"Thank you for your patience." And off she goes.

The guards aren't inclined to make small talk. After another couple minutes, another elf appears. "Hello?"

"Mimale, this is Tyelkormo; he's from very far away and claims to be able to talk to animals. Tyelkormo, Mimale is one of our animal caretakers, I'm sure she'll be able to help you."

"How exciting," says Mimale.

"Hi. I haven't been able to teach anyone else how to talk to animals but I can bounce to you - that is, send you how I'm experiencing the conversation. Can you take me to them?"

Mimale shoots the guard a questioning look; he shrugs helplessly, and she returns her attention to the Quendi. "Sure, come on in. Would you like to start somewhere in particular?"

He points in the direction of the animal that struck him as most upset.

She nods thoughtfully at this choice. "Do you mind if we stop by the stables for a second, first? I have a friend who I bet would like to see this."

"That's fine."

So they do that.

"This is Nidela, she doesn't talk much but she's very good with the animals. Nidela, Tyelkormo is from very far away and can talk to animals; he wants to go see that lynx you've been worried about. Want to come?"

Nidela nods, "hi."

They head off to see the lynx, and Mimale explains as they go: "He turned up over the winter - we think he got lost, one of the scouting teams spotted his tracks and brought him in. We don't get lynx around here, so we don't know the best way to take care of him, and we don't want to just turn him loose again; we're trying to find a way to send him back north where he belongs."

"Better den," Nidela adds.

"Yes, you're probably right, but we don't know what kind of den he needs."

Okay, maybe these people don't suck. He relaxes considerably. "I'd be happy to talk with him."

And so they go talk to him. He very dearly wants to go home, but a proper den made out of rocks rather than the too-large wicker thing they've given him and some tweaks to how he's fed - Nidela was doing it mostly right, but he needs a couple more changes and everyone to do it - would make things much more bearable in the meantime.

The elves aren't sure they'll be able to build the kind of den he needs; they aren't used to working with stone.

"We can do that. We might be able to take him home, too, depending."

"We?" Mimale looks significantly at the still-empty streets. "I'm not sure the council will agree to more of you visiting."

"Take him home," interjects Nidela, and then to Mimale, "-sorry."

"I can take him well away from here all by myself, no worries." Oh, good, he outright likes this one.

"Well, I can't speak for the council, but that'll probably be okay."

"Great." He says it sincerely. "Who should I talk to next?"

Mimale defers to Nidela, who leads them to an injured capybara who's depressed at being alone; the conditions they're keeping her in are fine aside from that.

(This one's fine, thinks Mimale, capybara are always lazy like that. But at least we can stop arguing about it now.)

So the one person is okay and the other one is terrible. Well. Whatever. 

He translates for the capybara.

Nidela gives Mimale a look. It is a very 'I told you so' sort of look.

Then she tries to work out how to ask if it'd be better to let the capybara go or try to catch her some friends, and her thoughts are perfectly clear on it right up until she tries to put them into words, at which point the whole process starts looking remarkably like what happens when he tries to read.

Well, there's not really a non-awkward way to - "I think it'd be better to let her go. If they form social bonds like that the friends might have friends, and you can't accommodate dozens of them or something..."

"All right," says Mimale. Nidela takes another second to clear her head, and then adds, "thanks."

She leads the way to the next animal. They have quite a variety; the ones with the worst problems have correspondingly tricky situations where it's not obvious what the best thing to do for them is without more information, but after three more of those, the next pasture Nidela leads them to contains a pair of giant rabbits that are being kept well and are mostly okay but still want to be free, and Mimale explains that they're being kept as breeding stock, with their offspring being returned to the wild to help stabilize the population there.

He explains this to the rabbits, what do they think about that?

Iiiit's better than they thought? They totally still want to go, though.

Do they know any rabbits who might want to come live here under these conditions, for that reason?

There are probably some but I don't know them, says the male.

I wonder if that big grey is still alive, she was always so lazy, she'd love this, says the female.

And he tells them that he bets if he talks with giant rabbits he can find ones who want to be here, but these ones don't. Also ones who want to be here will probably breed more and be easier to take care of.

"Okay," says Mimale, increasingly overwhelmed at the proceedings. Nidela just grins and leads them on.

Most of the rest of the animals are similar - breeding pairs who want to leave, being kept so that things can be done with their offspring; usually the offspring are to be released into the wild for various reasons, but a few of them are kept to provide food for the carnivorous animals - Mimale assures him that elves don't eat meat - and one of the pairs is kept to provide them with mounts. They vary quite a bit in how likely it seems that they can be replaced with animals who'd agree to be there. There are also a few personal pets who're dissatisfied with various mostly-minor things that their owners are doing, another few injured or otherwise not readily releasable animals with less pressing problems than the first few, and a couple cases where the animal in question is actually just fine and Nidela had misinterpreted something.