Somewhere rural! Those are lovely mountains which she's definitely never seen before, in person or in pictures, and twenty miles away or so down in a valley there's a village which...looks like maybe it was an experimental project by blind people or small children or people exclusively working with their bad hand? Orc territory doesn't have many rural areas but orc buildings would be prettier. There are people going in and out and about. They look more like Elves than anything else but half of them have their hair short and the other half have it loose. 

There's another, similar village farther down the river and beyond that the river turns behind some landscape features. 

They're not even small children. What in the world is wrong with their hair.

They don't seem to have chips so she will have to go over there to find out. She goes over there.

This village smells. That is probably because they appear to throw their sewage out the window into the street. On closer inspection the people are also shorter than Elves, and some of them have skin that is wrinkled and creased and crumbly, and most of them who are fully grown appear to either have rotting teeth or no teeth. 

What in the world.

What language are they speaking?

Unfamiliar. She's pretty close now but they don't seem to have noticed her yet.

Completely unfamiliar -?

Yup, no particular resemblance to Quenya or any language on Endorê.

She approaches anyway.

When she's very close and the smell is very unpleasant they notice her. There's nervous chattering. Some people pull their children inside where the children promptly peek through the curtains (the windows don't have windowpanes). Some people sort-of bow. At least a few of them awkwardly put a scarf over their hair.

...that's nice of them. She tries Quenya, not particularly optimistically. "Do any of you speak Quenya?"

A woman looks at her dubiously and then goes inside and helps another woman, this one with paper-thin nearly translucent skin and lots and lots and lots of wrinkles and a general air of intense fragility, out to look at Mirelótë. The second woman has a creaky voice. "A star shines on the hour of our meeting!" she says in Quenya, with the air of someone who knows exactly one phrase of Quenya.

"Hello," replies Mirelótë. "Can you tell me where I am?"

"Framsbah," the woman says, gesturing at Smelly Disaster Village. And pointing at the mountain ranges, "Mithrim", "Hithaeglir".

Mithrim sounds Thindarin. "- is Thindarin better," she says in Thindarin.

Lady gestures at her ears.

"...I have noticed that you are not an Elf. I'm not sure what you are."

She mutters something in the language Mirelóte definitely doesn't speak.

...Mirelote tries the two orc and two Dwarf languages she knows, not very optimistically.

"I said," she says in Thindarin after thinking on it a while, "you'll have to speak up I can't hear you very good."

"Oh!" says Mirelótë more loudly. "Is this loud enough? I'm sorry."

"Louder!"

"IS THIS LOUD ENOUGH."

"There you go, dear, you have to speak up or how will I hear you. What were you saying?"

"I AM VERY LOST AND TRYING TO FIGURE OUT WHERE I AM."

"You're where the Mithrim mountains meet the Misty Mountains," she says. "The Elves live that way -" gesturing away from both sets of mountains, at a forest - "but they're not your kind."

"WHAT KIND ARE THEY?"

"A different kind."

...okay. "I HAVE HEARD OF THE MISTY MOUNTAINS AND I DID NOT THINK THERE WERE TOWNS LIKE THIS NEAR THEM."

"This is how Mannish towns are. We don't have time to make them otherwise."

"WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE THE TIME?"

"Elf lands are full of mystery and magic and wonder. Eru loved his Firstborn best."

"ERU'S INTEREST IS NOT ALL IT'S CRACKED UP TO BE. I CAN TELL YOU AREN'T ORCS OR DWARVES."

"- we're Men. Have you not heard of Men."

"I HAVE NOT HEARD OF MEN AND THOUGHT I WAS PRETTY WELL INFORMED!"

"Have you been lost in song for three Ages of the world? I hear that happens to Elves."

"NO, I SING LESS THAN MOST PEOPLE I KNOW."

Shrug. "Men are like such." Gesture at the town.

"I THINK I AM MORE LOST THAN I PREVIOUSLY SURMISED."

"You could go to a city. - cities are where more Men live. Or you could go to the other Elves but I wouldn't know if they're quarreling with your kind of Elves these days."

"MY KIND OF ELVES ARE NOT QUARRELING WITH ANYBODY AT ALL BUT IT IS POSSIBLE I WOULD BE MISTAKEN FOR SOME THAT ARE."

"You look like the quarrelsome kind of Elf," she says dubiously. 

"IF YOU'RE GOING TO CHARACTERIZE SOME ELVES AS QUARRELSOME THAT IS NOT UNFAIR BUT WE ARE NOT ACTUALLY IN ANY SIGNIFICANT ARGUMENTS AND HAVEN'T BEEN IN A LONG TIME."

" - it has definitely been a long time but I didn't think that mattered to Elves very much."

"IT DOES. JUST DIFFERENTLY. I DO MEAN THOUSANDS OF YEARS AS COUNTED IN ENDORE THOUGH."

"Yes, yes, that sounds right. Don't ask me how many thousands but thousands."

"ANYWAY WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU DON'T HAVE THE TIME?"

"Elf cities take Elf time to build."

"YES BUT IN THE MEANTIME WE WOULD LIVE IN THE WOODS AND I THINK THE WOODS MIGHT BE MORE COMFORTABLE THAN THIS LOOKS."

