"No, I don't, I just want you aware that they stole it."

"Consider me informed."

"We're being remarkably not bitter about the whole thing, really, but I'm not above reminding them. This tree will do."

"Finding a tree didn't take long at all!"

"The other reason I want to see your planet is because a civilization of Men seems like it'd be overwhelming and utterly ridiculous and I very much want to try it."

"Those are accurate descriptions of many parts of the wormhole nexus. I like to think my planet is less ridiculous than some, but of course I'm biased."

"What's it like?"

"I think the biggest difference between this place and what I'm used to is the number of people around," he says. "My planet's population is low by most standards, but we still have cities with more people in them than I've seen or heard of in the entire time I've been here. I miss that a little." One of the safer things to miss.

"It's funny about that - my parents' generation went to Valinor mostly for the promise of big families. We don't have children in troubled times. But my generation, almost no one married or had children, because politics was starting to get rocky, and then the Darkening, and then the exile. Now maybe we never will. My brother has a daughter and wanted more, but now of course he never can."

Miles entertains the thought of finding where all these dead elves are kept and arguing for their freedom. Something to put on the backburner, maybe.

She's carving English symbols into a piece of wood, with Quenya translations underneath. "So how do we make electricity?"

"At its simplest: magnets and some way to make them move, and copper wire for them to be moving near. But first I probably have to explain how you make or find magnets, and I don't actually know that, although the Handbook might have some clues. They're, uh... an oversimplified summary would be 'lumps of stuff that behave oddly around iron'. Other ways to make electricity exist but I'm less confident of the steps involved."

"Hmm. Okay. We can start looking for those."

"The way they behave oddly specifically involves moving when near iron, or causing iron to move when near them, or both. Usually at very short ranges," he gestures a plausible such distance. "And they show up on some of the scans I've been doing, so it's possible I could find out if there are any nearby..." He brings up a holomap on his reader, specifically the version with various metal deposits marked.

"Oh, I have heard of that! I wouldn't know where to look for it, but that isn't very far away at all."

"How convenient."

She starts walking. "Do we need more than we'll collectively be able to carry? By the scrambling around, I'm guessing they decided 'yes' on pressing Angband, but I bet we can peel one or two people off."

"I don't think we'll need more than we can collectively carry just for the 'messing around figuring out how this is supposed to work at all' phase. You can always send people to collect more of the stuff once we have a better idea of what to do with it."

"...are we messing around figuring out how this is supposed to work? I assumed the scanner has instructions."

"I checked; it doesn't. It shouldn't take me very long to figure it out, because I know the theory pretty well and it's just a matter of filling in a few missing steps, but I don't have actual instructions available."

"What's the theory?"

"Hmm... how much do you already know about the underlying structures of matter and energy?"

"We have people who studied it. I'm not one of them." Then, more cheerfully, "if it's not in the book then they're not going to figure it out before we do, will they?"

"I'm told Curufin will try. I'm fascinated to see who finishes first."

"Stupidity and laziness do not number among my cousins' numerous personal failings, but absent something to work with I can't imagine they'd be able to figure it out very quickly."