And when he completes a circle of the right size -

- there appears a man with wings and a tail.

He takes in the scene, glances around, says, "Didn't anybody ever tell you not to draw on the floor?"

He leaps backwards a few feet. He looks perhaps seven or eight. It's a very pretty and intricate drawing for a seven or eight year old, if inadequate as a summoning circle. 

"...no?"

"Oh. Well. Don't draw on the floor. Luckily it's not a disaster this time! But it could've been really bad. You want anything as long as I'm here?"

"What kind of thing? Who are you? Why shouldn't people draw on the floor? Lots of people draw on the floor." His lip is perhaps trembling just slightly. "And I want ships and - and I guess something to kill the Enemy with, and I want my dad not to be dead, and I want the King not to be dead."

That is an unusual wishlist for a child. And lots of people do not draw on the floor. And what language even is this.

"...Sorry, back up, where am I?"

"...Araman? It's one of Valinor's moons."

"I cannot fix dead but I can maybe do ships. Who should I talk to about doing ships?"

"The King? Or one of his sons? Probably? I can call them - my mom can call them - Amil! There's a Maia here and he says he might help with the ships and not to draw on the floor!"

"What's a Maia?"

"Uh, everything that's not an Incarnate like us and not powerful enough to be a Vala? Is that not what you are? Incarnates can't appear out of nowhere and also can't make ships except the slow way and we don't have time for that if we're going to fight the Enemy."

A woman walks in. Mid-twenties, exceptionally pretty, pointed ears. She's in uniform and looks exhausted. She bows to Cam. "Hello. Can I help you?"

"Hi. I believe I have been summoned here from an alternate universe or something."

"Uh. Well. Welcome to Valinor." She says it a little bitterly. "Good luck ever leaving. What makes you think that, and how'd you get into our room?"

"Well, I can normally be summoned, but normally I am summoned to one of two planets or one moon, none of which are named these things. Also it is normally common knowledge that you should not draw on the floor, because you might summon something, as," he gestures at himself, "has happened. Also this language seems etymologically unrelated to any others I know anything about!"

"We're speaking Quenya," she says. "This is Araman, which is one of Valinor's moons. Valinor used to be magically kept in a habitable orbit around a binary star system for the amusement of the Powers but they got into a fight and now we're orbiting a black hole. As far as I know there's one other inhabited planet in the space our ships can explore, and the Powers have probably now taken their war there. So we're going to stop them. And it's twenty-five years' travel from here without ships that can leap light and we have ships that can do that but we do not have enough of them. Is that most of what you'd need to know? We can feed one more mouth, probably, but we don't have the means to get you home."

"...you don't have to worry about feeding me," Cam says, making a pitless cherry and popping it into his mouth, "or for that matter anybody else if you want my help with that, and while I suspect you could send me home I don't know if you want to, because sometimes people do draw on the floor to purposefully summon demons and we're very useful."

She watches. She blinks. "I should get Prince Nelyafinwe."

"That's why I called you," says her son. "Can I've a cherry?"

"Sure." Cam gives him a cherry.

He delightedly eats the cherry. The woman goes to a screen in the wall and says rather levelly that she has an urgent message and possibly a solution to at least three of the pressing supply problems and could Prince Nelyafinwe come here as soon as convenient please. Then she sits there.

"You said you were a demon? What's that?"

"Demons are one of the three kinds of daeva. Demons make things, angels change things, fairies move things. Daeva are also indestructible and summonable."

"That's - useful. And you were summoned? Somehow?"

"Yeah. This is not a good summoning circle and this could have been an unqualified disaster and no one should try summoning any more daeva by replicating this floor-drawing or doing more untrained floor-drawings, but kiddo over there completed what turns out to have been a valid summoning circle and here I am."

She glances at it. "That's pretty, Tása."

"Thanks," he says. He's eating his cherry very very slowly, still wide-eyed. 

"I take it the reason not to do it again is that were a demon less sociably inclined they could create things like a sun or a black hole?"

"Right in one."

"And people do it on purpose? Or are demons very well-reputed?"

"Demons are actually very poorly reputed, in comparison to angels and fairies. But a well-done circle can prohibit antisocial behavior, this just isn't such a circle."

"...can I please have another cherry?" Tása says. "If it's not too much trouble?"

"It's no trouble at all." Cam makes him a whole bowlful and the bowl.

His eyes widen. His mother turns to watch him expectantly.

"I can give everyone a cherry," he says triumphantly. "Thank you! Thank you so much! Mom I have so many I have to share - everyone's hungry -" And he takes the bowl and races out the door. 

"Do you want me to just go conjure up a feast somewhere or what."

"If it's not too much trouble we'll probably want that," she says. "No one's starving, we're just on half-rations because it's not obvious when we'll next be somewhere that can grow food - losing the Suns was a catastrophe on a scale we hadn't really prepared for... I expect the King'll want ships first and then food can be sorted while we're in transit, and weaponry once we land...we should give you something, but if you can make things it is not obvious what kinds of gifts we can give you..."

"One of the perennial demon-summoning problems. I happen to be an unusually altruistically inclined demon but the standard currency is ideas - media recommendations, usually."

"Oh, good, so we can just give you complete recordings of everything Macalaure's ever done - do we even need to give it to you - and that's just compensation even for a fleet of light-leaping ships, I think." She shakes her head. 

"You do not need to actually give it to me, just knowing what to grab is enough," Cam says.

"Prince Canafinwe Macalaure. Ah, start with the third symphony, I suppose, if you're starting somewhere. He's astonishing."

"Thanks." Cam conjures up his computer and makes a note of this and then clips it to a belt loop, tail aswish.

She watches him with fascination. And then - "oh, good, he's here."

And someone else walks in. Even taller, even prettier, with elaborately braided bright red hair that's barely the worse for the wear from the helmet he's pulling off. She bows again and he shakes his head at her. "There's neither time nor space," he says, "and it's I who should be honored anyway. How are you holding up? Maitimo," he offers Cam, taking in the wings and tail. "And what's going on?"

"Cam, pleased to meet you," Cam says. "I am a summonable demon and I have been accidentally summoned into an alternate universe suffering from what sound like extremely demon-meliorable supply problems!"

"He can create things. Any things."

He raises an eyebrow. "Well. In that case I am very very pleased to meet you and we definitely have demon-meliorable supply problems. What level of specification do you need to create things?"