"...more comfortable for Elves, maybe. We would die when it got cold, or get attacked by orcs and wolves."

"I AM ASTONISHINGLY LOST.

WHAT YEAR IS IT?"

"By the Elf calendar? I don't know. 3018 or something?"

"WHAT IS THAT COUNTED SINCE?"

"The end of the last war."

"I AM FROM A PLACE WHERE THERE ARE NOT ANY WARS IN PROGRESS AND HAVE NOT BEEN FOR LONGER THAN THAT. DO YOU HAPPEN TO HAVE ANY MORE DISTANT REFERENCE POINTS."

"Uh. Before that was the Second Age and that counted since the defeat of Melkor? Even in the Undying Lands I should think they've heard of that."

"I HAVE HEARD OF A DEFEAT OF MELKOR BUT IT KICKED OFF THE FIRST AGE."

"Oh. Well I think they had to defeat him again, and that started the Second Age, and the Second Age lasted 3441 years and then they started the Third and now it is 3018. Are you sure you haven't been singing for Ages."

"I AM EXTREMELY CONFIDENT IN THAT PART."

"Well. If you go back to the Undying Lands all your friends are probably still alive even if it has been seven thousand years."

"YES. AS OPPOSED TO WHAT?"

" - Men die. And then we don't go to Mandos we just stop existing."

"OH."

"Some Elves say that Eru has a plan for us but we don't really trust you about that."

"I AM SURE HE HAS A PLAN, IT'S JUST PROBABLY A REALLY STUPID PLAN AND THE PLAN MIGHT IN FACT BE THAT YOU STOP EXISTING."

She laughs. "You're a good Elf. I think the plan is that we stop existing. We get sixty, seventy Endorë years. Down south where they have Elf blood they get a hundred, hundred twenty."

"THAT IS AN INCREDIBLY STUPID PLAN. I AM GOING TO TRY TO FIX IT. DO YOU HAPPEN TO KNOW WHERE ELVES WHO FIND THE KIND OF ELF I LOOK LIKE FRIENDLY MIGHT BE."

"The secret hidden Elf cities but they're secret and hidden."

"THAT SOUNDS INCONVENIENT FOR THEIR ECONOMIES. ARE THEIR LOCATIONS KNOWN TO WITHIN SEVERAL MILES?"

"Maybe but not by me."

"DO YOU HAVE A MAP I COULD LOOK AT?"

"Sure."

It's not a very good map. It's on parchment. The tengwar look normal. There are in fact areas labelled (Elves??), three of them - one right near here in the forest, one well south of that in a different forest, and one just across the mountains.

"WHAT IF ANYTHING DO YOU KNOW ABOUT WHICH KINDS OF ELVES ARE IN THESE PLACES?"

"There's tree Elves and there's the Elves who came from the Undying Lands. You came from the Undying Lands. The tree Elves don't like the Elves who came from the Undying Lands because of the wars and the trying to rule them and taking their land and kidnapping their children and things. The Elves who came from the Undying Lands think the tree Elves are stupid. At least that's how Mannish schools teach it. This place is tree Elves, this place is tree Elves but the rulers came from the Undying Lands, this one is all Undying Lands Elves."

"OKAY. THANK YOU. YOU HAVE BEEN EXTREMELY HELPFUL. IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO FOR YOU BEFORE I GO LOOKING FOR ELVES?"

"No, we're quite all right. I suppose you could sing an Elf song."

"I WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO SING YOU A SONG BUT MOST OF THE SONGS I KNOW ARE VERY SAD. WOULD YOU PREFER A HAPPY ONE?"

"A sad song is quite all right."

She sings a sad song.

The Men gather around, awed. They cry. They clap. "They'll tell their grandchildren that once they saw an Elf," the old woman says.

"I WISH I HAD SOMETHING MORE USEFUL TO DO. I COULD EXPLAIN PLUMBING BUT PERHAPS YOU DO NOT HAVE ENOUGH TIME FOR PLUMBING."

"I don't think so, no."

"WHAT'S YOUR NAME? I'M MIRELOTE AMBELA."

"Badhril. Thank you for visiting us."

"THANK YOU FOR HELPING ME FIGURE OUT WHERE I AM. COULD I HAVE A FEW PHRASES IN THE LOCAL LANGUAGE IF I NEED TO TALK TO MEN WHO HAVE NOT HAPPENED TO LEARN ANY THINDARIN?"

"What do you want to know how to say?"

"'HOW DO YOU SAY', HELLO, PLEASE, THANK YOU, YES, NO, WHERE WHEN WHO HOW WHY WHAT, ANYTHING ELSE THAT SEEMS PARTICULARLY USEFUL IN YOUR OPINION."

She offers all those and "does anybody speak Sindarin".

"THANK YOU," Ambela repeats in the local language.

Toothless smile. "There you go."

Ambela curtsies to her and heads off over toward the mixed Valian and "tree Elf" population, traveling in such a way as to live off the land en route.

It takes a week or so. The land at least is pretty, if occasionally dotted with villages of Men which are all terrible. On one occasion in the distance she can hear orcs.

Are the orcs saying anything interesting?

