Haneo is just now being introduced to the concept of a playground. It's a weird concept. She thinks there are probably lots of other Liars who would like playgrounds, if they were on Endorë - the ones who want to be loud, the ones who run and jump and climb on things they shouldn't - but she doesn't really see the appeal herself.

"That's OK," says Haneo. "I like gardens more. And people. People are nice."

"People here are very nice! And they all know where you live, so if you go outside and wander around and aren't sure the way back, you can just ask any of them!"

"That's good," says Haneo, though she doesn't think she'll get lost unless she wanders very far away from her house; she's pretty good at building up a mental map based on what other people are seeing, at least as long as there are enough people. She's getting a little tired, because she likes people and places and new things to investigate, but this is a lot of new things, and she's not entirely sure how she's going to make very much more progress on her mission today.

Her parents notice her feet dragging a little and her attention wandering a little. "Are you about ready to go home and get some sleep?"

"I think so," she says, a little more cheerfully. Maybe she can work on her mission more tomorrow.

"Do you want to walk, or would you like us to carry you home?"

"You can carry me," says Haneo. This is not very dignified, but it does sound very nice, and nobody has carried her since she was very very small.

Her parents are delighted. Her father scoops her up. He hugs her and starts walking.

Oh good, that counts as mission progress. It was kind of an accident, but kind-of-an-accident progress counts. She hugs him back.

She was right, it is nice.

Her delighted parents hum a lullaby and carry her home and up to her room and to her bed.

Having parents is AWESOME. She hasn't proven that it isn't dangerous yet but it's AWESOME.

She goes to sleep very confident that her mission is going to work out.

In hastily prepared methane caves, Elves with instructions to get the Alteri to feel at home bombard them with linguistics questions.

The Alteri are mostly not linguists, but they do have one linguist with them who is very eager to ask his own questions. The others are plenty willing to answer questions. All of them know Confederate One. They can also answer questions on Confederate Two, Confederate Four, Confederate Six, and a couple of unpronounceable spoken languages. They're willing to answer questions about all of these except the unpronounceable spoken language that all of them share; they like having a way of discussing things among themselves without leaving to go somewhere else. They think that this is pretty fair of them, given that the Elves have that telepathy thing.

Super reasonable! (Elf linguists are totally working from the samples they have all the same). They're happy to answer other science questions too. Oh, and politics. They could discuss politics if the Alteri want. 

Is there no Confederate Three?

There's a Confederate Three and a Confederate Five, but none of them happen to know more than a handful of words in it.

The Alteri agree that politics are an important thing to discuss, though most of them do not seem super enthused about this. One of them is super enthused about it, and he wants to know everything about Elf governmental structures and who everyone answers to and how things get decided. The others appear to be putting in some amount of effort and then giving up and asking questions about the things that interest each of them - physics, chemistry, cellular biology, ecology, ancient history, sociology and family structures, astronomy and spacefaring tech - but oh, they really should be trying to understand that whole politics thing.

No actually it's fine as long as there's one person who is at all interested in discussing politics. The Elves explain their government! There's a King. Lord Maedhros technically answers to the King. They're guests of Lord Maedhros. The King probably doesn't know this. 

The one who cares about politics wants many many many more details than this. The others decide that probably he can handle that for now. The cellular biology one wants to know about the medical details of how immortality works, he's heard that Defilers are more or less immortal but he has tragically never had occasion to figure out what that means on a cellular level. Some of them are super interested in faster than light travel, how did the Elves manage that?

They probably shoudn't share details, since they're going to want to trade it with the Alteri for help defeating Melkor. (They are extremely interested in prospects of making that trade. And in whether the Alteri will stick to their side of it.)

Oh, yes, the Alteri are sure their superiors will be interested in making that trade. They could defeat the Defilers with that. The Defilers are awful. And they could see their family members on other worlds, and trade resources with the colonies on a regular basis - the possibilities are endless, really.

Yes but do they want it badly enough to fight Melkor, and are they trustworthy with agreements like that.

Of course the Alteri want it badly enough to fight Melkor, how hard can it possibly be to defeat Melkor? They've been fighting the Defilers for millennia, and the Defilers can blow up planets. 

The Alteri appear to be having an academic discussion among themselves with regard to the level of their trustworthiness; they don't bother to switch to their spoken language. There is no consensus. Apparently it depends.

"We're not liars," says one of them, eventually.

"I'm curious about the story behind that name!" asks a linguist spiritedly enough to disguise that this is, from their perspective, sort of a discouraging answer.

"The Defilers have no respect for sacredness; they defile the very core of everything they encounter. When they first encountered the Alteri, they sought to purge the most important aspects of our society, to make us an undifferentiated mass of hollowed-out shells."

"How terrible! And the Liars, how did they earn that name?"

"The Liars are fundamentally incapable of prolonged honesty. They ignore reality in favor of their own imagined worlds, constantly lying to each other and even to themselves."