This is not Idaia's closet.
It's something weird.
That could be either a really good thing or a really bad thing.
She probably wasn't going to succeed at what she needed to succeed at anyway; worth the gamble.
She steps inside.
"Okay. So, Bar says this is an interplanar bar, I don't know what your world's therapists are like but in my world you have to be a subtle artist to go into the field, and me with my therapist hat on usually involves at least low-level affect and/or thought reading."
Okay.
This is a medium-sized college town in Kilaiuossa, where she grew up and was fine for the first (fifty-three but the years are shorter there; she was in her early twenties by the current reckoning) years of her life.
This is how her parents died and she and her sister had to leave.
This is a weird snake-monster.
This is where the snake-monster dumped them.
Here is the university Bella attended. Here is where she wandered into an interplanar studies classroom. Here is where she landed in the palace with a little Quendi boy staring at her -
- here are the Valar saying she's disruptive and ignoring her while she begs for her life -
...No. And there's context behind that oath, I agree that the oath was a terrible idea but it was a desperate gambit to keep him from literally dying of grief after his father died.
I was there, she says, referring to Alqualonde. I fought. I killed people. There's context for that too. We asked to borrow the ships. They said no. We asked for help building our own. They said no. We asked them to teach us how. They said no. They said if we had to stay in Valinor long enough we'd calm down and realize trying to leave--doubting the Valar--was folly.
Melkor had fomented hatred in the house of Finwe, murdered him, stirred up shit against humanity, and fled to the Outer Lands where he was no doubt resuming his prior misbehavior. We had to try to stop him.
We tried to steal the ships. Maybe it was a bad idea. But. We weren't going to hurt anyone. They saw us trying to steal the ships, they attacked us, we fought back, we were losing and dying, and then the Nolofinweans showed up, knew nothing except that we were fighting and dying, and intervened, and the Teleri died instead.
When they found out the whole story they decided it would have been better to leave us to die instead. This even though they were going to use the boats anyway, instead of giving them back to the surviving Teleri.
She relates the exact terms of the Doom. They're not coming back. Not unless I--I'm magic, you saw that when I was explaining Kilaiuossa, nobody's ever managed to, to resurrect anyone or get somewhere clearly not physically on the planet anymore like Valinor, but--we've got really good biological science now, if I figure out a cure for aging maybe someday--
(She doesn't think this is likely but she can't just give up on them)
My world's inherently inimical to the concept of experimentation. Universe doesn't like being picked at. I was - I was a really good wizard and getting better all the time in Valinor, I invented so many things - I haven't cast a single spell since I got back because I don't know how to be sure it's not too scienceified, I don't even cast high school level cantrips anymore - subtle arts, my mind powers, those are more practice based, so I kept what I learned there but -
And they sent you back? Fuck the Valar. I mean, except Orome, probably, I liked him, but if he was down with sending you home fuck him too. Now I'm very glad I didn't meet any of the others, I mean, probably they wouldn't have done that considering I was metaphysically married to a prince, but.
Do you want to come to mine, if Milliways allows it? We totally have science, if you're a great wizard maybe you could help with the curing aging thing but even if you just wanted to fuck off to a cabin in the woods and never speak to anyone again no one should have to deal with that.
I want to but I'm worried Fëanáro's going to try to rescue me and get himself eaten and I have a stack of foreign language dictionaries in my apartment to distract him while I run to the interplanar studies department in the nearest university I don't know what will happen if I'm not where he expects me if he tries that -
He would, but - it's already been years, a note's not going to stay in my apartment long enough - maybe if I could get an a-mail to someone and have them tell Emily, he might check Emily -
- he used to write stories in which he landed in my world and had adventures and one time he was in a bad mood and wrote one where at the end a dragon ate him it was by far the most realistic -
Yeah. I think I can get my crystal ball without letting go of the door and I can a-mail my parents to tell them I'm going and Professor Winters to ask her to tell Emily. And to cancel all my appointments. Not sure I can reach the bookshelves from here - well, maybe I could knock them over and then I'd be able to see at least some of the books from the closet door, bring a few with.
I'm not sure about that at all. It could have been all the Valar, Fëanáro might die instantly if he sets foot - I think I still have their slow-aging thing that they gave me unless I'm just one of those people who keeps looking eighteen for the duration of their twenties - wouldn't risk it.
I - don't remember all the spells I invented in detail but I should be able to retrace my steps once I can - had some healing spells, wasn't prioritizing anti-aging but I can probably get somewhere on it before you die - my world doesn't have it but my world's fumbling around compared to experiment-aided development, it's amazing we have as much as we do -
It's not a bad standard of living in developed countries these days, if you're not too ambitious - or if your ambitions involve hitting things with swords, that also works for a lot of people - if I'd never fallen into Valinor I could have lived out my life there and it wouldn't have been great but it would have been okay.
In my original world when you have really intense dreams sometimes you get involuntary sympathetic reactions--like, if you're having a really intense nightmare that takes place in a swamp, your bed might start dripping swamp ooze--and with training you can learn to do something similar voluntarily. That's a massive oversimplification--she plays the memory of miscellaneous Feanorians interrogating her over her magic system.
You develop a really strong habit of checking things that dreams don't do reliably - like text, or checking clocks - to the point where you also check them when you're dreaming, and then if you notice a discrepancy asleep you can notice you can pivot into lucidity from there, although sometimes at first you just wake up instead.
Being able to control my dreams would be pretty big, yeah. If I could have done that in Valinor we wouldn't have needed to steal the ships because I could have made them after looking hard enough. I mean, maintaining them the whole way across would have been tricky, but not impossible.
"He was a prisoner at Utumno - he went around blind, borrowing people's eyes by osanwë, till I could arcane-heal him, he wasn't sure of the Valar's reembodiment process, I don't know how long he'd have kept the scars without me there - he's one of Finwë's advisors and even before I got there he was sort of trying to make up for how desperately inadequate Fëanáro's parenting was -"
"I had these things you could put on your ear and use to talk to people in the Outer Lands, so people could talk to their friends and family there. I don't know that it's a good idea - your Rúmil won't know me - but he might be alive, he might be able to tell us more about what happened after you died -"
"They cannot fucking conceive that Incarnates' lives and priorities and autonomy might be more important than their own fucking whims and desires--" she chokes out, tears welling again. "They--they let Melkor out and they Doomed us to fail in fighting him because we defended ourselves, fuck--"
"I didn't get all that much - they were just trying to convince me it was a bad idea to speed him up - Valinor has a time sliding effect, it took me a Year to notice it, and then I asked them to except me from it and they said they couldn't and I moved to Tol Eressëa and invented a magic necklace that would do it and I made a bunch and they panicked and broke all of them except mine but they did let me share it with Fëanáro - anyway what I have is -" this -
"So he died so soon anyway and that stupid Oath was for nothing."
"I remember the ships burning. Couldn't see it myself, but someone let me borrow their eyes."
"Left Nolofinwe's half of the host stranded in Valinor. And my sister and I, by accident. We were supposed to be on the first set of ships."
"Nolofinwe's host decided to cross anyway. Over the Ice. Lots of people died. Including Imliss and I."
"He shouldn't have and I'm not just saying that because it hurt me personally. I just. Everything was so shitty, and I've--I've been in that place where everything's going wrong and it feels like the world is conspiring against you and you'll do anything at all to feel like you're capable of fighting back. I think when you're in that place people ought to stop you from doing things that regrettable but--it just--"
Bella opens her door.