The language is too different from the orcish she knows to really guess. They're carrying axes and javelins and don't sound precisely happy.

"I am hoping," she says to the empty wilderness, "that my being here at all means you have decided it would be fabulously entertaining to have the place renovated to match your - neighbor - and can't bear to do it yourself. I will not be at all fetchingly engaged in the story if instead dreadful things happen to me. I will just be annoyed."

Eru does not see fit to answer this, apparently.

Yeah she wasn't expecting him to.

She travels and avoids the poor orcs and when she is near ??Elves?? she starts broadcasting that she is a lost Elf.

And after a while some Elves drop out of the trees. She's been to Ossiriand, in her Endorë; that's the closest match racially. They're carrying longbows and quivers of arrows; they look tense. 

"Hello."

"Hello. Please don't shoot me. I'm lost and someone told me I could find other Elves around here."

"It is not unprecedented for the Enemy to assume fair forms," the Elf says, but none of them draw the weapons.

"I'm not the Enemy, working for him, or in disguise for any reasons, I swear. I'll swear any other assurances you'd find useful."

"How are you lost -"

"I am very confused about that part. What seems from my perspective to have happened is that I was out for a walk and was eaten by a bizarre monster," looked like this, "whereupon I was a few days' hike that way," point, "near a town full of a species I'd never previously heard of. It is entirely reasonable that you'd find this a ridiculous story."

"Where were you when you were, ah, eaten by the bizarre monster -"

"Not far from Taniquetil but I currently suspect some combination of alternate universes and time travel so you should possibly not make all inferences you'd normally make from that."

"- okay. What, uh, leads you to expect some combination of alternate universes and time travel -"

"I hadn't heard of Men and would, if they existed, have expected to. The year at home is 1512 as counted in Valian Years from the Elves' arrival in Valinor. Orcs are the peaceful neighbors of Endorë Elves and Dwarves and have tourism bureaus so nobody has a reason to wander around carrying bows and arrows - hunting isn't even very popular anymore -"

They glance at each other.

"Men would have been very new that long ago," someone says tentatively, "and word of them might easily not have reached Valinor yet. But I don't think orcs ever had, uh - the word's not familiar but what I'm getting of the concept -"

"There is routine word between Valinor and Endorë. Ulmo is usually over there in case the people of Endorë need anything and he's in constant communication with the other Valar. I talk to the Valar all the time as my day job. If Men had existed for a week I would have expected to have heard about it."

"That," the same person says, "is not the case and never was."

"You can see why I would have jumped to 'alternate universes' in addition to 'time travel'."

"All right. 

There's a war on at present."

"That seems on par with the apparent general quality of this alternate universe. What's it about?"

"Ah, Sauron is close to conquering the southern kingdoms of Men and presumably means to come north after that - no one else has anywhere near the strength to field an army -"

Deep unimpressed sigh. "- Is the way the Men were living solely reflective of them being in a terrible hurry because they're going to die for no reason in a few Years or does it have anything to do with the local technology level."

" - there aren't things known to us which haven't been taught to Men but I don't really know how they live, we don't leave the protected areas."

"It's - I don't want to say that in my world they would not be allowed to live in those conditions if for some reason they reflectively preferred it, but certainly they would have been asked first and would not consider an Elf showing up and looking at a map and singing them a song a story for their grandchildren."

"If we go out in numbers smaller than a hundred word gets to the orcs and they come raiding. If we go out in numbers greater than a hundred then maybe it's all right unless word gets to a really substantial number of orcs and then they come for a proper war."

Sigh. "Was Melkor never caught in the first place -"

"You should perhaps speak to the Queen, she was born in peacetime and remembers it and could tell you how it happened - but they caught him and then they paroled him and then he escaped -"

"...ugh."

"He's captured again now, and won't get a second parole."

"But they just left Sauron running around."

"The war with Melkor took fifty years - our years, but still - and the continent crumbled and then the aftermath was separately a disaster and they concluded they shouldn't interfere directly in our affairs so they sent some Maiar to do it for them but I think the Maiar are perhaps inadequate to the task."

Sigh. "Which Maiar, where are they -"

"Uh, Mithrandir wanders, he might be in Imladris presently, they're holding a council of war with Men and Dwarves and Elves to decide what to do - Saruman is at Orthanc -" 

       "Mithrandir is Olórin in the Quenya," someone else interrupts, "And Saruman is Curumo - and the others are Aiwendil and Alatar and Pallando but their locations are not known, and haven't been for some centuries - Aiwendil surfaces occasionally -"

"Maybe I can solve this problem just by describing how to make sufficiently large explosions to Olórin," she mutters. Sigh.

"That would be lovely but I think the Men know how to make fairly large explosions. The Queen desires to speak with you -"

"I would be happy to speak to the Queen."

"This way."

Within a few dozen paces the forest becomes properly pretty; the trees are Valian ones, hundreds of feet tall and thriving and glimmering and filtering the sunlight nicely. There are stunning little carven treehouses up in the highest branches. The grass is soft and springy; there are valleys full of blooming flowers. It is not the prettiest place Mirelóte has ever been but it is exactly what you'd expect from Elves doing low-density low-tech tree living for some reason. People occasionally stop to stare, though they manage to keep it to one at a time; probably everyone else is borrowing the starer's vision.

