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you can't warm the stars with your hands
alteriverse!imrainai lands in sanity
Permalink Mark Unread

Houses Festri and Tellari have been trying to get the gate working for months. Their Liar work crews have finally gotten it to do something, but none of the Alteri ships have been able to use the gate for long-distance travel. They simply pass through to the other side.

The Alteri order the Liars to fiddle with various pieces of the structure, hoping that one of them will be able to determine the problem. Imrainai passes through the gate purely because it's the shortest route to the piece she's supposed to fiddle with.

She finds herself unable to see the gate, the support ship, or the sun. There’s a sun, and also a planet, but she’s pretty sure it’s not the sun or the planet that are supposed to be there. She’s also pretty sure this ends with her slowly suffocating to death between the stars - or worse, if they somehow get her back and decide it was an intentional escape attempt - but just in case, she fires up her spacesuit comm and starts broadcasting.

“H-hello? This is Tellari spacer 97816. Visual contact with previous support ship has been lost. Can anybody hear me?”

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The planet has substantial shuttle traffic! Four shuttles hear this and hurry over and then stop so they can discuss who should pick her up. None of them are super equipped for it. They've never had to rescue someone before. They check their external airlocks to see if they even work. 

One of them does! It hurries towards the person.

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Ohh boy, OK, this is fine, this is fine fine fine. She's moved through space to a different system, somehow, and now she'll be picked up by a different house and she'll never ever get to see Taz or Ves again but that's - not fine at all but she's going to cry about it later.

When the shuttle is in position, she identifies the airlock and maneuvers towards it.

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How could this even happen? There is muttering about the irresponsible experiments some other planet must be running. They send a couple of people down to greet her.

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She's standing in the airlock trying to look vaguely compliant. When she sees people she greets them in Confederate One, using hand signs.

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They don't know that language! They look vaguely surprised not to know that language. They try six or seven of their own.

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She doesn't know any of their languages. Since they seem to want to talk to her, she tries Etra La and the language of her homeworld and a few words of English, with progressively less hope that they're going to understand her.

(They should understand Confederate One. Everyone understands Confederate One. Exactly how far from home is she?)

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They seem as confused that she doesn't know any of their languages as she is that they don't know hers. 

 

After a few minutes one of them shrugs and introduces herself as Lindë and gestures for the stranger to follow her.

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She follows. She's... sort of worried about how casual they're being and about the fact that there aren't any Alteri around, since it means these Liars are given more autonomy and she doesn't know their rules, but she's certainly not going to make things difficult on purpose.

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Their ship is large and elaborate, with a garden in the center. It's full of people, most of them apparently families with children; tiny faces peek at her over the edges of their seats. 

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- OK, OK, it's a work community, they're taking her to a work community, that's OK, she can handle that until there's time to get to a closet and sort through whatever it is she's feeling. A very fancy work community. Wow. Maybe they're domestic servants or something for someone extraordinarily important. Oh no.

She waves at the children (just a little bit, not a threatening motion, mostly just one open hand), and tells herself that if she oversteps her bounds then someone will activate her implant. And then she'll know.

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Some children wave back. Now that it has been determined that she is all right, people start singing. 

They are weirdly spectacular at singing.

The person who introduced themselves as Lindë sits down and gestures at the empty seat next to her. She looks concerned and points out the window and tries to indicate that they'll be there very soon.

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Oh wow.

She - doesn't understand what's happening, but that's at least not something she reads as a hostile action? But - they should probably be taking her to the Alteri, unless maybe the Alteri are busy (is it possible that they have the whole ship to themselves?), except maybe they are and they're just - trying to calm her down first? Or they just really like singing? It's possible that they just really like singing, not everything has to be about her. They are so good at singing. She - she hopes they assign her to a different crew after processing, because whatever this one is doing is probably too important for her to survive doing it, but she hopes the singing is a cultural thing and that lots of people around here are like that, because it's pretty great. And she'll be able to appreciate it more later, when she isn't battling an anxiety attack.

She nods at Lindë and clasps her hands in her lap and focuses on her breathing.

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The poor thing is probably miserable on a ship this small. There weren't bigger ones to pick her up, though, and they'll land in an hour. Lindë nods back worriedly and sings and keeps the window transparent so it's obvious when they're approaching the planet.

