The walls stop shaking. Sauron screams in her head, grabs Lævateinn and wrenches it away, raises his hand to send her flying backwards.

She's over there now and catches the weapon and now she's behind him. Stab. Fighting is so much simpler when you can turn over being where you need to be, posed how you need to be, to a spell; she could do this in her sleep and she can do it while he screams. The spear's still hollow. Ice, asshole, you haven't shattered nearly enough times.

Everything goes black. The music starts again, but instead of shaking the walls it is trying to stick to her, hold her down.

She can feel where he's stuck to the end of her blade and tags him with light. Pops to his other side, tries to clobber him to the ground with a polehammer.

"Not fond of the cold?" Loki hisses, and she aims a hand at him and the fire both and sprays freezing crystals.

All the other effects stop, and he stops moving, face fixed with concentration, but the fire roars up even stronger.

She can do this all day. Both hands.

The fire loses a few inches of its radius while he adjusts to that. Then he does, and he's scorching the ground and scorching the air and burning hot enough to melt the ice and he starts projecting osanwë into her head again, not his own screams but Vár's.

Oh you asshole that's the last thing to get Loki to back off. She takes up her spear again and appears directly above him, feet on shoulders and spear at head and healing spell ticking off twice a second.

He moves aside impossibly fast, slashing at her as he goes. She might want to heal more often than that, the heat is overwhelming.

Yeah it's uncomfy. Her armor's going to be in a hell of a state. She heals faster. She teleports into his path and hits him with more ice.

He - flickers, that's the best word for it, when hit. He's trying to expand the radius that's on fire. He now has red-hot, glowing metal in his hand and lunges at her with it.

If he's going to use implements then she's going to catch them out of his hand with Lævateinn and go drop them in the ocean and then come back to make him flicker some more. You get to fight unarmed, ice sculpture. (Heal heal.)

Well then she's not there anymore, is she, she's over here now, get with the program, Thauron. Would it make it any harder for him to set things on fire if I dumped water on him or not so much.

Should, but probably only slightly.

Okay, not worth going and finding a rain barrel under her cargo allowance. Ice time. Lots of it.

He snarls at her, and sometimes he staggers and sometimes he flickers but there are now four voices competing for attention in her head and the sky goes suddenly blindingly bright.

Huan, if he keeps doing that my eyes can't keep adjusting, where is he -

A projection of the location. I can keep it running if it won't be more distraction than it's worth.

- and flickering and staggering but there's molten metal dripping out of the sky, now -

What, seriously? Huan?

It's not metal, but it's not entirely an illusion...

Okay, well, she can teleport into positions not about to be hit, swat her enemy into the drops, see what they do to him.

They cling, and scorch, and he has to stop dripping them from the sky in order to shake them off him and aim them at her, music roaring up again to try to slow. her. down.

And now he's not a bird, he's a werewolf, but he's sprawled on the ground and not moving; the song changes, the fire intensifies- and intensifies - how much can she heal -

She can do it as much as she has to ice ice ice ice ice ice die die die die die

He staggers to his feet. The ground opens up beneath both of them.

She gets Lævateinn, pops to the edge of the crevasse, stabs him as the ground starts to swallow him, pitchforks him over to the unbroken ground. And then she's on him again and ice ice ice ice.

A much much larger crack in the ground, running all the way to the edge of the city -

She just grabs him in her bare hands and flings him to solid ground, this time, before teleporting back to where she can ice the werewolf-Maia-icecube.

And a third one, which rips through the walls towards the quarter of the city where the Men are living.

Are these even real? She doesn't have a counter for them if they are except "kill him as fast as possible", but if they're not she can stop interrupting to avoid falling into the crevasse. (Hurl, away from the city. Port. Ice.)

Yes, Huan says grimly, and then flames roar out of them and the ground starts melting into them like when water flows through sand.

Well. "Kill him as fast as possible" it is, then. Lævateinn. Rip him open, fill his fucking abdominal cavity with ice from the inside -

The ground crumbles into flaming abyss around them and this time when she tries to move him he does not move.

