"Yes. They worked very hard later to explain to us how it had happened in the first place so they could earn our trust again. It was a very long time ago. His prison is very comfortable, it doesn't harm Valar to be confined."

That's - actually pretty reassuring, huh. "That's good. How long ago?"

"In your years it'd be four thousand."

"Ah. Yeah, that is a long time." 

She - really really feels like she should be asking lots of intelligent questions here, because if he didn't want to answer them he wouldn't be offering and she can't claim that she doesn't want to know things, but - she's really having a hard time thinking of which questions to ask to figure out what exactly she doesn't know. 

"I - think I might have a lot of different background cultural stuff, so I'm expecting a lot of things to be different in ways I won't expect, and I'm not sure which things make sense to ask about?"

"That makes sense... I could describe ways we're different from the other species we know of?"

"Yes! That'd be helpful. What other species do you know of?"

"Two, though orcs are just Elves who Melkor enslaved and distorted. Dwarves are genuinely an independently created people. And then there's the Valar and Maiar, I suppose, but they're hard to characterize because they are so old and strange."

"OK, so - orcs and Dwarves, how are you different from each of them?"

"Orcs grow to maturity faster than us. We take five hundred of your years, while they take about ten. Orcs like to have lots and lots of children - ten, twelve, maybe even twenty now that there are planets and enough space for them. Elves have usually preferred to have small families, though having all the worlds is encouraging us to have more, too. - Elves never have babies except as an act of deliberate will by both parents, while orcs could have them by accident until the Valar fixed that. Orcs are ugly. They don't mind their environment being cramped or ugly the way Elves do.

Dwarves are very short - this high - and all of them are bearded and there's no way to tell men from women - and they think it's silly that you might ever want to. They don't have governments, they have this complicated economic solution to everything. They are very practical and very smart. They typically feel very strongly about their economies and find other sorts of government upsetting. Some Dwarves live in our lands, but not many, and usually to trade."

She nods, processing this. "Liars are mature around twenty. We can have children by accident but in practice we have them whenever the Alteri decide we will. Twenty is a lot of children, for a Liar, but ten isn't unusual. Alteri don't have children on purpose or by accident, they just have them at certain times no matter what. Usually - I don't know for sure, I want to say about seventy children is pretty normal?"

"That sounds awful and probably the Valar will try to convince them to change it. What do they do - growing their population that rapidly -"

"If a child only has a mother and no fathers, then the child is sterile, we call those suke. Lots of Alteri are suke. Not very many of them are daele, mothers. But their population does grow, and then, well - there's a war to throw bodies at."

"The Valar can make planets fast enough for orcs so they can probably make planets fast enough for Alteri." Sigh. "But how terrible. The poor mothers."

"The mothers are in charge of everyone else. But I imagine it's probably tiring, yes."

"It sounds awful. What if they aren't ready - what if they don't have a good family for the child -"

"They, uh, sort of always have children before they're ready? Usually the first litter and sometimes the first several are all sterile and are given to the government or to their house. If they want to keep the earliest ones then their grandparents help them raise them. I - suppose it would be sort of terrible."

He shivers. "The Valar'll - they're really very good at things like that."

"That's good. If we can help them then we should." She bites her lip and looks at the ground and nods with something approaching decisiveness. "That'll be good."

"We'll help the slaves also."

"I know! I'm just. Not used to thinking about them in those terms exactly. But it'll be good to help everyone."

"Do you know what the Carthons might need?"

"Nooot off the top of my head. I have mostly heard the version where they are beings of pure evil that intend to defile all things sacred. And the competing version where they are our only hope of improved circumstances. So, y'know, they're - somewhere between those things, probably."

"Mmhmm. It'll be easier once we're talking to them, probably. How's your language written?"

"It's - not, it's a spoken language. Confederate One's a visual language, so you can write that one, but not Etra La or Yahivi."

" - you can write spoken languages - we have a spoken language - do you mean you don't have a rule for it -"