"That is very weird." He picks up Fëanáro and hugs him. "Bella, can you do me the favor of explaining - " he looks helplessly around the room - "this place?" 

"...it is eerily like the Imperium but everything runs on science and I think it is not a monarchy."

"...okay. Are we planning to live here, or figure out what happened to the Elves, or -"

"Right now we're planning to rescue this world's version of Feanaro, and his sons, one of whom I am married to, from Mandos."

"Rescue?"

"They are almost certainly dead and have been for millenia."

"And haven't been brought back already? Well - Fëanáro - the Valar said he wouldn't be -"

She remembers the Doom at him.

"What did they do?"

"So Melkor murders Finwe, steals the Silmarils, and runs back to the other continent. It is at this point blatantly obvious that he needs to be stopped. The Valar have thus far shown a deeply shitty track record for effectively dealing with Melkor. We set out to cross. We have no boats. We go up to the Helcaraxe. The Helcaraxe is fucking lethal and this becomes ever more apparent the farther north we get. Eventually even Feanaro has to admit that trying to cross that way is a terrible idea. We go back south. We beg the Teleri to let us borrow their ships. They refuse. We beg them to help us build new ships. They refuse. We beg them to teach us to build our own. They refuse. They call us idiots for doubting the Valar and trying to stop Melkor, and insist that as long as they withhold the means to do so safely we'll sit tight and inevitably realize we were wrong and go back to being nice complacent little do-nothings. We decide to steal the boats. They come at us with lethal intent. We defend ourselves. We've been training to fight orcs. We're not good enough at defending ourselves to do it non-lethally."

He closes his eyes.

"Oh, Fëanáro...."

"I honestly don't know that we made the right choice, but we didn't--if there's anything that could make someone deserve that Doom, it wasn't that."

"There are dozens of people who could have talked to Olwe, how many days did you give it - but, no, the Doom's the wrong reaction - the Valar are terrible at that sort of thing in general and they must have been in so much pain -"

"We tried talking to Olwe. The best anyone could get out of him was that if we lied through our teeth he might choose to consider it if we waited long enough that we could plausibly have changed our minds from the true things we had already said."

"It seems this is a painful subject. I'll ask my questions of someone else, I'm sorry. I don't mean to chastise you."

"The last time I ever saw my husband he was lying unconscious with a dent in his skull and I died knowing that when he woke up there was a good chance I would have killed him with grief."

"I am very sorry. Do you want to tell me about him?"

"His name is Turkafinwe Tyelcormo. He can literally talk to animals and his archery was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen the first time I saw it. He has a great sense of humor and priorities that make sense to me. When I first showed up mourning my parents he immediately offered me a shoulder to cry on. He looked at me like I hung the stars in the sky and thought I was the most beautiful woman in Valinor."

"I'm very sorry for your loss."

"We're going to get him back. We're going to get all of them back."

"If we are provoking the Valar again I want a plane we can run to afterwards."

"I was hoping to in-and-out without getting noticed but that is a very sensible precaution."

"Well, apparently the existing interplanar teleport targets people and not plane characteristics, because Fëanáro found me and not Materia. Is there a technical reason or could it be tweaked?"

"I think it is unrealistic to expect grabbing a lot of people from Mandos wouldn't be noticed," he says, and Fëanáro enthusiastically launches into an explanation of his spell targeting.

Which Bella takes notes on. "This could probably be reformulated to do plane characteristics but I'm not sure how to parameterize 'no gods'..."