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.
"Because there are no bathhouses or fountains or hills for sunbathing on ships. This is to Elven sensibilities way more sexual than nudity."
"Huh, go figure." Begone shampoo commercial. "I think I will submit to the curators a note on this discrepancy and also by the way FTL tell the fairies to tell the humans and also seeking correspondents on related projects."
"Fairies are trusted not to request souls?"
"Yeah, and summoned much more commonly. Angels get summoned a lot too but they don't like demons, so."
"I really really want to find a way to go to Hell someday. But it can wait for after the war."
"Only way I know of is the way I got there, and that keeps you out of Limbo and Heaven and Fairyland."
"Which sound less interesting, unless my one item should turn out to be 'Tirion', which is not entirely impossible."
"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."
"...if he invented the lightleaping engine why didn't he have any of his own ships?"
"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."
"Ah, yeah. - What were people even doing with them? Are there colonies somewhere?"
"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."
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