"Hello," he says when they walk in. "Apparently everyone hears what's said as their native language, which makes no sense and is the sort of thing a person who knows nothing about magic would decide magic could do. Who are you?"

"Um," says Bella. "Hi. That sounds like a perfectly reasonable thing for magic to do to me? Where are we? I'm Bella and this is Fëanáro."

At that he turns around. 

It's - Loki, or a shorter Loki, and in fact someone who looks vaguely like what he remembers of - 

"How did you give me six books of explanation and not mention that you can do time travel?" he demands of the bar. 

...Bella recognizes him too, apparently. She squeezes the smaller instance of him a little closer.

As I have said repeatedly, I am not personally in control of most bar features, says the bar, and this is not time travel per se but rather a matter of an alternate universe.

He turns around. "Hello," he says to Bella. "You're holding me. Can you set him down? He'll be curious about the bar and I have lots of reading material for him." And to Fëanáro, "it's an interdimensional bar. I feel like my intelligence is being insulted but apparently no time passes back home so at least I'm not getting behind on anything important. How are you, what's she doing here?"

"D'you want me to put you down?" Bella murmurs.

"Yes." But a little apprehensively. "Are you the future version of me who killed a lot of people?"

"Yes," he says dismissively, "but it was necessary and they're back."

Bella puts the smaller of the Fëanors down.

"Necessary? Back?"

"I'm curious how you heard what happened, I didn't know when I was your age or I'd have been able to invent enough ways to prevent it. The Valar pardoned Melkor. He murdered our father and returned to torturing everyone in the Outer Lands to death, slowly. I amassed an army and went to stop him. Some people tried to stop me. Then we fought Melkor and we stopped him and my instance of the person you are calling Bella managed to free orcs and get all the dead released and round the planet and put us in touch with the rest of the galaxy, where we've commenced rescuing everyone in need in it."

"You have an instance of me? I'm not even from Arda. An Arda."

"Nor was my instance. She's Asgardian. Well, technically a frost giant."

"...well, I'm not. Either of those. We know what happened because the Valar told me."

"Did they tell you that we stopped Melkor and that doing that six months slower would probably have meant half a million more people tortured and that the dead were all back within three Years?"

"No, it was kind of patchy. And I definitely would have remembered if another me had featured. Also there was a part where you died."

"That's when the other you showed, actually. Maybe your instances arrive to disrupt whatever the Valar anticipate, even if they pick different times. Though I would have left the war in capable hands. We have seven children," he says to the smaller Fëanáro.

"I wanted ten."

"Your wife will want to stop at seven. And they're seven excellent children, worth two of ordinary ones."

"I'm... not sure at all you should expect this one to wind up the way you did even if you had a very good reason."

"Oh?"

"I, uh, disrupted. Things."

"Oh, no, did you murder the Valar? Loki seriously considered it."

"Nnnnno the Valar are all still alive - Loki? That's the other me's name? - but they kicked me out of Valinor for disrupting too many things and my Fëanáro rescued me from my evil universe and now we live in a third one."

"Ah. Hmm. Well, maybe he can come here and meet the people who would have been his children. You'll like them. What universe do you live in? How do you hop them? I and the children can come visit you, we have an interdimensional teleport that ought to do it. What makes a universe evil?"

"I've been calling my plane Materia, wizardry does the trick if you can work on it in amenable conditions, and my native plane is both full of relatively ordinary hazards and also systematically and enforceably opposed to the concept of science."

"Hmm. So - we were going to go places, drop a lot of artifacts that are directional teleports to somewhere safe, with instructions about how to use them - will that go wrong if we drop them in Materia?"

"Not necessarily - the problem with the place is that it hates being predicted and accordingly I can't make any truly reliable predictions about it. It didn't squish me when I went back having done science, but I didn't try to do any there, and when Fëanáro came to get me he'd already developed his spell safely outside of it and then I distracted him with a language textbook while I packed, so - I don't know. Uh, but you may not want to let arbitrary inhabitants of my universe out."

"Why not?"

"Because some of them are stupidly powerful and would still be that way even if the universe itself did not enforce their superiority."

"We are also stupidly powerful and getting moreso," he says. 

"Are you epic?" says Fëanáro.

"Not familiar with the word. I stopped time forever over a space of several miles, I can do that again at need."

"Epic is a loosely defined term which basically means 'if you get in a fight with a god, while in Materia, you might win'. Gods come with all kinds of inconvenient properties and some of them might be categorically immune to temporal effects or something."

"Loki's probably epic, then," he says, "and we can wait on Materia until she's helping."

"What'd she do?"

"She wields the Tesseract, she killed Thauron in single combat and Morgoth with the twitch of a finger, later, and she's working on resurrection of Men at the moment I think because she kind of adopted the species. Very capable person." He says it approvingly. 

"...sounds awesome."