She breathes a little easier. "Your forest is lovely."

"That's the other reason we don't send small armies out to all the human villages - it's exhausting and terrible and in a year all undone - people get idealistic and do it for four hundred and then get so tired -"

"I can see how it might be wearing without sufficient infrastructure, yes."

"And we don't understand the things they die of well enough to help with that."

"It sounded like they just kind of die for no reason, although I wouldn't be surprised if they found other ways to do it under those conditions, and they said afterwards they stop existing."

"I don't think that part's true, Eru is supposed to have a plan for them. But they don't go to Mandos."

"Do you think it's unlikely that Eru's plan might be 'they stop existing'?"

" -yes? That would be horrible."

"Of course it would."

Blink. "Uh, the Queen's up here -" Tree! With a little rope ladder!

Up goes Ambela.

She'll recognize this person!

"- Artanis."

" - I haven't heard that name in a very long time. And I do not think I know you."

"I suspect this - timeline - doesn't have a me. I'm Rúmil's wife, if you knew him - is there a him -"

"Yes. I haven't seen him in more than seven thousand years but yes."

"Well. Anyway, I'm from a - better managed - Arda, and earlier."

"I was listening. We, ah, have an unhappy history with management."

"I'm getting that."

"I imagine it's worth comparing notes and cataloguing all the differences. Do you need anything first?"

"I was a little conservative about eating and drinking random things I found in the forest on my way here."

"I'll have people bring food. It's good you didn't come to harm; it is not always safe out there. I lost my daughter that way."

"I'm sorry."

Nod. "Our age of peace ended before the year 1512 could have been counted."

"Should I describe our history first, or you yours?"

"Why don't you go first."

She nods. "My name is Mirelóte Ambela. I was a child when the Elves who so chose traveled from Endorë to Valinor -" She names the tribes and their kings, gives numbers.

"Names are the same, our numbers are an order of magnitude smaller."

"I suppose that alone could explain my absence. Anyway, twenty-five short years later we arrived - I was still a child when we landed, if barely -"

"It took us longer, 20 Years - we set out in 1105 and arrived in 1125 -"

"- why did it take that long? It's only about twenty-five light-years."

"Light-years? And I was of course unborn but they walked slowly, and built themselves beautiful places to stay along the way and wait for stragglers -"

"- a light-year is the distance light can travel in a year. The distance - cannot be walked. In my world."

" - we walked to the edge of the sea and then the Valar ferried us across it. I have never noticed light having a speed."

"It takes a considerable distance before it can be observed to delay. A light-year is almost six trillion miles. We did not traverse a sea - I see the problem now - in my world Endorë and Valinor are separate planets, orbiting separate stars. There was a bit of delay collecting everyone onto the ships first, but the bulk of the journey was spent traveling near the speed of light in airtight miniature ecosystems through hard vacuum."

"Valinor is the continent west of here. It's cloaked now so Men can't reach it but it's not far."

"Well. I suppose that means that if I decide what I need to do is go there and appeal to the Valar I will not have to wait for a shuttle and spend two and a half Years in flight."

" - no, you wouldn't. Appealing to the Valar also does not have a very encouraging track record. In particular I'd expect not to be permitted to leave."

Sigh. "My usual pastime at home is 'explaining incarnates to Valar' and it may be faster the second time."

"Well, that would be something. If your Valinor is a different world the differences might be deeper, though."

"Possible. I haven't decided that that's definitely what I should do, it's just an option."

"Lots of Elves are going west, in anticipation of losing the war. Not everyone - we'll end up there anyway - but you'd have company."

"It's possible I could write up the lines of argument that worked for someone else to deliver but I still wouldn't expect very quick results; if the war can be ended with my help it probably won't be through the Valar at all."

"If the war could be ended with your help it would be an extraordinary good. The kingdoms at risk of falling to Sauron are the Mannish kingdoms where Men live longest, occasionally learn to read, know the history, know enough of various arts to make themselves good lives. It would be a loss beyond their dying even sooner if their lands are lost."

"If you, ah, haven't noticed light having a speed, the most plausible avenue is through technological advancement, but that might provoke enemy escalation."

"I don't think he's noticed that either, or why confine himself to equipping orcs with axes?"

"I don't know, but until I at least have a guess I should maybe not explain the really big explosions."

"I think they tried quite a lot, back in the First Age. But certainly err on the side of caution."

Nod. "Anyway. We spent twenty-five years flying to Valinor and settled there. I'm a Noldo but lived most of the time in Valimar once I grew up, studying the Valar and explaining things that they have trouble with. They captured Melkor, and his Maiar, who are imprisoned to this day with a virtual reality setup to keep them amused, except Thuringwethil, who made good at her trial."

"She is dead. Died during the wars of the First Age. Did Finwë's first wife die and decline to return -"

"- uh, yes, for a while, but shortly after the Oath Reform Act of 1400 she came back."

"1400 is when they paroled Melkor."

"Grand. So, Miriel died, was reembodied several times and kept killing herself until Mandos let her stay dead, Finwë remarried and had four more children after Fëanáro who has seven of his own..."

