Right. Everyone on the shuttle. Ramp up. Hatch closed.

"Now we go back to your camp," he says, and takes off, flying as steadily as possible so as not to jostle the injured.

As steadily as possible still allows them to go very fast. It's not long before he's approaching the camp, checking the viewport and vid feeds in search of a good place to land.

The dilemma: send a family member to the Nolofinweans, and risk that they'll be outright detained there? Or send a messenger, who can be trusted to get through but will have to be told more than he's yet prepared to tell all his subjects? Everyone has assumptions about Men, and it's worth considering how best to challenge them. And Miles is dangerous.

In the end he sends Amrod. The message is short: This light does not appear to have been of the Valar's sending. We think these are Men. We're inviting them here. Please discuss how you'd like to proceed.

Enough to keep Nolofinwë busy, and probably to stop his people from loosing arrows at the shuttle when it returns. And hopefully they'll return his little brother when fthey get curious enough to want to respond to the message. 

Sound logic, he thinks, but Amrod hasn't returned yet, several hours later, when he sees the blue light arcing through the sky again. This time it's headed here.

There is a space big enough to set down in. Miles sets down in it. It's one of the neatest landings he's ever made, as gentle as a drifting feather.

He opens the hatch and lowers the ramp to let everyone out.

It's a delight to watch, though he cannot imagine how the propulsion system would work even in principle. People had tried flight, in Valinor, sometimes with Manwë's indulgent approval and sometimes while he was occupied. You could glide, with well-designed wings. That was it. Sustaining the weight of something like that shuttle would take motion, so much of it that the air should be whipped into a whirlwind, but instead it's fairly close to the ground before he can even hear the air moving. So the parts that do the propulsion are internal: sensible, if Men have enemies. Do they? They should have asked that - they should have asked many more questions before sending Miles back out to his shuttle.

As a general principle you ought to ask questions right away, rather than saving them up to look over, day after day, once the only person in the world who could have answered them had crumbled to dust in your hands.

It lands. 

He greets Miles with a few of the questions.

"What metal is this? How do you make it? What's the mechanism that keeps it up in the sky? How fast can it travel, and how far? Could you build one from scratch? Can we take it apart?"

Miles waits until there is a gap in the questions such that he can get a word in edgewise, and then responds with, "I killed a Balrog. It exploded. Did you know they explode?"

"...no. We haven't killed one, they're major Maiar, I wasn't even confident it was possible. How did you do it? If we can find a way to kill them from a distance they'll have to keep them separated from the rest of the Enemy's own forces."

"One of my weapons. It does work at range, but a shorter range than is ideal for dealing with a Balrog. I don't know how to make that weapon, though, or how to make my shuttle. You can't take my shuttle apart now. You can take apart some other things. One of the grav stretchers, maybe," and he gestures to where the two critically injured Elves are floating.

"I'll start on the lenses, actually, if you have the materials with you. It's a time-consuming process and I can learn what you know of your world once that's progressed enough that I can hand it off to other people. Unless you are, unwisely, leaving the camp again. I expect that the enemy dearly desires to kill you, at this point, and if your weapons can fire on one at a time - well, he'd happily lose a thousand for the chance to take them off your body."

"I'll get my tools."

He fetches some things, glancing at Tyelcormo along the way - should he be asking him to play translator? How bad is an injury like that, among these people? The preindustrial elves have magic; he is not at all clear on how this should affect his intuitions about the effectiveness of their medical technology.

Celegorm is trying to focus. 

It was rude of Curufin to say it, of course, but there is something wrong with Miles' soul. It clings to his body like it's been clumsily taped on, coalescing in the vital organs. One tiny knock in the wrong place would rip it loose. 

The Eldar are their souls, and can, if needed, get new bodies. That avenue is out at the moment, the Valar having communicated that they're inclined to hold a grudge, but in principle it can be done: the bare basics are given, the raw materials of a incarnate being, and the Elf's force of will shapes the rest into the form that it remembers.

There've been cases of Elves changing genders, in Valinor, because their mind knew what it was and dragged the body into line.

There've been cases, since Valinor, of Elves who experienced such griefs that their soul rejected their body, suddenly and violently, crushing it from the inside, making it crumble despite no visible injuries.

Orcs, they say, are just Elves raised from birth in such torment that their self manifests as a hidious abomination. 

And the cousins, of course, had hiked across the Helcaraxe. Impossible cold, impossible hunger, a thousand impossibilities powered by sheer force of will. We are not our bodies; we are very powerful, very dangerous, things that realize ourselves in the physical world through them.

So Celegorm can't see, and can only half-hear, and has some fairly serious burns, but there are hundreds of years of the light of Valinor burning within his spirit and all of those other ridiculous things ought to stop being a problem, very soon. My physical manifestation has a nerve there, has retina cells there, can sense light when it hits the tissue there -

...Well shit. Okay. Elves are magic. Good to know.

This distracts him on multiple levels; he finishes fetching the tools, and he means to ask about the practicalities of translation, but what ends up coming out of his mouth when he meets Curufinwë Atarinkë again at the foot of the ramp is, "What did you mean about my soul earlier? What is a soul?"

"What word would you use for the - the visible presence of a Power when it's not deliberately adopting a human form, the thing that is visibly different between a dying person and a dead one, the thing that is different between us and you?"

"...I don't know anything about Powers," he says. "I don't know..." Back to English. "'Soul', maybe, if I understand what you're getting at."

"Soul. So, yours is different than ours. Ours actively is the force that anchors and embodies us in the world. Yours is ...along for the ride, maybe. It makes you look very fragile. I originally assumed it was a distortion because of the armor you wear, but when you lower the helm it is even more noticeable. Can you consciously control your heartbeat?"

"...No."

"That is what I would have expected. Set your body temperature? Your metabolism?"

He shakes his head. "No and no."

"This will complicate fixing your biological decay, because it's probable that whatever is wrong with you is something it will be difficult to identify externally and something which we correct automatically. I will attempt to develop a technology to attach your soul more securely. Though if that fails, this enterprise should in principle be able to prevent wood from rotting, and it doesn't do that through reliance on any innate capacities of the wood. How do I use your tools?"

So Miles launches into an explanation of what all the stuff he's carrying is and does and how you manipulate it.

He has some extremely powerful lenses already, in amongst all this, and other tools that do that job in a more complicated way, a pile of scanners adapted to various specific tasks or sets of tasks and this is how all of those work, and what all the words on the displays and the labels on the buttons say, crash course in English orthography and vocabulary... they could end up being at this for a while, but Miles, like his devices, is pretty good at moving information around quickly. The fact that he's talking to a telepathic elf helps a lot. The mysteries of the handheld reader, and the Betan Astronomical Survey Reference Handbook, are going to come into it pretty soon.

He does not actually notice that he switches dialects of English as soon as he starts reading from the Handbook.

But he does, immediately. "Say that again," he says, and then "I suppose with that many people, you'd have many, many dialects. Which is your native one?"

"Uh... Barrayaran English, that I have been speaking, is the dialect of my father and the planet where I grew up. Betan English, that this book is written in, is my mother's dialect. I'm fluent in both. And I know the three other languages spoken on Barrayar, but not as well."

"Three other languages? Can you say a few sentences in each?"

"Uh..." He thinks for a moment, and then recites the first couple of sentences of a Barrayaran folk tale in Russian, French, and Greek. His level of confidence in the words falls off pretty steadily as he goes: comfortable with the Russian, slightly unsure of the French, very aware his Greek is shaky at best.

He listens, utterly fascinated. "How many languages are spoken in your world?"