There abruptly appears a beautiful woman in beautiful clothes who looks extremely annoyed.
She looks around at her surroundings, and sighs.
She has a brief conversation in the first language with the man that ends with him writing something on a piece of paper in an unfamiliar alphabet much less pretty than the Tengwar. He gives her the paper and she says something in a tone of polite request and gestures for Mirelote to follow her.
She leads her through a corridor that isn't quite pretty enough, through a garden that is, and into another building, where she locates a particular closed door and raps on it. A woman with wispy white hair and a large number of wrinkles emerges. Illia shows her the note and she begins trying more languages, quite a lot of them.
She frowns and says something to Illia, who nods, and then writes something on the other side of the sheet. Illia leads her to another building, and knocks on another door. This one is more like the one she was originally in, although the tiers are straight lines instead of curved. She has a brief discussion with the woman standing at the front of the room that involves Illia brandishing the note.
"...I have probably not provided vocabulary sufficient to answer the question. Ah, basics - zero one two three four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve. It's possible you don't use base twelve... I am an Elf, I think you are not Elves but nor are you orcs nor Dwarves nor Ainur... I have arrived here accidentally on my own part and likely as some hilarious divine joke on someone else's part..."
"Mandos is one of the Valar, of whom there are fifteen, one of whom is - not in good standing and therefore imprisoned by his fellows. The Valar are intermediate between Maiar, who are smaller in scope and more varied in psychology but similar in kind, and Eru Ilúvatar, who is broader in scope and different yet again psychologically. I suspect the latter of sending me or acquiescing to my being sent but I do not know why."
"So there's three kinds of magic--Sympathy, Effort, and Conquest--and they hurt differently and they do different things to your head, and Sympathy--makes you more pliable, but I am really not a pliableness-compatible person, so it has to work way harder to get anywhere with me."
"It's fine. I'm really Sympathy-resistant. ...Context: doing mind magic to oneself generally leaves one significantly more vulnerable to the relevant mental effects of the magic than doing that amount of magic not to one's mind does; I'm resistant enough that I could--adjust my reaction to pain."
"So 'magic that we already have' that isn't just free-form is...ways of persuading or pushing or commanding that are known to be relevantly effective. And telepathy in particular is tricky because it's incredibly important to be able to tell it apart from freeform mind magic after the fact."
"...It is possible to tell, with magic, whether or not mind magic has been done to someone. Telling what mind magic has been done to them is much harder, when it's possible at all, which it often isn't. So any mind magic done to another person is verboten, because you can say 'well, I boosted their work ethic like they asked me to' but it's not possible to tell whether you've made any other changes, like implanting the memory of asking them to, or literally anything else."
"I mentioned one of the Valar is not in good standing. He created orcs from captured Elves - we have blessings that give us excellent control of our bodies but they don't work under sufficient stress and a sufficiently tormented Elf given some other constraints will have orc descendants; they look different and have less functional chips, but can still swear oaths. He obliged orc children to swear him oaths of service as soon as they could talk, without time limit. Their oaths have now been broken since the Oath Reform Act of 1400."
"...So underblood is capped with these things that prevent the stuff that does stuff from degrading when cells divide, but in doing so they degrade and eventually they run out; this causes gradual breakdown of the body which can be reversed by magic but there aren't enough mages for everybody to get as much of that as they need so most people die after a hundred or so of our years; less so Genosha which does have enough mages per capita to cover everyone. You said you don't have magic, so I'm assuming telomere decay eventually gets you."
The twins lead her to yet another building, through more Sufficiently Pretty gardens, to what appears to be an administrative building.
"Hello," Illia says to a secretary. "Someone from another plane of existence landed on my theoretical bloodworking class." And she shows him the note. He examines it for a while and then looks up at Mirelote.
"So you're the supposed outworldly visitor?"
"I would like to assess the plausibility of going home using resources from this end, and if that seems intractable I'll wait for assistance from home and will want to pass the time looking for things to share that will be useful to you - it seems likely that we have more technology, for instance, though I'm not an engineer to tell you the entire tech tree."
"There are magical beings in my world and most of them are Maiar and the fifteen largest and most powerful are called Valar. One is not in good standing due to war crimes in our history's only war, and is imprisoned by the others. They have specialties, although some of them have more relevance than others - Mandos for instance specializes in the dead and can reembody people, from chips if they survive or from backups sent from the chips if the chip is physically destroyed. They are psychologically different from incarnates in many ways but have learned to accommodate incarnate needs and are very useful."
"Alright," he says. "Three Great Mages didn't survive; four did. I escaped, altered my appearance, hid my power level--not something everyone knows how to do, even all Great Mages--and assumed a false identity; I am many centuries older than is commonly believed. The three known to have survived murdered the others and have been quietly picking off anyone who looked like they were going to be both able and inclined to upset the status quo."
