When Celebrimbor woke up, it was night time. Through the open window drifted the familiar smells of Eregion in summer: musk roses, green things, and cat urine. He felt strange. He felt fine.
He got up and tiptoed, barefooted, to the window. Such a sky he had never seen; the stars were brighter that ever. Like silver fire they bloomed over heavens of blue-grey and slowly turned in majesty. A nightingale sang its song of liquid gold; it echoed through the quiet streets of Ost-in-Edhil.
Music drifted from the gardens below — music from some sort of harp, and then a song in a strange language, that he somehow understood.
There must be some kind of way outta here
Said the joker to the thief
There's too much confusion
I can't get no relief
Celebrimbor hurriedly covered himself in a green dressing gown and hurried downstairs. A boy with dark and curly hair — not elven — was playing an instrument that Celebrimbor somehow recognised as a guitar, although he had never seen one before.
There are many here among us
Who feel that life is but a joke
But you and I we've been through that
And this is not our fate
So let us stop talkin' falsely now
The hour's getting late, hey
He was with another youth who strangely reminded Celebrimbor of Elrond, despite his terrible haircut. The song went on for a while; Celebrimbor was entranced. When the last note had faded, he stepped forward, and the strangers looked at him with an uncanny familiarity. He felt as if he ought to know them.
"Hey Eddie," said the one who looked like Elrond, "we're not alone after all."
For some reason, Celebrimbor felt compelled to speak. "Welcome to Eregion," he said. "I hope you shall like it here."
In the morning, Celebrimbor found a girl with bushy hair exploring with unbridled passion the city archives — or, rather, a loremaster dragged her to him to complain that this girl he had never seen was ransacking his library. He ordered him to let her go, and the idea of tutoring her struck him as a good one. There was one, he felt, who one day would be able to give even the most learned a run for their money. Besides, little Celebrían, that her mother had left in his care while she was traveling beyond the Mountains, had latched unto the girl like a lamprey.
Another friendly stranger had witnessed the exchange with the loremaster; she introduced herself as Madam Pince, and offered to help him tidy up. Her system, she said, was very efficient. The loremaster fell in love.
A tall man with dark greasy hair sometimes walked the streets. Celebrimbor asked his guards to keep an eye on him: the man reminded him of Maeglin.
Outside — outside — Varda Elentári, Queen of Stars, checked the logs with satisfaction. She was still, after all, the best terraforming nerd to be found, and she hid the simulation machine in a cupboard. If anybody asked, she was testing a new galactic shape, which she was — except that close to the heart of it, where stars were the most numerous and at their brightest, she had put a small planet copied quite exactly from the one in the main lab. She may not have access to the Archive's mainframes, but she could make do.
She had also taken a few liberties before integrating the sentient saves — the tiniest, really — barely worth mentioning. The humans would never grow old beyond adulthood, and never die unless they were slain. No big deal.
Someone knocked on her door. Aulë came in, carrying two big cups of coffee. The fancy kind, quark-infused.
"Everything's good?"
"It is," Varda said.
They sat and drank for a while in silence.
"I'm thinking of taking another cat. I miss Mister Truffles."
"Don't bring him here," joked Aulë.
An undergrad came and went, leaving behind a pile of copies. Varda looked at Aulë over her cup. "You're right," she said. "It's fun, messing with sentients."
"I never said that. Morgan did," Aulë protested.
"Yeah."
He carefully blowed over his coffee to cool it. "What will you tell the boss about the machine you took from the stock? It had been earmarked for Ulmo."
"He can work on his fluid mechanics on an older one. He doesn't need all that computing power for that."
"But won't he look for it?"
"No," said Varda with a shrewd smile. "It got lost in the inventory. We lose stuff all the time, after all."
Aulë made a noise of disbelief, so Varda explained herself a bit more. She had asked a friend to fix the inventory for her — a friend who wasn't one, who had been relegated to a glorified cupboard for the last few millennia, and did data entry all day long.
"You asked Melkor for help?! Are you mad?"
"Not quite. I gave him in exchange a tip about a job at the Archive. He was very interested."
Outside, a breeze of dark matter blew. It was a beautiful day. The simulation machine quietly hummed. All was well at the Arda Laboratory, and the multiverse outside.