"I can imagine it must have been upsetting to get the news, especially devoid of context."

"It can't possibly compare to what you must have gone through."

"In the interests of full disclosure I was assigned to assist in resurrection logistics and refugee resettlement and have worked closely with Swan in that capacity."

"- resurrection - logistics?"

" - like I said initially it seems like maybe you are pursuing this case while lacking a lot of materially relevant information."

"Please do go on."

"Elves have chips in our heads which record our thoughts, enable a variety of cognitive enhancements, and record backups of our brains. If we are killed but the chips are undamaged, we can be restored to life by making a new body around the chip. Demons can't make valid chips, apparently for the same mysterious reason they can't make humans. Our world has beings called the Valar - magical, unconjurable persons who have existed since the beginning of our universe, who can assume physical form but do not need to. Until we had the technology to do it ourselves the Valar maintained backups of our chips and did restorations to life. Now we have our own backups. Swan has spent the last five months of our time resurrecting people on a duplicate of the planet they lost. He should be done in another few months. I have been working alongside him to reassure and reacclimate people, arrange them transit home, and explain what happened."

"...I see."

"I'm not really sure where to start. What do you know about what happened -"

"...I can just get you the report we have -" She produces it.

She reads it. She raises her eyebrows slightly.

"Okay. In that case I'll start with - I mentioned the Valar. There are fifteen. Fourteen ruled Valinor. They're - they meant well. There was aggressive censorship and they edited people who experienced same-sex attraction and they wouldn't let anyone leave, for a while, but Valinor had no material scarcity and they really did want us to be happy. The fifteenth is, as far as anyone can tell, concerned only with causing as much horror and suffering as possible. When Elves were newly created - we're a created species, we didn't evolve, the first Elves awoke fully grown on Endorë one day - when Elves were newly created Melkor figured out how to kill us, extract the chips, run the chips on computers, and torture us in accelerated time. Separately he genetically engineered Elves which were in constant not-quite-debilitating pain, made them want children very badly and mature more quickly, and bred himself the race of orcs."

James blinks at her.

"I mentioned our chips come with cognitive enhancements. They also come with a feature that allows you to make binding commitments. If you swear to do something, you can't back up, it's an intensifying psychological compulsion. Melkor arranged for all orcs to swear him obedience in early childhood. So he had slaves - five billion, by the time I was born. The Valar arrested him for all of this, of course, but after three thousand years they paroled him. He went back to it."

"I..." James trails off, then nods helplessly.

"There was some division in Valinor about what to do about him. My country decided to send a military force to fight him if that could safely be done, and evacuate and play a support role if it could not. This decision angered the Valar, and there was a fight aimed at preventing us from departing. We didn't have that many lightleapers and some were destroyed in the fighting. We were parked on one of Valinor's moons figuring out logistics. Cam appeared."

"...we know he made some ships."

"We explained the situation. He was not willing to help us with the war without more information, he said, but he'd do ships if they didn't have weaponry. They don't - lightleapers are such that the scariest thing you can do with them is aim them at something. We asked if he could make the chips to resurrect us - we didn't realize how scary that'd be if it worked - and he tried, and it didn't. We recommended him some reading about the war so he would decide Melkor was terrible and be willing to help us. He read it, he was still reluctant to help with the war - humans couldn't have faked that much evidence, certainly not while not knowing daeva existed, but humans can't do the brain backups either and didn't have FTL, he didn't want to presume it was sufficient.

Prince Nelyafinwë proposed he make a planet in interstellar space, for refugees from the war, so in the worst case we could take people somewhere Melkor couldn't find them. Proposed he take the summoner there too - Cam had explained by then how summoning worked, tried to teach us how to summon other daeva but it failed to work."

"...why didn't it work?"

"We're not sure. Possibly the Valar. They later informed us they'd decided summoning should be disallowed in our universe and had gone ahead and disallowed it. It's sometimes unclear whether that was it. Anyway, it didn't work, which made it urgent Cam not get sent home. We decided the hidden planet was a good idea. We restructured to work with the greater numbers of ships. Cam, in the course of his reading, learned about the fight we'd been involved in leaving Valinor. It ended with the Valar doing a - chip-interfacing thing to give us bad luck. They called it the Doom. Cam was worried it would apply to him. He went to talk to the Valar to get reassurance that wouldn't happen. He gave everyone in Valinor the library of Hell..."

"We noticed that."

"And he went and made the planet. Did more verifying of our story while he was there, came back inclined to help with the war effort against Melkor. We got to Endorë. We realized pretty quickly that the Enemy was toying with them. Trenches and machine gun warfare, from someone who was also devoting continents to server farms to torture people on and spreading carefully-designed bioweapons - prion diseases that looked like food poisoning, ones that were asymptomatic for a week and then killed you in your sleep, ones that caused two weeks of torturous agony but then left you completely healthy..."

"Wh- why -"

She shakes her head. "I don't know. We may never - we asked Cam for the suicide triggers. They're keyed to us. People were so glad of them."

"- it's almost impossible to tell who a chiplocked item is locked to."

"It sounds like it'd be in many respects really challenging to have this trial here."