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If Mathrael were here, she would tell her that the ground under her was never solid, and her safety has always depended on her ability to land on her feet when it vanishes. She isn't here, so Imrainai's just gonna have to land on her own. It's good that Mathrael isn't here, Mathrael is with Taz and Ves and everyone else she knows who needs looking after. So she doesn't have to worry about them. She just has to land.

She's sure that the planet must have people who know Confederate One, so after they land they'll probably be able to process her right away. She supposes they'll probably want to know how she got here, and she doesn't have a comprehensive explanation for that, but - she'll tell them what she knows and she'll hope that that's enough, and if it isn't, then - 

Deep breaths.

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They land in a canyon, with enormous, colorful, layered cliffs on both sides. In the distance there's a waterfall with a perpetual rainbow hovering over the foam where it crashes into the canyon. There are hawks soaring overhead. They let her get off the shuttle first since she's obviously in distress. 

The people here are singing to greet them.

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Oh, OK, her brain informs her, slightly hysterically. I get it. We're dead.

She is - probably not actually dead but if she turns out to be she won't be shocked. There are - probably some Alteri somewhere and they're just keeping people in this place for - reasons, OK, they could have reasons, she shouldn't assume that she can instantly imagine every reason that someone might have for keeping people in some kind of giant massive beautiful canyon without any Alteri and also giving them their own spaceship.

She smiles as calmly as she can and waves slightly at the people.

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Everyone else gets off the shuttle; some of them have people to greet them, and those people run up for hugs. Lindë has people to greet her; she waves them back a little and says something while gesturing at the stranger. Someone has a colorful bird perched on their shoulder. Someone else has a snake.

No one seems in any hurry to tell her what to do.

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Well that's terrible.

She stands around awkwardly for a bit and tries to think. She is - probably not dead, this would be a weird afterlife processing method too. She might have been found by some kind of weird social experiment group, she's heard of social experiments set up in places that're isolated from their Alteri observers, but if they were supposed to be a secluded experimental group then it'd be super weird for them to have a spaceship. They could be the descendants of some group that was conquered by the Carthons, but the Carthons don't leave people alone like this and they would surely have been able to pretty immediately contact someone who knew Confederate One.

It's also possible that this is another Earth. It's not actually Earth, the stars were wrong for Earth, but if it can happen that there's one planet of free Liars without any Carthons or Alteri around, then it can happen that there are two. And it'd make sense that a planet of free Liars would have at one point had access to the other planet of free Liars, even if they eventually lost contact when the gate broke down, and that now the gate is working again.

Meaning the Alteri could follow her through at any time.

Oh man.

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A shimmery-feathered bird lands on Lindë's shoulder. Lindë smiles at her and clumsily attempts to ask whether she'd like to go to the buildings or the trees or the river.

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She gets the three places being indicated, but - she doesn't want to talk to anyone or have to make any decisions or do anything particularly more taxing than hiding in a closet somewhere right now, but - but if the Alteri are going to show up then she does actually need to find a way to explain this to these people before it happens.

She motions to the buildings. Buildings sometimes contain people.

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Then they'll escort her up to the buildings! They're built into the cliff face, very cleverly, so from a distance it's hard to tell that most of this cliff face is buildings. They're beautiful. Everyone around her is still singing.

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Her brain is resolutely screaming in the background of all of her thoughts at this point. She's - not really very sure what she was intending to do once she got to the buildings, actually, so she smiles up at them. They're very very pretty.

Aaaah, why couldn't they have gotten someone competent to warn them of possibly impending doom?

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There's a complex network of pretty carved tunnels winding through the cliffs connecting the buildings. People mostly peaceably continue on their way without gawking at her, except small children, who stare and sometimes point. Shoulder animals are popular - birds and snakes and one lemur. 

 

They bring her to a room with a bed and a dresser and a viewscreen and a indoor hot spring and a balcony full of flowers and attempt to ask whether this one will do.

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She's not going to comprehend that one. Her first guess is that someone very important lives here and is out at the moment. Which is good, maybe she'll be able to explain the impending doom thing to them when they get back.

She will just. Wait here. For someone better at figuring these things out.

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Lindë has already contacted the capital and let them know that there's a strange person here with a language no one can speak. It'll take Prince Fëanáro a few hours to arrive, but he's sent a flurry of language questions ahead of him. She tentatively tries them though really this is an awful lot of questions and maybe the stranger would prefer to be left alone.