She heals herself faster, faster, faster, and she exhales ice onto herself as protective coating, she can leave if she has to she cannot be trapped here no matter what he does but oh she wants him so dead -

The ground is still widening, still widening, he apparently vanishes but Huan's outline suggests he's still there, the sky flashes brilliantly bright again -

- she's not relying on her eyes, now, just the squish of not yet sufficiently frozen viscera between her fingers and the sensation of burning that she keeps at bay spell by spell.

And then the world goes silent and the rock claps closed.

Silence. Just a landscape burned and cratered for miles around.

Huan?

I can't sense him.

In principle we can't be killed. We can be dispersed so firmly we can never come back together, or even remember that our pieces are supposed to be together. You might have done that.

Yes.

In she pops. If it's obvious, she'll go where it's obvious; if it isn't presumably he can deploy her. She pries steaming armor off her arms as she looks for injured.

He sends her a mental map of where she's needed. This shelter, these people who stayed in their house, these people crushed under the collapse of the wall, this corridor probably doesn't have survivors but should be checked...

She pops around to each place, heals everyone she sees.

There are a lot of places. There are a lot of people. After an hour or so - everyone else was stable enough to move and is in the center of the city, you can come in -

She comes in.

He glances up, registers her, goes back to giving orders to the several people he's speaking to and from the looks of it also the numerous people he's speaking with mentally. Fëanor is present as well and doing the same thing.

She doesn't interrupt them. She goes around healing. Teleporting is faster than taking even a single step: she teleports.

And at last the bustle slows to a manageable pace. The Elves have started singing their funeral songs. I have a list of the dead for you, if you'd like, Maitimo says.

Yes please.

Around four hundred. Sixty two are Men.

She takes this back to their quarter to see that the news is distributed.

Their quarter has a fair bit of damage, and they're all terrified and glad to see her.

She is sure the damage will be patched soon. If anybody's home is wobbly or the structure's damaged enough for its illusion to break, they should squeeze in with friends for now. Did she miss anybody injured who was too walking-wounded to get attention before? Everybody know where their spouses and kids are? It's over; he seems to be gone, actually gone this time.

Families and children are found. There are minor injuries and lots of people whose injuries are probably psychosomatic.

Well, she can tap them all, figuring out who's actually hurt and who has real whiplash takes longer than poking every presented nose.

After a while someone nervously asks how long the Elves will be singing.

They'll probably do it for a long while; it's a funeral custom. Is it bothering them? She could soundproof the singing areas.

It's sad. But maybe that's okay. Since people are dead and that's sad.

Yes. People are dead and that is sad. The Men probably do not want to sing for days about it but it would maybe be appropriate for them to think about how they would like to remember the lost.

They don't really have many ideas. They could name children after them.

That sounds like an entirely reasonable thing to do. They could write down what they remember about the person's life so it's not forgotten, maybe, and then the children can know one day who they're named after.

That sounds good, but they don't exactly scurry off to do it. They still stand there near her, anxious and a bit lost.

Lots of people have ideas for that.

Okay. So she sits with them writing down the biographies of the dead.

Maitimo comes by a while later with Caranthir, surveying buildings to see what will need repair. He stops to listen, offers a few short stories, asks that anyone with concerns about their homes take those concerns to the palace.

"Thank you, but we've already got them marked and you must be tired."

"I ran a sleep skipper before Thauron even showed up." For pleasanter reasons.

His eyes glimmer with amusement. "All right. I can't think of anything that requires your attention. I was myself planning after we finished this quarter to go rejoin the funeral proceedings for my people."

"Okay. If you do think of anything that needs me, I'll be up."

"Congratulations, Loki."

"Thanks."

He walks off.

And she pops back to the Men's quarter and works through the night.

In the morning the Elves are still singing, though they've also started repairing the walls. Macalaurë is in fact multitasking on these two things by singing the walls back upright.

I'm thinking of going and telling your cousins what happened, Loki says to Maitimo. Comments? Other messages?

We have been in very recent contact with them, I haven't much to add. I do not think they'll ask after our dead, but if they do you are welcome to share the list with them. None of their people were harmed.

The camp looks the same as it did when she was here yesterday.

She demonstrates her ability to turn someone into a bird and looks for somebody she habitually talks to.

Irissë is sitting in the shade of some buildings with some people she doesn't recognize. She doesn't see anyone else about.

