He's the 'mostly'; royalty is terrifying. And I don't know how to deal with royalty in disagreement with other royalty about what I should be doing, at all.

Obey the King; Fëanáro deserves better than this mess, and hopefully things will improve soon, but he can't do anything and you won't have any difficulties as a consequence of ignoring him. There's an ironic undertone. Everyone does.

Okay. At home that sort of thing could easily be an impossible puzzle where either one of them could make my life difficult or short if I didn't find a way to satisfy them both.

I understand that the Kings of your homeland are ruthless, but small children would have the power to harm you?

Not directly. By and large. But they could command people who could and wouldn't care whether there'd ever been a way to avoid one or the other royal party's annoyance.

You poor thing. Finwë is our King because he led us here and we trust him and he advises us wisely; no one would obey him if he asked them to harm someone.

What would happen if someone disobeyed him? For some other reason.

I suppose he wouldn't trust them with important work in the future.

...Oh.

I take it that's another cultural difference.

It's considered very important at home that when someone's an authority others are supposed to obey, that happens, consistently. Not everybody's the Emperor who can casually execute anybody who isn't from an important family or organization, but if someone disobeys a law or a validly issued order they're punished, so they and/or anybody else who hears about it is more reluctant to do that in the future.

That sounds frightening. I suppose if someone was going around doing things that were wrong, we'd stop them. It hasn't come up. Most people want to build a beautiful land where we live in harmony, they don't want to hurt their friends and neighbors.

It seems really nice here.

Does the Emperor casually execute people who aren't important?

Not frequently. He could do it and everyone knows it, so people avoid provoking him because they don't want to die.

Can anyone - stop him? That's horrible.

Um, I guess there could be a rebellion, if he were using his power in really unpopular ways, but then a whole lot of people would die.

That system sounds nightmarishly unjust. You must have been terrified, at the palace earlier. I'm so sorry.

It was really scary. But not actually as scary as the Valar, because anything like a Valar at home would be much more dangerous than the Emperor. The Emperor at least might be in a good mood and find out whether I meant any harm and then go 'oh, she's a freeborn Imperial citizen and it was an accident and no harm done, let her go'; that wouldn't happen if I walked up to a god or a dragon or a fae and did something they didn't like. Maybe unless somebody was watching and the god were courting their good opinion, or it was a noble dragon under some sort of agreement that involved not hurting people, I guess.

Oh, do you have healers for mad people here, that's - what I was going to school for, it's sort of the obvious subtle artist career choice...

We didn't have anything like that in Endorë. People are pursuing many different avenues of study in this new world. No one's punched a Vala, or anyone else, so we haven't needed to learn if there's anyone who can help people with the desire to visit violence on others cease to desire that.

I was actually on my way to my first class in - the study of healing the mad and allied topics - when I had my magical accident. But that's the general sort of thing I was going to learn to do.

I would regret that you didn't find us a bit later, but it sounds like your world is awful so I'm glad you got out sooner. And Fëanáro's about to hit his terrible teens, that'll do no one any favors.

Your people seem to grow slower than mine. I'm actually not quite nineteen, my birthday's in - a few days.