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She's not going to understand most of the questions, but she'll do her best to engage even though she has no idea what's going on.

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They want to know her word for this object and this object and for the numbers one through twelve and for a bunch more objects and for "here" and "there" and "my hand" and "your hand" and for "my pen" and "your pen" and for "room" and "bed" and "balcony".

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She has another mini anxiety attack over whether she should communicate these things in Confederate One or in Etra La, and decides on Etra La on the grounds that they're using spoken language and will probably find it easier if she does that, too.

She doesn't have a word for the balcony; she settles on "platform" and makes the motion for uncertainty (one hand, shaking from side to side a little as if you're not sure whether you want to wipe away what's been said) to indicate that it isn't quite right.

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Cool, then Lindë has the vocabulary to communicate "your bed, your room, your balcony. Lindë here? Lindë go?"

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- well that's weird, but OK, if this is where they want her.

She looks like she's sort of agonizing over whether to tell Lindë to stay or to go, but she settles on "Lindë here." 

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Okay! In that case she'll ask about a bunch more objects and get some videos on the viewscreen to try to get some verbs and then try to get words for 'person in charge' and 'person who made things' and so on.

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She will try to offer words! She will not always have a very good word and will not always be able to tell exactly what word they're trying to get at. She's not sure whether they want master or leader for "person in charge" - do they have slaves here, and even if they do, is the word more general than that? But if it's specifically that she doesn't want to get confused. She guesses "master" and makes a mental note that she wasn't actually sure.

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With more vocabulary Lindë will explain 'the master of this planet lives Entucuilëon. Lindë say 'person here, no Quenya, no Sindarin, no Tumunza, no Erdege, no Khazad, no Nandorin, no Elechad'. The master of this planet come to help. Come in an hour. Lindë here, Lindë go?"

 

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- master of a whole planet is probably not a thing, they probably did mean leader, although she's not sure that having to talk to the leader of a whole planet is actually less terrifying. That's actually probably more terrifying than having to talk to someone's master, oh frick she is so far in over her head.

But the Alteri could come, so she can't lock herself in a closet right now, because that would be irresponsible.

"Lindë.... choose?"

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"Uh -" she requests a couple more words. "97816 looks is scared. Lindë making scared 97816, Lindë go. 97816 scared other thing, Lindë stay."

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"97816 scared of other thing." Mostly.

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"Draw thing?"

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She laughs, which seems to startle her for a moment, but she nods.

She draws an insect with twelve legs standing on a planet with ships around it and a ring, and points to it and calls it "Earth". She draws another planet and calls the other planet "here". She draws an arrow from the first planet to the ring to the second planet. She draws a stick figure between the planets, in the middle of the arrow, and calls it "97816".

She circles the insect and makes a motion stretching from the first planet to the second.

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"Scared that your people will not know where find you?"

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"A little scared of that. Mostly scared that they will. Some people on Earth are nice, some... aren't."

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She looks really confused. "They find you, they not nice, you say them 'go'."

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She looks slightly horrified by this suggestion. "They won't go."

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"They bad at going?"

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"They're - uh - "

She draws another spaceship with a bug inside and attempts to draw it blowing up the planet labeled "here". This may not be very clear and is not strictly speaking what is likely to happen, but she doesn't know how to draw the Alteri conquering a planet and enslaving all of its inhabitants.

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"If they try to go, they will end the world?"

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She makes a frustrated noise that she only partly succeeds at muffling behind her hand. She can do this. She has no idea if that's true but if it isn't then they're in a lot of trouble, so she's just going to assume she can.

"Alteri want to be masters of this planet. All planets. Alteri come here and hurt people. If they can't then they might try to end the world, yes."

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"- oh, the people of this planet like the masters we have. Not want new ones. They can have a different planet. If it is nice, people go there."

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"The Alteri don't care, the Alteri want all planets."

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"....well, they can't have planets other people using. They can have lots planets."

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"The Alteri say no, all planets," she says, and then has absolutely no idea how to communicate the concept of violent conflict. "I'm scared that the Alteri will come here and try to take the planet. And kill me, I guess, but the planet is really more important." Half of those words aren't going to be comprehensible but she's tired.

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"Don't be scared," Lindë says. "Everything good."

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Imrainai looks doubtful of this claim.

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"I don't have words but - if they come then everything good. If they no come, Quendi go find them so no one scared 97816 lost. Everything good."