...Not as far as she knows on either count.

Why doesn't she tell them all about it.

Sure. Where's Findekáno...? He wanted the blow by blow last time, so...

He is definitely in the excited crowd, though he looks a little more worried than excited.

...Well, here is how she as-good-as-killed Sauron with lots of visual aids.

There are cheers and shouts and would Loki like them to carry her on their hands and shoulders through the city because they can do that, and several people are going to start composing the epics.

...Sure, that sounds like fun.

So Loki is carried through the city. The music, while impromptu, is quite good.

Yes. What were the casualties like?

Your people there are all okay. A few dozen Men, some of the Fëanorian host - Maitimo's fine. I can give you the list if you want it.

I would. Thank you. Sorry to spoil your moment, if I did.

It's okay. Uh, I'll show you the list when I'm no longer being carried around.

Yup. He manages to sound cheerful.

And when she is no longer being carried around she goes over to him and produces the list.

Thank you. And congratulations, really, sincerely. It's extraordinary and you should enjoy and be proud of it.

Thank you.

And the parade circles Lake Mithrim and Elven singers are doing visual illusions on the waters and converting the waters itself into a prop for their telling, chasms opening in it as they sing.

Whoa, cool.

They are maybe a little more enthused than is healthy about Sauron smashing the eight-pointed star city's walls, but it's otherwise a lovely rendition.

Yeah. That's the part where people died. Loki doesn't comment though.

And then there shall be an impromptu feast, with food cooked on impromptu bonfires.

Mm, food.

And then dancing, and more music that paints pretty lights in the sky.

I think I'll go home now, Loki says. See you around.

Bye.

It hasn't; someone lit the whole place on fire. A while ago; things have started to grow in the ruins.

No. And he sends his location.

Pop. "Men's settlement is torched, has been for some time. How long is it convenient for us to stay? It's spring now, they can get a crop going if I move them now, but otherwise I'd sooner wait another year, maybe bring small batches out in the meantime to work on the place."

"Are you confident there's nothing else out there that'll give them trouble? The city has beds for everyone; they have as long as they need."

"I can deal with orcs and Balrogs. What else does he have?"

"I saw Thuringwethil maybe three, four times? Half a dozen things like her. Who I saw. I was not, in the scheme Maiar use, there for all that long."

"So maybe I should stick around to see what else he sends after me," she sighs.

"Entirely up to you. Don't leave on our account; the city can accommodate these numbers and populations of Men don't grow that fast."

Nod. "Thank you."

"My pleasure," he says, only a bit mechanically.

He smiles.

She smiles back, and then pops back home.

The repairs of the city are well underway.

Hey!

Hi! Guess who killed Gorthaur!

Oh, Eru. I'm so proud of you. How?

Learned to teleport. Am I allowed to teleport in and out of Doriath or is it too affecting-a-living-thing-y?

Come to my rooms. Until anyone notices you doing it they can't clarify whether it's allowed. And Mum's distracted. Probably with Gorthaur suddenly dying, actually.

How would that distract her? Pop.

I don't know. She tries to keep track of big things, and that's a big thing. I didn't know that we could die.

Well, he might not be technically dead, he might be something dead-like, but there was another Maia helping me keep track of him through his illusions and he couldn't sense him anymore. He's deader than he was the last time we fought.

I'm so proud of you.

Thanks.

And she bounds through the door into her rooms.

Hi!

She hugs her. Hi! Teleporting? In four years? That's amazing.

Hug! Just tactical. No passengers, no more stuff than I can take with me when I'm a bird, no destinations that aren't on this side of this planet, no targeting a person's location without knowing where they are. And it's kind of a hack job as my spells go. But yep!

Does that mean the Men are okay?

Most of them. He made some fissures through the ground that reached into the city and there were some deaths, men and Quendi both. But most of them are fine.

I'm glad.

Me too.

You should relax and stay awhile, I've missed you. Tell me about the Men. Eat something.

I don't like to be away from them too long, but I can certainly stay for lunch and tell you all about the Men. She pulls out her census, talks about this one and that one and the hours-trading system and the recordkeepers and the werewolves.

She is an attentive and enthusiastic audience.

Yay. Loki is proud of the Men.

