"That is good to know. Valinor has two stars - had two stars, Melkor destabilized our orbit on the way out and I don't know what they'll have to do now but they were mumbling about variously drastic things -"

"Oh, wow." She tests whether she can rotate in the air, or if flipping upside-down messes up her aerodynamics. "Stars have to be alone and of a certain mass to be added to the network. Earth's system meets the requirements, it could theoretically be added. I'm sure they'll try it if they can establish control of the system. Are people going to have to evacuate Valinor?"

She can rotate in the air, though it's a bit dizzying how the vision screen changes and she loses a fair bit of altitude when she does. "I doubt it. The Valar are the Valar, they'll figure out something."

She decides not to overdo the rotation. She's pretty sure birds don't do very much rotating, and she's a bird right now, not a spaceship. "Oh, right. The Valar aren't trying to stop Melkor, though?"

Sigh. "Uh. Not really. They said that we shouldn't rush and they'd do it eventually and - they probably will - but it might be centuries. Might be millennia. And the King didn't want to wait."

"Is there, like, a reason they need to wait? Given that people are actively being tortured?"

"The Valar just don't really think about time very much. And they're worried it'd be destructive if they intervened, but mostly I suspect it's the not thinking about time very much."

She sighs. "I guess. The Elves seem kind of weirdly timeless, compared to the Alteri, but I guess there's a spectrum for things like that. And you're probably not as timeless as you seem, I just keep forgetting you have clocks in your brains. It's, uh, good that you're trying to fix things even when other people won't."

"Yes. It's worth everything, even all the horrors of war, to end this now instead of when the Valar get around to it."

She nods. "I hope your war ends soon. The Alteri have been at war for - I don't remember how many generations. Longer than the Liars have existed, supposedly."

"Well, maybe we can end that war too."

"Maybe you can! It's mostly been going on for so long because of the distances involved, I think, and the lightleapers should be a game changer on that front. Although there is the issue where the Alteri absolutely despise the Carthons and try to enslave everyone else they come across, but - well, you have to hope for things."

"I wonder if Alteri who are brought up better are better behaved."

"I bet some of them would be. Like I said, they're not all the same. I'm not sure how much variance there is or how much of it is because of how they're raised, but it's something to try figuring out. There are a few mothers in Earth space now. I think only three of them, and I don't know how they're planning to raise their children, exactly, but they're there, as of the past few months."

He looks astonished. "Why would you have children during a war?? In a contested area???"

"...because they can't stop having children? Even if they could, they wouldn't. They're almost always aiming to have more mothers so there can be more children down the line. Besides, the war's been going on basically forever; if everyone stopped having children, then the Alteri would lose just because they'd run out of people. They'd die out entirely without the Carthons having to lift a finger. I wouldn't let my whole species die out just because someone'd declared war on us, if I had a say."

She feels kind of weird defending the Alteri on this or any front, but it really would be pretty unreasonable to expect them to stop reproducing because of something as intractable and unchanging as the war.

"As for why they came to Earth, it's not the safest place, sure, but the mothers are the ones with political power, and whoever gets established first is going to have a massive political advantage in Earth space as more people immigrate. That one's - less defensible, I guess, but it still seems understandable."

"You have to have babies in warzones in order to have political power? No wonder the whole system is so horrible, only a monster would do that."

"The mothers just have babies all the time, wherever they are. I guess they could stay out of disputed territory and let the kriale decide everything in active warzones, but in a lot of cases that would mean evacuating the area of civilians entirely. Earth's not colonized yet - and it's not really very much of a warzone, it's closest thing to peaceful cooperation between the Carthons and the Alteri you're going to find anywhere - but the Alteri want the mothers to be the ones making decisions, especially around prospective colonies." She frowns. "Endorë's a war zone, right? Do the humans there not have children, or...?"

"You actually should evacuate warzones of civilians if you can...the humans on Endorë have children because no one knows how to prevent it, as far as I know -"

She is actually kind of upset about this assertion, even though it would obviously be better if you could easily evacuate civilians from warzones. Even though the Alteri are terrible and make terrible decisions and have a terrible society. If it were - she doesn't know who, but someone else, she'd kind of want to yell at this point. But it's not someone else and she's not at home and she doesn't actually know what happens here, if you upset people, and you can't really yell at people properly if you're in the middle of flying anyway.

She gains as much altitude as she can and doesn't reply for a bit.

The game allows her the pretence that she has soared very far away from him. 

Good for the game.

She continues pretending to have soared very far away from him for several minutes. Or until she sees something vaguely savanna-shaped, whichever comes first.

It takes more than a couple minutes to reach the savanna parts of the map.

It doesn't take her very long to get over wanting to yell at him.

"We're going to go to war with the Alteri," she says eventually. 

"You suppose we'll have to?"