"Yes. We were fortunate, with her. And well-positioned to aid her. And the Enemy underestimated us all."

"You can go get all these people?"

"Ah, I think someone has to hold the door open. Because of the rules of the bar. But yes, I can. Want to meet her?"

"My epic counterpart from the future, what am I gonna say, no?"

So he steps outside and pops, and then a minute later pops back. "No one is sure what planet she's currently on."

"That is a fun problem to have, I guess."

"D'you not have a teleport? You said your magic could do it..."

"We can do teleports, yes and planar shifts - my Fëanáro did most of the research for those, I was stuck in Materia at the time carefully casting no spells at all and being a therapist instead."

He looks back at little Fëanáro. "Why was she being a therapist?"

"She was scared Materia would eat her. I was scared it'd eat me but I wasn't there to be scared every minute and I needed her back. She saved our mother."

"She saved our mother?"

"In your world did she die?"

"Yes. Yes, she did."

"- did she come back, you said everybody came back?"

"She didn't want to stop being dead. And then the Valar changed the rules so she wasn't allowed to. But after we won the war, yes, she did, she lives here, she - she says I did okay, she says she's proud of me -"

"And she's... okay?"

"She got to watch the strings of fate unravel before Vaire's eyes. Shouldn't she be okay-"

"The reason she died was she swore to kill us when we were a baby,"  Fëanáro says.

"Oh.

Well, Loki gave us all free will. So."

Bella relaxes.

"How'd she do that?"

"She wielded the infinity stones. They might only work for one if you're already epic, I'm not sure. I haven't tried it, if you try and they don't like you they might blow up the planet. Anyway, they're obviously as evil as the Valar but they helped a lot with the war and Loki likes one."

"The infinity stones are obviously evil but she likes one?"

"'as evil as the Valar' doesn't mean, you know, the Enemy, it means 'could have saved the universe and didn't and I'm unimpressed. And this one at least sent her, albeit only because it was bored. I think. When you meet her you can ask."

"The Valar and I did not part on good terms what with all the begging for my life I was doing."

"...they tried to kill you? That doesn't seem much their style."

"They sent me back to Materia. I would've gone quietly to the Outer Lands but they sent me to Materia and they said they'd make sure I was safe but I didn't think they could reliably pull that off and I'm still not sure they did, because they weren't protecting Fëanáro when he came to get me and he didn't get squished so it may be that Materia only cares about science committed in its jurisdiction and I was just careful enough."

"I see. I bet you could talk Loki around to shredding yours, I think she was vaguely disappointed it did not come to that with ours. It wouldn't even take her very long."

"I'm not at all sure that is the route I wish to go with them but I will bear it in mind."

He nods. "Fëanáro, if your mother didn't die then you never got any tedious half-siblings. I did. Four of them."

"Oh."

"I prefer to pretend they don't exist but they had children and their children can't stop clinging to mine."

"Oh."

"You came out ahead on the whole, don't worry."

"I know I did."

"But maybe let's not tell your counterfactual nieces and nephews that," Bella says to small Fëanáro.

"They know they're very boring,"  Fëanor says.

"They must be sad about it,"  Fëanáro says.

"I never really wondered, honestly."

"Many people are perfectly content to be boring and it doesn't intrude on their thoughts much."

"I hope that's true of them, then,"  Fëanor says. "Do you want to come here, Fëanáro? I want to teach you everything you need to know about engineering."

 Fëanáro looks uncertain. 

"Bar says it's guaranteed safe in here," Bella mentions.

"Are you scared of me?"

"Bella won't love me if I grow up to be like you."

"Well, Loki doesn't love me but we're very good friends, she doesn't think I shouldn't exist or anything."

"I didn't say I wouldn't I said I couldn't be sure in advance."

"And she didn't even know the good reasons we had," he says. "I studied it for hundreds of Years but I bet I can teach it to you in much less than that."

And little  Fëanáro jumps into his lap.

Bella plops down at the bar and accepts a milkshake.

An hour later they are still talking a mile a minute.

It's pretty cute. Bella has had Milliways explained to her satisfaction by Bar - they might have to planar shift back to where they left Rúmil and all their books because neither of them is from the universe they're currently living in, but they can do that if need be - and received a book, which she reads while listening with half an ear to the engineering conversation.

Eventually Fëanor concludes that he needs a forge to teach  Fëanáro anything more, and invites him back to the planet the victorious Noldor have settled. And Bella too, if she'd like.

"I would like to make sure we can place an earwire call from there to the plane we're staying in - Bar thinks that should unpause it for the duration of the conversation - so that we can be sure it's not unreachable with wizardry or anything inconvenient like that, before you close the door."

"Okay," he says agreeably. "Fëanáro, you also need to learn algorithms, but you'll pick them up quickly, computers make it trivial..."

"They have those in the world we moved to! They're cool and they do science ethernet."

"They should work everywhere, the principles are very simple and I'm not sure a world where they didn't work would have recognizable physics."