She's got her crystal ball on a wheeled piece of furniture, and wielding a broom through the air she can bat the cart into view after fifteen minutes of trying and float the ball over; she composes the a-mails she wants to send.
She manages to knock her bookshelves over and pull across the books she can see where they spill into the hall, drag the shelves a little and prop them up just enough that she can see a few more. Swats the broom around in the bathroom a door down from her closet until the mirror shatters, sweeps out some shards, picks up a big one and uses it for an angle of sight on more books until she's got nearly all of them except the ones that went under the couch and she can't move the couch.
Sends the a-mails.
Retreats into the bar with her books and her crystal ball.
She can't generate any novel behavior from them but she can put what she saw on a loop.
"I know. I actually have three friends besides my sister who know--everything--Daphne's my college roommate and I spilled the beans after the third time I woke her up in the middle of the night leaking nightmares of the Helcaraxe, and she convinced me later to tell Gloria and Klaudia--and Gloria's a double art/art history major, beauty is one of the most important things to her, she almost swore retroactive fealty to Feanaro on the spot when I showed her them."
"Klaudia's actually the reason I don't expect you to be floundering horribly while getting started there and not speaking the language or having a legal identity, her dad has money and is vaguely incompetent at showing forms of affection other than spending it."
"I should have actually said instead of just thinking that if they didn't like his fate they shouldn't have done anything to restrain the behavior of a well-intentioned person with free will. They wouldn't have listened but I wouldn't have to wonder if they might've."
"The Valar told us we couldn't win against Melkor but as far as I know Orome was the only one who knew I existed and we never mentioned my magic to him so--we thought--I have no idea what happened but Melkor must have been stopped somehow but my family's got to be dead I have no idea how Arda turned into Earth."
"I met Orome once individually. He slowed my aging and made it so I wouldn't have accidental children and it was obvious that he and Tyelcormo loved each other." She shows her the relevant memory.
She shudders. "My husband's bisexual, it didn't come up before the wedding--it didn't come up at all until Tirion, when someone stopped me in the street--" she sends the memory "he said most people would feel betrayed for not having been told beforehand, but that they'd forgive you it if you promised you'd grown out of it or had it corrected." She shudders.
"Aww! When I showed up it was so bright and I asked about tinted glasses and I was trundled off to Mahtan's and he invented glass from my descriptions with Aulë's help right then and a while later I woke up and realized I hadn't seen any wheels and I explained wheels."
"We got to comparing species differences and he said we could test strength with arm-wrestling except that he was exceptionally good at that and I said it was just as well since I'd fight dirty anyway and he said he had six brothers and doubted I could pull anything they hadn't and I said that if his experience with cheating came from brothers then of course I could and he asked if that was a challenge and I said yes and we started arm-wrestling and I kissed him."
"I noticed the time slide when his birthday snuck up on me and I finally did the math and did not have a decade's worth of work under my belt. His birthday present was a bouncing spell and he used it constantly -" Tiny Fëanáro, bounding roof to roof through downtown Tirion - "Then we learned to fly -" Tiny Fëanáro swooping down to receive snacks in the square like a seagull.
It is technically possible to be a valid citizen with no documentation at all, merely difficult to prove that this juxtaposition is in place. Birth certificates are relatively harder to check up on than anything with a central issuing authority, and my recommendation is one of those and an expired passport to be "replaced".
"Oh, I know what I need," Bella says, "I need scroll supplies, once you know some basics you can get a little more slapdash in how you learn spells especially since I can transmit them by arts but to start out you'll want scrolls to look at."
And she purchases a scribing kit.
"Remember how I said Tyelcormo can talk to animals? He was concerned that going near the adult versions was too risky since I wouldn't come back from Mandos if I died so we looked at them from a safe distance and he brought me a baby one to actually interact with."
"Exactly. Sometimes it feels like one, though, when I got sent back nearly twenty years had passed but I looked the same age, I went back to school, I didn't talk about where I'd been because no one expected me to have been somewhere, it could have all been a dream..."
"My dad screwed something up, and someone else reacted badly, and things escalated, and a lot of people including both my parents ended up dead, and it was decided to place all the blame on them, and Imliss and I could renounce them, stay and have everyone be super chilly to us, or leave. We left. We were in transit when the snake-thing got us."
"Okay. I will always check before doing anything not read-only with your mind and I am professionally obliged not to disclose anything I do read to anyone else without your express and specific permission. There's an exception for things involving oaths but you're a human so it's not relevant. I'll have a better sense of what's salient to your goals and in what ways with more sensitive readings, but how much and how often I read is totally up to you and you can ask me to stay away from certain things without having to explain what they are, I have a way to place signposts at things you concentrate on that doesn't reveal the contents to me. How would you prefer to be read?"
"I mean I spend a lot of time dwelling on things that cause me to have negative emotions." She misses her in-laws, she misses her parents, she hates the Valar, she deeply resents the people she grew up with and this is deeply uncomfortable because she used to care about them, her family is almost certainly dead and almost certainly suffering, she died, she died cold and alone because Imliss died first, she hates being cold now when it's not under her direct control, because she died she couldn't prevent the Holocaust or the genocide of the Native Americans or any of the other shitty things Melkor was showing off.
My world does not have science - it is literally impossible to practice usefully - and we have a standard of living that I think is close to what you have here in most respects. That's mostly wizardry, some divine magic. When I was doing serious wizarding I could fly and speak to people across oceans and heal and enchant crystal balls - She gestures at her crystal ball - which are networked and share content people put on them with each other, and a bunch of other stuff. Casting takes mana, which people have a finite but rechargeable amount of, and at first it's pretty rigid but with practice you can freeform a lot of the pieces of the spells and combine them in new ways.
Bella wakes up noonish to her alarm. She does herself a coffee thing.
She notebooks on the crystal ball for a while, quite a while.
And then she takes a deep breath and prestidigitates her hostesses' room tidy.
Lightning does not strike, a fairy does not climb in her window, she is not summoned to the office of Vice Chancellor Embries.
She nods to herself and starts outlining what she remembers and what she knows she's forgotten.
Daphne pops back in after classes get out. Hey, I probably should've warned you earlier, but a lot of people are going to assume you're sleeping with me if they find out you're staying in our room and especially my bed. It's not without precedent. Just correct them, they ought to believe you, I don't seduce people who are going to be ashamed after.
Valinor makes it hard to care about the passage of time. It also made me sleep less, so I didn't suffer the full factor of ten, but when I noticed I invented something to make that not work on me, and I gave them out, and the Valar panicked and broke them all except mine, and I shared it with him and he kept going at breakneck speed, and - they had some prophecies about what he was going to do, which came to fruition in Idaia's version, and they thought making him faster was making it worse and I was changing things too fast for them to keep up in general -
I think it's admirable, in a way. Imliss thought of it as them taking more pride in their craftsmanship, that everything was so beautiful, until she found out. She doesn't need pretty the way Quendi do but she likes it a lot. Gloria too, although I can't say she doesn't need beauty so much, but she can tolerate the presence of non-beautiful things better than I got the impression Quendi do. And they're good at it, so. I think there are a lot of humans who would be happier living in a well-run mostly-Quendi society than a well-run human one.
I know, right? Apparently he pretended to grovel a lot and they were all, weelllll it's this or eternal imprisonment and that's a nasty thing to do to anybody.
