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.
"Nearby quarries and things will probably make things faster, anyway."
So he keeps going, copying the map into a larger-scale one with more detail.
Illia nods along, and scrawls out calculations in the notation she's familiar with (she's learned their alphabet but not how they do math maybe she should fix that at some point) about distance and her sister's maximum flight speed and carrying capacity and multiplication capacity and how well various materials and kinds of structures bear weight.
"I can have my aunt in to do the math with you, if you'd like any help or someone to check your calculations," he says.
"I'm not sure how useful it would be, considering that we almost certainly use different notations, and anyway these aren't meant to be precise."
"Sure." Another armful of books. "These are accounts of our history with Men so far and what the challenges have been."
Well that should be interesting. "Reading those should probably wait until I have a decent first draft of the city drawn up and am waiting on someone's critique or for my sister to check in."
"Very fair. Some of them are written by Men - by Andreth Saelind, actually, who you should meet if she's still alive - and you might find those more useful."
"Man of Ladros, of the House of Beor. She was a prolific writer and spirited commentator and I have mostly heard of her through my cousin Finrod, who had long debates about theology with her."
"Well, if she hasn't died of old age by the time my sister goes to visit Finrod, she probably never will."
"She was in her eighties, but what she might have died of was the war. Finrod settled his Men on the front lines of it, in Dorthonion."
"We can't ride back out to Dorthonion again. It was a close thing last time and that was with two fronts and desperate need."
"Sauron. And yeah. I don't know if he's still there but I don't think we can try rescuing any eighty-something mortal refugees."
"I wish it weren't so hard to resurrect people who don't have conveniently coplanar afterlives."
"Yeah. Anyway. City planning." She starts sketching out various ideas.
They work on that until it's very late. "Should you sleep?" he says. "We can do this all night, but Men usually -"
"I'm a college student, I've pulled all-nighters before," she replies flippantly. "But yeah, I should go to bed."
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