"Well, I wouldn't bet on Materia," says Bella.

"The universe smashing them in annoyance is a different problem."

"It would not surprise me in the least if a non-smashed computer without any special attention from the universe ceased to work in Materia anyway."

"...and I suppose the fact this makes physical laws inconsistent in a way that makes it stupid that leaves are green wouldn't help?"

"I do not think that would help at all."

"Your world is terrible. That's probably why it's taken you longer than Loki to become epic."

"What, how old is she?"

"Coming up on nine hundred, I think?"

"...I'm, like, approaching forty."

"Really? Hmm. Then you'll probably be fine."

"What took her so long?"

"Her people come of age even slower than Quendi in Valinor, and her magic system takes decades to develop anything with. Even once we'd invented a way for her to experience time at three times the rate of everyone around her it took decades of nonstop work to get teleportation."

"Okay, that's a reasonable excuse. And here I freaked out when I noticed Valinor was screwing with my time sense and I'd spent a Valian Year like it was a regular one."

"I left so I could grow up faster."

"That was a very good idea. Shall we test your communication device?"

"Sure, if you'll hold the door I'll call Rúmil."

They hold the doors. He thought of more things  Fëanáro should know about metalworking and says them.

And Bella calls Rúmil on her earwire.

"Hello."

"Hi, Rúmil, we found an interplanar bar with a grownup Fëanáro in it whose version of me is very different and didn't show up until later in Arda's history and I just wanted to make sure his plane isn't too far away from the one you're in for us to get home without the interplanar bar involved!"

"...huh. A grownup  Fëanáro? In the sense you saw?"

"Mostly? His version of me showed up in time to stop him from dying and they won a very important-sounding war. But she only got there after he killed a bunch of people. But they're back now."

"After he'd killed a bunch of people? And she still - oh no -"

"I think it sounds like things are stably okay now? I would ask their me but they don't know what planet she's on at the moment."

"He killed a lot of people and now that they're back things are just okay? I have a bit of a hard time imagining that."

"It did sound more complicated than that, do you want to talk to him?"

"Could I?"

"Hey, Grownup Fëanáro, do you want to talk to our Rúmil?"

"...sure. What's he up to? He came with you?"

"Yeah, he did."

"Hi,"  Fëanáro says. "D'you want the last four hundred years of linguistic development of Quenya because I can just send some papers back with Bella and your me-"

"Actually,' he says, "I was worried about you."

"Don't be, I'm fine. I spent a few decades attempting suicide-by-evil-Vala, in hindsight - at the time I had been calling the impulse 'optimism' - but I had some good people around to catch me and we won."

"I am very glad to hear it."

"Don't trust Melkor."

"Duly noted."

"I have amazing children."

"I do not doubt that at all."

Eventually he hands her back the earpiece. "Thank you.."

"Thank you," Rumil says on the other end.

"You're welcome."

"I think he is all right. I'm not sure he should be, but - I'm glad."

"Interesting way to summarize it."

"What would you have said?"

"...I'm glad a me showed up?"

"All of Arda is deeply grateful for all instances of you."

"It sounds like other me got sort of close to wiping out the Valar and just decided not to, I'm not sure I'd assume it unanimous, but thank you."

"Pfft. Good for her."

Bella giggles. "For getting close or for deciding against?"

"For being in a position to decide, I think. I trust her judgment."

"For all we know she mostly just looks like me," Bella points out, "we're different species and stuff, it's a little different from the Fëanáros."

"Looks like you and apparently became powerful enough to fight the Valar and then decided not to. So at least some common personality."

"Yes, there is definitely that."

"Planning to ask her how she did it?"

"If I get to meet her, yes. She's not reachable right now; I'd give them the earwire to call her but it could be on purpose."

"She might be tired of Fëanáro's double, he seems a bit tiring."

"That is possible but probably not the whole reason?"

"How's our Fëanáro doing?"

"He has learned a lot of engineering and seems all set to learn some more."

Sigh. "And not any mass murder, I hope."

"Has not been part of the curriculum."

"Have fun."

"I will. We're going to meet his children, he has seven. Don't know yet who their mom wound up being."

"... Good for him. I think. Have a lovely time."

"I'll call again if we're not going to be back in a day or so."

"Okay."

Both Fëanáros are watching her impatiently 

End of call. "All done."

"Great, I can get him to a library," says the older Fëanáro, "and you can come see our new world. It's beautiful."

"He might want to steal your library."

"I can get you a copy of all the books," he says, "galactics have very fast book copying."

"I wouldn't steal your books," Fëanáro says.

"You should, if I wouldn't give them to you!"

Bella giggles.

The city is astonishingly pretty, and bigger than Tirion - "we had three hundred Years for the population to grow," Fëanáro says, and at its center is a university rather than a palace.

"Is father the King?"

"Technically," he says dismissively. "Our son is in charge."