They didn't know when Men were going to show up. Maybe Melkor killed everyone and the Valar reimprisoned him once there wasn't anyone on the continent to worry about destroying it and Men only showed up after that.
She also believes that there are situations where someone theoretically could be trusted to continue existing in the future but their victims' need for closure carries more moral weight than their right to live, if they've been terrible enough in the past, and I dunno if that counts as revenge or not but she doesn't see it that way.
Bella turns out to have all the consonant phonemes except hard "th" and G as in "genre", and most of the vowels; she pronounces some sample words to determine what substitutions she should use while she's working on getting those out unmangled. Pax has stupid letters and stupid letter combinations too, although not the same ones.
He ended up building his house about an hour's walk away from Tirion, and when Imliss went to live in the city to learn things better they corresponded in order for her to keep teaching him the language, and when she said she'd start corresponding when her tengwar penmanship was good enough and he said not to bother waiting she suggested she might just write to him in Kilaiuossari characters and he apparently looked like a puppy who'd just been offered a biscuit.
No, but I'm coming along anyway, aren't I, and I do like dressing me up. And maybe you'll find something sentimentally significant! Idaia found this thing, once, red corset with a short skirt attached, buttons up the front with silver eight-pointed stars. Wears it with a long white skirt underneath and a white jacket on top.
Like, coming out of high school and being talented at wizardry but not a budding epic or anything, I knew a spell to cast if I ever fell from a height that would see me safely to the ground; and for Fëanáro's birthday I turned that into a bounce spell that he could use to jump over buildings and it was adorable; and eventually with that and some air manipulation I could fly; and building an airship would involve that plus the physical airship plus principles of enchantment. I learned a cantrip to detect magic and developed that into a more detailed magic sense when I knew enough to break out of specific spells and I never got farther than detecting magic that was present and active; it'd be the same school of magic to learn how long ago an event happened but naively I will have a temporal range limit I have to stretch out gradually and it'd be harder to also incorporate more information about the things I'm divining...
I've never sailed recreationally, but I did spend a while living on an island off the Valian coast and I took a boat there. Fëanáro stowed away, his parents came after him and they had a screaming fight and dragged him back - I convinced them later to let him come out again -
I had to see Aulë right away because I came with a knife because my university had a mandatory weapons policy and the person who was showing me around was horrified and wanted him to fix it so it couldn't hurt anyone. And Lórien I met when I went to the garden to work with Miriel. And I saw all fourteen of them when I was at Taniquetil.
There are a handful of restaurants nearby! Klaudia and Daphne get into a minor argument over whether to go to a nearer chain fast food restaurant (Daphne) or somewhere farther away but more morally defensible in every way (Klaudia) until Daphne brings up that they should let Bella pick and Klaudia reluctantly agrees.
You can osanwë anything in them and they'll change for you. Fizz in the river, sticky note leaves, bubblegum flavored tree sap, whatever. Whoever you're looking for is right around the corner and if you want to be alone there's nobody around and the ground will go soft enough to sleep on and it's always exactly the right temperature.
It has some advantages. I was trying to reinvent them all and have everything wonderful all in one place. Safety and not having to do your laundry by hand! Chocolate and Quendi-quality architecture! Helpful Maiar on hand for all your problems and the concept of therapeutic ethics!
You'd know better than I would how people here would react to the introduction of magic-and-stuff. My world's got enough variety that it would take something colossal to get a reaction bigger than 'Tuesday already?' from more than fifty miles away, but you've got an all-human population, people used to science, no magic anything...
It seems like a lot of the superficial concepts are similar, based on what I remember from reading the genre as a kid and what Daphne was saying. But the fantasies gloss over a lot of the more tedious details and make it sound more reliable than it is unless there are plot reasons for something to fail.
Nice. Okay, I'm going to have to put some thought into this. I'm going to go with teekay-slash-cleaning, I think, I can already do illusions. Not that I think those'll be redundant, if they let me illuse stuff that I never dreamed, but it still lowers their priority.
The light one is probably not useful to you because you have probably ever dreamed about light, although I don't know how much control you have over the details of your constructs. The sound one might be useful, you can control the illusion however you like as long as it isn't too loud, and it's time-limited in a way that means it can be a good gauge of your general progress. Here's Prestidigitation, I'll walk you through how to read it -
Prestidigitation ensues.
She cups a hand, and light bursts from a point above it. It's mostly white, but streaked with ultraviolet, which Bella can somehow see despite using only human eyes for the purpose. If she's ever borrowed an Elf's eyes to look at a Mingling she may recognize it.
In general if I do something I don't have practice with or something really complicated there is a small possibility I will fuck it up and do something else instead or in addition. I could probably fix or at least mitigate anything I fucked up, but it's not guaranteed, and the fixing itself is not something I have much practice with because I usually do not fuck things up. Exactly what mistakes would be most likely would depend on exactly what I was doing. The thing I'd be inclined to try first if you were having trouble with lucid dreaming would be a habit-formation assist and anecdotally when those are done incorrectly the results are most likely to include obsessive and/or compulsive behaviors, sleeplessness - that, no matter how insomniac you wound up I'd still be able to put you to sleep and that's safe - superstition or addiction formation, or déja vu.
Nod. I wound up shuffled around a lot, I was in a guest room in the palace and then I was just sleeping outside in my house plot because they hadn't introduced rain yet and then I went to Lórien and stayed there for a while and then Lórien gave me a magic leaf that teleported me between a certain tree there and one in the palace courtyard.
Bella cackles. I just got over it, there's some species that treat nudity really differently in Materia. Nymphs are religiously obliged to go around stark naked literally all the time and public decency laws don't apply to them or anyone within, I forget, ten feet of them.
Someone told me to braid my hair without explaining, and I think once or twice I may have patted Fëanáro on the head or something but he was really small so it wasn't a big deal, Rúmil just explained. I got very conscientious about it. When I loaned Fëanáro my magic necklace I put it on him by teekay.
She heads out to the forest.
She conjures her bow--the beautifully carved one her beloved made her before they were even married, when she expressed the desire to learn, the one she wouldn't have the real version of anyway because she left it behind in Formenos--and arrows, and leaves holes in trees for about an hour.
"Just what I can normally pick up. I could develop something for that - something for strength like my boots are for dexterity or something to drag stuff through the air after me maybe - but I haven't yet." Carrying Fëanáro to Tol Eressëa, since he didn't have enough mana to make it, luggage dangling from her arms...
"I'm not sure how I'd approach some of them, but boot-style stuff for the strength I can do, I can probably figure out the vision and hearing... the perfect bodily control would be a real pain in the neck. I'll probably be able to do that with subtle arts one day but only on myself, a spell for it would be hard."
It's a novel but it's written in a sort of biography style, complete with the explanation of the paladin's family and early life mentioning her future deeds where they may be connected; the biographer-narrator's almost more of a character than the paladin. Bella explains whenever something comes up that they don't have here - demons, paladins themselves, the church of Kharol, etcetera.
"...Materia is... It depends, a lot. I am reasonably sure that whatever they walked into is safer than being on Materia and doing science experiments all morning and insulting fae over lunch and blasphemy all afternoon and tickling dragons twice weekly. It's probably more dangerous than being a human in a developed human country on Materia and operating a grocery store and knitting."
"You're from Valinor, via some kind of world that fails to permit science, or perhaps vice-versa, but not Idaia's Valinor, and you have unfortunate restaurant-choosing criteria, and you're going to see to it that our chances that the people on the relevant task will fail and we'll all grow old and die are much slimmer."
