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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.
"It wouldn't have any people in it. Heaven and Fairyland sound nice in their own ways though. Fairyland's got native life besides the fairies, even."
"It'd have houses for two million of them, and shops and gardens and so forth. I wouldn't have as much fun but it'd matter more, by the sound of it. Most Elves would probably love Heaven, endless making pretty things.
We don't even get your afterlives. Probably wouldn't even if we died without backups."
"Yeah, okay, Tirion would be a big deal in Limbo... Maybe one day the Valar will let you do summonings. Or you'll circumvent them, that's probably more likely. And maybe that'll work."
"Or like I said, my father will figure something out. He invented, ah, the printing press, heavier-than-air flight, and the lightleaping engine. Valinor wouldn't be much ahead of Endore without him."
"This was right when he got the idea for the Silmarils. He published a paper - sloppy paper too, the title was 'I did it' - and then ignored all the subsequent engineering. We know how to build them, but it would have taken about a Year the non-demonic way, and - well, imagine if we'd gotten here a decade later."
"For a while it was mostly used to tour Endore, though that stopped about ten Years ago because the Valar expressed disapproval. There was an astrological survey that might have eventually had colonies as a mission. Valinor's nowhere near having population pressure, though, as I said. Tirion was our largest city at two million. Everyone was hoping to find aliens, but - nope."
"To be fair they had a pretty good reason. People were going and handing out tech that Endore didn't have the capacity to maintain or replicate, instead of making an organized effort to catch them up to our pace. The people gearing up to do an organized tech-elevation were delayed by endless internal division over whether to give it to orcs, which I guess we should now be glad of... a couple idiots tried to declare themselves Kings...and then there was a murder, the first one in ten thousand years, and that was the final straw."
"How'd that happen? Humans murder each other plenty but if it was literally the first in ten thousand years it must have been something extreme -"
"Well now I'm betting it was the Enemy. But at the time the story was that some idiot landed in Eriador, decided he liked one of the two candidates for the throne better than his brother, and gave him a necklace with a couple thousand blessings, plus flooded the local market with all kinds of nonsense - Valinor doesn't have material scarcity but lightleapers at the time didn't have the capacity for us to get that to Endore - anyway, he was murdered in his sleep."
"The Valar still allowed travel to Endore with slower ships - figured the travel time would be a cooling-off period - and they were expected to lift the prohibition eventually once we had sensible procedures to prevent that kind of problem, and work continued apace on lightleapers with more capacity, so it struck everyone as a reasonable reaction."
"I should have run everything personally but the Enemy very cleverly had me very distracted at the time."
"He put a thousand years of work into it. I'd be impressed if I wasn't so annoyed. My father has two half-brothers, who he dislikes, and Moringotho planted a lot of evidence that my father was getting unstable and paranoid and was planning to get them and their families exiled from Valinor, possibly as the first stage in a violent coup that ended up ousting the Valar. And then he planted a lot more evidence that my uncles were planning a coup to get my family exiled. And then he fanned the flames on the internet, and I woke up one day to find most of Tirion carrying guns in the streets. I don't know if you can summon the kind. They were modified welding tools. They were very deadly. Everyone insisted they had them for sport."
"No one died. Findekano and I didn't sleep for three years, trying to talk everyone back down, but no one died and even when the King was assassinated leaving succession an open question we managed not to settle it with violence. But I wasn't paying Endore much attention."
Nods. "I traded all my interpersonal relationships for a united Noldorin command and I haven't wondered even for a second if it was worth it. But I do constantly think that if I'd been better I wouldn't have needed to."
"Yeah, I have a thing like that. If I'd been a little more charming with the daeva would they have told me about ex-human daeva in time for me to get my parents to summon things. If I'd rolled out the revelation a little differently would demons have such a bad reputation. If I'd done it better somehow would I have maybe not been murdered. Totally worth it. But."
"It's - unpleasant, to have spent so much time being better than everyone else and then run headfirst at something where that's not where the universe has set the bar and your best isn't actually good enough."
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