing, somebody sent us here."

"Our magic cannot do that, yes. The real question is whether you can kill Melkor but between two magic systems and three of -" helpless gesture at Minor - "I bet we'll find a way."

...she giggles at the gesture and squeezes Minor's hand.

"So, the war." And he explains the Valar and the first war and the parole - "three thousand years seemed like such a long time, see -"

"...yes, three thousand years is considerably older than most extant civilizations on our planet, arguably all of them."

"I thought you all seemed young."

"I'm eighteen."

Minor and Curufin double-check their guesses at the length of years, then - "Elves at that age are still young children."

"Humans're of age at seventeen."

"I think orcs are something like that."

"I was going to ask what orcs are..."

"Elves are - a soul temporarily inhabiting a body, and the shape of the soul shapes the body. If you torture an Elf from birth, selectively disable our ability to control our bodies, do that a couple generations longer, you get orcs. The Enemy breeds them by the millions and then has them all swear him eternal loyalty."

"Um."

"Thus the war. Well, there are a lot of reasons for the war, but that's one."