SNAP.
"It has, like, a piece of Sauron's soul in it. I didn't know it could talk, especially from this far away, but if you can hear it you should definitely not be listening to anything it's saying. In fact, if you can do it from here, you should open a Gate right below it and portal it straight into Mount Doom."
"I don't know how it works and if you want to you should ask an elf. I do know that it will corrupt you if you're around it too long and you should treat anything it's saying to you as though it were coming from Sauron himself. Now if you're not going to destroy it we should wink out of here now, the natives managed to handle it in the original timeline even if the solution wasn't ideal." He was just trying to help but it's starting to seem like he's no longer doing that.
:I've never tried to distance-cast a Gate before, I'd have to - be closer than this -:
Which feels like a perfectly sensible idea, but Vanyel is suddenly VERY dubious of his feelings on things.
:I - maybe I can do it with Farsight, without going any closer?:
"A little closer is fine. Preferably not close enough that anyone sees through the invisibility, and definitely not close enough to be in range to physically take the Ring."
He could probably get the Ring with Fetching from here, but he's not going to tell Tony– okay. Stop.
Why does he keep feeling like it's a bad idea to tell Tony? Because he'll want them to leave and that means scrapping the mission? Because he has information Tony doesn't, about what the Ring could help him do - what the universe would be giving up on, by destroying it - and it's not like he has evidence other than words from other people, not even under Truth Spell, that Sauron isn't to be trusted -
- wait, is that true at all? He knows Sauron imprisoned Loki by switching places with him in Mandos' realm. He knows Sauron is working with Thanos, or at least, he can't see why the others would have had any reason to lie about that, and it's...awfully hard to believe that everyone is lying or confused about Thanos being someone they have to fight...
Why is it so damned hard to finish his thoughts, right now, he keeps getting distracted by - impatience, no-time-to-waste, something -
He's shielding, he can't See the Ring anymore, or hear it - but somehow he can still feel it. Or - feel its attention on him, maybe. It knows he's here, now.
Vanyel takes a deep breath.
:- All right. I'm going to go in just a little closer, to make this easier on my mage-gift, and then I'm going to look with Farsight. I don't - think it can talk to me, that way - but if it looks like I'm going to do something stupid, I guess you should stop me?:
He flies in closer, to about a quarter-mile's distance directly above the house in question. The illusion of sky should still be covering them well enough, from here.
He extends his Farsight. Can he get enough of an image of the Ring's surroundings to do a Gate off - the bottom of the drawer is probably workable as a threshold to build on -
He can see the Ring. It's a simple golden band, alone in the drawer it's in. It's hard to believe that so small a thing could have such power.
....Okay. Focus. He's going to try to do this without using mage-sight at all, which is a terrible way to have to distance-cast a Gate, but he's worried that opening his shields at all will let the thing talk to him -
- why is he even trying to avoid that, all information is worth having -
He takes a slow deep breath. Lets it out. Reminds himself that he can't trust the Ring, or assume that it's not still affecting his mind in some way.
He grits his teeth, summons all his concentration, and builds a Gate-threshold from the bottom of the drawer, and then reaches - searches - it's taking all of his strength and focus and it hurts and he keeps not being sure why he's even doing this at all...
The search finds its destination, the hole in the ground by Mount Doom. The Gate snaps into place.
The Ring was designed to be immune to all forms of spatial non-locality. Normally, absolutely nothing would happen. But it can still pass through a Gate if it wants to, and right now, it actually does want to be Gated. Just not into Mount Doom.
The other end of the Gate appears three feet in front of Vanyel's face. The Ring falls out, and hangs in midair for longer than it ought to before it drops.
Vanyel doesn't move. It's taking every ounce of control he has. He is not going to catch it. Catching it is the sort of thing that if this were a ballad would end in disaster. He's so confused but he doesn't even have the spare attention to notice that, let alone to Mindspeak Tony and clarify that he didn't mean to do that -
Th Ring falls, unimpeded by Vanyel.
This wasn't anywhere on Tony's list of things that could go wrong, and wouldn't have been even if he had made such a list. Nonetheless, the thought occurs to him, even in his panic, that "any craft that we here possess" probably didn't include a lot of crafts that he does, in fact, possess.
He dives below it, so he'll be shooting into space if he misses, and fires as powerful and as tight an energy beam at it as he can generate.
Damn it that would probably have worked if he still had the Silmaril—
Wait.
He winks back to 2018, flies to where Thor is waiting at the Avengers Facility, gets the Silmaril from him, integrates it back in his suit, flies back to the random field in the English countryside where he'd emerged, and winks back to a millisecond after he'd left.
He fires again, with the full power of the Silmaril in his shot.
Where once there had been a ring, there is now a small cloud of very energetic gold atoms.
The magical shockwave punches into Vanyel as though he'd run full-on into a stone wall. Tony, not being Gifted, barely feels it.
Tony overrides the controls on Vanyel's suit, winks them both back to 2018, and sets him on autopilot to the Avengers Facility, then follows him.
Vanyel's Gate, tethered to the bottom of the drawer in the house below, had still been up at the moment Tony fired on the Ring.
He's still conscious, barely, as Tony takes over the suit. He kind of wishes he weren't.
Tony monitors Vanyel's vitals on his HUD, and decides to hold off on asking what the fuck just happened until Vanyel feels better.
They meet up with Thor, who Bifrösts them back to Valinor, and then the three of them go back to Y.T. 1250. The suit can float Vanyel back to his bed and then stow itself away, while Tony calls for a Healer.
"I, uh, destroyed a powerful magical artifact slightly too close to him," he explains to the Healer apologetically. "While he had a Gate up, if that matters."
Savil comes running. She reaches Vanyel's bedside, takes his hand, and then glares at Tony.
:What happened? I thought this mission wasn't supposed to be dangerous!:
"It wasn't. We got the Time Stone out almost immediately. But we were in a time period that I was, uh, familiar with, and there was something that had to be destroyed to stop Sauron from taking over the world, and the way things originally went, this involved a war in which tens of thousands of people died, and I thought we could do it faster and with less collateral damage. We were going to Gate the Ring directly into a volcano, but something happened and it popped out right in front of Vanyel. My first thought was he was trying to steal it—I wouldn't have blamed him, it's extremely mind-affecting, but it would have been really bad if he'd ended up with it—so I blasted it with Silmaril-light before things could get any worse. I, uh, didn't realize it was going to produce a magic shockwave and knock him out. I'm sorry."
:Gods. I...really can't imagine Vanyel would've tried to steal it. Not like him at all!:
Vanyel starts to open his eyes, groans, and thinks better of it. "...S-Savil? Wha... Y'not s'posed t'be here?"
"Huh? ...Nevermind, don't try to talk right now, ke'chara. You're safe. Everything's fine, you're back in Valinor now."
Vanyel ignores her. "Th'Gate, I don't– did I...make it do that...? I, I wasn't, I thought..." He trails off, coughing.