"Yes. So. Along with the concept of money comes the concept of debt. Sometimes, you want something and don't currently have the money to pay for it; when that happens, you can borrow some temporarily, either from a friend or from an institution dedicated to lending people money, or you can ask the person whose thing you want to give it to you now and wait until you have the money to pay them for it. In either case, you now owe someone some money. If you mismanage this ability badly enough, you can end up owing a lot of money, often on uncomfortable terms. This particular pilot was going to have to give up his ship to cover his mismanaged debts, and if he lost that ship he was probably never going to be able to fly again. I felt sorry for him and decided to take on those debts myself. I didn't have the money to pay for them either, but once I got the creditors to agree, he was able to keep his ship for the time being, and therefore we could use the ship to acquire more money by getting other people to pay us to move things between planets."

"Huh. You could buy something, at home, with promise of payment, but if you couldn't pay your family would, so you wouldn't end up having spoken falsely, and then they'd chastise you later for having been unwise. You couldn't lose your horse for it. All right. So you got his ship. Is that the ship currently in our lake? Do you still owe someone money?"

"No and no; this was all years ago, and that's a significant amount of time among humans. We did get his ship, but it turned out I had made a poor estimate of how quickly we could acquire the necessary amount of money, never having owned a ship before. Most of the people who wanted to pay us to move their cargo wanted to pay us less than we needed. But there was one person on the planet who wanted to move what he referred to as 'farming equipment' from Beta Colony, famed across the wormhole nexus for its advanced weapons, to his home planet of Tau Verde, which was at the time experiencing a war he was on the losing side of, for what I might describe as a suspiciously high price that also happened to be enough to cover our entire debt in one trip."

"So you joined his war so you could honor your word." She seems satisfied that this is reasonable.

"Actually, no. Originally I didn't intend to fight in the war at all; I just wanted to move his so-called farming equipment, get paid, clear Arde's debts, and be done with the whole business. Unfortunately, things... didn't quite go according to plan."

"What happened?"

"The winning side in the war was guarding their end of the local wormhole, searching any ship that came in, and then taking their jump pilots hostage. A brilliant idea, actually. You cannot cross a wormhole without a jump pilot. It isn't just a matter of skill; some people can be jump pilots, and most people can't, and the ones who can still have to train for it and be specially outfitted with a pilot's headset that connects them to their ship. No pilot, no way out. So we got that far, and the blockaders searched us and didn't find any concealed weapons because I'd hidden them better than that, and Arde wasn't happy about being taken hostage but he was willing to go along with it... except that the captain of the blockading ship decided he'd rather have my best friend instead. And he acted in a way that implied her stay with them was not going to be pleasant. And she looked to me for protection."

She frowns and nods. "Uh...why? Did they know each other?"

"No. He was just bored and felt like making trouble. Anyway, so we captured their ship. Then we had the problem of this captured ship full of semi-competent enemy soldiers who we honestly didn't have much chance of maintaining control over in the long term, and I decided to apply a Brilliant Plan... see, when the man with the so-called farming equipment first spoke to me about moving his cargo, he assumed I was a professional soldier and I encouraged him in that assumption. Well, it seemed to me that although the fact of the matter was that the crew of the blockading ship was a bunch of screw-ups and we'd won the fight only by being a luckier bunch of screw-ups and a little cleverer where it mattered, they would probably appreciate the chance to think that instead they had been defeated by a crack team of elite military geniuses. So I implied that that was exactly what had happened, and, ah, offered to let them all join my imaginary army. My previously-imaginary army. And they were so generally confused about their situation, and so glad to have an explanation for recent events that didn't involve thinking of themselves as laughably incompetent, that they all agreed."

"..."

"At first I thought that I was going to have to drop them somewhere without any explanations and run away as soon as I'd delivered my cargo. But they - they believed in this imaginary army of mine, and believed in their own places in it. I very much did not want to abandon them. And then we ran into some of their former comrades, and my new not-so-imaginary army fought for me and won. The captain of that ship managed to escape, and went back to his commander to demand a new ship as was his established right by previous agreement, but instead his commander got angry about all this nonsense - in fairness, the reports he'd been getting must have been very nonsensical - and yelled at him for losing and gave him nothing, so the frustrated captain took his crew and came back and asked if he could join my army too."

"I think I like you, Miles. So then you had a real army, and there was a war going on."

"I had an army, and a war, and there was no way I was going to be able to leave without applying the one to the other and winning. So I did that. And my best friend fell in love with one of my officers and decided to stay, so I left them in charge of the army when I went home. And that's the story of how I stumbled into a war and semi-accidentally won it."

"Their feud might have been quite trivial, though. It, uh, doesn't sound like you checked."

"I'm eliding over a lot of the details. Part of the reason why I managed to successfully steal a large part of what had previously been the winning army was that they weren't actually members of the relevant side in the conflict; they were mercenaries, an army for hire, being paid to fight on their behalf. When the fighting was over and the two sides themselves had to sit down together and negotiate the resulting peace, they were... disinclined to cooperate. To put it mildly. Of the many things about that whole situation that I wish I'd handled better, that's one of the major ones. They did eventually get something worked out, and as far as I know they haven't started the whole business up again since, but still, if I'd been thinking ahead... well, if I'd been thinking ahead the whole thing would have gone very differently, but particularly I would've tried to figure out why these people hated each other so much. They did hate each other a whole lot, though."

"The cousins abandoned us to our deaths, got everyone Doomed, and murdered a bunch of people."

"Your cousins made a series of very bad decisions that got a lot of people hurt. But I've managed to get along reasonably well with both sides so far, and no one has tried to kill me over it or even so much as suggested I must be morally corrupt for being friendly with the wrong folk, and that's a big step up from situations like the Tau Verde conflict."

"I mean, if we were suspicious of anyone who's friendly with them we'd have to dump me and Findekáno first, and I don't think Father's ready to lose two more of his children."

"Yes, exactly. That's... extremely promising, on the scale I'm used to. From my perspective, it seems - well, not easy, but doable, to bring you to a meaningful reconciliation. It's on my list for sometime after I save the world."

"From Melkor?"

"Yes. Save the world from Melkor, teach you all everything I know, reconcile the two groups of elves, make my sincere best effort to return home despite believing that it's probably more impossible than the kind of impossible thing I can usually accomplish if I put my mind to it, and then what I do after that depends on whether the previous step succeeded. But I'll consider my life to have been well lived if I get through the first three all right."

"It's almost a shame my uncle is dead. He could get you home, he'd just also have started several civil wars by now."

"I'm tempted to respond 'and I can avert civil wars, perfect, I should've arrived earlier', but I suppose we will in fact never know how that would have gone."

"There are a lot of people who devoted their whole lives to averting the relevant civil war and managed only to delay it. But. I think you arrived at the right time, for what it's worth."

"Well, I'm glad you think so, I guess."