"I can copy things I can identify sufficiently well; I have to know more about what I'm doing if I'm making inexact copies; for a book I usually want title and author, say, but I can sometimes make do with substitute information; I don't expect to have any trouble with 'Canafinwë Macalaurë's third symphony'."

"You have dreadful taste," says Maitimo to the woman, "I shall insist until the heat death of the universe that the seventh is the best one to start with. Wait, I suppose we might not need to worry about the heat death of universe anymore. In that case I'll insist even longer. There are ten so far," he adds to Cam. "I can ask him to compose another for you, if you win us this war."

"Gosh. Uh, my standards of knowing what's going on for war-winning are substantially higher than same for giving a kid a bowl of cherries."

"Good," he says earnestly, "I'd be alarmed if they weren't. Can you access our data systems?"

"I would be astonished if there were preexisting compatibility between my information tech and yours."

"'Maitimo's personal computer, and a copy of his mind-signature,' isn't enough specificity? Or do you avoid that on principle, I really shouldn't try to goad you into it..."

"I mean, I could make your computer but I would not know how to operate it unless it's very intuitive. Mind-signature?"

"You don't have one, I just thought you were blocking us. Perhaps in your universe there's no hardware for it. How do you communicate mind-to-mind, or do you not?"

"...We don't. That is not a thing."

"Ah. It is a thing for us. I suppose if you're indestructible it wouldn't be necessary. Care to come back to my ship? There are people I can put to the data compatibility question who'll sort it very quickly and I can explain everything in the meantime."

"Sounds like a plan."

"There are two ways to get to Endore from here," he says while they walk. "One is to just fly it in standard ships. That'll take - I don't know if our years are the same length - a Year for us is the length of time required for the Suns to cycle seventeen hundred twenty eight times - we use the distance light travels in a year as a unit of measurement for this kind of thing -"

"Light-years are a measurement I'm familiar with but the years are different years." He pulls up a clock on his computer. "Smallest increment's a second, sixty seconds a minute, sixty minutes an hour, twenty-four hours an Earth day, three hundred sixty five Earth days a year. Really precise comparisons may need to await data compatibility."

"Probably. Anyway, Endore's more than two light Years from here and by then we're terrified for the civilian population of the planet, it won't take the Enemy that long to crush them based on what was most recently communicated of their capabilities. And we don't have the supplies for it. So now we have a few light-leap ships and those can do it in a week, but we're short on them. And control of them has become politically contested. If there are enough for everyone I think that'd solve more than half our current problems - food's not a problem either if we'll be on Endore in a week."

"Okay. So, my world does not have faster than light travel - except of information via demonic conjuration - and I won't be able to help you with this if the ships run on magic, antimatter, or some other category of thing that I have as a hard power limit. But if they're just made of stuff I can make stuff in ship shapes."

"They're not magic. I don't think there's such a thing as magic, I doubt even the Powers run on magic. I can get you blueprints. I don't understand how they work myself - if I had, none of this would have happened..."

"Blueprints or an actual ship to copy work fine. I don't have to understand them. I'm technically magic but I can't make magic things."

"I wonder what you can do with things that only work in Valinor because the Powers set it up that way, like music having 'magical' effects. I very much wonder if you can copy a Silmaril, actually, come to think of it - I can't get you blueprints of those but I can pull up a picture -"

He glances at a screen behind him and up pops a picture of what looks like a very large faceted gemstone.

"What's it do?"

"A lot of things but we could put it in orbit and relight the world, most notably, it can output arbitrary amounts of light. It can heal - they can in fact be weaponized, if you want to wait on it until I have explained the war..."

"Yeah, if they're not urgent on an amount-of-time-it-takes-to-explain-the-war scale."

"I do not think it should take too long to explain the war. A while ago the Quendi - our people - awakened on Endore. Awakened, we weren't born - we're a created race, not an evolved one. The Valar say that Eru created us and I've never heard another explanation. I've also never met Eru or heard anyone who wasn't a Vala credibly claim to have met him.

The Valar are very powerful, I do not know exactly how powerful, and they had at one point put Endore together as a site for Eru to put his creations. By the time we came along they'd gotten bored of it - or frustrated - it turned out disastrously, you know how design by committee goes - and built Valinor instead. One of them stayed behind on Endore. We call him Moringotho."

Cam takes notes. They're not in the local alphabet because his computer doesn't know it yet; he transliterates.

"The Valar have one notable limitation; they cannot create thinking conscious beings. Moringotho wanted to find a way around this. So when the Quendi appeared he kidnapped us and conducted various biological experiments, and used some to bring to term children engineered to his own specifications, and in this manner bred his own race, orcs. Also lots of other horrifying monsters but to my knowledge orcs are the only one of those to be created from people rather than from animals. He also enslaved lots of Quendi for manual labor until he had enough orcs for that, and after that he just tortured prisoners for fun.

He also hated the Sun and kept the planet shrouded in volcanic ash, which might also have prevented the other Valar from perceiving him; that's unclear to me. 

Eventually they found out. And they fought him. The war shattered four of the planet's seven continents, and left large swathes of the others uninhabitable. They won, and took him prisoner. When the fighting ended, the Valar offered the Quendi a place to live in Valinor, and many of us took them up on it. Several generations were born in Valinor; I was. And then they offered him parole.

Everyone was skeptical, obviously, but the alternative was holding him prisoner for the lifetime of the universe, so - only moderately skeptical. We'd also grown up in paradise and were a bit naive. And for ninety Years it seemed to be going well, but he was secretly working on a number of ways to undermine us, and they came to fruition when he put out the Suns, assassinated the King, stole the Silmarils, and fled for Endore. Where one assumes he's starting the same thing again, and Eru put other creations besides the Quendi on Endore - Dwarves, Men, Ents, there's probably some I'm missing. So we decided to leave and go stop him."

"'No minds' is a limit I have too. I can make animal bodies but they're never smarter than, like, bugs."

"...I don't think you're the same kind of thing as the Valar but I suppose it is technically not impossible. Except they usually don't take physical forms at all."

"I am definitely a demon," he says, "there are lots of us and we all have physical forms."

"I mean, more, perhaps the Valar are demons and all of their non-making-things abilities are advanced technology? But that wouldn't explain the ability to abandon physical forms at will - though if you're not backed up anywhere - are you backed up anywhere? Are the backups indestructible?"