"I don't think Miriel was reembodied, she just told Mandos not to bother - the rest matches - did you know them -"

"...I still, uh, do know them, they're all fine. My you I don't know quite as well, she doesn't get along particularly well with Fëanáro and things get sort of partisan around him and even when I think he's being silly I'm very fond of him, I was around a lot while he was growing up. Mandos didn't run our Miriel disembodied to ask her questions..."

"My understanding was that our disembodied are conscious by default. - they're all dead. Everyone is dead, a hundred forty thousand of us crossed to Endorë when Melkor escaped, to try to help, and there are three survivors."

"- why would the dead be conscious by default?"

"I don't even think that's incompetence on the part of Mandos, I think it's that way even if you don't go to Mandos."

"There is a disconnect here - uh - my soul is or at least before I came to this world was continually sending copies of my mindstate to Mandos instantaneously, such that it doesn't even take twenty-five years to get there from Endorë, and if I die and my soul is intact a new body can be put around it and I can resume as though I blacked out for the interim and if my soul is destroyed Mandos can put my mindstate as it was at the last moment before my death on a fresh chip and embody the chip. There's nothing to be conscious while someone is dead - a disembodied soul doesn't do any processing without a brain - Mandos can run the mindstate on non-body architecture if he needs to ask the dead questions or something but he doesn't keep them like that unless they prefer to be conscious but disembodied for some reason -"

" - our understanding has been that the endurance of the soul beyond the death of the body preceded the intervention of the Valar, and that the soul cannot be destroyed at all by any means, even by the Enemy -"

"Melkor can't interrupt the backups - perhaps I should say our Melkor can't do that, it seems they are probably different - he can melt souls, but so can a sufficiently hot fire, and that doesn't interfere with Mandos writing to a new one."

"I don't think our souls can be interfered with physically at all."

"Is your soul some thing other than a bit of metal embedded in your spine."

" - uh, yes. That is not what our soul is at all."

"Oh. Ours are that. What are yours?"

"The - non-physical self, which temporarily holds a physical form in the world as a body -"

"...would you say this is loosely similar to how Maiar work?"

"Yes, although we can't shapeshift."

"Right. Okay. So you are... magic Elves. My kind of Elf is not magic."

"I think that might have avoided all the trouble all by itself."

"How so?"

"Most of it was over some magical things Fëanor made and then some different magical things his grandson made  - and oaths -"

"We have oaths. Well, sort of, they were revised and now they can only verify honesty and intent and so forth, not bind future action. ...I should assume that I may be subject to the local form while I am here. What are the magical things?"

"This is really not a happy story, particularly if you knew them. Just - so you're braced. The magical things were called the Silmarils, and they were made from the light of the Trees which was of course the light of creation, and at the time he told us they were just beautiful but they were weapons he meant to use to found and defend his own civilization free of the Valar."

"What trees?"

" - uh." She sends the Trees.

"Well, they're very pretty. We don't have them."

"We no longer have them; Melkor put them out. They used to light Valinor, before the sun and the moon."

"I don't actually know what's wrong with that."

"Sorry. Uh, in my world, planets orbit suns at a distance of some light-minutes and moons, where planets have them, orbit planets at a distance of a few light-seconds. Light bounces from suns onto moons, which are just rocks and do not shed light. It would be fairly unheard of to have a planet roaming about without a sun. Without a moon, there would be no tides - unless I suppose Ulmo was handling them manually - and without a sun there would be no light, even shining trees couldn't cover the whole globe unless they were also motile."

"They were not. Endorë was dark."

"Were warmth and wildlife also handled manually?"

"Yep. By Yavanna. It sounds like maybe your Valar were, ah, better at their jobs from the very start."

"Or at least at - physics."

"Even when the Sun and Moon went up they were originally fruits of the Trees, on chariots drawn by Maiar. Eru eventually intervened, made the world round and the stars different. Our system now might be like yours."

"The world wasn't even round?"

"It was flat. Gravity was directly managed. Melian was a bit embarrassed about that, they'd realized eventually they'd done it wrong."

"- Melian being the Maia queen of Doriath who married Elu Thingol under dubious circumstances?"

"Accidental on her end, at least in our world."

"The marriage or the dubiousness?"

"They are also both dead."

"How did that happen?"

"I'd be skipping a bit ahead, but he was murdered, Lúthien for unrelated reasons chose to die permanently and irretrievably, she tried to hold it together because she was protecting a kingdom of half a million against Melkor singlehandedly but she slowly fell apart from grief - it just shredded her -"

...nod.

"And then the kingdom was sacked twice and nearly everybody died including Lúthien's child and his children - who were six years old -"

"Twice?"

"Neither time by the enemy! I should back up - it's still bad but with context it's - contextualizable -"

"Yes, of course."