If for some reason I ever turn up straight then someone has fucked with my head without my consent and if I appear to be okay with it they fucked with that too and I give my consent in advance for you to take whatever risks you need to to fix as much of the damage as you can. Not that I expect it to come up, but.
"I don't think Idaia met him. He's one of Finwë's advisors and he helped me settle in and try to get Fëanáro more adequately parented... may be that he didn't do as much of that without prompting or something, I was a little surprised that he wasn't hard to miss by the time she showed up."
"I mean, like, five? This isn't Valinor, if it were my top priority would be getting myself another anti-time-slide. I started with high school arcana and a little college plus cultural background on the conceptual stuff, and started reverse engineering things very soon after it was safe to do science."
It takes a few more days for Klaudia to talk her father into securing an apartment in town for a friend of hers he hasn't met--"He may want to meet you at some point in the future, it makes him feel more involved with my life if he can tell himself he knows my friends"--and Gloria gives her a painting of Tirion for a housewarming present and grocery shopping occurs.
Gloria circumvents the issue of whether sandals-and-so-on are much harder to enchant than boots by finding a pair she really likes--supple black fake leather that goes up to her knees and hugs her calves fetchingly. Klaudia has a pair of combat boots. Idaia finds something reasonably nice but nothing special. She also picks something out for Imliss, whose visit is approaching.
"That would be me," Idaia says in Quenya. "...Also this is another Arda but instead of getting Bella when you were little it got me and my sister when you were an adult, we're originally from yet another universe, and we were too late to stop any of the prophecies Bella got about you. But there was context that the Valar left out. And we died and somehow-we-have-no-idea-how reincarnated. We're pretty sure our version of you and his sons are dead so we're planning a magical rescue mission."
She does not try to use words. She has never liked them much for things like this. Instead she does her best to transmit her whole impressions of each.
This is Adult Feanaro: Brilliant, adorable when exposed to new languages, caring. Shoved into corner after corner and not always reacting in the best possible way. Invented the Silmarils, which are utterly amazing. A wonderful person, hurt until his broken edges hurt others and then cursed for it.
This is Maitimo: Blazingly social, people-smart to the point of for-all-intents-and-purposes-psychicness. Would have been the next king if everything hadn't gone horribly wrong.
This is Macalaure: Sings like any divine being from any mythology one cares to name. Also has the following other personality traits.
This is Tyelcormo: Absolutely brilliant with a bow and arrow, can literally talk to animals, good at just about everything not classified as "academic." Caring. Sweet. Fantastic sense of humor. Held her when she was grieving her parents' death. The most beautiful person imaginable. Intensely beloved by her.
This is Carnistir: Sarcastic, doesn't suffer fools well, nice to non-fools especially family, profoundly good at economics.
This is Curufinwe Atarinke: Name says it all, really.
The Ambarussa: Twins, nigh-inseparable, the kind of people who'd change the world given the opportunity.
She ticks off on her fingers. Let Melkor out in the first place. Refused to let the Noldor who wanted to emigrate do so. Completely failed to do anything whatsoever to stop Melkor once he had started running amok. Tried to get my version of you to destroy the Silmarils to restore life to the Trees. Doomed you and yours after the Alqualonde Incident. Also, temperamentally indicatively, all the stuff yours did, like banishing Bella back to Materia.
I'm not actually sure why I'm not. The Valar could have been right that they were able to protect me, or Materia might only care if you try to do science while in it and I was careful enough. If it's the first one you could have been killed trying to get me and it would have been perfectly reasonable to try to get you not to.
Also I think I heard something about a "no mortals in Valinor" rule, which apparently didn't apply to Imliss and I, although whether that was because native-to-this-dimension humans hadn't started yet or due to the bare fact of having come from another world or because Orome dramatically slowed our aging or because I got married to a prince and this would have made it a hassle to get rid of us I don't know. Although I suppose Bella's example points to the former two.
I'm still making sure I remember all the pieces from the basic version; I haven't been here that long and didn't cast any spells at all while I was in Materia and don't have my original notes, so I'm rusty. You're certainly in better practice than I am even if you haven't specifically been doing earwires.
Because he tried talking me out of it and all his reasons were reasons not to do it carelessly and I said so and he said that of course getting you back was important but I was going about it very carelessly and you wouldn't want that, and I said you'd want to be rescued and he agreed.
"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."
"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."
Rumil turns and looks at Feanáro. "I love you," he says, "and I think that you were not creative enough and that you can do better and that sometimes you think there's only one way forward, and it could have gotten you killed in Materia and in this world it killed a lot more people than just you. I am not mad. I want to fix it. But it was a mistake, which I am pointing out so you learn from it."
"I'm going to be epic, I won't need to steal boats."
He smiles at him exhaustedly.
"Okay, which three? English is the local vernacular, so you'll want to start with that one...I don't personally speak that many languages, granted, English and French and Mandarin from this world and Kilaiuossari and Bremik from our world of origin, but we know some people who speak a handful of others, if you're only going with three for the moment I imagine you'll want to start with the ones with fluent speakers readily available rather than just relying on books..."
"Pff, fine--This is a sentence in English. This is a sentence in French. This is a sentence in Kilaiuossari. This is a sentence in Bremik. This is a sentence in Mandarin. English and French share roots and so do Kilaiuossari and Bremik, to a lesser extent, but neither shares roots with Mandarin."
I don't know, I've never been to Mandos. But if it's been thirty thousand years he'll have had time to try lots of things. There's technically no reason you can't enchant the planet's bedrock, if you wanted to and had, well, thirty thousand years to spend on doing it, your fidelity would have to be amazing...
I will be happy to teach you Pax after the essentials are out of the way, she says in Pax, and then in Quenya, I'm far away but using a magic item that closes osanwë range. I'm with your daughter-in-law Idaia and her sister Imliss and a younger version of you from an alternate Arda.
Yup that's a Fëanáro. I fell into my Valinor in a magical accident and didn't want to go back because my home world sucks so I didn't prioritize interplanar travel, but the Valar kicked me out and smol-you invented a spell in my world's magic system to rescue me but before he did I met Idaia in a confusing interplanar bar and went home with her and his spell targeted me and not my world so now we're all here. My home world is aware of several other planes but it and all the planes it routinely contacts are fundamentally opposed to the concept of science so they're not very systematic about doing anything with them. According to the proprietor of the confusing interplanar bar there are lots and lots of worlds; she didn't give a clear inifinite-or-not-infinite answer though.
Okay!
And to everyone else, "he wants us to come to Canada! so everyone is in one place for the dimension-hopping project and we can teach him wizardry and he can teach us all the science! He said we might need currency and he's having someone bring us some and also he was dead but Mandos got tired of him."
Oh, he works for the government and has a information-processer that takes in really absurd volumes of data and searches it for content that might be relevant to us, and he will, given the information that Idaia's alive, be able to find all of the information that has been put in the right format and that is about her, and this will include where she's currently living.
All of science, but I can't explain it all remotely. I suppose I could do the most central bits of that? All matter is made up of these small particles called atoms; atoms are themselves made up of smaller particles, and all the regularities in physical chemistry stem from these. The simplest element is hydrogen; it is made up of one smaller-than-an-atom particle that's called a proton - scientists picked a word for a form of regularity where there's a binary option for flavors things come in and two of different flavors tend to pair, called charge, so protons are said to have positive charge, and one electron, which is a probability distribution around the outlying area - he sends the concept - and, as you can see, there's a symmetric location for a probability distribution around the outlying area, which means that hydrogen will tend to bond with exactly one other atom. Here's hydrogen bonded with hydrogen. Here's helium, two protons, two neutrons - no charge - two electrons, which looks like this, see how it's symmetric, can you guess what'll result?