"I am not backed up, I'm just indestructible as-is."

"Convenient. Most likely the Valar aren't demons, then, which is too bad because we'd have a new avenue on figuring out how to kill one. I am guessing you'll next want to verify everything I said about the murdering and experimenting and torturing and putting out the Suns? I'm not clear on which of those things you'd find objectionable."

"They all sound pretty bad, but yes, I'd like to verify."

"I can swear to it but if you don't have telepathy and you don't have backups at a guess you don't have Oaths. You'll have to wait on data compatibility."

"I can incidentally do data conversion, if you want to name me files, although for that to really get anywhere I'll have to program my computer to handle your language and that'll take a little while. What I can't do is make it talk directly to your hardware."

"Can you get the major news sites' coverage from Elenya the 129th of 1495? That'd do it for the putting out the Suns and assassinating the King, and the transcripts of the parole hearing of Melkor in 1400 should do it for the rest."

"You'll have to name me the major news sites," he says, starting to input Quenya glyphs into a fontmaker on his computer.

"You can't go, like, ranking of Valinor news sites by pageviews in 1494? Ah, maybe - " and he names several. 

"I could make the entire internet of Valinor and go sifting through it; if I want anything specific I have to know what it is." Notes notes back to fontmaking.

"It is a good thing that we are used to paradise and don't have any state secrets," he says, frowning, "that seems extremely exploitable."

"Yeah, I am a terrible infosec hazard, it's a thing."

"It's convenient at the moment. I think this war is about as justified as any war has ever been and I'd like you to be able to verify that as quickly as possible."

"Won't be long now, you don't have that many letters."

"We don't. Everything's spelled exactly as it sounds, too. We took good care of the language."

"Oh, I could live with irregular spelling, fluency comes with the summons."

"Can you do me a big favor and not mention that to the King? He'll spend the next three weeks picking your brain on every language you know and I need him for some things."

"...isn't he going to want to know how I came by Quenya?"

He shrugs helplessly. "You'll probably have to cop to at least one additional language, maybe two, but he'll pick up those in a few days. If you speak thirty or something our brightest mind will be out of commission for the next Year."

"...it's more than that."

"So please save that for if we need to peacefully remove my father from power, don't mention it outright."

"I really don't know how I'm supposed to explain speaking Quenya then!"

"On your world, everyone speaks - pick one. When you get summoned you get that language. Since you got summoned here you got Quenya. If you get summoned by a Vala you'd get Valarin. He'll demand to know how he can become a demon but I won't have to rule for a decade while he's becoming fluent in more than thirty languages he'll never need and then writing books about their linguistic evolution."

"This will involve blatant lies about how mortals in my world work, let alone the linguistic habits of daeva."

"On your head be it, then. Don't say you weren't warned."

"I'm just not sure I'll be very convincing if I tell him yep, everybody in my world speaks English all the time, pay no attention to the etymology behind the curtain - might be easier to pass off Chinese -"

"Everyone who's summoned you, right? And I'll trust you on what would be convincing - it's just - the King's murder was very much orchestrated to make a point to my father, and the Enemy very much succeeded in making that point, and my father's very easily distracted by intellectually intriguing things anyway, but this is going to be a lot of politics as well as a lot of engineering and language-learning, figuring out how best to protect Endore."

"I'll steer around it best I can," Cam sighs.

"Thank you. I won't be annoyed if you don't. I can't actually think of much you'd do short of hurting my people that would annoy me, these ships will change everything and a faster arrival will save hundreds of thousands of lives."

"Y'know, I never get to do the saving hundreds of thousands of lives thing anymore and it's been grating on me."

"Winning the war would save - I don't know the current population of Endore but plausibly billions. We can't claim all that benefit just from arriving a little faster, though.

We're about ten minutes out from our destination, what else should I cover? Political structure, enemy capabilities, timeline of the recent mess..."

Cam informs his computer of another Quenya glyph. "Anything you haven't mentioned I should stuff onto this chip?"

"The Valar are really furiously angry with us with reasonably good reasons and we're exiled from here, that doesn't change the strategic picture much but I suppose is worth mentioning. They've also suggested they'll delay reembodiments for a few Ages, which means we're more hesitant to risk our lives than we ordinarily would be."

"What is a reembodiment?"

"We're not indestructible. So the Vala of the Dead, Mandos, keeps a backup of everyone's mind in the Halls and if we die he can build us a new body and reinstall our minds and we can return. It's the same hardware that gives us telepathy and Oaths, which is why I inferred you didn't have the latter from the absence of the first two."

"...huh. Do you have copies of your own backups?"

"No, just Mandos. Special Vala privileges - could you make them."

"Can't do minds. ...Although I don't actually know how that applies to pure data-based minds, if they're that."

"I think they are? The Valar gloss their own abilities as magic - well, as divine power - but lately we've gotten skeptical. I'd be reluctant to hand you a copy of my mind anyway, that's very very abuseable."

"Oh yeah. Anyway, if I try to make a person, I get the body, and it'll be alive, and breathe, and stuff, but it will be disturbingly stupid."

"...and if you then instantiated the mind from backup..."

"No idea! We don't do backups, even the mortals."

"...so they just get annihilated if they die? That's kind of awful."

"Oh, no, they go to Limbo. It's not exactly nice there but they're indestructible as daeva, just no snazzy magic powers besides that and a really boring world."

"That's interesting. As far as we know if we're destroyed and all our backups are destroyed we stop existing. But we also did not know daeva existed."

"...uh, also, people who summon daeva get to be daeva when they die instead, and I have no idea how that would interact with backups."

"Uh.

That would be worth testing if we could get a volunteer but I am not sure I'd feel comfortable asking anyone to volunteer." He gestures ahead. "That's our technical support ship - by which I mean it's where my father and my technically-inclined brothers have been working - and I bet they'll have compatibility working in what-would-have-been-a-day-when-this-system-had-Suns."

"Cool. You never did say if I should stuff anything else onto the chip I'm going to conjure up, now that my computer can handle Quenya?"

"What else would you want? I can name history books, political history books - there's not much about the Enemy's capabilities, the Valar like to have their powers be vague 'we are gods' type things - a family tree might come in handy..."

