"Okay. How sure are you that none of you are the same kind of magic we are, because Karen can make wands... in nonmagical populations at home there are spontaneously magical people sometimes..."

"How would we know?"

"Manifestations of accidental magic. Moving things without touching them, teleporting short distances, transfiguring objects, some people can shapeshift a little, some people can talk to snakes, accidental's usually under high stress..."

"Tyelcormo can talk to snakes. And all other animals. Haven't heard of any of the others, except with music which does it deliberately -"

"If ours went through music Michael would know about it but it doesn't. The snakes thing is only snakes - but it runs in families, it wouldn't be impossible for there to be a different thing which was not only snakes -"

"My father couldn't pick it up and Tyelcormo has no children."

"I don't mean there couldn't be a Muggleborn who had the thing, I just mean if there's a pattern where we're from it wouldn't have to be the same as a pattern or a one-off from here."

"Well, he can certainly try your kind of magic. It sounds like a dozen wizards will make quite a difference even if none of us are."

"Depends how much of one. If we're stuck here several hundred years - I guess if we all had extremely cooperative children by some miracle, we could avoid getting too inbred -"

"Oh, there's a war on, don't have children."

"Michael's wife has a religious objection to birth control and if in three hundred years you need a wizard you'd better hope we had grandchildren, humans don't live that long unless Finis figures something out."

"Don't live that long? What happens?"

"...we die? Of old age."

" - like animals?"

"I don't super appreciate the comparison but yes animals do the same thing."

"I just mean that here sapients don't do that, we all live until the end of the universe - that's horrible - is Finis likely to be able to fix it -"

"He's working on it, I don't know his exact current prognosis."

He talks rapidly with Curufin in Quenya for a little while. "How long do you have?"

"Wizards live to about a hundred fifty, a few decades of variance. Michael's wife, and Catherine, are Muggles and might have like eighty years total, they're like - twentyish and three now -"

"Depending what causes it I could probably come up with something by then - or if we could get the Silmarils they could do the Valinor thing, buy us more time -"

"What's a Silmaril?"

"Until recently there weren't lights in the sky - there were stars, but not the big ones. Separately, Elves who've been exposed to the light of Valinor cannot exist in the physical world forever without it - it takes a very, very long time to come up, we're expecting on the order of ten or twenty thousand years, but still - when we wanted to leave Valinor my father made magical artifacts which produce arbitrary light, reverse the effects of being outside Valinor, and capture in full generality Valinor's anti-decay magic, which has lots of implications - we think we could use them to kill the Enemy, we could almost certainly use them to prevent you from aging and by default I think they'd do the thing Valinor had, where everything aged slower - I don't know how to use them, my father's notes were all destroyed when the Enemy melted the library and he was killed shortly thereafter, but I bet I could figure it out -"

"...the sun and the moon are new? - probably not important - uh - yes those sound like they'd help - where are they?"

"In Angband. The Enemy stole them."

"In the perhaps staggeringly unlikely event that I successfully waved my wand and caused them to come flying out of wherever they are straight to us would this have undesirable side effects such that I shouldn't try it?"