She opens up the list of animals.

Wow. That is kind of a lot of animals.

It is!! Valinor and therefore this game contains velociraptors and giraffes and gazelles and zebras and wildebeasts and sauropods and hippopotami and cheetahs and hyenas and triceratopses and wild dogs and rhinoceri and white-backed vultures and many many more. It's failing to translate most of the names but there are pictures.

She has nothing to compare most of the pictures to. This one looks like a bird. That one looks like a big lizard. That one is - something. Something very weird. "There's - OK, the name's not translating into Confederate One and I have no idea how to read anything else, but - it has spots and hooves and a really long neck?"

"Oh!!! Yes, let's go see one of those, they're so cute!"

She is delighted that Ettelië apparently has excellent taste in megafauna.

She takes off.

Now that she's picked a target critter the game will direct her towards the nearest herd of them.

She follows the game's instructions until she runs into some.

...wow, they're tall. And they are pretty adorable.

The game prompts her to feed them sugar cubes. She has to hover at the right height to accomplish this.

Well she is not going to say no to feeding the adorable megafauna sugar cubes. 

They're fake sugar cubes and fake adorable megafauna but they act very realistically delighted.

A lot of the good things in life are fake, honestly. This is sort of the hand that Liars are dealt.

She looks over at Ettelië to, like, check whether she's interacting properly with the adorable megafauna. And also possibly whether he is also being adorable.

Ettelië is feeding giraffes sugar cubes and beaming.

Aww.

It's actually pretty hard to believe that the world is terrible right now. Probably a non-terrible world is a world with real giraffes and real sugar cubes and happy lullabies and no torture and no slavery and no cities where Orc babies get shot in the head, and basically nothing in it that can prompt Ettelië to stop beaming. But that's a frickin' high bar, so they'll just have to do the best they can with this world. Maybe figure out how to shoot fewer babies, that should possibly be on the to-do list. She has a lot of things on her to-do list. That's OK. She hasn't had free time in, like, ever, she probably won't know what she's missing.

"They really are adorable."

"They are! I should look up the creators and tell them what a lovely job they did."

"You should! ...huh, so are there people who design giraffes for games all day? That sounds cool. How do you, um, decide what people are going to spend their time doing? Like, as a society?"

"People mostly did whatever they enjoyed, before the war. Now we get assignments."

"Huh. Did that work? You didn't, like, run out of people who wanted to grow food?"

"Valinor made it easy to do most things, so there was always enough of everything. And if something were scarce then you could make money doing it, so that evened out whatever needed evening out."

"That makes sense. The Alteri have money and some freedom to pursue what they enjoy, but they also get assignments from the houses. Different than our assignments, though. A lot of times one of the mothers will open up an assignment to anyone basically capable who wants to try it, and members of the house who are looking to gain status will offer to take it on. There's also usually some kind of monetary reward, but I don't think that's usually the important part."

"I ....guess you could summarize our society that way if you wanted? If you want to learn with a specific artist or be in charge of a department you'd demonstrate you were good at whatever was involved and then intern with them for a while and then eventually get to do it."

"That makes sense. I've never really had to think about having goals like that. It's possible for us to get assigned to better positions based on merit, in theory, but I kind of figured it was never going to happen to me and I had better just focus on, uh, less-ambitious things. But the Alteri think about it all the time. Half of what everyone's doing is just trying to impress their superiors enough to be allowed to do whatever it is they actually want to do."

"That sounds exhausting. I don't think it ever worked like that for any Elves but I don't know anyone who wanted to marry a prince or run a department or anything..."

"I think almost all Alteri want things like that. Or at least, like, want to have more status than they have at the moment. Though I could be working from a biased sample. A lot of them just want to have enough status to be able to marry anyone; there are never enough mothers for everyone to get married, so they tend to compete for things like that."

"Well, that's horrible. Why don't they aim for a balance -"

"I think they kind of do sometimes? But a mother can't have any daughters until she's married six people, and it takes a while to find that many, so there tend to be fewer of them. And if there were more then there'd be even more Alteri competing for space. I guess they could try having more suke so that there were fewer of the other genders, but mothers generally don't want suke, and I don't think they have a mechanism of controlling the genders of their children more precisely."