Huh.

"Why?"

"I don't really know," he says, "he likes it and it makes him happy. And he's good at it, not that that's hard."

...really now.

"Are our kids smart?"

"They are! Smart and ambitious and brave."

"All of them?"

"Every one."

"Are they all around now?"

"No, Tyelcormo and the twins'll be wandering the galaxy and I think Moryo's off too."

"But the other three we can meet?"

"I expect they'll be very excited."

"Will they like me?" Fëanáro says.

"Of course they will, you're me. And they'll like Bella because she's Loki. Although Maitimo likes everyone so his liking you isn't very meaningful."

"Everyone?"

"Everyone he disliked is dead, anyway."

"Did he kill them?" says Fëanáro.

"No, Loki did."

"At some point I do need to meet her and form my opinion less secondhand," remarks Bella.

"He hated them because they tortured him for years, erased and tampered with his memories, and left him unable to tell reality from sadistic hallucinations. Loki was entirely justified."

"I didn't so much suspect she didn't have a good reason as want to hear the kind of context it will be easier for her to anticipate I might want than it is for you."

"Should I talk to you like I'd talk to her? I can do that, it's just not as interesting to Fëanáro - oh, Fëanáro, I can teach you Asgardian..."

Fëanáro wants to learn Asgardian.

"I don't know how you normally talk to her," Bella says. "We have evidently had really different histories even if it's the same underlying personality, it might or might not even be an improvement. If you're going to talk in Asgardian please translate by osanwë."

"I am not sure how much of temperament is species or nurture or nature," he says, and then switches to Asgardian with an under translation. "We were exiled because of the war, so after it we moved to this planet. Everyone can teleport, but we'd hardly want to visit Valinor."

"Yeah, we aren't going back because the Valar might attempt to have opinions about what worlds we should live in, again, and that would be troubling. We've got earwires so Fëanáro can call his parents."

"If you want to hug them or something they're here," he says, "my set, they'd probably be happy to meet you since they respectively missed or mismanaged my childhood and it was a long time ago anyway."

"Not really."

He nods approvingly.

"Me and Rúmil have been sort of surrogated in."

"If you're much like Loki that should be adequate, I think. Just let him do things."

"They do."

"Then they're fine. If they stop you can always stay here."

Adequate, huh.

"I think we turn out all right no matter what," he says. "Probably not in the world that hates science, but anywhere else. We're smart enough."

"You killed a lot of people."

"And won a war and saved a lot more."

"There is room for improvement."

He sighs.

They enter an astonishing building that appears to have been designed by Elves introduced to steel for the first time. "Maitimo," he says, "there's a dimension where it's still the Year of the Trees 1180 or so, and Loki's counterpart already found me and apparently decided to mother me."

And someone emerges from around a corner, eyebrows raised so high they're lost in his shockingly red hair. "That's a new one," he says, and then sees Bella and Feanaro and - "you know, I was all prepared to bet he was not serious."

"No, here I am," Bella says. "Hi. I'm Bella."

"Maitimo. It's a pleasure," he says, very sincerely. "I expect you'll be happy to hear that your counterpart known to me is a very capable and absurdly powerful person who, to keep her diverted while she invents resurrection, has been ending a millenia-old war between her adopted and birth civilizations. I've been helping. They call her Loki Godslayer."

"That is impressive enough that I will forgive her taking hundreds of years to get around to it."

"No one threw any gods that merited slaying at her for the first few centuries, and I think it's commendable that she waited to find one who really really warranted it. And then ensured no two molecules of him shared the same cubic parsec. Do you want to come in and have something to eat? Miss anything from Tirion? Feanaro, you are going to grow up to be a great man and I think given a little support you will also be a very very good one. Do you want to hear what your counterpart did for the war, beyond being the only one who was willing to call it necessary and call on us to fight it?"

He nods. 

And Maitimo leads them into a brightly lit sitting room that looks out - over a enormous drop - at the countryside.

"I do miss a couple things from Tirion, actually -" She names her favorites of the things she didn't manage to replicate in Materia.

And a few minutes later someone brings a teetering pile of them in, and Maitimo settles himself facing his beautiful countryside view and tells them a child-appropriate history of his world.

Bella takes notes.

He reaches the end of the story and tells, smiling, how Loki made Arda round and fixed all orcs ever.

"I'm not sure why the flat planet bothered her so much. My home planet's round but just sort of incidentally."

"Where she's from there are lots of planets, and all of them round, and also I think to her it reflected the incompetence and excessive power of the Valar."

"I guess that'd do it."

"Anyway," he says, "we'd desperately gathered on the crumbling continent and waited for my father to attempt something impossible again, and then suddenly there was Loki sizzling with Tesseract power and explaining that she'd won the war, was relocating us to a nice planet, and was going to get back all the dead. And then she did. Went home herself, threw a feast in her honor, talked us down from saving the whole galaxy immediately, booked me a honeymoon, and started on her next project.

