She nods and tests this too, gaining altitude until she finds the silvery things; it's not hard to angle herself to hit them. "Ancestors, I've missed - it feels ridiculous saying I've missed flying when I've never seen anything remotely like this, and I shouldn't miss work, of all things, but there was a reason I was glad to be a spacer - but this is so - how far does this simulation go, it's beautiful - "

"There're thousands of miles of it - we'll get out of the desert before that, though, and then there are mountains - I'm really glad you like it -"

She's really glad that he's really glad - people are never really glad about her emotions, and it's a really surprisingly nice thing to hear. She's not going to say that, though, because she's way too busy enjoying the simulation to do anything that will require her to die of embarrassment on the spot. 

"It's beautiful," she repeats. "Mountains, I've never seen mountains before - I've never seen a desert, either, only in pictures - only in advertisements, I think, and this isn't even comparable - oh, are there oceans anywhere, I've never seen an ocean before at all, Parael tried to describe them to me once but she said I wasn't picturing them right - "

"I think so - you can pull up a map -" he gestures with his fingers and then apparently is looking at one, though she can't see it. "It's in, like, the lower corner of your vision, you want to sort of reach for it and pull it into view -"

She manages to pull up the map. She doesn't have much experience reading two-dimensional maps, but her spatial awareness is good enough that she's able to make sense of it without much difficulty. It has to be pretty good for anyone to let you be a spacer. 

"I'm gonna go look, OK?" And she soars off to find the ocean.

The desert floats along beneath her. From her view it looks like Ettelië rapidly recedes into a speck in the distance, though he must still be right next to her. Eventually in the distance she can see something hazy on the horizon, and a while after that it starts to look like water. 

She stares at the ocean from the air for a bit, then lands on the beach beside it.

"Wow. I knew it was - when people describe it they tell you it's a lot of water in one place, but then you think it's just an enormous puddle, and they insist that it's not that. Parael said there were waves, but I thought she meant, like, the kinds of ripples you'd see on the surface of a sink when it's full, not - I didn't realize they curled. And they said there was a sound, but nobody's ever quite able to make it."

"I heard you can hear the way the ocean sounds in seashells, though I don't think there's any reason it'd work that way," says Ettelië, landing too once he's caught up. 

"Huh, is it true? Do you think they put that in the simulation? How would we - I've never been to a beach, but seashells are grown by marine animals, right, if we wanted to find some we'd probably have to look closer to the water, right?"

"They'll be all up and down the sandy parts of the beach. I doubt they're in this version, though, it can't do touch so it's not very good for interacting with objects."

"That makes sense," she says, sounding only slightly disappointed. "I guess I'll just have to live long enough to see the real thing sometime, and then we can test it. But this is really incredible, too. Thank you for showing it to me, Ettelië."

"Of course! I'm glad you like it. Some people find it really helps with the not having enough space, that's the main thing it gets recommended for, but it should have occurred to me that it'd be nice just for - seeing a world."

"Yeah! I've only ever really been in cities. I was on a train once that went underground and then passed through a mining district, but nothing really natural, I don't think? I went to a park once, on Earth, but it was only a little one and they decided to send me back to space right after." She laughs weakly. "The two things were sort of related."

"Oh?"

She hesitates for a moment, then continues. "So - the thing is that on Earth they don't really have slaves? They did a long time ago, and they kept some people in similar conditions until really recently, but the idea of slavery is taboo enough that when you go there people are, like, really upset about other people being explicitly kept as slaves? And they'll - they'll encourage you to do things that you know are dangerous and against the rules, things you'd never do normally, and if you're not careful you'll forget just how little leeway you actually have. Anyway, uh, there were some students who liked to hang around the office space at odd hours, and at one point when supervision was stretched thin and we were mostly done with our work, they offered to drive some of us to the park. We only stayed for - I dunno, an hour maybe, not more than that. And we asked one of the suke, it's not like we ran off without telling anyone, but we didn't ask the right people because the right people would have said no. And they were very upset when we came back." She sighs. "It was stupid. They could have killed me for something that stupid, and then Ves wouldn't have had someone to be a real parent for her. But it's not like I knew that six months later I'd be living in an Elf ship and taking daily walks in a little indoor forest, you know? I thought it was my only shot. Shouldn't have taken the shot, but I'm dumb sometimes."

"Doesn't sound stupid to me. Though we don't die - not like that, not just where you're gone forever - so I might be missing something."

She considers this. "I think mostly it's that I can't afford to die right now, and I couldn't afford to die then, either. I had responsibilities. Much less important responsibilities, admittedly, but it was wrong to put myself in a situation where I was risking things that Taz and Ves needed, too. But even apart from that, even if there was nobody in the universe who cared about me or who needed caring about, I - I like being alive? And I liked the park, the park was nice. Paled in comparison to your courtyard, but it was nice. And if I'd been thinking clearly I never would've traded that one hour of niceness for maybe a whole lifetime that would've included other nice things."

"Huh. I think I'd feel like a life without any parks was just worse than not existing."

"I don't think so," she says quietly. "It's not a good life, no, but it has good things in it. Friends and children and music and stories. And flying. And I just - I want to get to keep existing, even if my life only has a few good things in it. I also want it to have more good things in it, of course, but - if someone had killed me six months ago, I'd've felt like they were doing something horrible to me, not doing me a favor."

"I suppose species and people that just couldn't live like that would have all been killed a long time ago, so the ones the Alteri hold as slaves are ones which are different from us in that way."

She nods. "There's also... when the Alteri created us - they say they created us, I don’t know if they really did - they were trying to create a being that could do the same sorts of complex tasks that Alteri workers could, plus navigate complex terrain and require less space than they did. More than anything, though, they wanted a creature that didn’t need very much to find its life worth living. They wanted a creature that could live on dreams indefinitely, no matter how desperately it wished for something solid.” She frowns out at the ocean. "I guess they'd probably stop us from wishing, if they could, but maybe you can't breed that out of people."

"That makes sense. Melkor bred orcs to be in pain all the time but also to be able to function in that kind of pain. So I suppose that kind of thing is possible for evil enough people."

"Yeah. ...I hope we're, like, able to live in societies that aren't horrible. Be pretty embarrassing to get help freeing ourselves and then find out that we're not very good at doing things we weren't designed to do. Hope the same for the orcs, I guess, it sounds like it's not their fault they've become what they are."

"It isn't, not at all. I - don't know what we'll do after the war.  I don't know if there's anything to be done. Probably someday."

She nods. "Yeah. Can't think of anyone off the top of my head who could help, but it's a big galaxy. Lots of people to ask, once we're in a position to ask them."

She's silent for a bit. Beaches seem like good places for silence. It's way less awkward than when you're in a normal room.

"Anyway. This is really cool. I think it's getting kind of late, so I should probably go to bed and get ready for star charts in the morning, but this was a really good suggestion and I'm really glad you showed it to me. So thank you. And, uh, maybe we could explore more tomorrow, after we've taken lots of notes on stars?"