Whatever reason might that be. Cam provides answers where they exist, "but of course then I showed up so perhaps I've thrown it all off, who knows."

"Perhaps you've thrown us all off, too. Why did you pick now to arrive?"

"The Valar were going to parole Melkor soonish and now instead they're gonna not do that, which is an enormous improvement."

" - that'd do it. Huh. Do we have to just imprison him forever, then, that's -" Shiver.

"I think if time travellers say 'don't parole the evil god' you don't parole the evil god."

"Hopefully the Valar see it that way."

"They will. He can be more pleasantly imprisoned, that's harmless."

"- how can you already know that -"

"...what about that is more implausible than the rest of the time traveler thing?"

"I was going with a model of the time travel thing where - Melkor did something awful so then you came back to warn us not to parole him. But that wouldn't allow you to have information about what happens if they are warned by time travellers not to parole him."

"Well, for the time being this is left as an exercise to the reader."

"I think our future selves are having a laugh."

"Aww, darling, would they do that to us?"

"Yes," all the children say in unison. 

After dinner one of the babies decides to topple a plate of pudding on her sister and then both of them start screeching and then Macalaurië starts singing and they fall immediately quiet. She sings until they are sleeping in puddles of pudding on the rug; Huan licks them.

Always a treat.

"We inconvenient humans sleep every day."

"That does sound inconvenient. Have you tried being a demon -"

"Haven't had an occasion yet."

"Also I think he'd be a fairy and it would interfere with his current magical powers until he learned cellular biology and even that's an incomplete fix."

"You didn't mention having a current set of magical powers!"

"It somehow didn't come up."

"I have them too! The cellular biology method of acquiring them is not available for Elves yet either though, sorry."

"What's missing, technical expertise? On what exactly?"

"Genetics. The magic powers naturally appear among humans with a certain gene. Elves do not have human genes so it can't be naively inserted."

"Huh." And she has several hours of questions about that. Timothy is nodding off on Cam's shoulder.