"...eh, maybe it should wait until I can tell you in local terms how much data storage I can fit on one of these things, I just try to be in the habit of not making anything unnecessary because I don't have getting-rid-of-stuff powers." He makes a chip and tucks it into the computer.

And he tells his family over osanwe what's going on and please stay focused on the war effort demons have lots of interesting implications but most of them can wait a week. 

The interestingly implicated demon follows where he is led, reading his reading material.

And this ship is of the same design, with more monitors, all of which are full of diagrams and tables of numbers, and a number of men who are very obviously all related. Maitimo bows. "Father. Cam, who can make things. Arbitrary things, but not people or antimatter or things that don't obey the laws of physics."

"Hello," he says. "Where are you from and where'd you learn Quenya?"

"Got it when I was summoned," Cam says. "It's very pretty. I live on a planetoid with a personal gravity well generated by a black hole, commuting distance from the major demonic population center on an enormous stupid plane of solid gold."

"I assume there's some context that would make that make more sense."

"There is an infinite naturally-empty-vacuum expanse full of people who all have the same powers as me, we're called demons, it got really tacky really fast. We are summonable. So are two other kinds of magic winged people, angels and fairies, who respectively change and move stuff where demons make it."

"And you were summoned here? How?"

"Kid was drawing on the floor. That is very unsafe to do without knowing what one is doing, by the way, please do not have people drawing on the floor, you're lucky you got me."

"Unsafe how?"

"Well, normally one summons daeva, especially demons, with bindings so we can't do whatever we happen to want to do. My circle had none, so I can do whatever I happen to want to do. I happen to want nice things. Many demons - especially of the subset who bother answering summons, it's voluntary - would not."

"I don't suppose strategically leaking this so the Enemy tries it is a good idea -"

"Endore ends up in a black hole," Maitimo says, "or worse, the demon thinks the Enemy's charming."

"Yes, yes, I know. Which means we have to be cautious of unstrategic leaking. Who knows?"

"Me," Maitimo says, "Tasárinon and Alyanne, who I've told not to tell anyone though Tasárinon shared his cherries, and Cam. I'm sure of them. I didn't look carefully at the circle and couldn't reproduce it. Should I have it erased? Cam, is that safe?"

"Erasing it is safe, that exact collection of lines will not work twice but redrawing it would."

Maitimo's expression flickers. "Alright, I told them to erase it. If there's video to their rooms that could have caught it, erase that too. Are you stuck here, Cam? I imagined erasing it might send you home."

"Oh, no - the summoner can send me home on purpose, and if he dies, that does it too, those are the ways."

"If he dies without a backup?" asks Feanor. "And how does he do it on purpose, if he's a child of twenty might he do it carelessly?"

"Summoners at home have no backups so no clue. He'd have to focus for a minute on wanting me gone, difficult but not impossible to do by accident. He's twenty? How slow do you people grow?"

"A sun like Endore's -" he calls it up on the monitor - "yellow, medium-sized - will have a lifespan of a billion years, does that establish for you roughly the length of a year? We take fifty of those to grow up."

Cam does some arithmetic on his computer. "Factor of about ten compared to my years. Wow that is a painfully long childhood. I'm only a hundred and seventy-two in Earth years."

This wins him a fierce grin. "I found it unpleasantly long, yes. I think Valinor slows it. He'll age faster in the Outer Lands. We stop aging at a hundred."

"Humans do not stop aging until they die of it, but daeva and Limboites - dead humans in the afterlife - look like young adults, which is to say early twenties."

"Fascinating. Now for the arbitrary amounts of matter - can you do a hundred ships like this one? I have blueprints here. Fuel and supplies for them? A city once we land? Weapons - does your world fight wars habitually enough to have weapons? We don't, and are at a bit of a loss."

"Yes to all of the above on a conceptual level, I will want more war-related information before I help you win it."

"I'm surprised Maitimo didn't tell you-"

"They don't have Oaths," Maitimo says, "so I did but he'll need to read things he retrieved himself to verify it and not everyone reads as quickly as you."

"I read pretty quick but I've barely started," Cam nods.

"In that case perhaps I should let you orient yourself," he says, "while we plan how we'll do the ships if we aren't short anything we need - and stop wasting half our time figuring out how to save on fuel - I can take a look at making your data systems compatible with ours, that should at least be interesting."

"Sure, what do you need to do that?"

"Documentation, if you have it. Are your computers binary state machines, at least - if they're not binary they can be made that way, if they're not state machines I'm not even sure we mean the same thing by 'computers' -" he flutters through some screens and names some more things. 

"They are binary!" Cam confirms. "Name a format and I can get you specs for the kind I'm using, though my computer doesn't have enough Quenya to translate into it so that'll have to be done manually."

"Oh, don't translate, I'll figure it out, what language are they written in?"

"Lemme check - uh, Lagalann."

"Great! Then that, plus if we can speak in Lagalann for a few minutes I'll have enough to go off."

"Format?" Cam prompts. "What d'you want me to say in Lagalann?"

"Paper, since you're not wasting resources on it? Best kind of file security, at least when one isn't dealing with demons. I'd like the sentences 'This person speaks Lagalann, an unusual child speaks no Quenya, that man hesitantly speaks Lagalann, he speaks Lagalann, speak Lagalann, I once spoke Lagalann, I have occasionally spoken Lagalann, I speak Lagalann over there, I speak Lagalann when I'm over there..."

Cam hands him a book and starts repeating the sentences in Lagalann.

"''I read'? 'I understand'? 'I see'? And the alphabet?"

Cam hands him an alphabet and repeats the sentences.

"Would these be right? 'I see a child speaking Lagalann? I understand that the child is speaking Lagalann, when I don't understand Lagalann?' Who designed this alphabet?"

"Yes, those are right. I don't know who designed it, some demon I guess."

"Is it your native tongue? 'I see where Lagalann is spoken? I no see where Lagalann is spoken?""

"It's one of the more common demon languages. I don't see where Lagalann is spoken."

"I don't see where the child is? I don't understand what the demon understands? There are others? What are those?"

"Yes and yes. I don't have a complete list on hand, there's billions and billions of demons inventing languages willy-nilly," says Cam, "and I don't know of anyone who's put together a comprehensive list of what they all are."

He sets down the paper. "How do I get to where you're from? No one's put together a list? Are there lists of all the demons? Could you go 'language notes by this demon' for every demon on this list?"