And proud of herself, hopefully.

Yes, that too.

Lúthien is delighted and hugs her and has songs for the Men if she wants them.

Ooh, what are the songs?

She sings them. The falling-asleep one is done for things that aren't Maiar but doesn't yet work on Maiar, she's working on it, and there's a song for a bubble of air around your head and a song for harvesting faster.

Ooh! Loki records them all. (The sleeping one she can only get as far as the part where she falls asleep.)

Lúthien didn't consider that problem with a sleeping song. She wakes her up, apologizing, and suggests that they try the second half and see if Loki can fit them together later?

Sounds like a plan.

So they try that. It takes some fitting the two sections together but eventually they have a sleep song.

Which Loki stores in inactive baffled form. Gosh she has a lot of songs now. Now that she can teleport she should start storing backups in various locations.

Lúthien would be happy to be a song backup repository.

So Loki writes a list of songs - names in Asgardian, she thinks the oomph song is still slightly secret or something - and attaches a copy of each to its label for Lúthien to hang onto.

And by then it's getting late and someone brings them dinner.

Loki stays for dinner and then hugs Lúthien goodbye and goes home for the evening.

Repairs on the city continue apace. The Elves are helping Men copy their memorial stories. The Elves are still singing.

They're still there, still well, delighted by the gifts she gave them recently.

Good, good, just checking, she's glad they're all doing well. By the way Sauron's dead.

Now they're rather awed, though not as intimidated as the first time she told them she fought him.

Good, she is not here to be intimidating, just to give them the news. He might not be technically dead but she doesn't expect to hear from him again any time soon.

There is cheering. There is a celebration. They will bake clams on the beach.

Sounds fun!

The island still seems to be thriving. They race off eagerly to the waters.

Loki stays for clams, and goes home.

Ooh!

It is a pretty exhaustive party. Apparently no one is tired of singing, because there's more singing, and lights in the sky, and they go outside the city to watch the walls being completed by Macalaurë who is obviously having the time of his life, and they march across the ground to the place where the earth clapped shut and they erect a monument there and there is so much food and drink that one is practically tripping over it.

Well. Loki partakes of party. Maybe she can find that brunette again when the party's winding down.

She can! She's quite drunk, though. "Loki Sauron-slayer!!! That was amazing. You're amazing. It was pretty hot, too, if I hadn't been terrified, watching you -"

Oh dear. A little too drunk. Presumably she'll sober up. Or Loki can do it, if she's impatient. "Oh, I didn't realize I had much audience. Did you have a good view?"

"We were all assigned to the walls. Shoot arrows with the Maia-annoying sigil at him, counter the songs. Lord Nelyafinwë said we were only trying to hold him up about twenty minutes - time for you and Huan to develop a plan, I guess?"

"Time for Huan to get there; he was away and I couldn't see through the illusions on my own. The plan was pretty much 'ice him again, more this time'.

"I'm not gonna argue strategy with Loki Sauron-slayer," she says. "Anyway we were his match on the songs and he was hitting the walls pretty hard but they're pretty hard walls and then you took over from there. It was spectacular. The King said, y'know, back in Valinor, he was leaving and the Valar were like 'no, stay, you can't defeat Morgoth' and he was like 'maybe the fire in our hearts is greater than you know, and whether we succeed or fail they'll sing songs of our deeds until the last days of Arda" and he didn't say "maybe help will actually just drop on us from the sky". But. Worked out pretty well. Imagine if we'd stayed in Valinor."

"Then I would have landed in the Helcaraxë all alone and been very confused indeed, I suppose, and it's anyone's guess which continent I'd have gone to from there knowing nothing about either."

"I was thinking more, if you came here, and had to do all of this with Elwë for backup. But yeah, that too."

"Yeah, I'm very glad to have the backup I have instead."

"Did you try the frozen werewolf snacks? They're great."

"...The what? I don't think I saw them. Did someone make werewolf-shaped popsicles?"

"Lord Nelyafinwe by all accounts personally demanded that all the ice around be brought in the day after the fight and had werewolf-shaped popsicles made. I think he likes you."

"I think he doesn't like Thauron, but the two sentiments may be similar this week."