And you," he says to Feanaro, "Said to your brother 'ruling this planet would be a waste of my time, Father can have the title back and you can have the paperwork', helped us build this city, and then got to work on I think eight different avenues of ending aging everywhere, making a hundred paradises superior to Valinor and getting people there, and possibly evacuating the galaxy if it's ever needed.

What are you two up to?"

So Bella replies with her own history - subtle arts major, subtle arts are this thing, she had a magical accident and landed nearly on top of teeny Fëanáro, got sorta used to Valinor eventually, became a science wizard, discovered the time slide and made necklaces but the Valar broke most of them and she and Fëanáro had to share, invented all these other things, practiced unlicensed therapy because there was no one else available, eventually was kicked back to Materia and kept her head down and finished her degree and got her license and saw patients until her rescue, now they're exploring a science fantasy world which doesn't seem to come with its own magic per se.

"That's lovely," says Maitimo, but a little as if suddenly distracted. "Loki thought I should see a therapist but I've been deflecting her on it; I'm doing my job well, so I have rather little motivation."

"...well, functioning at work is only one reason to want to see one but it's up to you, of course."

"I have a hard time justifying bothering other people for no measurable benefit," he says. "My functioning matters."

"If you don't think there would be a measurable benefit even to you, I can see why you wouldn't invest the time."

"That was carefully phrased," he says with a smile. "I am genuinely undecided but if you want to persuade me it might not help to have any version of my father around - do you want to see the library, Feanaro? - because he likes being supportive by pretending I am not broken and inventing me things to make that more easily done."

"I'm not hugely invested in persuading you, I don't even know what you'd be getting therapy for," Bella says, and she looks to see if Fëanáro will take the library bait.

Fëanáro will take the library bait. They will walk him in the general direction and then he will take off at a run as soon as the library door is pointed at.

"During the time I told Fëanáro that I was indisposed until Loki healed me, I was taken prisoner by the Enemy. I am not sure what I'd be getting therapy for because I have mostly through exhaustive practicing undone the majority of the instincts I came out of the experience with, take drugs for the nightmares, have the panic attacks internally, and don't really mind my new sensibilities about architecture. I like having things around I could jump off if I needed to. I was much worse off before I could teleport but now I mostly feel safe; after a few decades I was able to let people touch me, I really think I came out of it all right."

"...I mean, I can and have treated ex-Enemy-prisoners for panic attacks, there were some even in our Arda era. I can do nightmares too."

"Did they find it helpful?"

"Yeah, I had good reviews. Pity I couldn't count them as clinical practice hours when I went back to school."

"In that case if it's convenient I'd be interested in trying that. Does your world do currency? We can do currency here..."

"My world does currency, so does the one we're living on now but much less - and we can summon stuff from our Valinor as-needed. Don't worry about it."

"All right. If you describe your world to me in enough detail I should be able to visit, this is an interdimensional teleport."

"If by my world you mean the one that would not be an extremely bad idea to visit, uh, what kind of descriptive parameters do you mean?"

"I mean the one where you're staying, though I think I'd be all right in Materia, I - well, I used to have good self-preservation instincts and I am only ambitious when it serves me. And if you can send some images of it, some facts about it - I should ask Loki, she's the one who developed the spell..."

"I definitely cannot guarantee your safety in Materia whatever your self-preservation instincts and ambitious inclinations are like," Bella says firmly. "We're staying here -" Image. "Outside a city that looks like this -" Image.

"That might be enough. I can check." Pop.

And then pop.

"I suppose I should have confirmed we need the same atmosphere and things. But yes, I can find you there."

"I mean, Fëanáro and Rúmil are staying there too, we would have had to go somewhere else if they couldn't breathe."

"Your world's magic seems strictly more flexible and faster than Loki's or ours."

"Wizardry is pretty great especially when you can do science to it!"

"So I'm not at all sure I can pull off whatever you and Fëanáro have. At least until we pick up your magic, but I'll trust that to others, I'm not going to be uniquely good at it."

"We can teach anybody who wants it wizardry. You have to build up your mana reserves to cast much though."

"I can put out an announcement and have some people who are good teachers learn first."

"Sounds good."

"And I'll drag Loki along to see you when I run into her next, I expect she'll be fascinated."

"She'd better be."

"You two aren't - people from different timelines in the same history, like my father and your Fëanáro. You're just - lookalikes with the same personality?"

"I guess? I can't confirm the personality thing except by hearsay, but we definitely don't have the same background."

"Same personality," he says. "I am pretty good at evaluating that."

"What're you picking up on?"

"Ah, ambition, the emotional appeal to you of being able to look at problems and go 'listen up I'm powerful enough to make this stop existing if the rest of you just follow your incentives' and a lot of tendencies that tend to make acquiring that power feasible - beyond ambition, I mean - goal-driven, self-aware..."