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She nods, although she doesn't look very convinced by this. "Many things are very bad. But - thank you."

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"Things only bad because masters, Valar not know them. Know now, work everything good."

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Yeah, she doesn't understand that at all.

She'll just wait for the master (leader, leader, she really has to correct that at some point) of this planet to come and try not to think about how important this person is and hope that they succeed at getting more words from her.

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He shows up a short while after that. He is tall and energetic and extravagantly dressed and beams at her when he sees her. "Hi! I am Fëanáro. I got the words you said while I flying, so you not need say things two. When I say things that no Liar say, can you say me the right words?"

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She nods. She looks overwhelmed but willing to help. "My Liars would say 'I got the words you said while I was flying, so you don't need to say things twice. When I say things that no Liar says, can you tell me the right words?' It's slightly awkward but correct then."

Noooot thinking about importance, not thinking about this at all.

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"How say good help, glad of the help..."

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"Thank you for helping. Is what I'd say. 'Thank you so much for helping', if you're very happy."

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"Thank you so much for helping! Thank you so much much for helping? Or thank you so so much for helping. If you're so much happy."

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She laughs. "'So so much' is better. It's understandable but informal. You wouldn't use it with important people. But I'm not important, so it's fine."

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"Important? Informal?"

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"Important... I think you're probably very important? If you have a whole planet? Formal speech is for important people, people you need to be respectful of. Informal speech is for friends, family, people you're closer to - I know you don't know a lot of those words yet, sorry - "

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He turns and frowns at the viewscreen and a picture comes up - it's of him with a red-haired woman beaming at him and two children, one nearly an adult and the other still quite young, one with red hair and one with black. "Family?"

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She nods. "Yeah."

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"Informal is talking with family? What is word for -" the viewscreen changes to him giving a lecture in a crowded auditorium - "what is word for this talking?"

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"'Informal is for talking with family'. Yes, and friends, and for when you're not being very serious. 'What is the word for this sort of talking', or 'this sort of speech'. That's probably formal, yes. And also, hmm - I can't tell where it is, but maybe academic? If you're - if it's a place where you're teaching people things?"

Doooon't think about the Alteri, do not think about them at all.

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Nodnodnod. "Teaching people things. Formal speech is different than teaching people things speech?"

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"Usually if you teach people in a big group like that you're using formal speech, but it's probably also academic speech, which is more - specific, I think? There are types of formal speech that aren't academic. Like, uh, ceremonial speech is different, and, uh - nobody handles anything political in Etra La but if we were talking about Confederate One then I'd say that political speech is usually formal but it's not usually the same as academic speech. But - if you were teaching a small child something it wouldn't be academic speech at all, it'd probably be informal. And they're not hard categories. 'So so much' is definitely informal but sometimes it isn't that obvious, sometimes a thing sound a little different to different people. Sorry if that's all - complicated," she says, before biting her lip.

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"Complicated is - many new words?"

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"Complicated is - hard to understand, yes, sorry, um - sorry." She takes a deep breath. "Academic speech is formal but not all formal speech is academic."

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Nodnodnod. "How formal say thank you so so so so much?"

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She presses a hand to her face for a second because she kind of wants to laugh and kind of wants to hide and kind of wants to - do something that will stop the Alteri from killing everyone. But only for a second. "I am extraordinarily grateful for your assistance. And then maybe, like, 'a thousand honors upon your ancestors', or something. For that many 'so's."

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"I am extraordinarily grateful for your assistance. A thousand honors upon your ancestors," he declares delightedly. "What means 'ancestors', 'thousand', 'honors'? 'assistance' is formal 'help'? 'extraordinarily' is formal 'so much'?"

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"Yes and yes. Ancestors are people who came before you, your parents' parents and everyone before them, especially if they're dead. One thousand is a number, it's ten hundreds. Honors is - like, kind of like respect? If you want to show someone that you respect them then you do something to honor them. Like, like have a feast for them or tell everyone how great they are or compose an epic poem about them, or something. So you're saying that you're so happy the person is helping you that you want to honor their ancestors a thousand times for bringing them into the world. Which is a lot of happiness."

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He looks like he's in fact experiencing that amount of happiness. "Very good. You said the Alteri want planets? Want all the planets? They worry about people on planets that they do not rule?"

