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Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
purposeful_glory
"...I don't have that problem. Anyway, I could deploy a song spell at range, which I can't do with my usual set; unless there are so many items on the menu here that I'm not going to be able to keep them straight might as well listen to one."
"Not that many, especially since most of what I can do is even less useful. As far as useful things go. I can make people less tired. I can make anything that hits them hit less hard. I can amplify my voice. That's actually a very simple series that most people weave into other songs, but I don't know how you can do that. Playing both at one shouldn't work, if you have two people singing you generally get a competition for which effect takes."
purposeful_glory
"I can amplify the songs without a song for it, unless there's something special about increased volume from magic-derived sources."
He shakes his head. "No, that's just so I have more range. They work on everyone friendly who can hear them. Probably everyone friendly to the singer, not the source."
"I'd expect it to be more situational than that - like, if Angband attacked and we were fighting alongside Nolofinwë's host, I'd expect anything I could do for them to work fine even if my personal feelings towards them were adversarial. If they attacked us, then no, shouldn't work, though I'd actually add in a theme specifically about repairing old wounds or about family turning enemy respectively to make it clear to the song."
purposeful_glory
"So I should go catch an orc, test the spell on it, and convert it only after that?"
"At that point would I still consider it an adversary? You could bring two orcs, one of which you've converted and one which you have not, so that my inclination would be to still regard neither as friendly, and see if the song affects either of them."
purposeful_glory
"Is the distinction in fact friendly or is it more like allied or appropriate healing target or what?"
"I can design a better targeted version. It's friendly, but in the sense of 'if we met in this battle we wouldn't raise weapons against each other' rather than 'we trust each other' or 'we'd spend an afternoon together'."
purposeful_glory
"I suppose I do have a purely at-will backup if I want to heal somebody you would feel inclined to stab."
"I told you before that I have no grievances with my cousins. And you can ask Findaráto for songs, too, I know he has them."
purposeful_glory
"I don't mean your cousins, or at least I don't mean them right now, but something might come up, I do keep meeting all kinds of people. Hey, is there any reason I shouldn't just run this spell basically all the time? I can spellcraft at the speed of thought, I don't have to move."
"No one's tried it before, if it has side effects we wouldn't know what they are. Anyone in my family would try it anyway and find it useful information if they sank into a week of dreamless sleep after a year of doing it, but I don't know your risk-tolerance."
purposeful_glory
"Well, what amount of use is known to be safe, and would you like a time-acceleration room set up so people who are less linchpin-y than I am can play with it?"
"I've done it for a week at festivals with only brief breaks and no sleep - I have another song for not needing to sleep, that one catches up with us after about three weeks. And yes, let's set that up."
"It's a sleep-twice-a-week spell unless you're my father, and even for him it's a sleep-every-two-weeks spell. You can go longer, obviously, but when it catches up with you it really catches up with you."
purposeful_glory
"And I assume I'll need more sleep than you, but still, I'd already have the ability to do without sleep altogether if I could have covertly used it in Asgard. How abruptly?"
"About eight times longer than you should have gone, your thoughts get foggy and you feel jittery like you're being sustained by external strings. As soon as you close your eyes at that point you will sleep for a few days, and if someone tries to wake you before then you will have something resembling a very bad hangover and also still be exhausted." A rueful smile. "The sample size is quite large, but all the tests were on me."
"You can skip a night regularly just to have more time to work in. You could skip a week to get somewhere faster - or, at least, we could."
He smiles again, leans back, starts singing. The air seems to grow slightly colder. After a minute it feels as if there are snowflakes landing on their faces.
purposeful_glory
Record record record. She will ask when he's done if the snowflake thing is essential.