"Only demons can be where I am from. I'm sure there are lists but I don't know where to find a comprehensive one, especially if you want conlangs or whatever. There is definitely not a complete census, and I think 'language notes' is not specific enough, I'd have to do 'complete works' and filter from there manually."

"How do I become a demon, then? 'dictionary'? 'file'? 'computer'? 'hardware'?"

His sons are quietly giggling.

"I cannot give you reliable information on how to become a demon, because the only procedure besides 'be a demon to begin with' is 'summon something, die, happen to become a demon instead of an angel or a fairy' and I don't know how it interacts with your universe of origin, species, backups, or anything else that may be operative. Dictionary file computer hardware."

"Then I'll have to find another way to get to where demons live," he says, "I'm sure there is one. This is a book about computers spoken in Lagalann?"

"Written in Lagalann," corrects Cam.

"This is a book about computers written in Lagalann. This is a book about computers written in Quenya. This is a book about computers spoken for a child who cannot read. I have enough Lagalann vocabulary to start on the book about computers?"

"Well, you could try, it does have plenty of diagrams, but I don't think we've covered most of the words in it."

"'interrupt'?"

"Interrupt."

"I can interrupt you while you read of Moringotho, I read of computers in Lagalann, question vocabulary."

"Yeah, sure, I can give you words while we're reading."

"If you would speak in Lagalann I would learn 'faster'. And I'll do that."

"Sure but if I speak in Lagalann I'll have to retrace half what I say to fill you in. Word you're looking for is 'faster'."

"I learn faster than demons, you don't have to retrace half what you say to fill I in."

"Fair enough. 'Fill me in'."

"I'll read and you can fill me in when I don't understand vocabulary. And read about Moringotho. 'the war'?"

"The war."

And he turns to the book. He interrupts frequently at first, then less so. 

Cam goes through his reading material.

After a while he has more requests for documentation. 

Which he provides.

"Do you need anything else to make up your mind about the war?"

"It'd be nice to have more reason to believe that this is all from a free press and so on but I'm definitely willing to at least make you ships and food and a city and suspect over the course of doing all that I will have more opportunities to learn things on a less explicitly you-tell-me-stuff level."

"'Thank you'? And you could look up enough to confirm that Oaths work and then request one, though I'm content waiting."

"Thank you," Cam translates. "It's implausible that you'd have been able to curate enough stuff for me to conjure up with a consistent picture of oaths but that implausibility relies on your information technology not being too much more ridiculously advanced than mine, and yours can do mind backups, which mine can't."

"Fair enough. I expect we'll be attacked immediately on landing; can I expect you'll help if we are?"

"What kind of help do you have in mind?"

"This ships aren't meant for fights. If they come under fire they will fall apart and the people in them will die."

"Well, do you have designs for more defensible ones or do you just want me to try to surround an entire fleet of ships in keratin or what?"

"There has never been a war in Elven history. I can sit here and design a more defensible one if it's worth the time lost on the other side, or we can switch ships to something better once we've leapt light. I assume this is a solved problem in places that have wars."

"Yeah, I can put you all in something armored up, what are you going to be shot at with?"

"Orcs definitely don't have light-leaping, definitely do have rocketry, I'm not sure what weapons lie in that range because again we didn't go through the ordinary technological path here."

"Anything radioactive? Can you quantify approximate explosive yield? What are they going to be using to detect you in the first place?"

"Perhaps we should send some autopiloted ships in first and see."

"Yeah, sure, I can get you drones."

"Thank you. Do you require sleep? Shelter I assume you can do."

"I can sleep but I can also just drink lots of coffee forever!"

He looks wildly envious. "Sometime you'll have to tell me more about how one becomes a demon."

"Some asshole shot me, that's how."

"I cannot describe how much I'd prefer it to Mandos. And Mandos isn't going to make me a new body."

"If the body is the only missing piece I can cover you on that."

"Can you try that. My father's dead - if you could reembody him before the Valar bother..."

"I can try; however, mindless bodies are pretty unpleasant to be around if you're not used to them and I don't know how you're planning to load a mind into it..."

"You'd need to copy it from Mandos. Can you do that with just a name?"

"Assuming no version control problems, should do, but how are you going to actually get it into the body?"

"...don't know. I always assumed it happened automatically once the chip that does osanwe and the backups and everything is in place."

"I can try this but I cannot guarantee that result, not knowing how your cyborg implants work. My 'no minds' hard limit has not been tested on software storage but may apply to it too. Also, Mandos will still have his copy."

"Mandos doesn't torture them or anything, it's wanting my father alive more than not wanting him dead...also I think Mandos would find the situation objectionable and wouldn't run his copy, at least."

"Like I said I'm willing to try it. What kind of substrate are the backups on, do you want me to just conjure both things in this room...?"

"Can you conjure our chip first, with his mind on it? They look like - let me look up some books for you, actually -"

"You have a way to check to see if it's a mind and not mysteriously-a-nonmind?"

"Not until you put it in, no - not if the difference doesn't show up in the code anywhere -"

"So what's the advantage of conjuring it that way first?"

"Oh, I suppose if you can just do it in the body that'd be even better..."

"Should be able to. Lemme have some more details about how these things work so I don't have to do it twice because there's something I didn't know and copy conjuration couldn't patch."

He pulls up a visual. "It's here. We call them thought-catchers. If it's not destroyed one can actually just reconstruct the body around it but if it's destroyed you need Mandos - and you need a Vala anyway, we can't create even unthinking bodies."

"Okay. So, your father's thought-catcher as last extant undestroyed and his body around it at - when, does it matter?"

"Not the moment of death, hopefully. Any time in the three hundred Years before that should look the same."

"Cool, can do. Clothes?"

"That could be what he was wearing when he died, when last not damaged."

"Okay. Right here right now?"

"Yes." His face is set. 

And now there is a basement dweller Elf cyborg on the floor. It is not smart enough to blink, and doesn't.

"...Sorry," Cam sighs.

He stands there a bit fixedly. One of the men stands up and hugs him. "I had a thought on file format compatibility," he says firmly, and then expands on it, and after a minute Feanor volunteers an objection. Maitimo picks up the unmoving Elf cyborg. "Thanks for trying," he mutters to Cam. 

"You're welcome." Dammit he couldn't just luck into a world where everyone was CONVENIENTLY RESURRECTABLE no that would have been too nice.

