"...I don't know. Many. Twelves of twelves at least."

"And documents written in some of those languages are preserved on your book-copying device?"

"Yes, a few."

"I'd appreciate the chance to take a look at that. Though this is probably a higher priority. And the weapons are the highest priority, if you think we could develop the means to replicate them. If Balrogs explode there's no way to destroy them with a sword that isn't suicide, and I'm not sure it could be done even then. But if we had a few hundred of whatever you used, we could storm Angband tomorrow, which would be - 

Well, success is more important than timeliness, but there's someone who might yet live if we act quickly."

"Yes. I don't know how my weapons are made but I am beginning to hope that we can learn together how you might make them. But teaching you how to use all this," he gestures at the assorted tools, "is still the first step in that, I think."

"Proceed, then. Is your mother from a city?"

"...Maybe. Yes." Beta Colony doesn't really organize itself that way, but she's not really from a non-city. "Why?"

"Knowing nothing about either your native dialect or your mother's, except for the way you spoke them both, hers sounds more - Noldorin. I suppose I am really interested in whether your mother's people are the Noldor of Men, but that requires conveying - more - and I want to learn the tools - you can ask someone else later, once I'm working."

He nods. "So, this is a Survey bioscanner..." and these are its functions and what it is able to detect and analyze and how it presents its analysis. It's technically at least ten models out of date of what Survey actually uses, but still ahead of his copy of the Handbook; happily, the Betans are very enthusiastic about backward compatibility, so the sections of the Handbook dealing with the scanner are still perfectly relevant.

These people are competent. He hadn't, when he'd first heard what Melkor had to say about Men, been particularly perturbed for the Men. It was a shame they died so young, of course, but it was mroe of a shame that they warred constantly and would prevent the Elves from having a homeland outside fenced Valinor. But someone created this equipment, and that someone was competent, and if that person died at a yení the world would have been robbed of something of indescribable value.

If Miles notices this undercurrent, he doesn't make anything of it. He moves on at blazing speed, the speed of one genius teaching another, right through teaching Curufinwë Atarinkë about all the rest of the assorted tools. Some of them don't do much more than compensate Men for their lack of Elven sensory discernment; but the Men of the wormhole nexus, never having heard of Elves anyway, saw no reason to stop when they reached the Elven level. Here's a pair of vision-enhancing goggles that embody this principle.

Infrared light visors are baffling; Men can't do that by default? Same thing with ones that enhanced Men's eyesight - when was the practical constraint on your line of sight what your eyes could manage, rather than the terrain? Looking at the Sun directly without doing (and having to subsequently fix) subtle damage to your eyes is useful, though, and he supposes perhaps sometime he'd like to be able to read a book over his cousin's shoulder across the lake.

"How long did all of this take you?"

"I'm not sure how long my species has existed..."

"How long since you invented writing, then?"

"A few thousand years at least. I'm not sure."

"All that in a few thousand years? That's doable, then. I don't even need to discover true immortality, just something that slows decay by enough, and then once we're up to your world's capabilities I can refine it."

They weren't so behind, after all; they'd only invented writing a few hundred years ago.

He suddenly can't make the scanner move beneath his fingers. The sense that he wasn't the one who should be doing this was overwhelming. "You, ah, should have met my father, he'd have it done much faster. He had a gift for everything, but particularly for that."

"Particularly for what?"

"Objects that permanently and meaningfully alter physics. He invented our writing system. And our instantaneous long distance communication system, and most of our chemistry, and the Silmarils which are the only way we can endure as the sort of beings we are permanently outside Valinor."

"He sounds amazing. ...Instantaneous long distance communication?"

"The palantiri. What's the range of your ship? They're truly instantaneous over every range we've been able to check, but with your ship we could probably double or treble it. Though they work off our osanwë, you might have a little trouble with them."

"Off your what? Is this a soul thing?"

"Hmm? No, osanwë is the thought-speech. You do it oddly, your thoughts are hard to catch and I have to speak very precisely to you for you to catch mine. So you might have difficulty conveying lots of precise information over a palantir. I don't think your osanwë has to do with your soul. It's probably just a lack of practice. People vary in natural capacity and lots aren't comfortable with it until they're fully grown, and you can't be more than sixty."

"I'm twenty-four. And I'm not sure if the thought-speech is even a thing I can do. It's unheard-of where I came from."

"I can hear your thoughts, so there's clearly a sense in which you're speaking them - wait. Am I hearing thoughts you don't intend to be public?" He's mildly horrified.

"As far as I can tell, I don't have any control over which of my thoughts you hear and which you don't. But it's helping immensely with communicating with you and learning your language, so I'm not that bothered."