Right. Lithium. Sends the image. Now you've actually got more possible symmetries for the probability distributions than the obvious one, imagine a distribution space here - he sends it - and here, and lithium's actually got seven spaces missing, which means it'll usually try to give away the one it's got, rather than try acquiring seven more. By try to give away I mean it'll bond in a way where the electron's probability distribution skews heavily towards the other involved atom -
And so on.
"We have legitimately no fucking clue how we're alive, unless 'reincarnation' counts. Uh, Idaia and I both have bank accounts? Mine's in Boston, hers is in this California college town where we currently are, but since we both have, like, debit cards it matters less where each one's technically located..."
"Well, after Bella showed up, the answer was 'her magic system,' and not a lot more defined than that. Before that it was 'try to figure out a cure for aging and a way to do it with dreamshaping, which. We didn't have nearly as much confidence at succeeding at."
I work for Finwë as an advisor, write histories, and was when Bella arrived primarily the person who managed relations with the Vanyar, a position I stepped down from because I didn't want to be away as often as it would require. It is possible that in your world I didn't step down, and if there were diplomatic crises in progress that I was in Valmar; if it is unlikely that I'd have been needed more there, it might be relevant where Finwë was and what he was doing. I should probably just ask it of this Fëanáro.
"No, just Venus, but that's a planet, not a star. It turns out that the Noldor can't live forever outside Valinor, we start to fade, which means we interact with the world less and less. He's a little bit faded. He's scared for when he'll be too faded to write. He invented a thing that fixes it but people kept stealing them because they were mean and awful and now two of them are lost forever and one's on Venus and we're going to go get that one."
"They were powered by the Trees and Melkor killed the Trees when the Valar let them loose, and also after the Valar tried to steal them and Melkor stole them and Ungoliant tried to eat them he swore to kill anyone who withheld one so it wouldn't be great for there to be more of them around anyway."
"Everyone kept leaving me and Melkor killed my dad and burned down the house and the library and everything I had and then the Valar didn't know the Silmarils had been stolen so they said to break them for them, so they could put the Trees back, I had to, they weren't mine to begin with because everything in Valinor was the Valar's gift to us, and I was so scared and so sad and I wanted to die and go be with my mom and my dad but my children said - said that there had to be an independent kingdom outside Valinor, had to be a place for people to live and be safe without the Valar or Melkor, and they'd never leave, they'd help me get the Silmarils back so we wouldn't be stuck in a box forever - no matter what, we said, we swore, no matter what people threatened us with, 'neither law, nor love, nor league of swords...'"
"He's called Fëanor in the language they spoke in the Outer Lands, we can call him that. I know he shouldn't have said nothing could deter him from getting a Silmaril back but people shouldn't have been trying to make him give them up - and the Valar still tried taking them after he was dead, after almost everyone was dead, they just swept in and said my sons forfeited their claim to them so they were the Valar's now -
- the Enemy destroyed all his mom's tapestries, all of them, and she died when he was little he didn't even know her -"
Hugs hugs hugs. "Well. We can explain to our Valar what will happen if they let Melkor out, since probably they don't know. And if that doesn't do it, we'll think of something else. And it won't have to happen the same way. Your parents aren't going to die, and we can think of something better to do about things you make that people might want to take away, because it is unrealistic not to plan for other people behaving badly, especially Valar."
Squeeze. "I want better results for you than what Fëanor got. I want it really, really badly, it would be so awful if you had to be that scared and that cornered and that dead for that long and with that much collateral damage, and it would make me especially miserable if it seemed like you could have done something else that made more sense instead. I do not like it when people make me miserable even if they're only doing it by hurting themselves, and this wouldn't even be that. But just because this one of you actually went and did the stuff in the prophecies doesn't make me not love you any more than seeing the prophecies could."
"Yeah. I told him. He still didn't think you could understand. He wanted me to have a plan for getting to Canada if you didn't understand and you got mad and tried to keep me and I explained how everyone in the palace tried to stop me studying wizardry and I got invisibility and walking through walls so I could get away from them and then he felt better."
"Mandos was really awful and I think he'd be scared of you. You won't mess with his head, right? The other thing he said was that in Mandos if he'd had any regrets Mandos could have used them to change how much regret he had until he regretted it what Mandos thought was the right amount so he doesn't regret anything so there's nothing to use against him."
"She accidentally said something that made her sworn to kill me and she didn't want to do it but delaying and delaying at an oath is really hard and after a while you can't care about anything else so she didn't care about anything and wanted to die. Bella just made it impossible for her to hurt me and that fixed it because if you're sworn to do something impossible nothing bad happens as long as you're trying."
"Bella's not allowed to say because of subtle artist ethics but I am. She was in labor and it was really painful for some reason and she said 'I swear - if this doesn't stop I'll kill him' or something and if you say things not meaning it it shouldn't really count but then if you think you swore it that makes it worse too and then it latches on..."
"I mean, even if it had been binding it was phrased to give someone an out if they couldn't condone their leaders' actions anymore. I don't know if I would have taken that. But yes, I don't regret it. I was upset with him for a long time--still am, a little, to be honest, but I can put it aside--but he's family. I can be upset and still love him and be on his side."
She hugs back. "It was really awful, watching him get shoved into corner after corner and seeing people get mad at him when he failed to react with perfect grace. I was upset with him for burning the boats but I was also really upset with the people who'd pushed him to the point where that seemed like a good idea at the time. I'm really glad the stuff that happened to him isn't going to happen to you."
"I think it'll work for you too as long as the party you're calling has osanwë. It shouldn't be too hard to design a version that works for voice calls, either, that's what magic mirrors in Materia do, just wasn't a meaningful design constraint when I put these together."
"We were talking about Oaths and I said I was glad I don't swear bindingly even though I don't regret anything I have sworn and he asked me what I'd sworn and I told him I swore fealty to you after the Darkening and he asked me if I really didn't regret that even though you messed up and I said that I had in fact been upset but you're family and I can be upset and still love you and be on your side and he hugged me and I said watching awful things happen to you and you fail to respond to them in the best possible way and people blame you for it sucked and I was glad none of that stuff was going to happen to him and he said he was gladder that you still had people who loved you anyway and I quoted that one time you said everyone deserves people they can count on unconditionally at him and he asked if I told you I still love you because he didn't think you knew and I told him I'd told Caranthir I loved him while I was talking to him but hadn't mentioned it to you specifically and he said you'd be surprised and relieved."
"After nearly everyone on the continent was dead, someone stole a Silmaril and with it was able to navigate the magical protections that stopped anyone from entering Valinor. For the crime of entering it without leave some of the Valar favored executing this person, but they reduced the sentence to 'circling the sky with our Silmaril forever'. And then intervened. And won."
"Short version: Telvo tried to take a boat back. No one knew he was in it. It was lit afire and he suffocated. The continent was besieged by orcs, the local population in dire straits, and the Enemy threw everything he had at us. We hadn't even built walls yet. We built them out of bodies, slept behind them, kept fighting. Took back the whole continent. It was not easy but it made us overconfident, there were a million orcs dead at our feet - Father charged Angband. There were giant fire demons we later called balrogs. We drove them off too late, he died in our arms. We had been there three weeks.