"Yes. Before five hundred years ago...we--I and several others who were like-minded--were working towards--improving the world. Making mages more accessible to everyone. We had some successes. Many of them did not survive the--transition. Rates of magical de-aging have plummeted in the last five hundred years. Some did; it's currently all but unheard of for disease to be fatal, or for that matter more than a minor irritant."
"I expect it rather depends on the context," he muses. "This is not, you understand, a possibility that has come to mind before...the worst case scenario, off the top of my head, would be to attempt to magically prevent anyone from your world from being in this one and decrying them to all and sundry as incomprehensible horrors."
"That's - vague. Valar can reembody the dead and communicate instantaneously with each other or Maiar and travel at the speed of light and duplicate physical items and oblige architecturally implausible structures to stay up and prevent animals from reproducing beyond the carrying capacity of their environment and once one of them made someone's fingernails invulnerable."
"I can't tell from here if my chip is sending backups. If it's not I might not be able to directly communicate with home even if I swear something to a Vala. If you can bring someone from my world here, does that reliably imply that you will be able to send them back?"
"I'm going to try swearing to the Valar that this is a matter of urgency and that I have certain intentions if they can't manage travel, give them a day, and then I think you should try to bring in my husband. It wouldn't really be excusable to wait much longer with the dying for no reason."
She nods. "I'm going to attempt to hurry the Valar now."
She switches to Quenya.
"I swear by Manwë and Varda and Ulmo and Aulë and Yavanna and Mandos and Lórien and Estë and Nienna and Vairë and Oromë and Vána and Nessa and Tulkas that I have found a world populated by an inherently mortal unchipped species, that it is my opinion that time is of the essence in bringing them aid, and that if I receive no contact from home within the next Valian day I mean to authorize a magic-user here to attempt to bring my husband to this world so that he can attempt to send one of us back again as a test of the use of his powers for transit."
"The Valar have received extra power as he's stepped it down, nothing tragic has happened since then, and he does judge a lot of very sad poetry and such, but if he did wish to fake it he could. I think faking it would be stylistically inconsistent at least as regards the people I knew about but it wouldn't floor me to learn that this place was a secret side project."
"It isn't strictly necessary, just faster. There are qualia associated with doing magic that can't be naively derived from nonmagical qualia; once you have them you can use them, and the swiftest way to acquire them is directly, but being around a large amount of magic being used will eventually cause it to be transferred that way."
He sends it.
It hurts as described--not only the magnitude of pain of a broken bone, it actually feels like it, or like a very intense jar.
Along with the pain comes information--this is what Sympathy feels like this is what Effort feels like this is what Conquest feels like--and, this is how you manage the mental side effects. Self-examination and modification. Exactly the sort of thing she's good at already.
"I am better at Sympathy and Effort than Conquest, to about the same degree; I think I would have been very vulnerable to Conquest as a child but have tended to veer away from those mental habits for the same reasons I am now better at the other two; and I do not think I am in danger of becoming - more sympathetic - than I already have, to the degree I might be in danger of excess stubbornness."
"I am assuming, perhaps erroneously, that you have a general idea of how much practice corresponds to approximately how much range, whether that range varies by the type of magic used or whether one is achieving motion or divination or something else... I am beginning from absolutely no background information about the subject, at all, and things you can normally omit from even beginners' lessons are likely to be new to me."
"I have attentional capacity blessings. I'm not sure how to render it into translateable terms - ah - I can have a couple dozen conversations at once? I don't always have all of this turned on, it can be boring if I'm not doing and thinking about many things, but I have plenty to spare for this."
"Okay--so suppose someone's had their arm lopped off, and I want to grow them a new one. If I have enough power, I can make their body regrow it. But if I don't have enough power to just issue that command, I can detail exactly how the cells should replicate to create the new limb, and see if I have enough power for that."
"Orcs are basically off an Elf template but without most of the - special features - and they're uglier and they like having very large families and living in very dense cities. Dwarves are shorter and don't have gender as a concept and they have beards and they're very fond of - trade, markets, economics."
"I think I would have found Conquest very appealing as a small child but have cultivated different habits since then. I have had decent success with Sympathy and expect comparable efficacy with Effort. If there is such a thing as being generically resistant I might be that, although most so to Sympathy."
"You are welcome to look at it. I assume you had no plans to do anything else with it but I should be understood to have what is probably a stronger-than-human negative reaction to the idea of finding myself with children I did not plan for or have under ideal conditions."
"He's occasionally useful but your system definitely has its advantages. Anyway. I asked Atennesi to bring you here because he can use people from Arda to magically locate Arda, and if he sent me back he might not have been able to find it any more, and humans are inherently mortal."