This is too easy. This would have seemed too easy even before the Doom. But Maglor just nods. "Thank you." He should say something else but the sculpture is still shimmering there. Even if this is a trap - especially if this is a trap - he may as well bask in the talent on display there for another few seconds. 

"Do you require food or drink?"

"I should check the air first, now that I've thought of it..."

Unfortunately this requires him to temporarily get rid of the holo display of Arda so he can consult the Betan Astronomical Survey Reference Handbook. He navigates quickly to the correct part of the guide, gets out the appropriate tool, verifies that he can totally breathe this atmosphere no problem, and then restores the map since the elves seem to like it so much.

"Breathable," he concludes, and the glass of his faceplate retracts, though the strange lights beneath it remain. "Yes, food and drink would both be good, although if your supplies are short I can sustain myself with my own for a while."

They're going hungry. For a few years it was almost impossible to grow anything here, and now that the Sun's arrived and changed the calculus of survival entirely they're scrambling to plant things. He's torn between offering the stranger appropriate hospitality and saying "yes, eat your own food." Though he can't require much - he's the size of a child of htirty or so. "Moryo, will you get us all something?" he asks. 

That sounded like a nickname. Names, he knows two names in this room besides his own - also if he's going to be eating their food he needs the Survey Handbook again, to look up how to run the toxin and microbe scans... he sighs quietly to himself and switches the display on the handheld reader back to flat text. He can bring them another reader from the shuttle later; he has at least five, so surely there's one to spare for the telepathic elves to go nuts over.

Maglor would of course give anything for leave to copy the map, but that'd be unspeakably rude. Even with the fate of the world at stake, you simply don't respond to someone's artwork by asking to make a copy for your own purposes. They all committed it to memory the minute it went up; still, they all flinch when it vanishes. Is he storing it in another world, somehow? How can he so casually -

Miles is wondering their names. Right. 

"Canafinwë Macalaure," he says, "this is Curufinwë Atarinkë and Pityafinwë Ambarussa. My brother who just left is Morifinwë Carnisitir. That's all of us, now. There used to be seven of us."

"A pleasure to meet you all," he says; he can manage that much in Quenya. "Sorry for your loss," he has to say in English.

And, because he suspects he knows the source of that flinch: "This," he indicates the reader, "is called a handheld reader. It's a common and unremarkable thing where I come from, but I only had a few with me when I came here, so the number that exist in this world is limited for now. It can hold millions of books," a lowball estimate if anything, "and holo images like the map I showed you. The next time I return to my shuttle I can bring back an extra reader and show you how to use it."

"Millions?" says Maglor.

"They count by tens," Celegorm mutters, "and that's seven tens."

"Why would anyone create something that could store that many books? It'd take you three full Ages of the world to get a tenth of them copied for it!"

"Oh, I'd do it if I knew how," Curufin says, looking faintly more engaged. "Just to see if it could be done. It doesn't have to be useful -"

"There's currently a war on," Caranthir says, walking back in with wine and bread.

Curufin spins around. "You have some nerve, to accuse me of forgetting that -"

"I didn't. Just said,as much as I'd like to devote a few centuries to studying under Miles in the art of the handheledreader, we can't -"

Huan barks anxiously.

"How long does it take to learn?" Celegorm asks.

"Not long to learn how to use it. I don't know how to make it right now, though I'd like to teach that too..."

Thank heaven for telepathic elves going around speaking their language in front of him. He's picking it up at least ten times as fast as he did with Russian, French, or Greek, probably through the sheer psychological pressure of being the only native English speaker on this flat fucking planet... no, anyway, explain information technology to the preindustrial elves, Miles. And perhaps leave the explanation of how they cannot in fact spend centuries learning anything from you for later. Though ideally not too much later.

Back to English for the clarification: "The way they store information, it's very fast and simple to copy entire books or libraries between readers and other things with similar information storage. To copy the entire contents of this reader onto an empty one would take only a few minutes. Less than an hour even if it was full." Does he dare attempt an explanation of how a comm laser actually works? He'll probably mangle it, but where are they going to get a better one?

They all fall absolutely silent.

"You can copy a book in a few seconds," Celegorm says. 

"Yes. One of the things my devices do best is moving information around very quickly," he says. "With the work of a day or two I think I can figure out how to copy all the books in this library onto a reader faster than a person could read them - sort of the same way the reader can do this," and he takes a holo of the current contents of this room and makes the reader display it.

They all stare at the hologram without speaking for several minutes. 

"That - changes the best order of action," Maglor says. "I was inclined to insist that we kill the Enemy first, then learn how to build flying ships that will take us to the planets. But -"

"But if we learn how to do this, everyone in the world can know everything that's discovered, as soon as the creator has time to write it down."

"We can fly to the planets, learn everything they know about warfare and weaponry in a single yeni, come back, and kill the Enemy with that."