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She looks - like she is experiencing a lot of feelings and is not sure what all of them are. But this is important, so -

"The Alteri - they want planets so they can have everything on the planets, and so they can tell everyone on the planets what to do. I'm, uh, I'm worried that they're going to follow me through the gate and try to enslave everyone and that if they can't they might blow up the planet. In which case I am very sorry."

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He shakes his head dismissively. "It would be sad, because - you have seen the small people?" He pats his shoulder.

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"The - the animals?"

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"Yes. If the planet was blown up, they would not be anymore."

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"Right yes OK but also everyone would be dead."

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" - no. We would all be in Valinor. Valinor is where we are when - hmmm - the only everyone dead would be the animals. But this would be sad. So we will ask the Valar to come teach the Alteri."

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She blinks uncomprehendingly. "Valinor?"

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"I think I need a lot of words I don't have and maybe words your language does not have. Valinor is where we wake up when we die. Valinor is fine. Not extraordinarily but fine. If the Alteri want to make people die that is fine. But if they destroy the planet the animals will die. Animals do not wake up in Valinor when they die."

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"Oh," she says, weakly, before her brain decides that this sounds very fake but that it's not an argument she's going to win. "Then I guess only I'll die. That's, uh, cool, I guess." It is not cool at all, she does not remotely want to die, but she's having trouble thinking of how to - say anything.

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"You think you are like an animal and do not wake up in Valinor?"

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"Liars don't wake up anywhere when we die. Neither do Alteri. I don't think anyone I know does. We just - we just die."

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"So then you should get on a ship and go to Valinor in case the Alteri come before the Valar have arrived here."

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"OK," she says. "If it's not, uh, any trouble or anything. Thank you. So much."

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"If it's not any trouble means..."

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"If - if it won't cause any problems for you or be an inconvenience or - or anything." It occurs to her that this is an extraordinarily stupid thing to say. "Um, but if it's only a little trouble then I want to go anyway. Because I like - not being dead."

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"You should go even if it cost a whole planet, because people should not be dead."

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- and she cries.

She doesn't want to because it's dumb and she's not worth a planet and crying is childish and dumb and humiliating and it's even moreso in front of someone who runs a whole planet, but she's crying silently now and she's not sure how to stop.

"Thank you," she says, after a moment, and doesn't know how to say anything else.

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"I will take you to the shuttle. They take five days to reach Valinor and they are not very big, will you be okay?"

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She nods. "I'll be OK." Not crying not crying not crying, Imrainai, you need to stop. "Sorry."

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"What is sorry?" He stands up and starts walking back to the shuttleport.

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She follows. "Sorry is - sorry is for when you make a mistake or you do something wrong or bad and you would like the other person to know that you acknowledge the wrong thing and you're going to try not to do it again, except I might do it again because I'm really not very good at not crying but I'm sorry about it anyway."

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"Crying is mistake or wrong or bad?"

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"Crying is - not always bad but I just - feel like I shouldn't be crying now. I'm not good at explaining it right now. I'm sorry."

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"You are really good at explaining! I am talking your language! That's good explaining!"

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She laughs. She's still crying a little, so she's not sure whether she's feeling better or if she's just feeling very unstable. "You're really good at learning languages!"

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"I extraordinarily like learning languages! I think I will go with you to Valinor even knowing there is one of me in Valinor because I do not want to wait to learn more your language!"

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"'I really like learning languages' sounds more natural with the rest of what you're saying, you don't know very many complicated words yet. And you'd say 'more of your language.' Don't you have to stay with the planet if you're, like, in charge of it?" She's not even going to attempt to process what 'one of me in Valinor' means.

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"I really like learning languages, I want more complicated words of your language. If I am in charge then that means I don't have to do things."

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She frowns. "I - suppose that's true." Maybe 'master' is a better translation for the concept, what does she even know about anything. "I know a lot of words in this language and I know two other languages, too, if you want to learn those. On Earth there are hundreds and hundreds of languages. I only know three, but I can teach you those three."

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"Hundreds and hundreds! Yes I want to learn all the ones you know."

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"OK! I - would like to leave the planet and then I will definitely teach you more Etra La and Confederate One and Yahivi."

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"The shuttleport is not far, it's where you arrived. We will leave the planet and go to Valinor and learn the other languages and someone will teach the Alteri how to get planets doing nice things."

