"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.

"The wizard lives!" announces Tony, and several people at the table laugh. "Come on, the food's still hot; I think it's magic."

He gestures to the only empty seat at the table, which is between him and the red-haired elf with the piercing eyes.

:I apologize for my lateness: 

Leareth takes the seat offered and collects some food for himself. He's still unsmiling, his expression very controlled, but he looks much less tired and also more - actually present in the room with them, than when they last spoke with him. 

Conveniently, eating doesn't interfere with Mindspeech. :So, what are our research plans for today?: Leareth asks the others. 

Well, there goes his chance to squeeze some information out of Leareth. He's assuming it was intentional on Leareth's part.

(He maintains his mental shields very carefully, in such a way so that to an untrained observer it looks like he doesn't have any, and he deliberately leaves that thought on the outside, to see how Leareth will react.)

"I'm going to attempt to produce Pym particles with my particle collider. If that's successful, I should be able to make jewels for each of us that can replace the red fluid, but are fully reusable."

"What he said."

"Unfortunately this house is thousands of years old and doesn't have decent computers, but I've remotely devoted all the free ones in Formenos to the geometry problem. I expect a solution within a few hours."

:Oh, good. It sounds like we should soon have a solution for both components of the time travel challenge, then? I can help you check the computers' solution: he adds to Calanáro. 

He does not react visibly at all to the red-haired elf's deliberately exposed thought, mostly because it's not a surprising thought to him in any way. (Leareth is also NOT an untrained observer, and absolutely does not believe that this is all that the Elf is thinking.) 

Shavri does blink in surprise, but her eyes are fixed on her plate and she hasn't been participating in the conversation at all, so this isn't very notable. 

"The hope is to attempt a trial today. Calanáro has already volunteered to be the first test subject."

"It's possible the solution will be several gigabytes of data, but your help will be appreciated if it turns out to be something that can benefit from manual checking."

Maitimo can't read Leareth's mind, but he can read his body language well enough to realize that a battle of mind-reading games is not going to be fruitful. This is useful information in itself, though not the information his father wants. He leaves all this deliberately exposed as well.

Leareth is kind of appreciating this Elf! 

He, in fact, doesn't want to play mindreading games right now either. It's hard enough trying to focus on just the research work, when every other sentence reminds him of someone who's dead or something that's lost. It's not even very informative, since all he can read is what Maitimo wants him to know.

Almost certainly they don't want him dead right now, which is the part that matters. Leareth folds away his Thoughtsensing and stops bothering to skim surface thoughts at all. 

:All right. I may not be useful for much of the preparation today, then. I definitely wish to observe the trial itself, to find out how it shows up to our mage-sight and whether my magic can interact with the process: 

He asks some questions about the trial, but tries to show in his body language that he's not opposed to the red-haired Elf talking to him directly, if he wanted to do that instead of sneakily leaving some of his thoughts out in the open. 

When they're done with the breakfast, Fëanor leads the research team toward the forbidden south wing of the house. Meanwhile, two of the elves who aren't involved in the research begin to clean up the dishes. The dark-haired one that Leareth hadn't seen before today is singing a rousing song in his own language as he does so. (In fact Maglor is attempting a Quenya translation of "That's What Bilbo Baggins Hates", a song which, to his knowledge, was never actually sung by any member of the Company of Thorin Oakenshield.)

The door to the south wing is made of heavy steel and has a strange, faceted panel beside it. Fëanor touches one of the Silmarils to the panel, and the door slides open for the first time since the rising of the Sun.

Everything my father values is keyed to the Silmarils, Maitimo thinks in Leareth's direction. He's followed the research team there, though he wasn't participating in any of the technical discussions earlier. They're entirely irreproducible, so it's actually a brilliant security system, if one assumes that none of the Silmarils will ever fall into another's possession. That's a mistake that my father—well, probably will make twice.

I'm Nelyafinwë Maitimo, by the way—Fëanáro's eldest son, he adds, in what's meant to sound like an afterthought.

:I am pleased to meet you, Nelyafinwë Maitimo. ...I confess, I do not think I followed how the Silmarils left his possession originally, or what happened in your world in the interim, just the part where Strange collected them and resurrected your father. It does seem the system has that downside - is he considering replacing it, since presumably your world now has far more advanced tech for that?: 

That...is a long story. Although I don't expect either of us will have anything to do for a few hours at least. (Fëanor, Tony, and Bruce have gathered around the exposed part of the particle collider at the far end of the lab—this is where the actual collisions happen, although the acceleration ring extends for several miles underground. Calanáro is monitoring the simulation progress on his phone.)

