And he shows them where they can stay. The King'll want to meet you but it can wait.

Today's okay. It might be a couple of weeks before I want to deal with people again, if not.

Alright. This way - and he leads her off to a central conference room that's full of books and very pretty. 

The King has fairly horrifying scars, is missing the external parts of both ears, and is the only Quendi she'll have seen with hair shorter than their shoulders.

Ila follows, of course. She's not letting Nidela out of her sight any time soon.

Nidela pauses, face going blank, when she sees the King - what happened, what does that mean, is he okay - but Ila nudges her shoulder after a scant moment, and she remembers where she is and curtsies. "Hello, your" - words are hard, unfamiliar words moreso, but she manages not to stall out this time - "majesty."

I regrettably have not had time to learn much of your language. Can we speak like this? Welcome to Lake Mithrim.

Sure. Thank you for letting me come.

Our pleasure. Everyone who'd rather face danger than complacency is welcome here.

Yeah, okay, you could describe her that way. It's not really why she's here, but that doesn't mean she's not going to help out while she is or anything.

What are you going to need to be comfortable here?

Um. Privacy - a place that's mine and quiet that nobody goes in. Work that I can do in the afternoon or at night - I don't sleep at night, I've never been able to, I sleep in the morning. She feels kind of guilty about this, but she's long since resigned herself to it. Co-workers who aren't going to be mean about it when I have trouble with things. Food that's easy, by which she means both 'not spicy' and 'not requiring complicated utensil use'. Talking like this is easier, can all of you do that? Talking the regular way is a pain, she will definitely not mind never having to do that again. I don't know what kind of work you have for us to do; I'm mostly good with animals and Ila and I together are good at scouting and woodcraft stuff.

We can all talk like this, yes. I can mostly put you on scouting - the only animals we have are horses - 

I haven't spent much time with horses, but I should get along fine with them. She gets along fine with everything else, after all. (Really, though, no other animals? That's going to be weird.)

For what purposes do elves keep a lot of animals around?

It's kind of a religious thing? We take care of the forest, and that means taking care of the animals in it, and a lot of the time that means taking them into the village - breeding pairs to get more of them to release back out, or just as many as we can get to nurse them through a disease they're having a problem with, or whatever. Plus almost everybody has a pet or a mount or both. Like her Ila, or her one friend's pet giant turtle, or her squad leader's giant sloth bear mount.

Animals on this continent don't come in that size, and we don't really have the resources to feed that many pets. Or to take particular care of the ecosystem, though it seems to do fine on its own.

It's fine, I'm not religious. That's kind of the core of why she came, actually, having to pretend to care about the parts of that that she doesn't really sucked. It's just what I'm used to, and I have my Ila.

I'm glad. Welcome. We're going to want your help in figuring out how we can get the elves to stop hurting people, but not until after the war. 

Yeah.

Ila nudges her again. Thank you.

My pleasure. You must have a lot of questions for us.

Questions, not quite, but curiosity, definitely; she takes a moment to figure out what she wants to ask first. What's the story with the evil god?

There are fifteen gods. The Valar. Most of them are - okay. Wrong about lots of things but well-meaning, and Valinor is a very nice place to live. One of them is evil. He tortures people for fun and he wants to take over the world and fill it with orcs, which are constantly suffering.

Well, she did ask. And your best plan so far is going to take fifty years? What is the plan, anyway?

We have found a way to use the teleportation spell form to teleport between worlds. We are going to try to send him to one without any life so there's no one he can hurt.

That sounds like an entirely sensible way to deal with an evil god and she wonders why they're waiting fifty years to do it.

And in the meantime?

The teleportation spell form is new, he answers the not explicitly asked question, and we don't have anyone trained with it, and it'll take a long time before they even have a chance of casting it fast enough before he stops them.