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"I - I guess if they can stop people who can blow up planets then they might be all right. Can they - I don't know if you have enough words for me to ask this in a way that makes sense, but - the Alteri have lots of Liars and they're terrible to them and - and if you're strong enough to stop people who can blow up planets, then - I just. Is there anything you can. Do for them. Do you think."

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"If something is terrible then we will fix it. I don't understand what is terrible so I don't know how we will do it. What is terrible?"

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"They - Liars are slaves of the Alteri but you don't have that word and I don't know if you have that concept. Slaves are - you know when you have the construction 'my pen', because the pen belongs to you and you own it? A slave is someone who someone else owns, so they can do anything they want with them. Like a pen."

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"Oh! We had that, we had Melkor and he did that. Then the Valar stopped him. We will stop the people doing this."

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"OK," she says, with a sort of cheerful disbelief. "That's - good luck with that, then. And thank you."

She is either going to get an entire other civilization killed or most of her civilization killed or else free everyone she knows. So that's no pressure at all, is it.

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"If they want to be alive we will have places for them. I am sorry we did not know sooner."

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"They do want to be alive. Most of them. I'm sure. They - I guess it might be hard to free them without giving the Alteri the chance to kill them first, but - hopefully there's something."

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"I am sure there's something. Before we leave I will tell the Valar and they will figure out something."

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"OK. Thank you. A million honors upon your ancestors if you pull it off."

She is going to free everyone (or get everyone killed) and then she is going to hide in a closet for the rest of her entire life (or be tortured and killed herself after watching her niece and nephew be killed in front of her) and then never have to be embarrassed about anything ever again (either way).

Or this is going to end up being a dream or something, in which case wow, this is a pretty nice dream, but it's going to completely destroy her concentration tomorrow and they're gonna activate her implant when she screws up and wow she is so incredibly tired.

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They reach the shuttleport and get on a shuttle which seems to be being rushed together just for them. People bow to the leader of the planet; he ignores them. "I do not know what my ancestors would do with a million honors," he says, "I only have eight ancestors. Do most of your people have more ancestors?"

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Oh wow people are bowing, that's not terrifying at all, keep it together Imrainai.

She doesn't, actually, quite keep it together; she digs her nails into her palms and focuses on her breathing and thinks about languages and reminds herself that if she were supposed to bow then someone would probably tell her and they're not going to activate her implant they're not they're not they're not.

" - I didn't - sorry, what?" She replays the sentence in her head as best she can. "Uh, I don't - that makes me worry that I explained the concept wrong. I'd have to do math to make a proper estimate, but I think - almost everyone must have thousands and thousands of ancestors?"

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" - how? That's so many."

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"We've - OK, so, Liars were created by the Alteri seventy thousand years ago, and all of my ancestors probably started having kids at twenty or a little before, but supposing all of my ancestors happened to be the youngest children in their families, then generations might be more like forty years on average, and - I can't do that math in my head but it's a lot."

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"Oh! We were created less thousands of years ago. My father's father and father's mother were created, and my - mother's mother's parents and my mother's father's parents were created. So eight ancestors."

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"Oh. OK. I guess if you haven't been around very long then that would make sense."

Her breathing is juuuust about back to approximately as normal as it was before.

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"Are you all right?"

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"- not really but I'm about as fine as can be expected under the circumstances and it's nothing to worry about?"

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"It's nothing to worry about is... worse if I worry or just the same if I worry or better if I worry but not as much as I expect or something else?"

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"It's, um, unnecessary to worry? I can't, like, tell you what to do - I don't want people to have to worry about me but I guess if they're going to anyway they can do that, just - " 

Aaaaaaaaaaaa she doesn't want to explain this it's dumb. But she looks at the ground and digs her nails into her palms and does.

" - I'm really nervous about everything because everything here is weird and I don't want to mess up and cause the Alteri to kill anyone. And sometimes I see things that remind me of something bad and it takes me a second to be OK, and then I wait a second and I'm back to regular nervous. Sorry."

And also because nobody remotely important ever talks to her about anything ever unless something really bad is happening but she's not thinking about that.

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"Oh! There are people who Melkor hurt who he didn't hurt the way that means they wanted to be dead forever. Just other ways, to make orcs. And they get very scared, sometimes. And the best thing is for the world not to have things that seem bad, so they aren't scared. So they live places that are like that. I am - not very good for places like that but we have them and you can live in one."

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"OK," she says weakly. "I mean I'm gonna be fine but - maybe."