"The self-aware thing is a point of pride."

"Loki coped very well with a lot of psychological pressure. I was impressed with her."

"I may not have quite that much resilience against psychological pressure? I don't think growing up in Materia was really good for me."

"The Enemy tried to distract her by torturing her friends and then forcing her to kill them. She was not distracted at all, as far as I could tell."

"...good for her."

"Give yourself a thousand years."

"I'm not sure I'm so much going for 'battle-hardened' as a direction of personal growth."

"I wouldn't call her that, just - hard to manipulate. Impossible to toy with."

"That I do like."

"You'll like her."

"I bet. ...Who's your mother, anybody I might have met in my Arda?"

"Did Father not say? Nerdanel, she's Mahtan's daughter..."

"Oh I met her, awwwwww!"

"They were very good for and to eachother for a long time. The Enemy managed to change that."

"...I have dabbled in family counseling but have no idea if they want me to go anywhere near that."

"She had persistent prophetic dreams that he'd burn my little brother to death. He refused to believe they were prophetic."

"...oh dear."

"Hard on even the happiest of marriages, that. I think they'll work it out eventually. Love survives quite a lot. I've been pleasantly surprised by it."

"Your brother's back like everybody else, right?"

"Yes. They're off conquering some polity, I think - don't worry, it was a really evil polity -"

"...I'll take your word for that."

"You'll have to, your counterpart ended oaths. After Angband I'm charitable towards ventures to end slavery, and my brothers are good at doing it bloodlessly."

"Ended oaths. What, all of them?"

"Yup. I swear before Eru that I am a penguin- does your world have those?"

"Yes. My world has penguins," snorts Bella.

"I miss some things about Oaths, but it saved orcs and prevented many issues, so..."

"Maybe I should get her to do it in my Arda too."

"I think the process was painful and dangerous and it caused considerable grief - it dissolves all marriages.... Depends how many orcs you have."

"I don't know how many."

"I'll raise it with her. Maybe eventually someone else will be worthy of wielding the soul stone."

"It works by worthiness?"

"I think it works by the personal amusement of the artifacts. Father is of the firm opinion they're all evil and I see where he's coming from."

"Yeah, he mentioned that. Evil in a sort of by-inaction way though, lots of things are that."

"Indeed. I don't dislike them. Loki is fond of hers."

"It grants her amazing powers, I think granting me amazing powers is a pretty good shortcut on that."

"I shall keep that in mind."

"Do you have amazing powers to dispense? Are you holding out on me?"

"I have yet to figure out how to bottle it! When I do my father will be the first recipient."

"All right then. - Is it weird for you that my Fëanáro is fairly unlikely to marry our Nerdanel? He's growing up faster than her now..."

"I expect I don't exist in the vast majority of universes, and never lost much sleep over it. Your universe is poorer for its lack of Macalaure but you can import ours from time to time."

"What're we missing?"

"He sings. And composes. You've never heard anything like it. I can send some recordings back with you but they fail to fully capture it."

"They'd be nice to have anyway, I'm sure."

"Coming right up." The wooden desk had a well-disguised monitor. 

"Now the question is how I will play them on a crystal ball or a science ethernet machine if they are from yet a third sort of thing..."

"Crystal balls I cannot help with but if the science Ethernet runs on state machines then these are in principle compatible."

"I do not know very much about how the science ethernet works. Haven't been in the new world for long. It involves electricity and screens and stuff."

"I would not expect there were two nonmagical ways of doing computing."

"Seems like a reasonable guess. We're working on crystal-ball-to-science-ethernet compatibility as one of our few dozen projects."

"How do crystal balls work?"

"Wizardry! They are... not an introductory topic, at least if you mean how they're put together as opposed to how one uses them."

"I mean how they process and store information. But I suppose I shall have to start at my wizardly basics when you give your lecture."

"It'll be just like when I lived in Tirion only without the passive-aggressive lecture followed by debate on therapeutic ethics."

He raises an eyebrow. "How did that come about?"

"I was unsatisfied with the condition of some of the reembodied. So I fixed what I could in anybody who wanted me to and then I wrote up a lecture about my native country's ethical standards for subtle artists and with a revised section around oaths because Materia doesn't have those they were adopted in response and as was intended people noticed Mandos was not meeting the standards... there were protests and reembodiments have been suspended, it was not my best work."

He raises an eyebrow. "Now I want to go visit your Valinor. That is a fight I considered picking many times. I am sort of glad to know it would have gone badly."

"You are welcome to go visit my Valinor if you don't think the Valar will try to keep you."

"Ensuring that Valar could not keep me has been something of an obsession."

"...right. They can pretty much suppress wizardry at will so Fëanáro hasn't been visiting home, but your thing may not have this drawback."

"My thing is now indelibly seared into my head and I don't think it has that drawback."

"Good for you."