"Right, yeah, guess it's personal. It's a good thing the Enemy got him, he's kind of impossible to perturb. If they were gonna get someone, I mean. Anyway, have a popsicle."

"...Sure." Loki has a popsicle.

"There's also vodka werewolf popsicles. If you want."

"I don't like being drunk, but thanks."

"In case Moringotho comes by personally?"

"No, if I needed to suddenly stop being drunk my healing spell actually counts alcohol as a poison, but I don't like the state itself."

"Okay. Bother you if other people are? Because I kind of want a vodka werewolf popsicle."

"I don't mind being around drunk people, although I do not prefer to stargaze with drunk people."

"Oh, we can't accidentally get married," she says.

"Even on my planet, where literally no one can get accidentally married, I prefer not to stargaze with drunk people."

"That sounds like an adventure," she says. "I think people'd be much less ...behaved."

"If by 'behaved' you mean 'steering clear of the sort of behavior that gets Quendi accidentally married', then yes. Yes we are."

"I'm pretty sober."

"And you will become still more sober with time. Or I can hurry it along if you're in a hurry." She wiggles her fingers.

She looks at the vodka werewolf popsicles, looking terribly torn. "Would you?"

Poke.

She smiles back. "If no one's worried about accidental marriage...why?"

"Why what?"

"For partners to be sober. Do people not drink at Asgardian parties? Or not hook up after them?"

"People drink a lot at Asgardian parties, and do hook up after them. The usual Asgardian line on too drunk is if somebody won't remember the event later that's too drunk. My line is that I prefer knowing that anybody I'm in bed with is very much there on purpose, per occasion, and anything past 'tipsy' makes me uncomfortably unclear on that."

"And you haven't known us all for five hundred years. Right. Fair."

"Even people I have known five hundred years, 'per occasion'."

"I don't mean that if I hit someone up every Awakening festival I don't need to check if she's in the mood, I just mean it's a little easier to tell. It makes sense to be cautious across, uh, a species barrier. And culture barrier. And dimensional barrier, I hear it told."

"Yeah, whole 'nother dimension. I have no idea why my transport managed to shunt me here."

"Maybe it figured we needed you."

"The Bifrost is not reputed to be sapient or to have interdimensional scrying capabilities."

She shrugs. "Maybe the Enemy tried it and goofed, big time."

"That'd be funny."

"Just don't point out to the King that if he hadn't lit the fucking ships on fire there wouldn't have been anyone on the Helcaraxe to meet you."

"I wasn't planning to, but why?"

"...because then he wouldn't feel bad about it, and he obviously should?"

"Ah."

"See, when I'm sober I have opinions about politics. I would absolutely fucking love to sleep with you, now can I get another vodka pop?"

"Sure."

She does. There are more lights in the sky. There's more loud music. She offers Loki a lick of the vodka werewolf pop.

Loki will take a lick of it. "Tastes like victory."

"They're calling it the Glorious Battle."

"Really? That's the kind of thing people name battles and it is not already taken?"

"There've only been two battles since the invention of writing. We called the other one the Battle-Under-Stars because it was before the Sun and Moon. It was also pretty glorious, but this is better."

"All right. Maybe I should tell the Nolofinwëans before they get too far on their epics."

"..bit crass of them, to take five days' head start on writing the epics because we were mourning."

"If I had known anyone was going to write epics and that five days' head start would matter perhaps I would have delayed conveying the news."

"I am sure there exist other ways to take your mind off epic-related etiquette."

"I can think of one or two."

"My place or yours?"

"Mine's under construction."

"Mine it is." Loki leads the way.

"Oh, you live near Toyon, she has a stunning voice and they say Men can't do magic but I was curious why not, if they can hit every note we can, and we're giving it a go next week, unless I'm on active duty in which case I guess we'll have to put it off. She's brilliant. Well, hasn't murdered Thauron, you know, but -"

"Ooh, teaching Toyon magic sounds like a great idea! She's always been fascinated by the song illusions I have scattered around to make magic objects, wanted to hear them go slower. Didn't make any of them work, but maybe you could pin it down."

"I can't imagine Eru's sitting down there with the strings of creation going 'who made that sound? Man? Elf? Illusion of Loki's?' On the other hand they say he's sitting down there going 'these people who're fucking, are they a boy and a girl. Boom! Sorry, suckers!' so maybe the guy's got a lot of spare time."