The world, so we were told, was created by Eru, the One, who created the gods to help him design it. Together they made a great Music into which the whole history of the world and all who dwell within was written, save the fates of Men, who are free of its chains. Obviously this is—somewhat metaphorical, although our culture has tended to take it quite literally. Anyway, one of the gods, whose name we do not speak—we call him only the Enemy—sought to change the music to his own liking rather than Eru's design. Thus was discord introduced into the Song, and the world marred.

I don't know if any of this is true in any meaningful sense. My father had little patience for it. What we do know is that the Enemy had already been fighting the other gods for millions of years before we came to exist, and although the other gods were...on our side, this was...not a high standard. When we first appeared, in the darkness of Endórë—what you call Earth—the Enemy captured some of us, and did...something horrific...to those he captured. Created his own race of twisted slaves, from the ruins of our bodies, sworn to hate us and all that is good in the world. The other gods intervened, captured him in a war that destroyed several continents. Imprisoned him and invited us to come live in Valinor. Some of us, including my grandparents, accepted. My grandfather became King of our tribe. We advanced rapidly under the gods' tutelage—from making stone tools to—this—in a few hundred years, and my father was responsible for a great deal of it.

About this time things started to go wrong. My grandmother died due to complications from birthing my father—this was not supposed to happen to us, least of all here, and worst of all was that my grandmother refused to return to life, when the chance was offered her. My grandfather wanted to remarry. This was also not supposed to happen—when we marry, it's for the lifetime of the world, and there's a...magical soul-bonding aspect to it as well, no one even knew what would happen if one man had two wives. But the gods convened and permitted him to remarry, if my grandmother truly refused to return to life.

My father hated this decision, and he hated his father's second wife, and he hated the children that were born of that marriage, the older of his two half-brothers—Nolofinwë—especially. The name my father gave me actually means 'Third Finwë'; a more to-the-point translation would be 'He-whose-uncle-is-a-bastard'. And into this mess, the gods released the Enemy, paroled after a sentence of three hundred years' imprisonment. He, of course, did everything he could to fan the flames of this discord. It came to the point that Nolofinwë accused my father of treason in the middle of a council meeting, and my father threatened him with a sword in response. The gods exiled my father from our capital city for it. My grandfather, furious at them interfering in his own government, left with him, which did not improve the situation.

A few years before this my father had created the Silmarils. Valinor at this time was illuminated by two magical Trees, which produced the various effects of Valinor that you're probably familiar with by now—but stronger, then, what you feel now are only lingering effects. We actually can't live very well without them—immortality becomes unpleasant, eventually. My father...deeply mistrusted the gods, and resented that we were effectively being kept prisoner by our dependence on the Trees. He decided to capture the effects somehow. He spent two years on it, almost continuously, barely eating or sleeping, and by the end of it he had produced the Silmarils.

On the day that his exile was due to end, the Enemy destroyed the Trees, murdered my grandfather, stole the Silmarils, and fled for Endórë.

My father went nearly catatonic with grief for a month. When he returned there was little left of him but rage. He swore...a magically binding, unbreakable oath, to recover the Silmarils at all cost, and pursue with hatred to the ends of the earth anyone, elf, man, or god, who kept them from him. We—swore with him. Nolofinwë was furious. Declared that my father had forfeited his right to the kingship by doing something so idiotic. We narrowly avoided a civil war by just leaving Valinor and going after the Enemy. Well, trying to leave. The only ships at the time were owned by the Teleri, whose king told my father, when he asked to borrow them, that he was being hot-headed and should go home and think about this for a while.

Obviously he did not take this well. He decided to steal the ships. We don't—we don't know who shot first, but soon there was a battle going on, the first violence that any elf had ever done to another in the history of the world, and then Nolofinwë's people joined in in the middle, not really knowing what was going on, and at the end twenty thousand people were dead, mostly Teleri. They were—'civilians' is too mild a word—their culture didn't even have the concept of war—

We left anyway. The gods forbade us to come back, or to be re-embodied if we were killed, and cursed us to fail in everything that we did, and be betrayed by our own mistrust. That's—more or less exactly what happened.