"Rrrright, you were there. Doing things other than make sure I get enough food and sleep and so on."

"We've made our personnel decisions well for our current resources and needs, I think. But yeah. Usually I have the command and do the 'making people eat and sleep' thing on the side."

"If it's more efficient to have me in the same place as you a lot of the time I could just mostly hang out at your place instead of here."

"I have a hard time anticipating whether the Enemy's next real attack will hit the Pass or hit here, honestly. It might be easier to head back over there."

"...I need to get over myself and make sure that I can, in fact, teleport without accidentally getting catapulted into a random universe. I mean, I probably shouldn't do it too much, it's Conquest and my resistance is only Sympathy...maybe I can come up with a Sympathy version, instantaneous effects are mostly Conquest but then it's not like I'm trying to do less or easier magic..."

"At your current travel speed they're less than half an hour apart," he offers, "you could fight here or there to be less predictable and get on the site of anything you're needed for before we'll have lost."

"Yeah. I should still see if I can figure out Sympathy teleporting, though, I do not want to bet peoples' lives that I won't need it later on. Anyway if it's that close at my speeds then it almost certainly makes more sense to stay there rather than here."

"Great. Grab any things here you've grown attached to, and I'll tell Maedhros we're leaving even though he can already hear us, already knows, and won't say anything in response."

She heads to her room, packs the dress she arrived in in her bag, and heads back.

"I was wrong, he says thank you for the letter from my cousins and stay safe."

"I'll give him the same promise I gave Fingon this morning, which is to do my best to ensure that my immediate vicinity is far more dangerous for the servants of the Enemy than it is for me."

Maedhros laughs, from far enough away that she won't be able to appreciate it. "Great," he says "Let's go."

Whee flying. For half an hour.

The Pass of Aglon looks almost the same as it did when she stopped there to go fight spiders. 

Correspondingly, she can land them in the same place Celegorm was standing when she first met him. Well. Land. She's still hovering. Same difference.

"And now acquiring decent food for you is my responsibility instead of Nelyo's. Bother. Lemme find you a guest room while I tell people to go get us some vegetables or something."

She laughs. "I can encourage plant growth--well. You saw," she gestures to her bag. "If there's some seeds or something I can make vegetables happen. Actually I should probably do something about that in general, increasing food stores was brought up earlier but I never got around to it."

"Yeah, especially now that we have a couple thousand refugees dumped on Thargelion. As long as the Pass holds we've got farmland south of here that can supply us and the local population. Estolad is constantly having fits of famine and we send them supplies but I'm not sure we shouldn't be doing something more sustainable - they have so many children they can't feed them all, and then if we feed them the next year there's even more - I don't know what we should be doing, surely not letting them starve, but it's a bit of a disaster."

"Magic can do birth control."

"That'd be very useful. I - I know it's a cultural difference, but among the Eldar to have a child you can't feed is monstrous, it makes it hard to spend much time around Men or remember that they have good qualities."

"There have been times in human history when the options were to have children you weren't sure you could feed or risk dying out. We can't always just wait a few decades until things are better. And that's us, who had mages."

"You couldn't find a single Elf who wouldn't say 'that's sad, but then you die out'."

"I'm not saying you're wrong. I wouldn't have kids I thought might starve. But instinct is a powerful thing, and refraining from having children for ethical reasons isn't a winning adaptive trait."

"I know. If you have a solution, that's very good."

"Yes. I can teach them magic and de-aging and birth control and ask them pretty please to wait to have children because they have time now and the odds aren't great that everyone will listen to me but I can do something. And I can make sure that the children who do exist don't starve."