"The Federation will trade to some extent with nonmembers; once we're set up we can import Earth crops."

"Sounds great," says Bella, suffering through her bowl of priv.

"We're trying to get the kind of trees that do whatever seems nicest," Fëanáro says, "but it seems like a hard problem."

"Yeah, directly copying Vala-exclusive tricks is very epic."

"So how many Bellas and Fëanáros do we need to find?"

"Possibly as many as four."

"This galaxy just might be big enough to hold them."

"There's more galaxies and you can apparently teleport, if it's really one-Bella-or-Fëanáro-to-a-quadrant."

"I mean big enough we don't have to make ourselves small," he says.

"What do you mean?"

"Metaphor for - limiting our capacities and ambitions so that my universe doesn't eat you or the Valar don't get spooked or whatever."

"Valinor didn't want us to grow too fast. Materia didn't want you to want to be grown at all. Here I think we can just - do things that matter, and learn, and invent, and it'll be okay."

"It looks that way. Or at least if something stops us it'll be regular people, like the Federation."

"Why would they stop us?"

"Well, they arrested T'Mir. Also I'm pretty sure Arda is a pre-warp civilization."

"So our first spells need to be ones we can use to get away from them," he says, "once we've learned the language, I mean. If they try to interfere with Valinor the Valar will send them away."

"Teleporting should do the trick, but we should make sure we're not, like, spied on to the point where they'd be able to ward against it or something."

He frowns. "We want to teach the whole realm magic. Is there a way to not teach wards?"

"Not exactly, they can always reverse-engineer stuff and invent things the way we do, but it's probably a good idea to stay ahead of them until we're reasonably confident they're not going to obstruct anything important. We should try to learn that early anyway so people don't have to abandon multiple planets in quick succession evacuating for nicer planes."

"Yeah," he says fervently.

"So we should start with a handful of people and then go ahead and look really disruptive and be ready to bounce out if somebody takes issue with us that we can't sustainably handle."

"Are there people you know from Materia who'd be good? If we suck people out of Valinor a few at a time that will be an impetus for the Valar to prevent that," Rúmil says.

"My parents are still alive."

"- both of them?"

"Yeah. You can borrow Charlie if it helps, I don't think he'll mind after he's over it being weird."