"The Enemy tore up my workshop," he says. "When you blast him with whatever weapons you've developed to do the job, if there's any occasion for nasty comments, you can slip one in about that. All right. I still think we're four years out on something that lets us develop nuclear weaponry from the information in Loki's memory, however indirectly I need that done. Loki, what are you working on, what's the timeline for it, how can we support you?"

"Next step in the teleportation. It'll take longer than the first part. I have some prioritization to do, actually -" She pulls out a page of notes, forces it from Asgardian into Quenya. "The ultimate goal is for me to be able to fetch things and information from my galaxy and the interdimensional part is as with your project the hard one. I could go straight to that, but I could also detour to adding passengers so I'd be more useful here in the interim - faster, hackier version would just let me have some of my cargo allowance be alive, I could take a few swifts with me that way; longer more elegant version would let me take large numbers of people without having to alter their size in any way first. The question is basically whether it's worth a delay of five to eight years objective time for me to be able to teleport passengers to handle intraplanetary refugee, trade, diplomatic, etcetera situations that crop up in the subsequent ten to, mm, thirty, objective, while I hammer out the dimensionality problem."

"Can you teleport half a mile above the surface of Angband and detonate a bomb we think we'll have in fifteen years?"

"Unless it's bigger than yea big," she gestures, "in any dimension, yes, I can do that with what I have now; if it's bigger I need to work the passenger angle."

He frowns. "Might be bigger. Might be able to eventually compress the needed firepower into that size, but my guess is that first run is going to be big."

"Customarily you'd also have aircraft, but that would be an entirely separate problem."

"Heavier than air flight requires denser fuels than we have access to, I did the math on it once. I suppose maybe the Dwarves have something."

"Possible, I don't know. I don't see an obvious reason you couldn't do a bombing run with a zeppelin, although they're not very fast, might be easier to take down."

"The Enemy made a serious effort at knocking the Moon out of the sky. He failed rather narrowly."

"I suppose if your project yields Asgardian library contents anyone who's working on extracting information from them will have to be literate in it anyway."

He brightens. "I hadn't even thought of that."

"There might be a few things written in other languages - Allspeak is standard on Asgard - but I think even most of the imported material gets translated."

"That delays us building a nuclear weapon by around eighteen hours, possibly." He smiles.

"If you wind up needing untranslated materials you might need them from a variety of different languages, and I don't actually know any languages except Asgardian and a little of the Men's language I picked up while their writing was in development so you might have to spend as long as several days deciphering miscellaneous script. I do not imagine this to be a prohibitive difficulty."

"Languages are a delight. When there is less hanging in the balance I thoroughly recommend learning some. And yes, compared to extracting information from universes with different magic, translating it isn't a problem at all."

"Oh, and it's possible you'll need to build non-uranium-based weapons because the Enemy has the Silmarils and apparently they block radioactivity? That might add an extra few development steps. Pure fusion bombs are also possible and don't rely on anything radioactive as far as I recall but typically appear much later in a realm's tech tree. Antimatter even farther along. So I don't know that I'd recommend sinking any fungible resources into getting uranium yet."

"They would stop the wearer from getting radiation poisoning certainly. If a bomb that exploded outside their radius exerted lots of force, they'd do nothing about that."

"I don't know what the radius of the Silmarils is," she shrugs.

"Are they visible when you fly over Angband?"

"I didn't see them."

"Then they certainly won't prevent us from detonating something above it. Their visible range isn't their decay-canceling range but it's strictly greater."

"All right, uranium it probably is, then."

Conversation follows about supply lines, the feasibility of defending other cities, shipping routes, projects with the Dwarves in the works, and eventually what Loki would like to do with the Men.