A hundred miles away, in Tirion, Fëanor stops abruptly in the middle of explaining the newly-invented tengwar to a packed lecture hall.

What?! he replies. Hold on, I'll be there right away.

He hastily apologizes to his audience and runs off stage, out of the university, back to the palace stables, grabs the first horse he sees, and is off at a gallop towards his country house.

He's on his way, Nerdanel tells Nayoki. It'll be a while—the Palace horses are fast, but it's a hundred miles away—he's actually got this design for a faster mode of transport, but most people think it's too ugly to build, and it's not like we're in a hurry anyway—well, usually—

She notices Leareth and Vanyel and is suddenly very concerned. Are those two—okay—here, come inside—

:- No, not really. There was a fight - it went badly, they were hurt, we can explain once Fëanor is here. Vanyel just needs somewhere to lie down comfortably, I think, Leareth is...worse off–: 

She stops in the middle of trying to think how to ask about medical technology or magic. :...I can get Fëanor here immediately. If he can Mindspeak you a mental image of where he is, I can make a Gate there, a sort of portal -: 

She's done so many goddamned Gates today - unscaffolded awful ones, too - and after this one she might not be able to walk, but it seems important. And they're safe here, hopefully, and Savil can't do this for her but should be able to handle any other needs for mage-work that come up. 

Savil helps Vanyel follow Nerdanel inside. Leareth is still being hover-floated around in Tony's suit, so he'll need to handle that part. 

Tony walks inside and has Leareth follow him, trying not to stare at the elf-woman, who looks really familiar. It would probably be rude to say anything, though—maybe to the one from his own time, the wife of the Fëanor he knows better, but she's currently dead.

Tony's mind-shield went down when Strange died, so Nerdanel can sort of pick up on his thoughts, though she's not trying to. She smiles amusedly to herself. It almost makes her trust Tony more, though of course that's completely irrational—and he does look a bit like Fëanor himself, though for some reason he has hair growing out of his face—

These people have some kind of magic, she tells Fëanor. Let me share your eyes, and they can—somehow—get you here faster, I think.

Fëanor stops, pulls off the road, and gets off his horse. Nerdanel doesn't really need to ask to share his eyes—the marriage bond makes it very difficult to keep private thoughts from each other even if they wanted to—but he pushes the mental image in her direction.

Nerdanel passes it on to Nayoki.

She grits her teeth, winces at the power-drain, and ends up sort of sitting on the floor just inside Fëanor's house. But the Gate goes up, one end of it on the doorway, the other end door-sized and shaped and built on thin air a yard in front of younger-Fëanor's face. 

:Tell him to hurry, please: 

Fëanor steps through and looks in amazement at all the unfamiliar people in his house.

Hey, he says, mostly to Nerdanel but broadcasting so that everyone can hear him. What's going on—half the people in the universe—other worlds—are you Secondborn? I didn't think you existed yet. The last question is, of course, directed at the humans.

Nayoki is busy taking down her Gate, and also clearly exhausted, and Vanyel is sort of hanging onto the wall in an attempt to stay on his feet. Savil answers. 

:We don't, yet, not in your time. We're from the future. Eighteen hundred of your local years in the future. We met future you, there - where did that Silmaril get to, he gave us a magic artifact to show you -: 

From the future—the possibility of time travel disproves everything the Valar have been telling them about fate and other such nonsense and he's so excited—but, first, these people clearly have some kind of emergency going on, one that he had, apparently, found important enough to get involved in.

He sees the Silmaril in Thor's hand almost immediately, of course, and takes it from him. This is my work, he says. I am sure of that, though the thought of its making had not yet entered my mind. What is it—did I manage to capture Treelight—?

I think that's approximately the explanation he—uh, you—gave us.

Fëanor actually looks dismayed for a moment. Then the situation here must have become bad enough that I decided we had to leave, he says. I've considered it, a few times, but it's never seemed quite worthwhile. But that's the only reason I'd put this kind of effort into portable Treelights.

I don't actually know what happens. There's a book about it, in the future, but most people think it's just a story, and I haven't read it. Right now, however, we have bigger problems.

Right. The death of half the universe. How, exactly, was this accomplished, and by whom? Melkor?

He's called Thanos. I'm not even going to bother explaining why he did it—it's really stupid—but he used these. He shows Fëanor the Tesseract. Inside this is something called an Infinity Stone—this has another one, he adds, showing the scepter. There are six in total; if you get all six, you're basically omnipotent. Thanos has all six. We figured out time travel and are trying to collect our own set of six by borrowing them from various points in the past, but he managed to follow us to the place we got these two. So we're hiding in a place and time that he probably doesn't know exists.

That's sensible. It's very safe here. I'm not, myself, sure that's entirely a virtue, but if you're fighting someone with the power to destroy half the universe it probably is.

He turns to Savil. How did she do that—the doorway opening in mid-air a hundred miles away—the Valar can do things like that, I think, but they're usually more subtle about it and they're also, you know, gods—

:Er, she's a mage, so are we: Gesture at herself and Vanyel and Leareth. :In the world we come from, humans are sometimes born with the innate potential for Gifts. Mage-gift is the most flexible, it lets you manipulate energy, and do a very wide range of things with it if you have the training. There are other Gifts too - I'm using Mindspeech right now to talk to you: 

All sentient beings can do this, he says, confused. Oromë teaches his people to speak to animals, too, though it takes years of practice to make any sense of what they're saying. Are—most people limited to spoken words alone, in your world? That's fascinating.

We can manipulate energy with our minds too, but the world is made of things much, much smaller than we are, so it's incredibly complicated to do anything useful—only the gods can hold that much in their minds at once. I want to invent a technique to bind it into an artifact, so it can be programmed once and used again and again, but I have so much else to do first—when I was a child we didn't even have metalworking. Nerdanel's father invented it, with copper, and then copper alloyed with tin, and then Aulë was impressed and showed us how to smelt iron.

Wait, how long ago was this exactly?

Iron was—fifty years ago? It was just after I started working for him—I left to start my apprenticeship very early, I don't get along with my stepmother. I'm 81 now.

He has no idea what ages mean for elves, but—

"He didn't tell us he was sending us back to fifty years out of the fucking Bronze Age," he says to himself.

Fëanor is now very distracted by the floating Iron Man suit. He touches one of the thruster jets curiously and immediately leaps backwards with a yelp.

What is this? he asks, nursing his burnt finger but mostly unfazed. You're—heating air so that it expands and using the—the kick-back effect to lift him? We know about those physical effects, but you must have some kind of mathematical formalism to invent things that use them so precisely—I've been trying to invent one but I had to fix our writing system first—most mathematicians communicate excusively by abstract osanwë and that's really hard for an adult to learn, so if you aren't chosen for the guild at age twelve—which I wasn't—

Nerdanel smiles apologetically at Savil and Tony.

Why don't we find better accommodations for your injured? she asks Savil.