"Bit crowded in here, want to go across the hall to my office and read or search from there with my credentials? There are a lot of people I need to inform of this."

"Okay."

He hands the body to some very confused-looking people first. They leave without asking any questions, or at least any audible ones. 

"Sorry," Maitimo says, when they're in the room across the hall, glaring his screen to life.

"I knew it probably wasn't going to work. There's no principled reason for 'no minds' and therefore no reason to expect it wouldn't apply to software minds."

"It doesn't make any sense at all. As a limitation."

"I know! I mean, I'm mostly glad we have it - Hell works as a society because everyone in it is indestructible, if we could just make squishy humans some people would and things would get potentially very fucked up very fast - but sense, no, none of that."

He raises an eyebrow. "Demons would mistreat incarnates if they could, you think?"

"Most demons, no! Some demons yes. Demons vary and there are lots and lots and lots of us."

"Quendi vary! But that, I think, none of us." He briefly looks troubled. "Well, if it's preventing great evils then it's not worth whatever benefits it'd have for us and it's not a good idea to find a way around it."

"I mean, I wouldn't have to go tell everybody," Cam says.

He raises an eyebrow. "I suppose not. Then we'll try thinking of ways around it - if you get the data and we press the metaphorical start button..."

"Maybe, yeah. Uh, do mind your infosec on that, I can translate you a handbook on how to security-by-obscurity And Other Ways To Keep Demons Out Of Your Data."

"Noted. Very much. We don't bother with audio recording, since usually we do everything with telepathy, so there's no records of any experiments here that aren't put to writing."

"Yeah that's gonna make it harder. I'll translate you the handbook anyhow." He pulls it up on his computer. "We can convert but not automatically decrypt, that's a big one."

"We don't have encryption except as a sort of theoretical math field. Valinor."

"...maybe I should actually program some Quenya into my computer so it can autotranslate if there's going to be so many things to want to do that with. Uh, can you name me a good varied text corpus with, like..." Arithmetic. "Maybe a quadrillion words for my software to chew on?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Can you pull up the palace library catalogue? Founded in 1251, it has my father's name at the top..."

"And that'll be about the right amount?" Cam tries to make it fit onto one chip.

"I honestly am not sure. I know how much we spend on the library but not how many words are in all the books. Father could tell you, not because he memorizes trivia but because he'd guess words-per-book and books-per-Year and get an astonishingly close estimate, but mine'll be way off."

"Fermi calculations: they're great." Chip! Success! He tucks it into his computer and fires up some computation and starts translating stuff so it has known plaintext.

"Should I leave you to it and go notify various people of your existence in order of how offended they'll be I haven't done so already? I can stay if you need other media suggestions or anything."

"I think I have enough to go on for a while," Cam says.

"Lovely. Later. Thank you very much for everything."

"You're welcome."

And he translates things and reads and he sips coffee.

And Maitimo's back a few hours later, having told people relevant bits and pieces of the things they're going to need to know - Cam's probably going to be annoyed to realize how disputed the Kingship is, but nothing they've asked of Cam is actually particularly political - avoids people he doesn't think he can talk to right now, can't find Findekano, returns nibbling on stale lembas. "I forgot to ask, do you know enough to be happy trying to replicate a Silmaril before we leave orbit here?"

"Erm, hang on a sec -" Searching library corpus for 'Silmaril'...

"There will not be anything in there about how to weaponize them, or even the fact that they're weaponizable, Father invented them and he's the only one who'd know how to do it."

"Oh. Well, that doesn't help," Cam says. "I haven't even made you ships yet, though, when do you want those?"

"If I hadn't said they were weaponizable you'd have no way to tell," he says, "all the articles are just about what an astonishing work of art they are and about how they could be used to restore light to the world. We have a lot cleared for the ships whenever you're ready."

"Yes," says Cam, "and I appreciate that so much that I'm not going to rigorously check your ship designs for weaponizability. Now's fine."

So they walk outside. One of Maitimo's brothers joins them with a handheld screen full of blueprints. Araman has just-tolerable atmosphere and is cold and windy and ugly. 

Well, Cam doesn't want to breathe this crap, and the Elves shouldn't have to either. Air, nice air. He can do that while he looks over the blueprints.

They are not obviously weaponizable. They have lots of things he hasn't seen before. 

Well, this will not impede his ability to make as many of them as they want.

They want a hundred. They fill up the empty space in front of them. Maitimo and his brother watch delightedly. "Thank you," Maitimo says fervently when Cam's done. "I'll get people moving, we can leave in two days."

"You're welcome!"

"And now you can give anyone else light-leap ships, too, am I right? Or would that not be much good since they wouldn't know how to fly them?"

"I mean, I'm sure they could figure it out."

"Oh, good." And then suddenly the smile vanishes from his face. There are a couple people walking across the grounds towards them. Two guards in the uniform Cam's already seen, and one man in distinctly different colors. Maitimo's brother sighs. 

"Hm?"

"We should go in," Maitimo says. "The air out here isn't very good for us."

"Bullshit," says Cam.

Findekano this is not the time. 

Forgive me for not taking your word for it, but last time I just wholeheartedly trusted you thirty thousand people ended up dead. 

Do you want a Silmaril in orbit around Valinor when we leave or not because this is how you get not and I can explain later why. 

How hard is 'I don't take your word as law anymore' to understand?

To Cam it just looks like they are glaring at each other. And then the newcomers arrive. "Cam," Maitimo says wearily, "this is my cousin Findekano. Findekano, Cam made the ships."

"I gathered that."

"I tried to find you with the full explanation but you weren't around so I gave it to Turukano."

"Same kind of full explanation you presumably gave Cam?"

"Cam can read the internet," he says, "I couldn't keep anything from him if I wanted to."

"It's a big internet."

"I started with everything about the war, seemed like a reasonable first priority. Findekano, the ships are yours. I'm not trying to-"

"What was the second priority?"

"Resurrection."

"Does that work?"

"No."

"Third priority?"

"We had not actually spent all that much time together."

Findekano glances between them. "Really."

"Jealous?" says Maitimo's brother bitingly.

And at that the two guards with Findekano actually have to stop him from lunging forward, and Maitimo turns with cold fury on his brother - "that was an insult to me and our guest."

"Didn't mean it as one."