Enemy offered to parley. A year to evacuate the continent and a Silmaril to found our Noldorin kingdom, and in exchange we'd let him war with the Valar unimpeded. Maitimo went to the parley, thought if we could surprise the Enemy with enough force we could get the Silmaril without negotiating and on the off chance they were sincere we could learn a lot from talking. We surprised the Enemy, but not with enough force. They took Maitimo alive.
The host crossing the Ice arrived. They marched right up to our camp and we retreated to avoid a war. Spent five years not doing much of any lest it make them nervous, they were doing the same. Findekáno got sick of it, hiked off to Angband, and got Maitimo out. He apologized for the boats - he hadn't had anything to do with it in the first place, he didn't know Father was planning it and he tried to stop him - surrendered the crown to Nolofinwe, pledged his fealty. It was sickening. He was still broken by Angband and trapped in his own head and didn't even believe any of it was real, and Nolofinwe was delighted."
"Maitimo moved us across the continent because the peace was still fairly fragile. There were two local kingdoms standing, and one of them was Olwë's brother's and he turns out to be a pompous jackass with a Maia wife who regards himself as ruler of the continent and makes it known that we'd better consider ourselves his subjects. I accused Artanis and company of being the shitbags they are, they went to him and told him about Alqualonde, he banned the speaking of Quenya on the continent.
Enemy tried something. We were stronger, faster, had better communications. Won. Besieged Angband except to the north where it's inaccessible, mountains. Built some kingdoms. Fought some brave battles. Four hundred fifty years, before he was strong enough to end it. The mountain ranges all erupted as volcanos, blotted out the Sun. Most of the kingdoms fell, though not Maitimo's, because he was a terror in a fight. Cáno sheltered with him, I and my people fell south, Tyelcormo and Curufinwe ended up in one of our cousins' kingdoms. Findaráto's. Both his brothers had died in the onslaught.
This mortal man wanders into Olwë's brother's kingdom and falls in love with the princess. The King, being a jackass, tells him he can have her hand if he brings him a Silmaril from Morgoth's crown."
"He goes to Nargothrond and asks the King to help him steal a Silmaril. The King is indebted to his father and thinks this is a lovely romantic way to die - he wasn't thinking very clearly, his brothers had just died, it was becoming apparent the war was lost - and decides to go for it. So Tyelcormo and Curufinwe give speeches trying to persuade his people not to follow him. They're very convincing. His people decide to stay. The King, the mortal, and a party of ten go off on a Silmaril suicide mission.
And the princess of Doriath gets word when they are inevitably and predictably captured by the Enemy, decides that she has to rescue them - she's half-Maia - and heads to Nargothrond herself to try to rally an army to the cause of saving their King. Tyelcormo and Curufinwe detain her there and write to the King of Doriath asking, I take it very rudely, what the fuck he's doing using Father's work to send mortals on suicide missions. Doriath mobilizes to attack Nargothrond. Huan decides that the princess's cause is very romantic and that she stands a chance with his help, and he goes off, fights one of Morgoth's lieutenants, helps the princess rescue her boyfriend. Then Huan comes home but Tyelcormo's a wreck and furious with him, and more furious when he learns that the princess and boyfriend have gotten Manwë's help getting out of Angband after sneaking in and stealing a Silmaril. Huan leaves again to try to rescue Doriath from the catastrophic fallout of this - a werewolf of Angband swallowed the Silmaril and had superpowers, it was killing everyone - and dies in the fighting, as do Princess and Boyfriend. The King of Doriath ends up with the Silmaril and asks the Dwarves to make him a necklace with it."
"After the Dwarves do this, he accuses them of getting designs on the Silmaril, refuses to pay them, and starts shouting threats and racial slurs. One of them stabs him. He dies. In retaliation the people of Doriath kill all of the Dwarves in Doriath. There are two survivors, and when they get home their people decide to march on Doriath and demand accountability for the massacre. The demand of accountability sort of falls by the wayside when the two sides meet, and the Dwarves end up sacking Doriath, and then all getting murdered by a retaliating Doriath host, including all of my children, who were shot while fleeing. No survivors, the second time.
We'd been trying to rally all of the free peoples of the world together for one last offensive against the Enemy. If not for that mess, it might have been enough. As it was, it failed catastrophically. We lost everything. Everyone who survived retreated far south.
And we wrote to Doriath explaining that we'd sworn to retrieve the Silmarils. Even then we could have used it to keep some people safe inpenetrably, we offered to share that safety with them. They did not send our messengers back. We attacked. I died, Tyelcormo died, Curufinwe died. We won, but they smuggled the Silmaril out and to a refugee camp on the southern coast.
Maitimo wrote to them, too. Messengers shot on sight. And then they stalled, as long as they could. Oaths gradually wear away all the other things you care about that aren't the oath, and if they'd stalled too long they'd have fallen on Sirion after losing their capacity to care about anything other than the Silmaril. They attacked. Pityo was killed. The Queen of Sirion jumped with the Silmaril into the sea rather than let them have it. Ulmo turned her into a bird and she found her husband and they went to Valinor, to plead for the Valar to intervene.
The Enemy swept up the leftovers.
And fifty years later the Valar marched in, overthrew him, declared the two remaining Silmarils theirs by right of conquest. Maitimo and Macalaurë wrote to them. The Valar said that by their deeds they'd forfeited their claim to the Silmarils and should turn themselves in and face justice. Instead they fought their way into the camp of the victorious host of the Valar, and took the Silmarils and prepared to die there, fighting. But the herald of Manwë told no one to stop them from leaving.
They left. The Silmarils burn the hands of evil things. Burned theirs. Oath was over. Macalaurë threw his into the deepest reaches of the sea. Maitimo jumped with his into a chasm that had opened in the earth as the continent crumbled."
"And being a prisoner of the Enemy can mean a lot of things. Back when his seat of power was Utumno he used slaves for mining. I do not expect he was doing that with captured kings of enemy hosts. I don't know Fëanor's son and don't know what it'll take to make him okay, but please do not observe to him that some people came out of it better."
"Granted. But people problems are really not your forte, so maybe wait on expecting results in that area at least until all the technical problems have been solved? You know what I bet is harder than resurrecting humans and Dwarves, is resurrecting Maiar, Tyelcormo was super attached to Huan."
She sends him an image of her exact surroundings and as much information as she can think of about the campus's location within the town and the town's location within California.
I am--oh dearheart--I--I can't imagine you're exactly okay, so I won't ask if you are, but--
I wasn't thinking--I should have gotten up and kept walking and worked on my magic like a madwoman and sought what solace I could in your arms and found a way to get her back and instead I condemned us both to what should have been permanent death and you to thirty thousand years in pain.
Mhm.
Before I found out you were alive and I was getting you back I worried that some day I'd wake up and realize I'd forgotten some trivial detail--the way you smelled right after scrubbing in a cold stream, the way honey tasted on your lips, the timbre of your laughter, the way you looked at me--and I'd really believe I was going to fail to rescue you, that I was going to live alone for the rest of my life and die with my body withering around me--
She stands up and all but flings herself at him, throwing her arms around him and burying her face in the crook of his neck and trembling. Tyelcormo--and they are married and he can feel everything she feels and one of those things is a desperate, roaring skin-hunger unsated by contact with any other person and ignored for lack of the ability to satisfy it only now he is here and she is drinking in the contact like someone come crawling out of the desert to an oasis--
And she is crying with sheer relief, half a decade's worth of grief obviated and let out, the anticipation of a thousand future griefs repealed--he's here, he's here, he's warm and solid and himself and everything's going to be just fine and she loves him so, so much.