"A boy and a girl Quendi in particular. You are the only people who have this problem. Men don't, Dwarves don't, orcs don't. Maiar I'm not sure what the rules are but they don't always."

"Orcs don't? Huh. I would've definitely expected them to. And Melian's not attached to Elwë?"

"Well, I don't think orcs do, I haven't extensively quizzed any - should probably do that before the kids grow up, however awkward it is - but they don't show any signs of it. Melian's one case; I'm not aware of other married Maiar and at least some of them have sex lives."

"I'm assuming only the evil ones? Since 'do Eru's will' is a big part of the deal for most of them. Also they could just pick a gender combo that doesn't break the rules." They're back at her place.

Into her place they go. "My evidence here is Thuringwethil, who bills herself as a neutral party rather than an evil one; who mentioned that she could in fact switch gender but said she hadn't, so unless Thauron sometimes went around female..." Possibly this hair over here should be in fewer braids. Yes?

Definitely. No braids at all sounds ideal. "I'm sorry, I'm going to need a couple centuries to stop being amused at the mental image of Thuringwethil talking about her sex life with you. And a couple millennia for the ice-sculpture werewolf thing."

Giggle. Unbraid unbraid. Pet pet. Neck kiss.

Lots of kiss locations. "So you got here from Asgard," she says, "and landed with the Nolofinweans, who presumably told you Elves Never Ever Ever outside marriage..."

"I got a distinct impression of scary levels of monogamy, yes."

"It's the law." She shrugged. "When the Valar doomed us all the people I know said 'well fuck' first and then 'well, at least they've washed their hands of us'. Not even sure we paid too much for it. You are one smoking Sauron-killer, Loki."

"Icy," she says. "I am an icy Sauron-killer."

At this point they cease discussing politics.

Oh good.

The party wraps up around sunrise.

And this is about when Loki is prepared to produce a kiss goodbye that is actually a kiss goodbye instead of a kiss wander back to bed. (It has been a long damn time.)

And her companion will delightedly wander off but not before telling Loki that there are a whole lot of people who want a turn and she can arrange to make it a whole lot more if Loki likes and if she happens to get all the way down the list here's my address, yeah?

Loki thanks her for the list! It is a useful list. Gosh, she might not even have to pace herself too much like this.

Maybe one more kiss goodbye but it really actually is a kiss goodbye, and she heads home.

Yaaaaaaay the dry spell is broken. Thank you, she tells Maitimo.

For what? But there's some accompanying humor.

My lovely party the other day. I did not remember to thank you at the time. I was distracted. Also I'm told the werewolf popsicles were your idea.

You put a lot of work into that fight scene, I felt like it deserved some appreciation.

...I think I felt more appreciated before you phrased it that way, but thank you anyway.

We're having a meeting this afternoon to discuss logistics and timetables before Father jumps back out of contact. You are invited.

I'll be there. What time?

The Men are the only ones who have your clocks. When Father calls it.

Well, let me know. I'll bring you some clocks.

Making mechanical ones is on someone's to-do list.

Speaking of someone's to-do list should I also bring my armor? I'm not sure if it's salvageable but it might be.

Oh, of course. If it's not we can make you something new, though it'd take about a year for something enchanted really well.

Which one is named Duilwen?

Mental map of the palace. Osanwë is so useful.

It is! Pop.

Duilwen conference room has a rotating marble table with a to-scale map of Beleriand sculpted onto one side. Tyelcormo rotates the table so that side is facing down and they have workspace, and then waves her over to sit.

She sits. "Hullo."

"- huh, like the mechanism behind my illusions. Uh, I think there's degrees, some of my reading is just vague and some of it's forgotten to the point where I couldn't pick the right answer off a multiple-choice test. I might have enough of the first kind to sufficiently determine the necessary information about nukes but there might be some huge gap. It's also entirely possible you wouldn't get a coherent model extrapolating solely from my memories because I've absorbed simplified explanations, not being a physicist. Many of my readings would have noted that and possibly even how they were simplified, but explanations I heard from people are less likely to have come with disclaimers and I don't necessarily have redundant versions of atomic structure to compare against one another."