"Thank your Loki. Sort of. It took her decades to trust me with it but after the war she was generously inclined."

"Why'd it take so long?"

"It's very powerful, and she didn't want anyone in Arda to have that kind of power. Eventually we convinced her that meant if she died the whole war was lost, and suggested she use oaths to ensure obedience to whatever conditions she cared to name, and she agreed to share it with people oath-bound not to try to reconstruct how it worked or develop new things from it until she died or won the war. And even on those terms she wouldn't give it to my family because she knew we'd teleport to take back something we needed for the war effort. In fairness I don't think she knew how badly we needed it, we were trying to keep its capabilities secret. Invention of Father's. 

I disagreed with her, and said so, and would have gotten through the worst of the suicidality much earlier if I could teleport, and said that too. But she promised once she won the war we could learn it and she did keep that promise."

"...Hm."

"You didn't hesitate to hand my father world- altering power? I suppose he's likelier to listen to you about what to do with it, Loki got on with us but we are hard to characterize as obedient."

"...I recognize you, I think. Before my Valar decided I was too much trouble to be worth it they showed me some stuff. I wouldn't want to hand the oath world-altering power."

"The Oath, if it's the same one, is also made way, way less dangerous with teleportation. 'You have to hurt people if you can't retrieve this' is not a problem well mitigated by making you less able to retrieve things and more able to kill people. And by then we were very good at killing people, though we got very lucky and it all worked out."

"Hm."

"Everyone else read it as her punishing us for the Oath and subsequent catastrophes by giving her powers to everyone else, and as making us provide the needed materials - it was a lot of complicated magic - as a show of power, but I don't think that was her intent or that she was entirely aware it was the result."

"Yeah, I doubt that was what she was going for."

"We only got the Silmarils back with about ten minutes to spare, and if there'd happened to be an earthquake in the wrong place before Findekáno found me we would all have died, but it did work out. And by that point I think that was an acceptable risk to her because she had plans to bring us back."

"I will want to hear her version of this before deciding what I think of it."

"I'm quite sure you'll agree with her, isn't that how this whole thing works? I am really not trying to bias you otherwise; the story I told Fëanáro had no omissions save for softening some of the Enemy's crimes because he's, what, twelve?"

"I will probably agree with her but I don't yet know why I will agree with her. And, yeah, twelveish, although that's going to get confusing to count numerically now he's growing on normal time and not Valinor time."

"The only things I did not share were things that'd give him nightmares or things about my personal life, though during the war it was in fact wholly appropriate for children..."

"Yeah, circumstances force all kinds of revisions of what's appropriate for kids to know."

"Loki was a great adoptive parent of Men."

"That's what the Valar decided I was, a Man."

"It's what you look like! Our Men were born fully grown and were very vulnerable."

"Oh dear. I'm glad she found time to adopt them, that sounds awkward suddenly existing full grown."

"And the Enemy had made a go of adopting them first." He shudders.

"Um. What did he do?"

"As far as we know, not much of anything? He was turning some into werewolves, who are tougher and immortal and mostly think they got a good deal; he was teaching them to sing hymns to Morgoth but they weren't magic hymns, he taught them stonemasonry..."

"...huh. How long did he have them?"

"Three weeks. We expect it would have gotten worse."

"Seems like a good guess."

"So my father authorized a in-hindsight-unwise effort to stop him, and we won, and someone died for me but he's back now and rather scowled at me when I tried to apologize- I think Findekáno coached him..."

"Who's Findekáno?"

A slight squaring of the shoulders. "My husband."

"Ooh, did Arda get more socially progressive?"

"No, no, it didn't. I just, once the war was over, didn't have more reason to care what Arda thought."

"Well, good for you."

"Neither of our parents disowned us. It was a poorly attended wedding party - Loki, Loki's friend - but my father sent a thoughtful present."

"I'm a little surprised your father didn't go..."

"We weren't exactly speaking at the time. My fault. I told him I hated him; he doesn't get over that very easily."

"Oh dear, yeah."

"He didn't mind that it was a man. He's even coming around on it being Findekáno. But I haven't been helping him along any." He shrugs. "I don't really want to maneuver him into it."

"He doesn't like Findekáno in particular?"

"He does not like Findekáno's father."

"Findekáno doesn't like him either." He shrugs. "Someday when I have nothing more interesting to do maybe I'll try to get them to get along."

"Feuding in-laws does not sound like tons of fun."

"They don't feud, they just go out of their way never to be in the same room. There's lots to keep them busy here anyway."

"I guess that's the sort of thing you could reasonably put off till later," agrees Bella.

"And we were expecting much worse reactions."

"Well," she says, "congratulations, anyway."

"Thank you. And congratulations on escaping your worlds' mess."

"I really didn't have anything to do with that unless you count 'letting Fëanáro rescue me'."

"I think you bring out the best in him," he says.

