She is extremely happy to know things that are helpful.

"OK. Thank you for answering all of this, it's very considerate of you and I appreciate it a lot. I'd love to hear more about what your planet is like, but this is also a lot of information and I think maybe I should eat again at some point, if that's not a problem?"

"Of course not! I'll have them bring lunch in."

She has to make an effort to even try not to smile now. She mentally reminds herself that she doesn't know these people and there's no guarantee that they're going to keep treating her nicely after they've learned more from her. Still, she can't imagine any circumstances under which Alteri would treat her like this, and it's honestly hard to think of very many things the Noldor could do that would make them stop being preferable to house Tellari. Maybe they could torture her for an entire year before killing her, or something. It'd take creativity.

She is not entirely sure how to ask questions about daily life on their planet, since all of her experiences are filtered through the lens of slavery, and asking if the Noldor keep slaves seems like it might be rude. She's also not entirely sure she wants to know the answer just yet.

She considers the question while she eats.

The food is tasty. He names things and looks over the starcharts that came with her suit and asks her a few questions about how to interpret them.

She repeats the names and asks to review many of the words they went over yesterday, reflexively apologizing for forgetting the ones she thinks she should know already. She knows how to interpret star charts. She's not a pilot, but all spacers know the basics and can use star locations to determine their current orientation. 

"I can answer more questions right now if you want me to, but I'm not very good at focusing on one thing for a lot of hours at a time," she says apologetically, when she's done eating. She's pretty good at enduring a lot of mental exertion without having a meltdown - people who have meltdowns do not get to keep being spacers - but it does get harder for her to remember things. "It would be easiest if we could review vocabulary a little more and then - I don't want to be a problem, but maybe I could walk around somewhere for a while before we come back to this? I don't need to if, um, that would inconvenience anyone, but I think maybe I would maybe be a little better at thinking if I did?"

"Yes of course! You can explore the whole ship except for other peoples' rooms, and call me back whenever you're ready to continue. Are you sure you want to review more vocabulary first? Humans usually have a hard time learning languages, we weren't expecting you to have it within a week or anything..."

She ducks her head in embarrassment. "Thank you. For lots of things. I'm not very good at learning languages, but I would really like to be able to talk to other people, and I don't know how long I'm going to be here, and it'll go faster with frequent repetition. Ves thinks so, anyway, she says it's more important to practice frequently than to practice for a long time at once. But yeah. I'll take a walk first. That's probably best."

"All right! I can show you how to reach the courtyard from here."

She follows him to the courtyard. 

Pretty pretty pretty.

"Take as long as you need!"

She mills around awkwardly for a bit, then gives herself permission to take a real walk.

There were big plants on Yahi and there were real trees on Earth, but she's never seen this many plants together, not even on the surface of a planet. Spaceships have lush but cramped greenhouses, optimized for producing food and oxygen, not for being pleasant to wander around in. The ship she spent ten years on didn't have a common space like this, not even for the few Alteri crew members who didn't sleep through the majority of the voyage. They had one cramped space for the Alteri crew and two cramped rooms full of bunk beds for the Liars. There was more space once they got to Earth, despite the far more demanding work schedule, but there was nothing like this.

She paces. She thinks. It's so good to be able to think.

There's abstract artwork and the strangest tiny windchimes that you can only hear if you put your ear really, really close to them and lots of greenery and some rooms with labels she can't read on the doors and windows looking out on space. Endorë is visible from here. It looks a little like Earth - green and blue with white clouds over it. The northern pole is entirely shrouded in clouds.

She investigates the artwork and the tiny wind chimes. They are weird but delightful, because they are clearly here because people like them and not because they serve some incredibly important purpose. The thought of a people who make spaces that are supposed to be pleasant is a good one. People probably pay more attention to this sort of thing on planets. She got over not living on a planet a long time ago, but this place is making her miss it again, and she hasn't even actually been to their planet yet.

She stares out the window at Endorë for a while. It's weird and uncomfortable not having a sense of time - she feels very sure that there's something she's supposed to be doing, or that there will be very soon, but she has no idea what it is or when it's going to happen.

She thinks about greeting some of the elves, but she's pretty sure she's going to get the pronunciation wrong, so she doesn't. Spending this much time doing nothing in particular is weird, so after about half an hour of wandering and ten or so minutes of forcing herself to try to decompress more completely, she heads back and looks for Ettelië.

They don't seem particularly interested in hiding that they're watching her; he shows up shortly after she starts looking. "Hello!"

She's OK with being watched. She'd watch them, if one of them showed up on her doorstep. Not that she has a doorstep, and if they showed up in Earth space then she probably wouldn't have been allowed to meet them in the first place, but - whatever, that's not the point.

"Hello! I'd like to try working on language again? And also - I don't need this at all so if it's a problem then don't worry about it, but I think maybe it'd be nice to have a clock? Maybe?"

She tries to smile instead of wincing this time, and sort of almost succeeds.

"Oh! I don't actually know if we have anything that would suit aboard the ship but that makes perfect sense and I will ask someone to look into it. Elves have computers in our heads, we use those."

"Thanks! It's, um, not urgent or anything." She pauses. "Do the computers do other things?"

"They do! They let us look at the world through each others' eyes if we choose to share. We like to look at pretty things and then show that to everyone within range. Right now only people on the ship are in range, it's more useful on a planet's surface. They let us remember things very well, and remember some things like words nearly perfectly. If we die they can be used to bring us back and if we are captured they can be used to hurt us very badly."

Her eyes widen at the beginning and the end of this explanation. Choose, they said, they're not psyons, it's not the same thing. Probably. Even if it were, they obviously can't use it on her. And immortality, hey, that sounds - sort of fake but very cool but it's probably fake and she can think about this later.

"We have computers," she says quietly. "But I think they only do that last thing."

"That sounds - uh, useless."

"Well it's not great for me," she agrees. "We, uh, didn't install them ourselves. It's easier for the Alteri to control people when they can immobilize or kill them at will."

"They're installed? Can they be removed?"

She shrugs helplessly. "Maybe? Sometimes they malfunction, so every now and then they put people to sleep for a while so they can open them up and do maintenance, but... they're installed in childhood, and if someone got it wrong the person would probably die or be paralyzed forever, so it's - it would be a risk." She bites her lip. "Do you, uh, think you might be able to figure out how to remove them?"

"I would expect so. Ours can't be removed, our brains run off them, it'd kill us, but if yours are installed in childhood then it seems likely it'd be possible to remove - or ruin in place - I'm not an expert but I'd certainly want to ask one and they might have some idea of how to do it."

"That would be nice," she says quietly. "That would be really nice. Um, do you have any idea - it's not urgent or anything, I don't think anyone can control the implants without access to Alteri technology, but - can you, um, maybe estimate how long it might be before you could maybe ask someone about it?"