"- how did he know I went back to school, was he watching? Can he do that?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, I played my time there very conservatively because I didn't trust the Valar to have actually safeguarded me against all the hazards. Didn't cast spells in case all my arcana was too science-infested, or tickle sleeping dragons, or do science experiments. It makes a difference in the extent to which he was or was not torturing me that I thought I was in constant danger, even if I wasn't literally chained to a rock."

Fëanáro hugs her. "I think it's just as bad."

Hug. "I don't, but it was still pretty bad."

"Well. No gods here. No one to rescue, except T'Mir, and now we should probably go learn the language. Languages. There might be lots of them!"

"It's about fifty-fifty on planets that have a standard planetary language by the time they hit warp level tech," says T'Mir, "but they're almost guaranteed to have speaking populations of others who just learn the standard for wider interactions. I don't remember off the top of my head how much my computer had to chew on before I could make forum posts with this planet in particular but the Prometheus would have the notes. Or we can, I suppose, just rely on psi and a small language sponge."

"I'm older than you," he mutters.

"You mentioned. I apologize, I can refrain."

"I think on this world it'll only be forty years to grow up, instead of four hundred."

"- why the disparity?"

"Valinor was slow. Magically."

"To the point where it would take hundreds of years to grow up? Why would anyone do that?"

"The effect is really sort of soothing if you're not concerned about using your time efficiently," Bella says, "and I guess they wanted people's childhoods to match everyone's sense of how much time was passing, although Eldar take a really long time to reach adulthood anyway."

"We live forever. People in Materia don't, they die. Even if they're not eaten."

"Not all of them, some of them are actually immortal until something kills them."

"Bella's kind of people," he amends.

"As far as I can tell I'm the same kind of basic thing as an Earthling."

"How were you telling?"

"Subtle arts - the thing you're glossing as psi that I have - can make species distinctions. It's not usually that useful, but the humans here read about like humans at home except none of them are themselves subtle artists."

"And nothing here is a Quendi, it was one of the first things I read on the science ethernet."

"We haven't contacted all the people in the galaxy yet, let alone the universe, there could be prewarp Quendi or Delta Quadrant Quendi or Andromeda Galaxy Quendi or something."

He shrugs. "I mostly want to know if there's another Fëanáro. Since there are two Bellas. One of whom is named T'Mir," he adds quickly.

"I wonder if there are more of us."

"I wonder that too. I'd hesitate to try naming us something less obviously temporary than 'Bellas' without more examples to draw on."