Mhm. She cannot think of a single thing she would rather do than just hang here holding her husband and being held by him, breathing in his scent and feeling his thoughts hum adoringly against hers--well actually she can, but her dorm room currently contains a small version of his dad, and everyone's going to want to leave for Canada ASAP anyway...
Reasonable, she thinks fondly. So a few weeks ago instead of my closet I found an interdimensional bar and met a woman named Bella. Bella's home universe is pretty terrible, but she got accidentally sent in a non-snake manner to Valinor--a different Valinor, at a different point in time, where she met a ten-year-old version of your dad, saved your grandmother, introduced her world's magic system, and eventually got kicked by the Valar back to her terrible original universe because the Valar are terrible. She escaped to this relatively non-terrible universe with me via the magic bar and her version of your dad came here intending to rescue her from her terrible universe and found us instead. Then it was posited that our Feanaro might've managed to escape Mandos somehow so we checked because it was a cheap test and discovered that you are in fact alive. She's so happy he's alive.
Not the most honest thing ever but I think legally we're covered. Imliss rented a trailer so we don't have to deal with pesky things like seatbelts or anything to keep us from holding onto each other but I don't think the noise of driving is likely to be enough to protect smol Quendi ears so we should probably behave ourselves.
Does the car have a CD player? I assume so, but I wasn't paying attention to the car when you were getting out of it, it could be super old, I have a ton of music so we don't have to bet on the radio happening to have something pretty enough to justify playing it loudly.
"I am not mentioned in even the long versions of their history but I think I can piece together what I would have done. I think after the harbor massacre I would have been unwilling to keep following Fëanáro absent any reason to think I could calm him down, which it does not seem like anyone was able to do."
Imliss grabs a couple of suitcases and a messenger bag. "Alright, you two get to share trailer space with these, I packed some of our stuff for the trip and there'll be more room there than in the car. The small bag has CDs and other things we're likely to want in the car in it and will be staying with me. Bella, you have nonzero idea how to behave like a local so you get shotgun."
"I landed there in a magical accident a little under two Valian Years ago. Can't identify any points of divergence prior to my arrival, although everything after it is hopelessly confounded. I named my world Materia because it's called the Prime Material Plane to distinguish it from other planes it's in regular contact with - of which my Arda's not one, that seems to have been a bizarre irregularity that was never replicated - and, uh, no, have not been in touch with my Valar since they kicked me out."
"I disrupted the bliss of Valinor by inventing too many things too quickly for them to keep track of even though they could break the things any time they felt like it and did some of exactly that, and they wouldn't settle for sending me to the Outer Lands so instead they sent me back to my home world which I was convinced would kill me while I knelt and begged for my life it was tremendous fun."
"Loosely you can think of the Materian universe itself as an agent. A shy, temperamental agent which hates being expected to behave itself in a regular manner. So if you try to catch it doing that it might kill you or it might make whatever you're looking at suddenly behave differently or whatever. Someone tried dropping a lot of objects from a height and measuring how fast they fell and now things fall sideways for a few miles around where they did that, I don't remember if the experimenter survived or not in that case. Anyway, the Valar said they were protecting me - and their anti-aging thing held up okay, I still look just shy of twenty and I'm pushing forty - but I also didn't experiment with the boundaries of that protection, so I'm not sure if they pulled it off or if Materia doesn't mind if one does science to other universes as long as one doesn't do any there. If it's the first one, the place isn't safe to visit even if you can restrain locally dangerous impulses for the duration. ...And if it's the second one Materia, being Materia, reserves the right to change its mind at any time."
"Fëanáro is one of the people I respect most but I think it is absurd that he was considered to run the country," he says solemnly. "Waste of his talents. And I'd like to hear more but maybe not right now, I don't think the painful-conversation to important-information ratio looks very good there..."
"It's kind of got several but what I work in is called wizardry, a subset of arcane magic. It starts with small structured spells and as you develop experience with them you can break them down into more foundational principles and mix-and-match to enchant stuff or customize spells for whatever purpose. I don't actually know much about how spell development works in Materia because it wasn't my focus before I had my accident and I didn't dare touch magic after I got kicked back, but in a science world it's pretty doable to reverse-engineer and develop new spells. So I've got high school level introductory spells, and what I invented from there over a Year of not noticing Valinor's time effect and a much shorter period of having worked around the time effect."
"Yeah! Although you won't have very much mana until you've practiced a fair amount - used to tap Maiar for extra but I'm guessing that's not going to be doable here - and you replenish mana by sleeping or at least not doing anything much, which perpetually annoys Fëanáro -"
"Mana supply limits your casting much more than it limits your theoretical ability. Once you have the basics you'll be able to help invent spells to do things like make people immortal. That's the sort of thing that would normally be divine and not arcane magic in Materia but there's some reason to believe the divide doesn't need to be that sharp in a science world."
"We have a lot of secret immortality labs where people are apprised of enough information to work from effectively and who would probably volunteer. But if you can't hold more than one at a time it'd make more sense for us to work on it as quickly as possible..."
"I've got some very preliminary work on computer to crystal ball interfacing - I think probably the top immediate priority is to get everybody doing introductory wizardry but I'm not sure if the efficiency boost from being able to send notes from the ball to the computers is enough to warrant doing that first - I guess Rúmil or Fëanáro are just as qualified to walk you through the cantrip scrolls -"
Nobody seems scared. The adult Fëanáro emerges, blinks at Rúmil, and then demands to be taught wizardry. And everyone gets to work.
At some point they get a tour of the place. Their rooms are stunningly pretty and look out on the mountains. There's a bank of computers downstairs. Fëanor doesn't sleep any more often than his younger version - less often, if anything - and rolls his eyes when told this will slow him at magic. They mostly grow and hunt their own food because it's 'less complicated'. They all take to magic quite delightedly.
And with all this science to talk about three days go by before Fëanáro mentions that Bella saved Miriel.
"I'm not sure what you mean by 'how did it work' - uh, I can do lots of things, like disrupting feedback loops for anxiety attacks and desensitizing traumatic memories and also utility stuff like the equivalent of coffee and I have decent telekinesis on light objects that I have line of sight to and I have to concentrate really hard but otherwise it's difficult to communicate to non-artists."
"Idaia! Imliss! I'm so sorry I couldn't get off work sooner - I'm so glad you're alive -" Hugs? Hugs. "Rúmil! This is - surreal, it's been so long and also I kept being convinced you'd scowl at me for - everything - despite the fact that in your world everything hasn't happened, yet - Bella, it is very lovely to meet you, I'm Matthew these days but my siblings never broke the habit of calling me Nelyo."
"Reasons might theoretically include applications of artistry I lack the raw ability for, patients with demonic ancestry whose minds are unsafe to contact without special equipment I'm not trained to use, delicate comorbidity or unusual presentation, lack of personal rapport, patients preferring artists who subscribe to their religious beliefs, and mind contents which are necessarily involved in the work and impair my ability to perform."