"We also might be able to make some necessary inferences," he says, "presumably someone in your world invented nuclear weapons in the first place. Anyhow, that's one avenue I can pursue; another is to try asking our universe what, if it had Asgard in it, would be in Asgard's libraries; another is to go ahead on the original plan. Each attempt should take me about four years, subjectively, two at full speed."

"Nuclear weapons have been invented several times but never on this infrastructural base that I know of, but it is possible you could patch an inconsistent physics model. Asgard's libraries would get you more than I know because I did not read every book in them, and if it worked would be strictly better than just turning me into a printer; but from my uninformed perspective it sounds thoroughly insane to assume the universe can answer that question."

"That we can specify the question well enough," he says, "the universe can answer anything but asking it things is really, really hard. What are typical features of a infrastructure base that invents nuclear weapons?"

"Factories. Very detailed physics and chemistry backgrounds; I don't think you have to have learned to see atoms, though, just derive things about their structure - although now I'm actually curious how far you can get with an illusion microscope and your ridiculous baseline vision. I think first versions typically involve fission of uranium so you have to be able to obtain and identify that. Um... it has to be bombarded somehow with something, I forget what."

Loki starts fiddling with lenses, trying to make a microscope behave. "Is radiation poisoning a mortal disease?"

"Aulë taught us about it," Fëanor says, "which come to think of it probably means Dwarves don't experience it, and it can affect the Eldar but it's nearly impossible, while it has very dramatic effects on Men. Because they don't control the behavior of their own body."

"Well, my healing spell works on it, and I can teleport occasionally to a uranium mine if anyone's having trouble with it." She peers through her microscope. "I'd want to attach this to some sort of armature to make it controllable, but it should work like this." She scoots it over to Fëanor.

"Oh," he says, "you can do this with lenses, though you're limited by the precision of your tools. Yes, that'll probably make progress faster, if you can do higher resolution than we can."

"Might be able to, I don't know how finely you can grind lenses at this time."

"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.

There doesn't seem to be any intractable friction from their presence here, although she's sure they'd like to get back to being their own society eventually. Their settlement was torched after everybody was out so there is currently nothing for them to go to. The fact that she can't sense Maiar, however effective she is at killing them once she knows where they're at, is a major drawback to her trying to defend anything being concertedly attacked with no Maiar assistance; she supposes she could try to hire Thuringwethil for a longer-term engagement or something and try to get another Dwarf- and rock-music-assembled city set up for them over a few years (if the Dwarves will extend her credit or declare that her IOU for the science lecture and couriering is valuable, or give her more couriering jobs she can now complete in moments).

Another advantage to a larger cargo limit is that she can become very very wealthy very very fast by doing shipping among the seven Dwarven kingdoms, come to think of it. The Men are welcome here for as long as it's needed and may use the rock-music-songs to build a new city when seems fitting. They are unenthused about hiring Thuringwethil but suppose that's an option.

Well, if anybody wants to suggest a Maia who is more of a free agent than Huan or Melian and more with-it than the river Maia she's open to suggestions but it seems like very few Maiar show up to work on this continent.

Wry laughter. They really aren't sure what she expected from Maiar.

She expects very little from Maiar, but unless anybody knows how to etch those repelling sigils into goggles or something so she can see them...

Fëanor is pretty sure he could do it but it'd probably take a few years.

Then the Men are probably staying put for the foreseeable future unless she works something out with Thuringwethil and develops enough Dwarf-related purchasing power.

"We came to these lands so we could put ourselves between Beleriand's peoples and the Enemy."

"I appreciate it."

"And I appreciate you. I think without you we'd have been a century out on a lot of what we needed to defeat the Enemy. And working without Maitimo."

"Positive-sum interactions are my favorite thing."

Logistics talk only takes another twenty minutes or so. Then everyone stands, and everyone hugs their father, and everyone disperses to get back to work.

Loki goes back and makes it known to the Men that they are probably staying here for another few years at least; she needed help to kill Sauron and help lives here and may be hard to come by elsewhere; but she is going to look into ways for them to go be on their own, it just might take a while. They should definitely let her know if they need anything to be comfy here for the next several years.

