"So you liked that they kept on trying even though it was clearly not going to work out for tens of thousands of years?"

"Yeah. That way it's still - sad and depressing and makes you feel like maybe everything is futile and there just isn't enough of us to really fix things, but it doesn't make you angry." 

"I don't think I would enjoy fiction which conveyed the emotion that everything is futile and there aren't enough of us to really fix things if it were actually true, that seems like it would hurt too much."

"Well, that's why I don't like tragedies most of the time. Because if they're right then that's terrible, and if they're wrong then it means that we could have won, and we didn't, just because we weren't quite as clever or as kind or as determined as we could have been. Though of course it could be somewhere in between, there could be some things that we have to sacrifice for the sake of other really important things. That's how it is a lot of the time." She sighs. "But really painful things are important, too. You wouldn't have any stories if there weren't any pain. Do you know the story of - well, no, you wouldn't."

"In the real world we just will always win and have all the nice things, which is why stories where that's not true are interesting. What's the one you're thinking of?"

She lets out a bit of a sputtering laugh at this. "Uh - on Targis and probably other places, I heard it from a Targian, they have this story about the creation of Liars. They say that when the Alteri first made slaves they didn't have material needs, they just worked, did nothing but work all day. And it was awful, they felt like they didn't have anything in their lives that made them meaningful or worthwhile. So they prayed to the gods, and the gods gave them gifts. Hunger was a gift, so that their masters would have to provide them with food to eat. Tiredness was a gift, so that their masters would have to let them sleep, let them dream, let them escape from their lives for at least a few hours every day. Loneliness was a gift, so that they couldn't keep us on our own anymore, they had to keep us with families or crews if they wanted us at our best. Lies were a gift, the ability to shape the truth into something else and give yourself enough breathing room to imagine something that wasn't as terrible. Pain was a gift, so that if you were injured you couldn't just keep working through it indefinitely, and so that - well, so that if you really needed to work for just a little while longer, you could spur yourself on to a little bit more action. And death was a gift, so that the suffering could only ever go on for so long, so that someday the Liars would have to be allowed to rest forever. And - it's not true or anything, none of our stories are true, but - there's this whole philosophy underlying it where the things that look horrible are actually necessary for everything good. And I don't know if that's true either, but I'd rather think that we're suffering for something resembling a reason than because there just isn't anything that can be done about any of it. I guess. I actually don't know whether that makes any sense whatsoever."

"- I think people have to eat because of physics. That's sure a story, though."

"I mean it's totally totally fake," she agrees.

"I can imagine narratives it'd - be an improvement on? But mostly it just makes it sound like your world was really really terrible and needs to be immediately dismantled."

"I mean I did kind of ask you to do that within like four hours of meeting you. It's, uh, a very ambitious undertaking and I don't expect it to all work out, but I figure you have to try your best with whatever you have. And - when what you have is hunger and pain and death, you end up telling different stories to communicate that than the ones you might come up with if you had more of other things."

"I bet Eru will love it."

"Eru's not getting that one. But I hope he likes what he gets."

"It's always mildly irritating that Eru is what he is, but I think I've never found it as infuriating as right now. Imagine if he were a good God and just had already made us all strong enough to fix things."

"...I'm not sure if I can imagine that. I'm not sure it's logically possible to fix everything that's wrong in a way that I wouldn't somehow object to. I guess all the slaves would be free and happy and the war would be over and nobody important would be talking to me about anything. I'd be - I have no idea where I would be."

"With your family probably, figuring out how you wanted your planet to be."

"I guess that doesn't sound terrible."

"Figuring out planets is surprisingly fun."

"It doesn't really sound like something I'd be any good at."

"Being good at it is mostly just not being an idiot and you don't particularly seem like an idiot."

She looks sort of skeptical of this. "It... sounds like the sort of thing that would be a lot harder than that implies."

"I mean, yes, you learn a lot by doing it, but you don't need to start out knowing it."

"...I kinda feel like if you lined up everyone in the universe I would be maybe fortieth percentile in terms of figuring out how planets should be run, and since I figure we're going to want to have our planets have more than two people each on them - more than ten or a hundred, even - it doesn't immediately seem like anyone that far down in the competence queue is going to end up working on running planets."

"I've met less than forty percent of the universe so I suppose I'll take your word for it."

She's not entirely sure whether she should point out that there are trillions of people in the universe and she's met, like, maybe a thousand, because this is a point but it doesn't seem like an incredibly productive one. 

"Anyway. I think it'd be hard to run out of things that needed to be done, so probably I would just keep looking for whatever I could do that needed to be done and... do that. I guess right now that's composing poetry."

"Do you want to see more plays to help with that?"