Fair enough. Okay, how are they talking around the forking thing.

Cam retrieved the Silmarils; the Silmarils do backups; they can introduce the fact that he didn't proceed with the destruction of Valinor until he had backups. 

What if someone notices that he did not in fact have them at the time.

"The prosecution agreed to let us stipulate that; there's a sealed and chiplocked court record explaining the whole story. But they won't introduce evidence to challenge that; in effect they have already conceded it."

"Okay."

What else does he need to know?

List of witnesses, lines of argument to expect, clarification of some minor timeline points, things that he should not freak out about they are not especially likely to be bad signs, sentencing if he is convicted - "one way this might play out is a conviction on war crimes charges and a sentence to restitution, which would mean 'work on setting it right until it's right, which is to say that you're done, so don't panic if it's not 'cleared of all charges', that doesn't mean the dreadful binding is sticking around."

Okay.

"Cam - everyone here wants to see justice done. You could not possibly have handed us an easier job, given the givens. You were astonishingly meticulous and consent-cautious and good to the people you interacted with."

"I was threatening to Findekáno and I kidnapped a family of orcs for information."

"So maybe you will come out of this with a misdemeanor threats charge and you will need to bring them both cookies."

"Is that actually a sentence? 'Bring them cookies'?"

"For interpersonal things, usually the judges will consult with the victims and it'll either be something like 'don't contact this person again' or 'apologize and explain why you know it was wrong and won't do it again', depending which they want. I can't actually imagine anyone bringing threats charges on the prince Findekáno's behalf, if they talked to him he'd have requested they drop it and for things like that that'd get a lot of weight."

"Gotcha."

"You are likely to be asked if you would do it again, under the same circumstances."

"Under the same circumstances, or, like, knowing what I know now and having access to multiversal resources and such -? I assume the point of this question is not to confirm that I am subject to deterministic causality."

"Knowing what you know now but not in the sense of 'now I have resources to solve the problem better', more in the sense of 'understanding what effects it had' - it might make sense to say you wouldn't have kidnapped the orc family..."

"Yeah, would not have needed to quiz them about how orcs work. But it did work as intended, I didn't fuck up the oath or anything."

Nod. "Thank you for that. It'd be a harder case otherwise, not to even get into -"

Nod.

"I should probably go," he says to Amriac, "Timothy's going to be a wreck."

"They're not gonna let him wrap himself around the defendant like a scarf?"

"They are not."

"Well, have fun at the, uh, war crimes trial."

"Hopefully it all comes out okay. At least Cam can talk."

"Yeah."