"That's the idea. He was the first person I met, when I landed in Arda, he was so tiny and brilliant -"

He smiles faintly. "He is brilliant. And very vulnerable in a lot of ways and doing right by him can be very hard."

"Bit of a balancing act," she agrees.

"This situation is good for him. Lots of things need inventing and everyone owes their lives to his brilliance and knows it."

"Mine has been having a lot of fun with the science fantasy world we went to. It's very... big."

A fervent nod.

"It sounds like here is also big."

"Some people need a galaxy to not be dangerously constrained."

"Or just unhappily constrained."

"He eventually reacted very badly to realizing he was a prisoner."

"...yeah that happened to mine sooner. First he stowed away to follow me to Tol Eressëa where I was going to develop an anti-time-slide spell, and his parents dragged him back; and then he teleported to the Outer Lands and everyone freaked out and I had to summon him back and he was so mad... and then the Valar booted me and he gave up on Valinor altogether."

"When our Valar made it clear that we would not be granted the means to leave, we had an army behind us and there was a way out and people tried to stop us from taking it."

"Explains some things."

"The thing that remains to demand explanation is why we didn't just wait and invent something, yes? The Enemy had the run of the Outer Lands and orcs reproduce very quickly."

"It is the third greatest regret of my life but it was also so utterly inevitable that I am as angry with the Valar for making it so as with myself for not thinking fast enough."

"Well. I'm sure not the person to go to for a defense of the Valar."

"The other two big regrets can't be pinned on them, except via the Doom."

"The Doom?"

"Did I fail to mention that? The Valar punished us for Alqualonde by damning us to fail in fulfilling our oath, fail in everything we began, and die - "by weapon and torment and grief" - or wish we had."

"Eugh."

"I think Loki's decided Aule is lovely and Ulmo tolerable? But yes, they did a great evil there."

"Aulë was the first one I met and that was back when I was very new to the concept of gods that were not intensely intrinsically hazardous to attract attention from so I don't think I formed a neutral character assessment, just 'sheer terror'. Never had a chance to form a separate opinion on Ulmo."

"It sounds like they wronged you worse than us. I am very sorry."

"Oh, the sheer terror thing wasn't the Valar's fault, that's just a 'grew up in Materia' thing. Aulë didn't actually do anything scary besides be a god at me."

"Eventually they sent you back there!"

"Yes, but I don't know if they were unanimous on that? They didn't argue in front of me but maybe some of them wanted to let me stay or only send me to the Outer Lands."

"I imagine so. But - 

my greatest regret isn't a decision I made, and is in fact one I opposed and feuded to have a part in. And that wasn't enough, I should have figured out how to stop it."

"Maybe some of them are very sorry. I don't know," she sighs.

"I seriously might go speak to them, if they've stopped resurrections."

"Since you've got a way out of the universe that doesn't depend on suppressible wizardry that's maybe a good plan."

"And we're living proof that instances of you can avert fate."

"Good for instances of me."

"Good for everyone. Fate seems to have been ugly. Uglier than things in fact got, actually."

"I think your world got the things I saw except for Fëanáro dying, what else was there?"

"Loki has a dubious acquaintance who says one of the Enemy's more sadistic lieutenants sticks around for eight thousand years. And that I personally take down half of Beleriand in an oath-forced catastrophe, I think. Mind, the acquaintance in question calls me 'Loki's pet Elf' and is not generally a good person."

"...why does the acquaintance call you that?"

"Not sure she thinks we incarnates are people. Loki gets honorary godhood. It is also something the Enemy liked to say of me."

"...that you were Loki's pet Elf?"

"No. His."

"I'm sorry."

"We won. The Enemy is dead and everyone he hurt is back alive."

"I'm sorry anyway."

"There is no power in the known multiverse who can keep me conscious and a prisoner."

"Good."

"My father and I weren't speaking, as I said, but he worked practically without sleeping, on that, for a year after the war."

Nod.

"I didn't believe I'd been rescued for nearly two decades."

"...that's awful."

"The Enemy liked to do - extraordinarily detailed mind games. Scenarios. You'd get rescued and then when he'd learned what he could from whatever you did, you'd wake up. And he could play with memory, refine it if you weren't convinced..."

"I didn't have any patients like that. Maybe they didn't like the idea of applying more mind powers."

"I think I got special treatment. He was definitely planning to do something with me eventually, I was not primarily useful to entertain orcs - or father them -"

"See, I think I'd traumatize a therapist. And needlessly, I mostly have a handle on it."

"I mean, normally I would have done an intake interview and stuff, this was a regular conversation a minute ago and I don't have my therapist hat on."

"I apologize. This is still a regular conversation to me, I forget how bad it sounds."

"Don't worry about it."

"It is unfair to treat you as Loki."

"Were you?"

"... As if you only differed from her in information, I mean. What happened to me bothered her only insofar as it wasn't yet fixed and prevented from happening again."