Fëanor leads them all, less Celegorm and Yfandes, into the spacious central hall.

"I have guests who are in need of rest," he tells Maitimo in Quenya. "We will discuss the situation among ourselves once they have been seen to their rooms."

Then he broadcasts his thoughts, gesturing to indicate where things are—Guest rooms are in the west wing. Please do not go in the east wing. I would like to see you try to go in the south wing. Maitimo will help you if you need anything.

Awww. He's so thoughtful. Yfandes likes this Elf already. 

:Honestly, the stables would do just fine - it'd be more suitable for me than what they could set up on Earth! Also, if anyone has time, I could really do with a good brush-down:

Companions, in general, prefer not to have anyone but their Heralds do this, but it's not like that's an option right now. 

Leareth is much too tired to want to investigate forbidden wings anyway. He thanks Fëanor and heads straight for the west wing and flops down onto the first bed in the first room he finds. 

He still expects to find it hard to fall asleep, but in fact he's out within less than a minute. 

Shavri has been sleeping kind of a lot, actually; it's a temporary escape from waking reality. She's not exactly tired, right now. 

:Thank you. I...think I want to go sit outside and listen to the singing for a while, if that's all right?:

Celegorm leads Yfandes to the stables. He has plenty of time to brush her down, if she'd like.

Of course it's alright, he tells Shavri. It changes his meeting plans slightly, but that's okay.

He, Maitimo, and Atarinkë go to his private study in the east wing of the house. He locks the door behind them. The room is warded against eavesdroppers; hopefully that also works against off-world magic as well.

"Where are the others?" he begins.

"Moryo and the twins are in the city. Cáno's down in the village leading the requiem. Turco is, I believe, dealing with the horse-person. And to round it off, Curvo's been with you and I've been here trying to hold this town together in Mother's absence—it's also kind of the only place in Valinor I'm not looked at as though I'm the second coming of Moringotto.

"Now, pray tell—what the fuck is going on?"

"Some purple maniac called Thanos got hold of something called the Infinity Stones that let him kill half of everyone, everywhere. Not the Silmarils, obviously, though that's what both I and Father thought when we first heard the name. He wanted to do it because he thought we'd multiply until we consumed all available resources. Stupid-ass plan, if you ask me, although having ruled a kingdom that included mortals I understand the temptation. We've been helping a group of Men with a random assortment of pseudo-magical special abilities gather the resources to fight him and maybe undo this. The current plan is to try to travel back in time and grab our own set of Stones that way.

"Then, like two days ago, Endórë time, a woman who could fly through space dropped off thirty mortal wizards in a space capsule they'd built themselves with technology worse than what we had during the Exile. I'm not sure how this is supposed to help, but one of them is pretty good at math, and apparently they have some mind-altering magic that might be useful."

Maitimo takes this all in stride. He doesn't really have emotions, these days. But "travel back in time" catches his attention.

"Do you think it's actually possible? To go back, undo something? The way we were taught, in the old days, I wouldn't have thought so."

"The math checks out. Apparently the structure of space-time isn't perfectly smooth at really small scales, and they have some sort of particle that can modify the scale of matter, but they don't have enough because whatever stabilization medium they're using to isolate them is shit and, consequently, one-time use. I'm going to try to use some leftover silma instead; if my assumptions are correct that should give us reusable crystals.

"Now, for the reason I called this meeting: what we—this family—are going to do with the Infinity Stones, once we get them and undo this."

"Destroy them."

"Once I wished I could do the same—no, wished I could want to do the same to the Silmarils. But now that that bond is broken, I do not think it would have been wise."

"We are not going to destroy the Infinity Stones. At least, not until we've used them first."

"To do what?"

"They can create the paradise for our people that we dreamed of—not only on Endórë, but on all the worlds. There are millions, apparently, and that's just the inhabited ones. There are billions more that are empty but habitable—although the Stones could, in theory, make even more.

"They can also, as we have seen, destroy the Valar altogether. With far less collateral damage than our previous contingency plan."

"Are you sure that's a good idea? Collateral damage aside."

"I still remember the words they spoke to us. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the west unto the uttermost east. I still remember what they did to us, for their words came true against all our wills. I intend to make them regret it."

"I concur."

"I think this foolish, but if we come into a situation where it is not—"

"Now for the second item of business. Here are people supposedly from another world, who resemble Secondborn in every way except that they possess magic even greater than ours. In the old days I would have called it a trick of the Enemy, and though I do not think the new Enemy is a twelfth as crafty as the old, I am still suspicious.

"Nelyafinwë, you have a better eye for this than I ever did. I default to suspicion, and we can't afford to do that right now. I need you to find out whether they can be trusted. No, more than that—I need you to find out why they're here. What their true intentions are—this man Leareth runs an organization which could not possibly have been built in the aftermath of Thanos' attack, and yet has no other apparent purpose. I do not think they came here only to fight Thanos. Probably they have intentions for the Infinity Stones, which cannot be allowed to conflict with our own. Find out what they are."

"I can do that." He really, really doesn't want to; he wants to retire from politics and subterfuge, and spend his second life managing his mother's tiny village of artists. But he will.

"Very well. Dismissed."

Shavri sits under a tree near the singers, and listens to their song for...a very long time. It's sort of hard to keep track of time, here; she's not sure if that's a magic thing about Valinor, or just an effect of everything being suddenly peaceful and beautiful and soothing when, for so long, her life has been everything but. 

She thinks of Jisa and cries, a little, but less than she would have expected. She had been sort of worried the tears were a bottomless well and would never stop. 

Eventually she picks herself up and heads back to Fëanor's house to the guest wing and goes to sleep. 

Leareth is running a lot of sleep debt. And Valinor is soothing and peaceful and it's the first time since the Snap that he's slept without nightmares. He stays asleep for a while, even by human and definitely by Elf standards.

Eventually he wakes up, still relaxed but no longer drowsy, and sits on the side of the bed for a few minutes, trying to assess how he's feeling now. 

...Hopeful? Which is almost more painful than the flat resignation before, but still. 

It was hard to feel any positive emotions about Captain Marvel's revelations to him, at the time. Learning that he had potential allies in this fight was drowned out by the realization that the deaths hadn't numbered in millions after all, but in trillions. 

Here and now, though, it's finally sinking in that he's here because they have a plan. Because, even if they can't undo the damage - and maybe they can - they can at least try to stop Thanos from 'fixing problems' ever ever again. 

- given the stakes, it's very important to understand who his allies are. Which he hasn't been trying to do so far, not really. 

Does he feel really to handle those stakes? No. Not really. He's terrified - which seems like the only sane response to this, really. Especially the part where when one of the Valar tried to kill Thanos by supernova-ing a star, Thanos escaped with the help of an...evil god? Leareth - should probably have asked a lot more questions at the time. 

Fine. So he's scared. He's - upset, at the deaths, at the pointless WASTE of it all. And, lurking behind that, he's angry, though he doesn't really want to lift the lid on that. 

Well. That's where his emotional processing here is at right now, then. Probably doesn't make sense to try to batch it all now, and it wouldn't work anyway. For now, there's work to do.

He slips out of the guest wing and goes looking for one of the Elves, and also for something to eat. 

Everyone else—Shavri, Tony, Bruce, Fëanor, plus five more elves, including a dark-haired one he hasn't seen before—is at the huge table in the great hall, most of the way through an extravagant breakfast.