They've never been camping before. It's not very common on Amenta.

Well the best time to first try it is probably not while pregnant. Someone offers the loan of their floatcar.

...they also don't know how to drive one of those.

It has pretty good autopilot but fair enough. They could go with? Or the Amentans don't have to do this at all, Vána would not be offended.

What does Vána do exactly? They were dropped on this planet with pretty minimal explanation.

She is the Vala of eternal youth and of springtime!

...really, really minimal explanation.

...oh.

Uh.

This world has gods. One of them is Eru, and he is omnipotent but does not do things very often; then there are the Valar and Maiar, which are immortal and very unlike ordinary people and have extraordinary divine powers but not anything near omnipotence. A long time ago Eru added Elves to the world. Not on this world, on Endorë, the place silly young Andúnar who brought them here lives. And one of the Valar decided to toy with Elves, and so he went about terrorizing and capturing and torturing them - and, uh, uploading them to torture on a server farm he filled a continent with - 

"He was really terrible."

      "Doesn't make it -"

"I know."

      "He's dead now. They're not conventionally killable but that dimension coalition can do all kinds of things. He'd - stopped - even before that - I'm getting ahead of myself -"

"So the Valar found out and went and stopped and imprisoned him, and they asked the Elves if we wanted to move to Valinor, which they had made themselves to be a perfect planet - perfectly beautiful and peaceful and everything. Some Elves didn't want to, but some did, and we came."

      "It's nearly three Years at close to lightspeed and we didn't have faster than light travel back then. You couldn't really go back."

"And they guided us and taught us and blessed us."

"What exactly does it mean to be blessed -?"

"They taught us to do the chip blessings, which aren't magic, they sometimes maybe do real magic - good luck, protection from danger -"

      " - the Doom -"

" - yeah - but small things, things that would be hard to notice except in the aggregate. You can specifically ask them for more if you have something specific in mind."

Nod.

"And after three hundred Years they paroled Melkor. He'd been saying he was really sorry and - well, we didn't want to imprison him for all eternity..."

"...why not?"

"...it seemed really harsh. Three hundred Years is a really long time. Eternity is, well, forever."

"...okay."

"...well, we were wrong. He went, uh, right back to it. And the King - uh -"

       No one volunteers to finish the sentence for him.

...oranges blink politely.

" - Melkor said that he'd stop all the torture and killing forever if they destroyed Valinor, which they had the means to do and he didn't."

      "He could bind himself to that promise, that's a thing Valar can do."

"...how do they do that?"

"...magic? We do it too but it's chip-loaded for us."

"Oh."

"Anyway. The King said to do it."

     "Which he can decide. If he sees fit."

"That's kind of beside the point."

     "They resurrected us as soon as they had somewhere to put us."

"That's here?"

"Yeah. That's why it's called Afterlife - it's the same, they made a copy of everything - except the animals - and people lost pregnancies -"

Oranges frown sympathetically.