"I could get you a text to speech thingy."

"It's really something I should pick up anyway. I just mean, we shouldn't be deciding this."

Sigh. "Timothy recently came up with a wizard-magic-based idea that might or might not pan out with more thought; I'm cautiously optimistic that something in that general direction will do the trick without being as - clumsy - as inviting Valar into the situation."

Nod.

"If it happens that there are no accessible solutions which don't endanger me, endangering me as much as necessary is fine, I'm not planning to insist on criminal justice proceedings appropriate to my native world or anything. But if summoning works as an immortality patch in spherical-planets-Arda that affects more people than are currently on the line."

Nod.

"What would your home world's solution entail -"

"I'd be entitled to the services of at least one legal expert, various people would be called upon to remark on my likelihood to recidivize and my character and my extenuating circumstances and the technicalities of my arrest, the most impartial feasible evaluators would be empowered to hand down a verdict and sentence and to commute that sentence if they so chose, and the harshest punishment available would in my case be being summoned under a binding preventing me from doing anything illegal or leaving a specified area, at least if they expected me to comply with a summon."

"I don't think it would be immediately obvious to the Valar why that would be a reasonable thing to do but maybe one could reason with them? I don't know if it'll come up often enough that we need a process, how big is the multiverse..."

"I didn't keep asking Bar after she said there were more than an octillion worlds."

" - so enough that we actually probably should have some kind of principled handling, then, but that doesn't mean the Valar would be convinceable."

"I didn't talk to mine very much."

"Aulë is kind and generous and knowledgeable and has no idea at all how incarnates work. You can teach him, but he doesn't learn like us either. But he made the Dwarves, and they're well-designed people with good lives, and he didn't cause trouble about Fëanáro running away from home - my guess is that he would take some time - less than either of us - to study all the facts and then he would want to go set everything right but he might need the others and they might be less reasonable."

"I do not know how they come to group decisions but the group decisions included 'subtle mind control curse on a bunch of people including their children'..."

"Yep, that's worrying. Of course, so is a fight over starboats that kills twenty thousand people -"

"More than that many were dying in Endorë every day. And it wasn't a curse to  - not behave like that, or anything, it was to fail -"

"I'm still waiting for my machine learning algorithm to tell me if it's still in effect."

The newcomers look very confused. 

"We should put together a book for alts who don't know anything yet," says a chip Elf.

"I know some things," he says. "And you should see Nerdanel's sculptures."

"I bet the future can do that," she says. "Won't be impressive at all - Cam, can you make the sculpture I made of Maitimo last year, it's in the garden..."

"Right here? Should I scale it or will it be okay full size?"

"Full size, definitely, or you lose most of the effect."

Sculpture.

"...awww."

He is standing there tugging at the hem of his shirt and looking around, exquisitely realistic, a perfect image of the little Elf outside. 

"Yep, we can do that. Holograph would be lower fidelity but you could 3-d print it - how do you get the temperatures right -"

"Rocks with different specific heats."

" - yeah, I think we'd have to use heating elements, for that part -"

"She does it with just stone and a chisel," he says smugly, and glances adoringly at her.

The chip Elves are uncomfortable.