"Everything that we have to worry about, at least."

She is pretty sure that the word we requires including yourself in the statement and that this is sort of at odds with worrying about things, but she doesn't press the issue further. "OK! Lead the way, then, I guess. I have no idea where I'm going."

An apartment has apparently been arranged for her in the city. It's much smaller than the one on the ship, presumably because they can leave at any time. It is still large enough to contain a piano and separate rooms for her and the baby.

Wow. She's sure that eventually she'll get used to the idea of having her own space, but there's a part of her that still thinks it's weird. 

She notes aloud that this is very nice, asks Ettelië what the piano is, and then checks whether the room contains any clothes in her size.

It does! They're not even obviously repurposed Elf uniforms, either. They're laid out by the stage of pregnancy they're suited for.

Aww. She keeps feeling like she's used to the concept of alien strangers being thoughtful, and keeps finding out that she's wrong. She admires the clothes for a bit (clothes that aren't all identical! clothes that fit!), then asks if there are any other places in the city that she should know about.

"I don't know what kind of thing you'd be most interested in. It's - a city, it has most things cities have..."

She blinks at him. She's spent literally all of her planetside time in cities, but she hasn't been allowed to just go places, and she hasn't really been able to go very many places with specific permission, and even if she had, she doesn't know whether all cities everywhere have the same sorts of buildings that they have on Yahi.

"Are there parks?" she says, because she cannot for the life of her think of any other things that cities have that it'd make sense to want to go visit right now.

"There are absolutely parks."

"OK," she says, relieved. "I can't actually think of very many things that cities definitely have? But parks are a plus."

"Ah, concert halls? A center of city affairs? An armory? A library? Workshops? Theatres? Sports fields?"

"I know what most of those things are. Uh, I assume concert halls are for concerts? I am pretty sure cities on Earth and on Yahi have political centers but I have literally never seen one. Also never seen a theatre. I have seen sports fields and workshops, and I've seen armories but they don't really seem like the sorts of things you let random aliens visit?" She pauses. "I have no idea what a library is."

"When books were copied by hand we had big climate-controlled buildings in cities where you could go to read them, and when we learned how to print books we let people take the books home from the buildings, and when books got to be on computers they were still valued as spaces where people go to read and to access stories on mediums that are not suited for transport to their house."

She narrows her eyes as though she is trying very hard to follow this explanation.

"....what's a book?"

"...uh, it's a compilation of a lot of information. Or a story. They were more common before everyone got everything on computers - they're still pretty common among the Vanyar, who don't use computers for much..."

"We have stories," she says, uncertainly. "Uh, can we go to the library?"

"Absolutely."

She takes a few minutes to change into clothes that fit, and then they are off to investigate this "library".

It's a big pretty building at a temperature slightly cooler, and with air slightly drier, than the city outside. It has shelves which contain actual sheafs of paper, carefully bound. It has a few shelves that contain scrolls of parchment. And it has big banks of computer screens with various capabilities that the standard ones don't have, including elaborate 3D modelling tables and screens with extraordinarily high resolutions (she can't see the difference, but Ettelië can pick out faces in a crowd scene on one such screen, even though they're tiny dots.)

Oh. Oh, oh, oh -

" - You have stories. I mean - of course you have stories, I knew that, you said you did, and of course you have the ability to write them down, you've been teaching me written Quenya almost as long as the spoken form, but - you can just have them stored here, just let people come back and read them, you can just - have stories without needing to produce them over and over again - "

She asks if there are special ways to handle books to make sure you don't hurt them (they're made of paper, what if they tear, but on the other hand you can't just go through and periodically delete them, either), then looks for ones that she can read if she's willing to ask Ettelië for every third word or so.

All of them except the scrolls can be handled by random people safely - "they do wear out, it's terrible, but they're not art pieces, it wouldn't do any good to protect them from wear by not letting anyone touch them -" and then she can read some Elven histories or Elven books of lyrics or Elven books documenting all the birds that there are.

Those all sound excellent and she is going to read them all as soon as she has time - or as soon as she can read without assistance, it's really a pity Ves isn't here but she's sure she'll get the hang of it eventually - but for the moment she goes for the histories, partly because she actually is really curious about the history of the Elves and partly because -

"We have stories - I haven't told you them because almost none of them are true and even the ones that are have mostly been mythologized by now, so I didn't think they were really pertinent, but there are so many stories that've probably never been written down, and if I write them down they'll at least exist somewhere - but I haven't practiced recording narratives in a permanent form like that before, I think I need to get a sense of how it works before I try it - "

"What a good project! I expect you can stay here and look into that as much as you'd like."

It is such a relief to have a project. She's never gone this long without having to do a lot of stuff, and it's great, but it's also sort of driving her crazy. Recording narrative poetry isn't, like, going to save anyone from torture or enslavement, but at least it's something that really should be done at some point.

She reads books with assistance and requests paper and spends an afternoon figuring out how to transliterate Etra La in the tengwar. For the next long while she'll be quite happy to divide the majority of her time between reading and composition. The latter means a lot of pacing and talking out loud to herself in order to get the content and the meter right, since she's never written things before and her words naturally come out spoken. But it's wonderful being able to write things phonetically - she could have written the content of her stories in Confederate One, if she'd thought of it and if she'd been allowed paper, but she couldn't have gotten the sounds right, and the sounds are really very important for poetry.

Most of the things she records are tragedies. The Liars have comedies and romances and histories and moral theatre and all the rest, and she'll figure out how to record them if she has time, but her favorite stories have always been the ones where things don't quite work out, and so the tragedies and bittersweet dramas are the things she starts with.

Meanwhile, an Elven lightleaper appears in space about two lightdays from the star of Savaek.