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The grownups are all very busy, but the children are all bored.
Bored or having nightmares. But Tasárinon was not on a ship and did not see the people dying and has only heard it thirdhand and can't exactly have nightmares about the look in his mother's eyes - well, he probably could, but he hasn't - so he's bored, and he is drawing on the floor. It is an absurdly intricate drawing. He has been embellishing it for three days.
Cam nods. "Should I go talk to the Valar alone - both 'would this furnish me a meaningful politeness advantage if I brought the right person' and 'are you able to go where they are'?"
"I am not able to go where they are, I am exiled. The right person will furnish a politeness advantage only if you're unable to pretend for ten minutes that you think they're the wholly worthy rulers of Arda and that the Doom was super reasonable and as a fellow super reasonable person you're deferring to their wisdom. If you can't pretend that, have someone talk for you. If you can, it'd be much less complicated for you to go alone."
"Well, I don't know how good they are at telling when someone is thinking you suck at the top of his metaphorical lungs but I can avoid actually saying it."
Maitimo smiles. Just for a second. "You aren't responsive at all to our telepathy and they are terrible at facial expressions and body language due to being so fundamentally alien to us."
"Have a lovely time. We'll be approaching Endore in four weeks, should you happen to find yourself there at that time."
"Four as you count them would be enough if I found a Suspiciously Marslike Rock. Making the rock from scratch and doing fun with geothermals is going to take me longer. So, uh, stay out of rocket range of the place and expect me to rendezvous in..." arithmetic! "six weeks? Should I take anyone along to the planet's christening party or fetch them later?"
"Let's have the valuable strategic asset even farther away than 'out of rocket range'. If you can take them along that'd be ideal. Can you also make a lot of food and supplies, if we're delaying six weeks? There's a cargo bay on all of the ships, it's empty."
"Yeah sure." Cam looks over the blueprints to identify where in the ships the cargo bays are. "What do you want?"
"Lots and lots of lembas - " he pulls some out - "looks like this, very calorie-dense and nutritionally complete - but I am told that I am soulless. If you have tastier options I am sure people will appreciate them."
"Am I worrying about allergies, should I be assuming you eat the same things people I'm accustomed to do, what nonfood should I be planning to fit in the bays..."
"Never heard of allergies, what are those? We don't have much in the way of supplies which isn't a problem if you do end up meeting up on the other end, we can eat animals and fish and fruits and grains and generally eat a mix of those."
"Some humans have bad autoimmune reactions to some food or environmental stimuli, peanuts are the classic. ...I am glad it just occurred to me to ask: how do you normally package these things, if I give you a lot of canned salmon are you going to have a problem lacking can openers."
They blink at each other. "Ohhhh," says Maitimo after a moment, "that shouldn't be a concern on Araman but it will be in the Outer Lands. We don't package things. Things do not deteriorate over time in Valinor. The Valar like it that way. You can leave salmon around on your counter for a Year and it'll still taste perfectly fine. Please do whatever packaging you normally do and include, ah, can openers and equivalents."
"...that is an interesting local property," Cam says. "I don't normally package things at all, I just make what I'm gonna eat, but I know how humans do it. Okay, lemme come up with some reasonable array of comestibles..." He fiddles with text on his computer. Hopefully Fëanáro is not about to walk by because he's doing this in English.
Fëanáro does not walk by. Maitimo mentions that data compatibility has been figured out and they have a patch they think Cam can run titled 'patch for Cam' that'll allow him to interact with the local internet.
"Cool. About to be obsolete as I fly off into intergalactic space but cool. D'you want a freezer, best way to preserve a lot of things is freezing but if you have a local freezer design because ice cream or something it'll be easier for you to power them without running down a ton of batteries over time?"
"We do have freezers," he says, "including ones made for ships if I recall - I'll look it up -" and a moment later there's a design.
"All right," says Cam, "you want me to translate this list so you can confirm you know what all the stuff is...?"
"Sure. Thank you. I don't know whether planet-making is the sort of thing you can multitask on but if so the medical people are talking to me right now with all sorts of suggestions on the coma problem - my fault, I told them it was top priority..."
"There will be a very long boring stretch," Cam says, "where I'm just making a jillion tons of planet; the design and terraforming stages are less multitasky." He translates foods. He's keeping it simple - flour, not pasta or bread or tortillas - but he has included nice things like herbs and spices and chocolate.
"Great. Then if you want them on your ship too they can talk at you during the boring stretch and be trusted to shut up during the rest. I have heard of all of these things, as you likely guessed from the fact our language has words for them. Thank you."
"Sure." So Cam does not completely fill all the cargo bays, just most of them, with a reasonable lembas/whatever ratio. "Food: done. Any good reason not to take a model of ship I already know how to drive down to Valinor, do you have really fast intrasystem transit or anything like that?"
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