"In 1400 the world is flat and Melkor so so deeply regrets the things he did and the orcs are sworn to him but he can release them, and he begs the Valar to permit him to do so, and they do and he does and he leverages it into a supervised parole and he's very obedient and very regretful and for six hundred years doesn't put a toe out of line - 

- and then the lies - he figured out who to tell to set Nolofinwë and Fëanáro at each other's throats, they weren't stupid but they both had that blind spot, and he spent three hundred years digging rifts and sowing rumors and letting people witness things that didn't actually happen and eventually Fëanáro started forging weapons because of course he did -"

"Oh no -"

"And everyone else started too, once he'd started it, there were people trying to calm them all down but there were lies undoing every calming measure they took, whenever they placed a bet it'd come up against them, he was good at what he was doing and he'd had the head start - and eventually Fëanáro threatened Nolofinwë with his sword and then Finwë pieced together what was going on and told everyone it had been Melkor and to please just calm down - but the Valar got word and were so upset - someone threatening someone in Valinor - and exiled Fëanáro for 12 Years -"

"That of course went over well. Finwë resigned. Half the city followed the two of them north into exile. Nolofinwë tried to talk the Valar down, got nowhere, ruled the other half. Once they knew it was Melkor doing it they were able to undo it pretty well- got all the weapons put away and the lies unravelled -"

"Until...?"

"The Valar decided to hold a festival of reconciliation and require Fëanáro's attendance."

"That must have gone over splendidly - even in my world Tirion is on the other side of the planet from Taniquetil because some people find it annoying to meet the Valar wallking down the street asking if there's anything they can do for you -"

"Well, Fëanáro wasn't going to disobey them, so he showed, but he showed in a ponytail and forge clothes and refused to talk to anybody. It was a festive little party even before Melkor put out the trees, sacked the city his family had built in exile, killed Finwë, burned down his library, stole all his inventions, and ran off to Endorë."

"- oh no."

"Yep. He fell apart, and the kids - the kids decided they couldn't defeat Melkor without him so whatever he needed - and the Valar had just tried to demand the Silmarils from him to restore Valinor, and then it turned out Melkor had stolen them, and so what he decided he needed from them was an oath to war with anyone who withheld them from him -"

"What the fuck."

"You don't say."

"So he drags all seven kids into an ill-considered oath. Then what."

"The Noldor schism. On whether this disqualifies them from leadership or not - of course it bloody should have done, they couldn't have done nearly as much damage if it'd only been them - but there wasn't really any question about who Finwë considered his successor - it was about two thirds for Nolofinwë and a third for them and of course that infuriated Fëanáro even more -"

"Fëanáro doesn't even want the bloody crown, Maitimo's going to get it direct from Finwë once he's raised his children!"

"Well, he got it soon enough. There's no way out of Valinor. There's a land bridge, to the north, but it's freezing and long and dangerous and at the time of course continuously dark, and we spent the better part of a year trying to find away across and there simply wasn't one, and eventually he wheels about and goes to Alqualondë and - 

- Olwë observed correctly that he was manic and had temporarily appallingly bad judgment and said he should go home and calm down and he'd realize he didn't want to do this - refused him any help - and Fëanáro tried to steal boats from them, and the owners of the boats tried to defend them, and they had those horrible swords he'd forged -"

"How many swords are we talking about."

" - thousands -"

"Tens of thousands of people died. The Valar were furious. They Doomed Fëanáro and everyone who followed him to fail and die or wish they had."

"...Doomed them?"

"It was unclear to what extent it was prophecy and to what extent it was sentence. It wasn't all prophecy, though - anyway. Fëanor got tired of dealing with the larger host who was loyal to someone else and angry with him about the massacre. He and his loyalists fled in the night and lit the boats afire on the other side, stranding us there. We crossed the Ice - it took years, ten thousand people didn't make it -"

Mirelótë shakes her head.

"He was dead by the time we made it across - he'd tried charging Angband - Macalaurë was ruling them -"

"Macalaurë?"

"Oh, Maitimo'd been captured forty local years earlier - objective, Angband's sped up - they'd given him up for worse than dead -"

"Chip backups can be rolled back to before capture - my husband doesn't remember Utumno -"

"Our Rúmil did."

"- Captured Elves who were not used to make orcs were uploaded from their chips and copied many times in addition to being run sped up."

"That we don't have."

"It seems like it would be hard to do with immaterial souls. People have tried running rescue simulations of their forks - it never goes well -"

"The locals told us to just kill escapees - he only gets them go once they're damaged enough to be more use to him - I was never sure if that was true of Maedhros or not - that's the Sindarin name he chose -"

"There were no escapees, of ours."

"I don't know if there were genuine escapees of Angband but sometimes he did let people go."

"Those either. Orc-ancestors and uploads. Or one and then the other."

Sigh. "Anyway, the two hosts of Noldor sat on opposite sites of a conveniently positioned lake and glowered at each other and eventually Fingon had had about enough of it and needed a tractable Fëanorian and broke into Angband and rescued him. And he was in fact mad, and grotesque to look at and desperately unhappy, but he was still better at diplomacy than any of the rest of them -"

"- you're going to need to use Quenya names if you don't want me to ask who everyone is but from context I assume Findekáno."

Nod. "Thingol banned Quenya when he found out about Alqualondë. It was a terrible overreaction but - to a terrible tragedy which everyone else was just pretending hadn't happened at all, so people found his overreacting more sympathetic than - all the pretending -"

"Banned Quenya. My word." Sigh.

