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.
"The Valar say that this is how Eru designed us. The commitment-mechanism part is really nice but I wish it were impossible to coerce an oath."
"But if it's the cyborg implants - are you somehow born with cyborg implants? You don't have to install them?"
"...yes? Everyone in the Outer Lands has them too, and did when we were illiterate tree-dwellers..."
"It...did not occur to me as particularly strange? The fact that people can reproduce is pretty odd in itself, I suppose. Do demons reproduce?"
"Daeva and limboites can't. Humans can, more or less the same mechanism as animals, and do not wind up born with anything - inorganic or networked or anything. When during gestation do the cyborg implants appear - am I even correct in assuming that the gametes-blastocyst-embryo-fetus developmental stages hold -"
"Yep, and it assembles at the top of the spinal cord when the spinal cord develops, and one time in a million it doesn't and then there's a stillbirth."
"Well that's real fuckin' bizarre," says Cam. "But probably not something we need to figure out right this second. I'll see you in a few weeks, s'pose."
"Good skill."
"Thanks."
And Cam packs up his thirty families into a ship and picks a nice anonymous patch of intergalactic space and makes for it.
Five days. It'd be five days more or less wherever he'd pointed the ship. The ships don't seem to actually go faster than light, they just get up to nearly lightspeed, firmly lock down their control panels and warn Cam to let the autopilot handle it, arrive at their destination, and slow down from lightspeed.
Long as it works.
The ship should be nice and comfy for everybody - he'll take requests on what's for dinner, if anybody has any - while he works out simulations for the geothermal warmth that won't run down in the near future or explode or anything. And then he gets to make a planet! Yay!
They have lots of requests for dinner. There's lots of food missed from when Valinor had a star system, apparently. And they're excited that he can make a planet! They have media recommendations for while he works!
Ooh, media recommendations! He can totally make a planet and watch/read/listen to things at the same time.
Then he can form his own opinion about the Prince's symphonies, and if he cares to he can watch Valinor's fairly boring movies in which the stakes are never higher than royal patronage or a romance. The visuals are stunning, though!
Enh. Art films. He likes the music better. ...Man what is Valinor gonna think of the Hell Library. What do his thirty families think of the Hell Library? He can start them on handpicked kids' cartoons or something, be gentle.
They do seem to kind of encourage antisocial behavior, say the parents a bit worriedly, but then there's all that research that media doesn't much influence behavior - it's too bad they don't have enough kids to run a controlled experiment but the King surely thought of it and is doing it with the main host...
Sure! Tasárinon's mother tells the story of how he got the cherries and ran off to give everyone a cherry, and everyone is very proud of Tasárinon and assures him that his father would be proud of him also.
The Elves will stage a thirty-six hour debate over this, if he wants a Quenya name.
This is a sufficiently pretty word he won't get any complaints!
Oh good. (Who wants to see Atriama? It is not the most socially responsible form of media ever but it's got lovely aerial ballet.)
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