"...I have no idea if you can fly to the planets," says Miles. "I know very little about the event that brought me here, and most of what I know is that it should have been impossible and if it wasn't impossible it should have ended with my shuttle and its entire contents including myself shredded down to a dust too fine to see and spread out randomly across an inconceivably vast distance; and instead, somehow, I ended up here."

"But Men learned how to fly to the planets," Maglor says. "We are not less capable than Men."

Curufin is drumming his fingers on the table. "In Valinor the time passes slower, and you don't notice its passing, and it is rude to count the years, or measure your achievements by how swiftly they could be replicated. It's part - a small part, but part - of why we left. And when we left we had to leave almost everything behind, and the Enemy destroyed my father's workshop and all its contents, so we're behind even where we were in Valinor. You see these houses and think we cannot build starships, but we can." 

"The problem is not whether or not you could build the ships. The problem is... there are a lot of problems, actually, and I keep thinking of more. I don't know if it's possible in principle for this place to exist in the same universe as the planets I'm used to. The way starships move between places that are far from one another involves fixed paths called wormholes, and exploring new wormholes is dangerous, and there might not be a wormhole route between here and any planet I know of even if they are in the same universe, which I still doubt. And a starship can only move through a wormhole if it's being flown by a jump pilot, and finding people with the potential to be jump pilots and then making them into jump pilots requires yet more specialized knowledge I don't have."

"How long did it take Men to do it?"

"It's hard to measure exactly, but at least a thousand years. On the other hand, we didn't know what we were working toward. On yet a third hand, there were billions of us even then and we may tend to act more urgently than you're used to because we only live for a hundred years or so each."

Speechlessness, again.

"Yes," Celegorm says after a while. "That's - that's one of the things they say of Men. That you die while still children, all of you. Is - is there anything to be done about it?"

"It'd be the same principle as halting the decay of wood and the aging of animals in these lands," Curufin says, "I can do it. Not - not in less than a hundred years, though. Not without Father, not without - what kind of precision instruments do you have, Miles?"

"...Many kinds," he says - this much he can manage in Quenya. "What do you need?"

"The way we'd do something like this - I think our approach to artifice differs from yours, the lightning-sculptor doesn't use any magic even though there are a few obvious ways it could be applied - would be to write the deep structure of the relevant phenomenon - biological decay, in this case - into a piece of jewelry, and then bind them with the music of creation, and then alter the form of our representation in a way that alters the deep structure. Then you experiment until you find the correspondance between alterations to the representation we've made and alterations to the original phenomenon, and design one that has the intended effect. It's generally powered by the will of the wearer but there's something wrong with your soul so we'd have to find a workaround.

I'm making do without a great deal of equipment for crafting - equipment for measuring and rounding, needs to be precise enough that you can't detect any bumps in a surface by sight or by touch, for something biological it might actually need to be more precise than that. Sulfuric acid for removing the imperfections from soldering and annealing, a better flux for soldering - then there's the things I'll need in order to identify what biological decay is. So I'll need the materials to make lenses - again, precision measuring equipment - " he starts sketching a device - "have you made a lens? The procedure's the same everywhere there's light, so I can't imagine your people do it particularly differently. You need molded plate glass tools, with the right sign for grinding the lenses - with biologicals, we're going to need a precision of a thousandth of a hair's width."

"Curvo," Celegorm says, "I don't think he can understand you."

"Then translate," Curufin says, "He's going to die in a century if we don't fix him, and I can learn his language once this is in motion -"

"Tools for very small things that have to be just right," Celegorm says, "Do you have them?"

"Yes. In my shuttle. May I bring the shuttle here?"

(Telepathic elves getting into technical vocabulary in front of him, it's wonderful, he's going to have this language down solid in a week particularly if he spends a lot of time listening to Curufinwë Atarinkë talk about manufacturing lenses.)

"Yes," Maglor says after an instant of hesitation. "I need to somehow communicate to the other host that we're not attacking them. And we should send you back out with a larger escort, because presumably by now the Enemy has decided what, if anything, he's going to do about this -"

"No matter who we send we'll still be in trouble if the Enemy decides to kill Miles at all costs today," Amrod says. 

"True. Can you defend yourself, Miles?"

"...Yes," he says. "In this armour, against a lot. With my shuttle, against much more than that."

"Then let's send twenty men and rely on speed. If you see trouble, run from it. Miles, everyone you haven't met is dead because they underrestimated the enemy. If you see trouble, run from it. How large is the pod, can it land within our walls?"

"I think so," he says. Running from trouble sounds like a sensible idea, possibly more sensible than he is able to carry out, but that's a bridge he'll cross when it starts shooting at him. It occurs to him to ask what a soul is and what's wrong with his, but he files that away for later. "I saw empty spaces that should be large enough."

"Good, let's go. We might have a horse here that's sized for you, and now that you've taken the glass off and have a smell you'll make them less nervous."