"Anyway. Maedhros surrenders the crown and apologizes for the ships - which he'd tried to prevent, he said, though I don't think we ever quite believed him because when he tried to get things he generally got them -"

"Depends."

"And then they besieged Angband for centuries."

"...okay."

"They were trying to invent something that'd let them take him but they couldn't do it in time. I lived in Doriath, Melian tutored me, she was the only person who maybe could have done it and then - and then the mountains on the northern range all erupted and killed everyone close, and the kingdoms folded, and the survivors fled, and one of them was this traumatized human boy who wandered into Doriath without reaching Melian's attention somehow and wandered into Lúthien and fell in love with her - and she with him -"

"Most of what I know about Lúthien is the music recordings she makes available."

"She was a - very sheltered, very talented, very sincere young woman, who erred the way I think royals often do where they take public goodwill as a bit of a moral imperative - not in the sense that one needs the trust of their people, in the sense that disagreeing with them about anything, or being anything other than precisely what they want you to be, is a betrayal of them - and Doriath wanted her to be naive and inspiring and blissful and irrelevant, and so she was, until she met him and wanted something badly enough to notice that she needn't be irrelevant -"

Nod.

"Thingol was furious. He told Beren he could marry his daughter if he came back with a Silmaril in hand - meaning, one presumes, to get him killed - and Beren went off to do that, and got captured, and Lúthien ran off after him - Thingol tried to stop her - and she ran to the Fëanorians, and they objected to the mission and when she couldn't be deterred from it imprisoned her - and Thingol geared up to go to war with them -"

"I hope you don't take it personally that I don't think very much of your world."

"Yours sounds lovely."

"Thank you." Sigh. "I was giving you its history - Fëanáro invented a lot of things in the absence of magic to invent them with, such as the printing press and the automobile - had what seem like the same seven children though you didn't list them all - calmed down considerably about his stepmother and half-siblings once Miriel returned to life - oh, and before that our chips were changed to prevent unauthorized forking, that was 1370, you wouldn't have an equivalent I suppose - over time Eru became more active, or perhaps I should just say talkative, most of what he concretely did was award the Valar additional powers -"

"Which they were responsible with?"

"Yes, they were, and he was doing it at the expense of his own, and after some scattered hinting it eventually transpired that he engineered the entire universe to be an entertaining tragedy but with sufficient shrinking of his omniscience he could just read books like a normal person and now he lives on the moon and judges poetry contests."

"Ah."

"A plausible scenario for what I am doing here is that I am supposed to explain incarnates to this set of Valar until they interrogate this Eru until he fixes his somewhat more extended and elaborate disaster, because it would be unaesthetic if he just did it one day of his own accord."

"You think Eru brought you here deliberately?"

"He at least allowed it. I can't rule out that it's for some other purpose, but the way his perceptive characteristics were explained it is in fact the case that not a sparrow falls without him cooing over how sad it is that nobody noticed and the possibility that he might resurrect it via exceptional miracle only to then coo over how sad it is that no one notices that. Certainly no one appears via snake monster without his approval."

"That puts some things in a new light."

"Doesn't it just."

"I haven't even really gotten to the tragedy."

"Go on."

"Lúthien befriends Huan, sells him on the mission. Together they fight Sauron, rescue Beren, kill Thuringwethil, impersonate her in sneaking into Angband - Lúthien reveals herself, tells Melkor she's defecting, snuggles up to him, sings him to sleep - they flee with a Silmaril - they lose the Silmaril along the way but Thingol realizes he might have misjudged some people and accepts Beren after all -"

"Melkor bought that? He has one of the better native understandings of incarnates -"

"I think the contempt she expressed for her parents and the Noldor was entirely sincere. Melkor either did not guess in time or thought it'd be great if she absconded with a Silmaril."

"Fair enough."

"Anyway. There's an effort to rally everybody who's left to a last march on the enemy. Doriath doesn't participate, Lúthien doesn't participate, Huan got killed during the whole thing - some of the human tribes betray us for Melkor -"

"He'd, ah, gotten to them first, made it sound like we were at fault - he'd do things like send out unarmed villages full of orcs, and then if we let them be they'd grow, have babies, move closer, and then one day be ordered to kill us all - so by the time the humans met us, if orcs settled near you, you went down and killed them, you didn't have a choice -"

Nod.

"But you can see how in the telling  - 'the Elf gods torture orcs forever after they die, and the Elves are their foot soldiers, and kill orcs even unarmed, even little children, fight for us, of course they have stories about how terrible we are, everybody has stories about how terrible their enemies are, but watch what they do to orcs and you'll know the truth -"

"Yes, I see."

"So they betrayed us, and we were anyways weakened, and we lost, and most everyone was killed and the human allied states given as slaves to the humans who fought for Melkor -"

" - yeah, about humans, they - they'll do that - I don't really have an explanation there, they're not terrible individually, but -"

"The one I talked to seemed nice, just questionable from a biological design standpoint."

"It's partially that, they don't really have time to - but it's only partially that."

Nod.