"I'd take it as a personal favor if you'd constrain yourself to true insults about my cousin's character, there are certainly enough of them."

"That was out of line," Maitimo's brother says peaceably, "sorry."

"Let go of me," Findekano says, and the guards do.

"If you'd like to produce supplementary reading recommendations I'll take them under advisement," Cam says.

"Alqualonde," he says furiously. "Do a search."

Cam makes a note of that. "Thank you."

"I'd like you to leave," Maitimo says, "we're departing in two days and there's a lot to do, but I am not going to insist."

"Because it'd look bad?"

"Mostly. Care to at least make yourself helpful? Fuel's not a problem, food's not a problem, if we can satisfy Cam that the war is necessary weapons aren't a problem either."

"The war is absolutely necessary," Findekano says to Cam. "For what that's worth."

"Well, unless I conclude this spat was staged that will be very reassuring," Cam says.

Maitimo laughs, a little bitterly. "When are your people planning to depart?" he says.

Findekano shrugs. "Couple weeks, perhaps. We are in less of a hurry."

"Lovely. I will see you then."

And they go back inside. Maitimo's brother parts ways with them. Maitimo is distractedly giving instructions over osanwe.

Cam does a search on Alqualondë.

Two weeks ago there was a massacre at Alqualonde. The articles are ugly. The pictures are worse. Thirty thousand dead. 

Christ.

"I assume you have some questions," Maitimo says.

"Yes. My first question is whether it's okay for me to go perform medical experiments on mindless Elf bodies so I know whether I can, say, put people into harmless reversible comas with the drugs that work on humans."

"That's a really good idea. You can do that with humans? You'd be able to tell if there's damage from mindless bodies?"

"I have a full course of medical demon training under my belt, nothing says I have to make stuff outside of people, and working on basement dwellers will impair my ability to discern many things about the effects of the drugs but they will give me enough information to get informed consent from volunteers."

"Then yes, you have permission to do that."

"Okay. Where's good?"

"You could walk away from camp in any direction, Araman's not inhabited and you can fix the air. I can send you an earpiece so you can reach us if you think of more questions."

"Walk," snorts Cam, and he shakes out his wings to full span.

A smile. "You can also fly in any direction, Araman remains uninhabited."

"Okay. I'll be thataway," point, "warn whoever you send that basement dwellers are creepy and that's why polite demons keep them in their basements if they're going to have any."

And he takes off and wheels around in the air and goes thataway for a bit.

Araman remains windy, unpleasant, and uninhabited. 

So Cam finds a flat bit of windy-unpleasant-uninhabited and lands and makes enough of a building that his basement dwellers will not be windburnt and he doesn't have to constantly make new air and then he makes basement dwellers. (He cosmetically alters all their faces so they won't look like anybody in particular because he is a polite demon.) And then he sets about performing sinister medical experiments.

Standard coma drugs don't do anything. Upped doses work somewhat normally. 

Hm. Cam tries some other things he might want suddenly - basement dwellers do respond very rudimentarily to pain, do painkillers work...?

Nope. Something physiologically weird here. 

Cam is gonna go ahead and vivisect one. It'll be just like med school.

This will not show any particular physiological weirdness. 

Huh.

Cam runs through some more drugs. They mostly don't work or work really badly. It is in all unpromising.

After a while Maitimo contacts him. "Hey, how goes it? I thought to ask some of our own medical people, they were all not optimistic at the prospect and can explain why if you like, but you might have some advantages background-wise on them. We're leaving in twelve hours. There are others leaving later if you aren't back by then."

"I've basically come to the conclusion that drugs, at least human-efficacious drugs, do not work on Elves - I can put a basement dweller in a coma but it takes a big dose and reversing it was weird too. I'll come back now."

He torches the place and flies back to the shipyard.

Maitimo meets him. "I'm sorry to hear that. Our medical people are happy to work with you on something better, though they think our bodies can't run without our brains for any real length of time and expect the coma thing won't work. Though if your interest is in nonlethally stopping a fight, you don't need the option of a protracted coma."

"That was my interest, yes."

"So you might not run into the problems that'd arise with trying to keep us unconscious for days. I can make sure you're jumping on the same ship as the medical people, at least. D'you know enough to make orc mindless bodies, test what works on them?"

"Probably, didn't try it yet."

"I was sort of imagining you'd want to have a confrontation in which you demand to know why we didn't tell you we were mass murderers, are you just not particularly interested in that?"

"Why, do you have an explanation prepped, I'm happy to listen to one."

"For how it happened or why I didn't tell you, I have both."

"Go on then."

"I mentioned that the leap-ships are the only way out and we didn't have enough. We didn't have any. Leaving Valinor is - well, forcefully frowned upon, to put it mildly, and has never been done. And when we announced our intent to do so, the Valar told us we were being foolish little children who should go back home. We thought about doing it the long way in the slower-than-light ships. We were projecting fifteen, twenty percent casualties just getting out of this system, it's - well defended, by the Valar, and those ships aren't meant for leaving it. And then those of us who made it would arrive in two and a half Years and by then I think most of Endore's population of probably-billions will be dead. Our years are ten times as long as yours, you said? Twenty five of yours, that's how long the trip is.

We went to Alqualonde. We asked for the ships. No. We asked for help building them. No. We asked for a lesson on lightspeed travel. Nope. They'd locked down their archives. 

My father decided to steal them.

There are no weapons in Valinor and there'd never been any violence and we thought we could just take the things and go but it turns out you can do as much damage with high-powered construction equipment with the safeties ripped off as with any weapon designed for the purpose, and they tried to stop us, and we fought back, and then the Maia of Alqualonde noticed what was going on and swatted fully loaded ships out of the air - killing everyone on board - and we made it out with horrifying losses and were sentenced in absentia to thirty thousand counts of murder. That is how it happened."

"Okay. There've been worse-motivated altercations. Everybody's backed up?"

"Yes. Everyone we killed should be back within a few weeks, I think. Our people won't be, because convicted of murder."

Dammit why couldn't everyone be conveniently resurrectable. "And you didn't bring this up because?"

"The Valar's sentence. My family is exiled from Valinor, as is everyone who follows us instead of turning back to repent. We will meet our deaths in Endore, and we will wait for reembodiment until long after everyone we wronged has forgiven us. Every project we begin will turn to evil ends; we will be houseless and nameless forever. Vala sentences - carry weight, they can actually bring about the things they prophecy. I have no idea if you fall under it, but you are likelier to if you choose to take up our cause knowing what we've done in the service of it."