This is okay. It feels weird not being very useful and not growing their own food or anything but it's not bad, just weird.

She is sure they can find useful things to do. She hears somebody's going to try to learn to do magic music, is that right? And there's other work around; she is sure they can learn anything they'd like to try if they're feeling at loose ends.

They kind of are, so that's good to hear.

If they would like to find out what there is to do in a less haphazard way than wandering around and communicating telepathically with Elves who may not have picked up their language yet she can ask!

That would be great!

So she asks. Maitimo? Have you got anything useful for Men to do?

Honestly, no. Once enough people have learned their language I could put them on the regular work rotations but my current vague sense of the capabilities of Men is that they wouldn't be able to keep up? And giving them half-shifts with breaks and arranging for their pace not to matter is more work than letting them be. I can invent things for Men to do if Men require things to do.

On the higher conscientiousness end - and those are the ones who are not just enjoying the idleness in the first place - they can put in about as much consecutive work as I can, complete with a similar tolerance for sleep skipping and missed meals. You could put them in separate groups if it would be awkward to have them working to different schedules, but I assure you being unable to go without sleep for a week does not inherently make a person useless, they just have to learn to do other things. They can cook; they can learn your recipes. They can farm; they can learn these crops. They can scratch Maia-repelling sigils into stones; they can do it in their apartments if it would irritate people to watch them putting down the tools for a moment to get lunch.

We have a moving generator-driven conveyor for sigiling stones as quickly as possible. It would not irritate people, it would stop the line. Likewise with cooking; feeding a hundred thousand people is less a recipe-learning problem than a mass logistical dance.

So it's make-work or nothing?

I can assign people to teach them things. They could do cleaning and tidying work, I'm just not sure that's any better.

Some of them might take cleaning work. I'll ask.

I'll come up with tasks for them, you can see if there's anything you find interesting.

Don't gum up your logistics on their account; I didn't ask because I wanted help patronizing them.

I will see if I think of anything.

I will send you information that might aid you in that.

Thank you.

And two hours later someone arrives at a run along the rooftops and drops a letter at her door that contains a description of things Men could do with their time, how much supervision or what resources he expects it to require, and how those resources would otherwise be deployed. In no cases except cleaning the streets and the palace would the Men be producing something more valuable than the resources (counting Elf time) used, though he doesn't draw attention to this.

They are all eager to study Quenya, and this seems to satisfy the urge not to be idling.

Okay! She doesn't speak it herself, but here's the alphabet, and the reverse of the phrasebook she gave Maitimo, and their versions of numerals because the Men have been using the Doriath ones, and their Elf friends will surely be happy to help.

The Elf friends are delighted to.

Do they have any ideas about the skill gap problem themselves?

Making Men useful to Elves isn't really a good goal anyway, and it's ridiculous if the Feanorians are trying to hold the Men to that standard. Childhood is a time for learning and exploring, not creating more value than you consume. Has she considered that Maitimo is not a very honest or trustworthy person and probably has ulterior motives?

She's not sure his trustworthiness is at issue here at all, and the point isn't to make them useful to Elves per se, it's to make them useful to the city they're living in because except for the ones who are yea high they are not actually children and will not be perpetually comfortable as dependents.

They could be taught any skill that Elves wouldn't have known before coming here, and not be at much of a disadvantage. Making weapons? Or arrows? It's hard to imagine they'd be bad at washing clothes? They could be personal attendants to soldiers and help them put on their armor?

That last has a language barrier problem. Loki knows how to make bows and arrows, though. She goes and finds the nearest Elven archer to see if there's anything about the bow design that would make the kind she knows incorrect for the local style.

There are minor differences, but nothing such that she doesn't know what she's doing.

Cool. She'll just go gather up an armful of sticks and whatnot from the wilderness and pop them back and teach some Men to make bows and arrows to the point where they can teach others. Target practice is to be approached very cautiously, please, she doesn't want to have to come deal with somebody's arrow wound.

This makes a nice break from learning Quenya, and they take to it with zeal.

That is appealing but they need to send a messenger at conventional speeds to the other Dwarven kingdoms to ask if they're okay with their locations being given to someone who can teleport. Also, good for her on the teleporting, what a clever idea. Have Elves heard of comparative advantage?