"It's not quite as interesting as it sounds. You sit in a shuttle and get smushed into your seat and then are weightless, that part's fun. For long trips on large ships you can spin the ships for pretend gravity."

"—and how does spinning make them pretend to have gravity?"

"Same reason going up really fast to travel to the moon smushes you into your seat! Imagine you have a bucket of water and you swing it really fast, in an arc overhead, it won't spill as long as it's quick enough."

"...huh." He thinks it over, picturing the movement, and then grins. "You know such fascinating things."

"I've been around a while and have an excellent memory."

"How long of a while?"

"I'm a little over three yéni - a yéni is a hundred and forty four Valian years."

"...that's a pretty long while, if Valian years really are ten years long."

"I'm not sure, because I don't know exactly how long your years are in terms I can compare, but I think approximately."

There's no one else around by now, and he's pretty sure she knows, and he's tired of dancing around it.

"So you're approximately my age, then."

"Approximately."

"Is there a reason you walk past my palace every day?"

"Listening. Thinking."

"It's very strange to talk to someone who knows I'm the Emperor and isn't terrified of me, but I suppose being a five-thousand-year-old visitor from another world would do it. I spent probably much too long not being quite sure you knew, just because I would've expected more of a reaction."

"What sort of reaction would you have expected?"

"Fear. Fear is the reaction I expect. Not that I'm complaining, mind, you're fun to talk to and that's very scarce. Fear I can get just about anywhere."

"Well, if anything terrible happens I can volitionally die."

"I can actually bring back the dead, it just takes about half a day per, which means that since I can't do it casually all the time for everyone I prefer to do it secretly and infrequently so people don't start expecting it. But I also don't plan to hurt you, so hopefully you won't have to find out how far you should be trusting spontaneous suicide as a defense mechanism."

"That sounds more pleasant all around. I wouldn't be expecting to permanently de-Mirelótë the world, my chip sends backups to the Vala of the dead back home and while it may not be managing to send updates from here it's probable that eventually my husband would authorize forking me from the time of my disappearance."

He giggles at 'de-Mirelótë'.

"It would probably take him a very long time, though, even if the Valar were very confident they would never be able to retrieve me no matter how much they wheedled Eru."

"I'm pretty sure I can find you a way home eventually, but I have no idea how long it'll take. And I'm not sure I want prolonged contact with your world, however tame its omniscient creator deity."

"It has other things to recommend it. ...Perhaps I should say it has any things to recommend it, Eru not really being one. The Valar he seems to consider pets more than playthings and they can make more progress on him than incarnates can, I think he is reasonably tame now with the possible exception of having been responsible for sending me here."

"I still have strong objections to the concept of omniscient creator deities."

"Well. I'd rather go home than stay here forever but I think it would be a pity to have the peoples of the worlds go our separate ways after that indefinitely. At least let the Valar fix your inherently mortal species, it's so stupid."