"I see."

"And also obviously I wanted the ships because there are potentially billions of lives at stake. But you knowing might make things worse, and I'd have avoided it for that reason alone."

"Or, you know, I eventually go back to Hell, and all my projects will turn to evil ends, and I get summoned for high-energy physics work on Earth and I fuck it up and Earth is sucked into a black hole and fourteen billion people die and don't have any backups and most of them go to Limbo which have I mentioned it's unpleasant there and I can't take any extra precautions because nobody told me."

"I did tell you about the Doom. I just didn't tell you anything that'd make it likelier for it to apply to you."

"My complaint is that you did not tell me it might apply to me at all."

"I apologize. I should have done that and I'm very lucky it didn't turn out to be a costlier mistake. It did not even occur to me I could be endangering the people of your world."

"I take summonses all the time. Only occasions I get to do anything meaningful."

"If you leave now I'm reasonably confident the doom won't attach to you. "on all those who follow them', it said, not 'all those who aid them'."

"How much does exact wording matter?"

"Uh, going ahead of us, or us announcing we follow you, won't save us. But it does matter that it's 'follow' not 'aid' or 'defend' or something."

"So if I make it clear that I am an independent agent, do not answer to your government, etcetera...?"

"You could ask the Valar yourself. I'm not sure if that'd be enough. It would probably help."

"Not to put too fine a point on it they sound like assholes."

"The kids are Doomed. They didn't fight."

"This angle crossed my mind. You can't ship the kids back planetside -?"

"We can. To grow up in Valinor, this not being the only issue the Valar are dangerously wrong about - it'd be nice to find a habitable system for them, or build one if that's something you can do, and some people did choose to go back but I wouldn't order anyone into the Valar's hands. Worst case anyway is that they die and then they're back in Valinor after all."

"It'd take me a while to build a whole solar system but I could do it given enough empty space. Less work to terraform an existing rock of the right size. ...Always wanted to terraform a planet. I have, like, plans, for planet-terraforming, worked out in my copious spare time."

"Lovely. Uh. You could go find some suitable system with one of the light-leap ships, terraform a planet, open it to evacuees from Endore? I have been thinking about the fact you could probably destroy the Enemy if the need's desperate enough by feeding the planet into a black hole. If we had some way to get everyone who doesn't have backups off its surface first."

"I would love to terraform and administer a refugee planet. How do I fly a light-leaper."

"So as you might have guessed we didn't get a chance to ask advice from the people who do it on the regular. We're going off the manual. Says 'Alqualonde Astrological, 1495' on the cover..."

Is this manual already in Cam's library...?

It is not! 

So he makes another chip - "I'm going to have to consolidate these and chuck the piecemeals eventually and it is annoying" - and goes and has a look.

It has, in fact, pretty clear instructions about how to fly the things. It also has warnings that you shouldn't do it alone, but more for precautionary reasons, there hasn't been a safety incident in a hundred Years. 

Well, what do safety incidents look like, is it like "explosion" or like "lost in intergalactic space".

Mostly 'lost in intergalactic space'. Which would really be unfortunate. 

For Cam it would in fact be much worse than an explosion. What does having somebody along help with?

They are twice as likely not to miss the large number of flashing warnings that would precede a safety incident. 

...'kay, Cam thinks he can skip that.

"Okay, do you happen to know where there are rocks of about the right gravity around or am I doing survey?"

"We haven't left this system, like I said it's not safe without those things and not really encouraged at all. You're doing survey. Sorry."

"I thought you might have had telescopes," Cam says.

"Oh, yes, definitely, but you don't want anything close enough to Valinor the Valar'd be tempted to poke it."

"How close is that close?"

"I mean, you have a light-leaper ship. It doesn't differentiate between thirty light-Years and three hundred. I'd err on the latter side."

Cam flips through the manual to see how likely he is to get lost.

He's not especially likely to get lost. 

"All right, halfway across the galaxy with me it is."

"If you determine you can safely use this at home it's going to be lovely for your home world."

"Yes, that will be lovely."

"I'm sorry I didn't think to explain the ways the Doom could impact you sooner."

"Well, the important thing is that you did it before someone tried to get me on board with a high-energy physics project."

"I will thank FIndekano."

"From a safe distance, maybe."

He looks vaguely anguished. 

"Sorry."

And suddenly his face is perfectly normal. "No, that was fairly incisive. It's just that we were once very good friends and he ordered his people in because I was obviously about to die and he didn't realize we had started it and - it is not really the most important thing to regret about Alqualonde but I nonetheless regret it tremendously."

Very good friends, huh. ...Not touching it. Nod.

Oh, for the love of - if people find out now - 

"Are you planning to head out separately from us, then, and if so is there any way to have defensible ships for landing on Endore?"

"...good question. Suppose it'll count as following if we take separate routes or something, if I stop in some random midpoint and then meet you there to make armored-up landers?"

"I don't know. I do think that if you ask the Valar before you go back whether you're Doomed, they'd answer usefully and truthfully? They're good for that much."

"And you don't think they'll do something actively antihelpful and/or assholish just because they become aware I exist or something?"

"I very much dislike and mistrust the Valar but - no. No one's worse off for having met them unless you can't restrain yourself from being very rude to them and even then they'll just exile you from this system."

"It seems like very slowly enforced exile, too."

"They're over a billion of our Years old. They'll get around to exiling us in a century if we haven't gone, and they'll get around to stopping the Enemy probably before the millenium is out."

"Grand. - It is probably well worth testing whether summoning works as normal for here. It may not, because it seems a little implausible that I'd be the first accidental summoning, but the field managed to remain secret on my world for a long time so it's not impossible. If it works I'm qualified to teach college-level summoning!"

"It also could not work in Valinor proper because the Valar prevent it. Could be commonplace in Endore for all I know. How do we test that?"

"I make most of a circle, somebody who is comfortable with maybe turning into a daeva when they die finishes it, we see if we get a daeva, you let me do all the talking, summoner dismisses the daeva, I teach a class."

"Okay. Should I get a volunteer for that now? We are leaving in eleven hours."

"Yeah. Not enough time for me to teach the class but plenty of time to see if it works at all."

He blinks. "My father wants to. Is that okay?"