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At first she was too relieved to no longer be staring death by homicidal professor in the face to wonder where Odette had taken them. Then she pulled herself off the ground and noticed that Odette wasn't there.
Then she noticed that she had no flipping clue where she was.
"I suppose it's possible that it would work better for you, but, um, back home that kind of thing generally ends badly, one way or another."
"The most common problems are abuse of power, which is why I said your cousins might not run into it. Although a lot of people would say that forcing other people to adopt your culture over theirs was...already problematic. Also if you don't know enough about why some things are the way they are changing them can have their own problems, like, if Elven crops had every nutrient except one and humans were relying on their preexisting crops for that nutrient, suddenly they don't have it anymore, as a specific example. Er, take all this with a grain of salt, World History classes were never my favorites and I've forgotten a lot of information that could be relevant."
He nods seriously nonetheless. "We will keep that in mind, thank you. And - I trust my cousins, and in this specific case the concern may not be warranted, but I don't think Elves in general are immune to the temptation to abuse power."
"I'm going to be completely honest and say that I'm erring on the side of diplomacy by adding qualifiers to a lot of things when I'm referring to your family members that I wouldn't bother with if we were talking about strangers."
"My family members include at least a half-dozen mass murderers, I am unlikely to lose my temper if someone suggests an unkind interpretation of their motives. Unless it's unkind along specific lines we've discussed, but that really does not seem to be your problem."
"I assumed these were different cousins," she shrugs. "Anyway I don't have a large family so it's entirely possible I'm overgeneralizing from the way I feel about my sister and parents."
"Yes, these are different cousins. If I suggested that your sister were behaving irresponsibly, you'd react so badly that I'd be wiser saying 'if someone less infallible than your sister did this, the failure modes would be such and such'?"
"No, but I'd probably be upset if someone said 'I think your sister is liable to abuse power'. Actually come to think of it that's probably because someone did say that and then tried to kill both of us, I have been overgeneralizing. Oops."
"In that case you can be as critical as you like of my living relatives. Until we have the means to bring them back we may as well leave the dead out of it."
Dor Lómin's guards come to attention and Fingon waves at them and they proceed into a very spacious lowlands boxed in by the mountains on three sides, with villages lining the river and two fortresses in what is becoming recognizable as the Elven style.
Illia is distracted for a moment by how pretty everything is. She's going to get used to that, eventually.
"I thought we'd settle in a village, ask everyone to assemble, heal ailments, hand out instructions to the literate, and teach them magic. By the time we've done the full rotation the people in the first village might have enough familiarity to learn healing."
So they head down to a village of a few hundred people, on the river, and set up extravagant silken Elven tents and play trumpets and announce that the Elven King has decided they should all be taught magic.
She makes a mental note to ask later if this kind of pageantry is necessary to the point where she'd have to adopt it if she accepted the whole "kingdom" offer, and then focuses on the people.
He writes letters requesting things they'll need to get more paper to make more copies with the printing press.
She has an attentive and respectful audience. They're also absurdly excited to get lembas for lunch in the middle of lessons.
She notices this. Do any of these people look underfed, or is it just an 'elves are cool and therefore their food is cool' kind of thing?
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