"It's not less like my office than anywhere else accessible, anyway. So when I arrived in Valinor the state of the art was 'therapy, what's that', and while they have the concept here I don't know how familiar you are with it and it doesn't involve subtle arts..." And she proceeds to summarize how this generally works when there is a subtle artist involved and the nature of her professional ethics.
"Mindstate cooperation is mostly useful for helping me find things, or flag things that for whatever reason I am not looking at, both of which may be relevant since you're old enough to have a lot of memories to search through the long way and since there's trauma history probably better dealt with in some sensible order rather than as I happen to encounter it."
"I have had - definitely ten, possibly eleven, possibly a lot more than that but my memory was subsequently tampered with, detailed hallucinations of escaping or being rescued, some of which played out for subjectively a century or so. This one would obviously have played out much much longer, but most of the time was in Mandos which is as effective a form of torture as anything in Angband itself and also low-fidelity, easy to leave a hallucination at for a while."
"Okay. One thing I may be able to do if you'd like is un-tamper-with your memories even if a Vala did it directly; I assume I couldn't do this if the tampering was done with me in mind but it wouldn't have been. I can't look at them to see what they are until I've unfuzzed them, but if you would only like them back under certain conditions, I can do it while you're unconscious and cover them up again before you wake up if they don't meet your criteria."
"I did see a few Utumno survivors and some of them wanted help with things like nightmares or panic attacks, and while recovering your memories might mean that sort of thing has to be done over again it would make the intervening time healthier and memory-recovery can be very time consuming."
"...that's going to be very time consuming unless it was done more sloppily than Mandos does it. Which isn't implausible. I'll get more efficient with practice, too, but even so it might make sense to prioritize if you have any idea what's in the gaps and what would be good to have back first."
And after another three hours and forty-seven minutes:
"That's all the factual memory tampering I can find. Episodic will take a lot longer and I do have a stamina limit on active use of arts, but if there's anything you'd like to talk about or think I should know that doesn't involve that I have the time."
"We don't know. The Valar said -
'Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they ever be for ever.
'Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken.'"
"Also can cause the not-having-preferences thing, as apparently you know. We tried to resist it, by the end. Could hold out for a couple decades. Could have held out longer, but - if you know you're going to eventually sack a city it's better to do it while you're still capable of caring about things..."
"The long term treatment for nightmares is learning to lucid dream, which can be done without any subtle arts at all, but it requires practice. Making it so the practice doesn't consist of nightmares I can place blocks against certain concepts entering dreams, if the topical content is consistent, or certain affective states, if it's not. Panic attacks are also done with blocks - interrupting feedback loops - but everybody's attacks are different so to be able to do that I have to actually induce and watch one in progress, but just one. The aversion to touch could be handled several different ways depending on how it came about."
"If there's one or a handful of precipitating incidents, there's a thing where we go over the memory with all its salience stripped out - the classic example is if you were once chased by a manticore off a cliff and landed in a harpy nest and took three days to limp back to civilization, instead you re-experience the memory as 'the time nothing in particular chased you nowhere in particular and you wound up in nothing in particular and took a while of unimportant whatever until this episode in your life was over'. The memory is still retained with all its detail in terms of content, but the mind stops attaching emotional import to it after you go over it salience-stripped enough times. And then you're not more afraid of manticores or falling or harpies or being lost in the wilderness than you were before the event.
"If there's a consistent pattern of precipitating incidents, too many to make it practical to do this with all of them, then for some minds it's possible to do a 'context change', which is sort of like rendering everything before the procedure the equivalent of something you might have read in a book - this is fairly drastic, it's got side effects even when performed perfectly, but it does work really well when it's what's needed. Some minds aren't architected in a way that cooperates with the context change; I haven't read you enough to know if yours is or not. I'd also hesitate to do it when you have an evidentiary, non-delusional suspicion that you're currently hallucinating.
"If there's no precipitating incidents at all or there are but the context change won't work, tampering with associations directly is possible - sort of the emotional equivalent of affecting factual memory - but it's very hard to do right and I'm not a specialist and something weird might happen because in spite of what Fëanáro says I am not actually flawlessly capable of literally all therapy-related tasks. I can do it lightly and impermanently, which will also reduce the risk, but then it can knock loose on its own."
"I like to be busy. It's probably maximally efficient to do two sessions a day, one morning one evening, so we can get the most use out of my stamina; I'll have to skip a couple evenings if a morning is spent doing something that can't be usefully chunked and runs long, but still. Nine tomorrow?"
She places dream blocks - "They'll last about a year, give or take depending on how much you sleep and how intense the nightmares normally are; if you don't get the hang of lucid dreaming reliably in that time I can replace them" - and she induces a panic attack and watches it play out and inserts interruptions in the feedback loops and she sweeps great swathes of fuzz off long-ago happy memories and she determines that he is not architected for the context switch to work and lays out the list of possible side effects if she makes any mistakes directly addressing traumatic associations in case any of this prompts him to decline.
Here goes nothing.
Gently gently gently pinch closed the links between this and that, and that and the other thing, and thus and such, careful careful light-touched tweaks that'll form back into shape if he so much as sneezes - but just for now, just for the next little while, sudden movements or somebody tapping him on the shoulder or hugging his brothers will not hook up to anything dark and evil in the other neighborhoods of his mind -
It takes her four hours, he has a lot of these.
"All done."
Of course. I should in hindsight have told him to deter him from trying himself but he was in the habit of screaming uncomfortable truths at everyone in the vicinity and I wasn't sure what'd happen if he happened to scream that one at the Valar but at best they might have made interdimensional magic stop working.
He goes back to work.
It worked, in a manner of speaking. He still prefers not to be alive because then he'd not be wondering if he'd wake up to Angband, and because then nothing could ever hurt him again, but he does not moment-to-moment find existence intolerable and if it were in his power to be absolutely certain that this were it and this were real and he could end his existence at will and would always have that option, then he doesn't think he'd exercise it immediately. And if not for the war crimes he'd perhaps even find living nicer than not doing that.
It wears off while he's at work. He'd forgotten just how crushing it was; he pretends to have a headache, sobs against the inside of his skull - very containedly, not moving a muscle - for a few minutes...
...gets back to work. It doesn't matter, not really. He forgot to chart his productivity, see if he was better when under magical assistance.
Hi! I'm safe. I went to rescue Bella and now we're in an alternate reality where we're safe but lots of horrible things happened - Mom died, and then the Valar paroled Melkor, and then he killed dad, and then he killed everyone, horribly, and we didn't get to come back until now.
And so on.
"After a few years back in my world I found a sort of transit demiplane and met someone there who let me into the world we're in now. It's another Arda, except thirty thousand years in the future; it got humans visiting Valinor but later than me and from a different world. And then Fëanáro found me, and it's lucky that his spell found me and not where he expected me to be but he's fine. We got Rúmil, and found the version of Fëanáro from here and we're at his house."
"And this world's Fëanáro has seven children and they're around and I think they'd have mentioned if there were anything else we needed to worry about even if it would have slipped their father's mind. - The one here translated his name at one point so he's Fëanor for lack of a better distinguishing nickname."
"The thing you really need to petition the Valar about - Rúmil may go back to help, depending - is that they musn't parole Melkor. That happened in this universe, they let him out and he pretended to behave while laying the groundwork to defect and then - it was even worse than the first time -"
"But omnipotence isn't something you can just go downtown and grab off a shelf, and it would take so long to do it as a single thing, so it makes more sense to get one ability and then another one and then another, and then you have to do that in some kind of order..."