Well. He'll do the best he can. (This is so fulfilling. Something that actually matters and that he's uniquely good at?) Why are they keeping carnivorous animals at all, why do they need to keep other animals to feed the carnivorous ones?

Sometimes the animals they need to keep to do their job of keeping the forest running well are carnivorous; also carnivores tend to make the best mounts. They breed animals to feed their carnivores rather than hunting for them because it's less disruptive to the ecology that way.

It is not true where he's from that carnivores make good mounts, or do well in captivity at all, but if these ones are happy then okay. Their job of keeping the forest running well?

These ones are happy. Would he like to meet Nidela's mount Ila, who is a giant lynx? She's very happy. Nidela leads the way back to the stables.

Mimale explains, as they go, that elves exist to look after the wild places of the world, and this outpost in particular exists to do that here; city elves tend to be much less religious, though lots of them still make pilgrimages.

"Religious?"

"Mmhmm, it's a spiritual duty for us."

Nidela has no comment. Nidela is not, in fact, religious; everybody thinks she's very very religious (ugh), because she's so good with animals and spends so much time in the woods, but in fact she's just here because the city was too crowded and noisy and overwhelming.

Yeah, he knows the feeling. "Huh. Well, okay. Sorry for stressing people out, but it sounds like a spiritual duty you'll be better at if you know what the animals want and stuff."

"Yes, we very much appreciate you stopping by."

And here they are at the stables. Ila is at the moment most concerned with her elf; here is a stranger and Nidela hates strangers and is Nidela stressed out about the stranger, does Ila need to lie on her for a while? Chase him off? No? Huh. Okay. Weird. What is the stranger like?

Nidela can't speak to Ila per se, but they have a pretty decent pidgin going on; Nidela assures Ila that Tyelkormo is nice and respectful and also useful, and encourages her to go meet him, so she does.

Hey. I'm here because they were keeping some animals who didn't want to be kept. You okay?

I am exactly where I want to be. If you try to take my Nidela away from me I'll bite you.

...she says that was rude. Still true, though.

Nah, you do you. She's okay.

She is. I got the best elf. Most everybody thinks their elf is the best elf but mine really is. And she pads back over to Nidela for scritches.

"Yeah, she's fine."

Nidela grins - there was never any doubt in her mind - and returns her attention to her furry friend.

"Is there anything else you'd like to do while you're here?" asks Mimale.

"Yeah, I mean, I asked you guys to let a bunch of these go, I'll get you ones who want to be here, but d'you want anything else, too, for the inconvenience? We've got lots of gemstones and fabrics and so forth..."

"It's no inconvenience; we'd much rather have animals who're happy here."

Nidela thinks that this is only mostly true - they could be doing a better job of that if they took her more seriously, but she knows what she'd have to do to make them do that, she did it back with the kobold thing, and it is such a pain and really not something she can keep up for long, so. Compromises. (Ila pushes her over and flops across her chest.)

Kobold thing. 

He does not comment but he listens more closely. "In that case, nice meeting you, I'll be on my way."

Nidela isn't thinking about kobolds any more; she's letting Ila distract her from her frustration at the current situation.

Mimale walks him back to the gate. "It'll take us a few days to get that all taken care of, but we'll start right away. Thank you again for your help."

"Yeah, sure."

And do they do that?

They do! All the animals who just straightforwardly need to be released are gone within a day; the ones who need more complicated things take a little longer to accommodate but they make steady progress at it.

Well, then, they suck a lot less than he expected and do not all need to be teleported off to an uninhabited planet.

And does he return with the promised animals?

Yeah, of course. He doesn't explain that when his people give their word they mean it.

Most of the elves hide indoors again when he visits, but the few that don't are awed at how he can get wild animals to just walk right into their pastures. What is going on. Maybe gods do exist?

Nidela is frequently away during these visits, but when she's not she comes out to say hello and meet the new animals. Once, though, after a few weeks, he catches her ruminating about the kobolds, trying to work out if she could have done something different and gotten the council to agree sooner to stop killing them, or not hex them, or something. But the problem is that the other elves think she doesn't know enough about what's going on in the village to comment meaningfully on what they should do, and they're right, the things she knows she's very sure of but trying to keep that much stuff in her head means having to give up on having enough detail on any of it, which is deeply counterintuitive for her and also, in her opinion, doesn't really solve the problem, if that is actually what the problem is. But she does know what she knows, and they could still pay attention to that and fill in the gaps themselves if they really wanted to, but, no, apparently not. She finds the whole topic pretty distressing; Ila is pulling out all the stops to keep her calm, but it seems like this kind of thing is a common enough occurrence that she's not freaked out by it.

"Um. Will people overhear us if we talk -"