"We absolutely can!"

Aww. She's so happy. Being happy is actually pretty nice.

She removes the helmet and returns it.

And the room is back to being a smallish windowless room, and Ettelië walks her back to hers.

She says goodnight. She does not beat herself up for her terrible conversational abilities at all, though she does spend several minutes reminding herself that she has several much, much, much more pressing concerns than either finding someone to coparent with or figuring out how to flirt with particularly excellent Elves. Such as, like, saving millions of Elves from torture, or saving billions of Liars from slavery, or saving however many orcs there are from... whatever specific conditions the orcs are being kept in. But all those things do sort of involve talking to particularly excellent Elves, so that's pretty convenient. 

She's still relatively happy and energetic in the morning, and is super eager to get started on labeling stars.

He is too! "How many Alteri colonies are there, do you know?"

She tries to remember if she's heard any passing comments with exact numbers. "No, sorry, not off the top of my head. I think at least a hundred in the network, and maybe twice that many minor outposts outside it. I can probably locate about fifty with certainty and give you the names of a couple dozen more."

"That'll be a great starting point. Thank you."

She is, as always, happy to be able to help. She can give the names of systems in Etra La and write the names of them in Confederate One. She can't write them in Etra La, since it's a purely spoken language. For most of them she's able to offer only a few pieces of information with any degree of certainty, and then she has a lot of much less definite information from sources of varying trustworthiness. 

That's of interest too. "We probably want somewhere out of the way we can ally with for the industrial base to build more lightleapers."

"Hm. Most of the systems I've heard things about are the ones in the network, and that's where all of the largest industrial centers will be, but there are plenty of places that are a decade or so from the network that have enough industrial capacity to produce at least some starships on their own." She points out a few such systems, offering very rough estimates of population and industrial capacity for each.

"Lightleapers are hard, but I don't know what other goods that the Alteri might produce are - predictive of being able to do things that hard. Very precise computers?"

"I'm not an expert on computer programming, sorry. I'd imagine that the most powerful computers are produced on planets in the network. But a lot of that is because those are the economicly efficient places - it doesn't mean that other planets will be totally incapable of producing more advanced technology after you share the blueprints with them."

He hesitates slightly - it's not clear 'sharing blueprints' is the plan - then nods. "Okay. Is this all of them you want to do right now, or..."

"I can keep going. I'm not sure how much more definite information I have, though. Is there anything more specific you think would be good to know?"

"Why don't I get this to the powers that be and then if they need more they can ask."

"OK! Sounds good."

"What do you want to do next?"

She wants to save the world and be useful and also probably keep talking to Ettelië, but she has no idea how to make any of those except the last thing happen, and she is definitely not going to say any of them out loud.

"Um. Language lesson, I guess? If we don't have anything else important to do. It's probably pretty important to practice at least once a day, if I want to keep making progress."

"Okay!" They can practice Quenya. He can teach her some songs.

She is pretty embarrassed to try singing because everyone here is great at it and she's had no practice and is probably awful, but as a language learning exercise she can mostly convince herself to try her best.

It's nice. At least as long as she can convince herself that Ettelië probably isn't wondering how it's possible for someone to be as bad as singing as she is. She doesn't even know how bad at singing she is. She is not totally sure how to tell pretty bad singing apart from really good singing.

Ettelië does not comment, except to explain the lyrics, on her singing. He knows lots of songs about meadows and peace and happiness and exploration.

They are very good songs! She likes learning them. She's not sure she would particularly have fun singing them in the presence of any non-Ettelië Elves, since, after all, she sucks at singing, but it's nice to think of singing them to Ves or to the baby she's going to have in a while. (Wow, she's going to have a baby in a while. Occassionally she has to pause to remember that that's a thing that's happening.)

She mentions that most of the songs she knows are lullabies. 

"That sounds lovely! Do you want to teach me?"

She nods, a little hesitantly. "I'm not very good at singing, obviously, my sister was better at it, but I can try."

"Lullabies are not meant to be technically challenging."