"They also don't speak any Thindarin yet, they've only just arrived and they've been very busy."

"There is that."

Although local standards for what qualifies as 'busy' seem... all right, that's not fair, no one's standards for what qualifies as 'busy' measure up to Miles's. By any reasonable measurement, he's the weird one.

He catches that too, and smiles. "My father might have shared your standards. I don't think he ever stopped moving." He pauses. "It got him killed."

"I don't plan to let it do the same to me," says Miles.

Which reminds him, if he runs out of other problems to solve, he'd like to learn more about the nature of the local afterlife and see about freeing people from it if that approach seems warranted. The fact there is a local afterlife from which people are not automatically freed is already a little suspect.

Maglor is now watching him with a distant sort of wistfulness. "Good fortune, then."

"Thanks." (What's that about...?)

Fighting Mandos. Everyone gets the idea, it's desperately tempting, it's probably not possible. Some kinds of hope are just distracting.

Well, that's why it's on the backburner. Things to do after I've run out of higher and more feasible priorities.

"Very well. I'm going to sing something to help Nelyo sleep." And he steps back inside.

Miles still feels a little lost, but he's starting to get back in gear now. Hmm. Maybe he should go across the lake and check on their progress. Probably faster than figuring out how to have a genuinely private conversation with Tyelcormo. Particularly given that he keeps broadcasting his every thought to every telepathic elf in range.

"Hello. We scaled it up and it stopped working, our engineers have some theories why but you'd mentioned a lot of current can be harmful so I thought we'd better wait and ask before we tried all their proposed improvements. Thank you for glaring the boys down from their stupid argument."

"Anytime," he says cheerfully. "All right, let's see what the trouble is."

He consults with the engineers and makes recommendations for how to proceed.

"How do we ever get this to the scale you need to fix your shuttle?"

"With more materials. And a source of movement besides people turning cranks. Damming a river is a popular option. So is burning fuel to heat water."

"Burning trees? That seems wasteful, they grow so slowly. And maybe Ulmo can't get any more irritated with us but I'm disinclined to risk it."

"Someone is likely to get irritated with you if you dam a river...? Anyway, yes, burning trees isn't a favourite, but it'll do if you don't have anything else. They're toying with making heat-generating magic rocks across the lake."

"Ulmo's lord of the waters, and I'm not sure but it seems he might. He's pretty angry with us over the Kinslaying. Oh, altered lampstones might do it! The question is how to make them share the trick."

"I can try asking nicely. It's worked pretty well for me so far."

"Because you have the weapons."

"I'm giving them away as fast as I can."

"I...noticed. You're a remarkable person in many ways."

"Thanks, I think."

"I don't think of myself as an unusually bad one, and yet I don't know if I'd land on a strange world and decide to fix all their problems within a week. I think I'd just explore for a few centuries before that even occurred to me."

"I don't think of myself as an unusually good person. I do think of myself as an unusually... active one. Maybe the difference is that virtue is something I aspire to, while mania I get for free."

She laughs. "Either way. How's Russandol doing?"