"They murder each other in anger fairly often, they sometimes beat or starve their children and they often do it to children who don't have caretakers - orcs are the larger risk of going out alone but it is not unheard of for a human to find an Elf pretty and kidnap them-"

"...are they faster than they look? I would be mildly surprised if they could catch an Elf."

"One couldn't. Ten could - or pretend to be injured and count on someone going to help -"

"Ah."

"Plenty of them are great! But with Elves, you can trust - even with the Elves who are furiously angry at us for one reason or another, if one is down on the ground crying out in pain I can be entirely sure it's not a trap, when that disintegrates it's so hard -"

"Well, your border guards thought I might be the Enemy in disguise."

"There aren't really miscellaneous Noldor who I wouldn't know."

"Well. I know you. Sort of. She's younger."

"I remember that age. I was so angry and had so little to be angry about. And now there's so much and it's just -" Sigh. 

"She has even less to be angry about, I take it, and manages to keep it to 'prickly' most of the time."

"Sounds about right. - so Lúthien petitioned Mandos to share the unknown fate of humans, and Mandos agreed, and set her and Beren up to get old human-paced together in peace. Thingol was devastated, yelled at the Dwarves who were putting the Silmaril in a necklace for him, got stabbed by one -"

"...wow. The Dwarves I know are pretty even-tempered."

"They were probably provoked, there were cultural differences and he could easily have threatened them without meaning it -"

"And he didn't have even a cursory subscription to a dispute resolution service?"

"He did not. Thought the whole idea was ridiculous."

"Ah-huh."

"Anyway, people panicked, tried to go after the murderer - couldn't tell Dwarves apart -"

"...it's not that hard."

"It isn't! I honeymooned on Endorë, I met a lot of Dwarves -"

"Well, most people hadn't met any, maybe that made it worse."

Sigh.

"There were two survivors. They went to the nearest Dwarf kingdom and they were furious and they marched on Menegroth and sacked it."

"And Beren and Lúthien died of old age and their son took up the Silmaril and what was left of the kingdom and - the Fëanorians had been writing, all this time, asking for it back - he ignored them -"

"Did he not know how oaths worked. - Can you clarify how they work here, since it's not chip-based -"

"Uh, if you swear to do something you'll get an intensifying compulsion to do that, and not doing it makes it - increasingly hard to have emotions or preferences that are about other things -"

"Consistent with ours before the reform. Go on."

"I think he knew but figured it was six of them - one of Ambarussa had died - what in the world were they going to do about it, and he needed the Silmaril to fend off the Enemy, so he just put it out of mind - well, it wasn't just six of them, they still had an army and their army was furious with Doriath and angry about the Dwarves and desperate to get the Silmaril - they thought they could kill the Enemy if they got it -"

"I'm going to guess they turned out not to be able to do that. Which Ambarussa -"

"The younger. They never did get it back, I don't know if they'd have been able to do it or not."

Sigh.

"They sacked Menegroth. This is when Beren and Lúthien's son died, and the six-year-old grandchildren, but he also had a three-year-old and she got out with the Silmaril and fled south."

"- a three year old? Is this - orcish aging rates or something -"

"No - well, a bit, half-humans do grow up faster, but three's nowhere near old enough to hold it, let alone understand it, but she had caretakers and they got her out -"

"Okay, that makes more sense."

"And half-humans also have - the human thing - they can have children by accident -"

"Orcs used to be able to do that and it didn't seem like a big deal to them but they let us fix it when we begged them."

"I don't know if humans mind it. Might vary. Sometimes they do, sometimes they die giving birth -

- she got married, she had kids. And the Fëanorians came after the Silmaril and she dove off a cliff with it rather than let them have it and they took the children hostage -"

"- dove off a - what the fuck -"

"I have no idea."

Sigh.

"And then the Valar decided that they should maybe stop Melkor. So they did. And pardoned us of the Doom and invited us all home - I guess I was still a bit prickly because I said that I couldn't accept their pardon, not having done anything wrong in the first place, and stayed -"

"I don't blame you."

"Oh, I don't regret it. We were needed here. Anyway, the freed human slaves charmed the Valar by being very very worshipful indeed, and the Valar consulted with Eru and were told they couldn't make them not human but they could make it better - made them live three hundred years instead of sixty, not get sick, not get - aged the way they do - until the very end -"

"Oh he fucking could too he just gets a kick out of deteriorating sapients and is conning the Valar into appreciating his invention."

"I have no difficulty believing you.

Anyway. The war's over, they start on rewarding their favorite humans and pardoning us - the remaining Fëanorians - it was just Maitimo and Macalaurë by that point, the others had died in the fighting - write them pleading for the Silmarils -"

"Having of course no other real choice."

"Yeah. Valar refuse."

"Having lots of choices but no protocol for making better ones."

"Is that it? They probably make more sense to you than me. Anyway, they break into and slaughter their way through the camp of the victorious host, get the Silmarils, are surrounded, seem all set to die fighting, but Eönwë says to let them go -"

"The - patterns of their decisions make some sense to me but that one I can't totally figure out."

"I think Eönwë let them go because he foresaw - the Silmarils had been blessed a thousand years earlier, by Varda, to repel evil. When they touched them they burned. Maedhros took his and threw himself into a fiery chasm with it."