Is she even allowed to have opinions on this it's actually not entirely clear to her.

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He does not seem offended by her answer and can't think of a linguistic clarification immediately either. Their shuttle takes off. "The shuttle will take us to a bigger ship. The bigger ship goes planets."

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"Goes to planets," she says, idly.

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"Thank you! Goes to planets. Goes between stars, and stars are far."

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She seems somewhat cheered by thanks. "Stars are far away, usually. I don't think 'far' by itself is wrong but it does sound unusual."

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"Stars are far away so it was hard to make a ship that goes between stars."

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She nods. "It sounds hard. How long does it take to get to Valinor?"

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"Five days."

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"...wow." She can't remember now whether he already said that but if he did she probably immediately forgot it because that's a really short time for interstellar travel and it sounds pretty ridiculous. "It took ten years for me to go from Yahi to Earth. So that's. Better."

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"What years?"

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"Earth years. Um, a year is how long it takes a planet to revolve around its star, so they're different lengths for different planets. I'm twenty-five Earth years old. So ten years was a long time."

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"Can I ask more questions so I can figure out how many Earth years in ours -"

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She nods.

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"Do you know how much of an Earth year it has been since you arrived?"

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"Since I came to this planet? It's only been a few hours, so - that's like a fifth of an Earth day, maybe, and there are three hundred and sixty-five Earth days in an Earth year. So, uh - "

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He nods. "The journey between Valinor and Endorë which my parents made was twenty or thirty Earth years. It was hard. But ships now are faster."

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"Wow. We make journeys that far, but yeah, it's hard."

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"The ship we will transfer to is small, too small for ten years."

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"Ours wasn't that large a ship, probably not larger than the one that picked me up. But, uh, I don't have infinite years so not spending ten more of them in space is good."

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"Infinite?"

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"Unlimited? Something that doesn't have a number because it's bigger than all the numbers? Liars live for maybe seventy Earth years. I think maybe eighty or ninety if nobody kills them."

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" - that's awful."

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" - it's not great," she says, after spending a few seconds trying to think of how to respond to that. She is not entirely sure whether he's referring to the concept of death or the thing where they get killed off early because that's more efficient, but you know what, both of those kind of suck compared to the alternatives.

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"The Valar will fix it.'

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"They'll... fix death?"

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"Yes! Well, they can't make you wake up in Valinor. But they can probably fix - the thing you're describing."

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"...wow. OK. Well. That would be nice?" 

There is no way these people can fix death, she needs to get to a closet so she can cry and think and figure out what is going on. But it's - a good thought.

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"I wanted to live far from the Valar because I don't like anyone telling me what to do but they are very good at fixing things."

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There's so much encoded in that statement. She doesn't know whether to be afraid of the Valar (the Carthons were trying to fix things too), doesn't know whether even if she should be they're still less scary than the Alteri (the Carthons probably are), doesn't know what rules they'll be living under in Valinor (they can't be so terrible if he's willing to go back with her?), doesn't know how you become the sort of person who can have their own planet when the social web is as small as having only eight ancestors implies (her brain helpfully supplies 'he started his own house!').

"I see," she says, because she cannot for the life of her figure out which of those things she wants to try to figure out.

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The shuttle connects with a much larger ship, the largest ship she's ever seen. It contains a pond and a grove of trees and a concert hall and lots and lots of rooms. Someone shows her to hers. Fëanáro does not seem to have noticed she is overwhelmed but the person showing her to her room does. "I expect the King has more questions for you so I'll fetch him tomorrow after breakfast if you like," she says, and then backs out and closes the door and leaves Imrainai alone in a room twice the size of the cliffside one.

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"Thank you!" she says brightly.

She looks at her rooms. They're big and empty and foreign and - yep, that's a closet, that is way more what she needs right now. It's honestly kind of big for a closet, but it'll do. She considers taking some blankets off the bed, but then she'd have to make the bed again and she doesn't know if she can do that right, so she just shuts herself in the closet without anything else and strips off her spacesuit and sits in the dark and cries. She's not even completely sure why she's crying, just - just everything is really really high stakes and really important people keep wanting to speak to her and keep offering her blatantly impossible things and she has no idea if she's ever going to get to see her family again and - maybe one of those things is a good enough reason to cry. Maybe.

When she's ready to stop crying she bites her hand and curls up in a ball and goes to sleep in her closet.

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This causes the person who comes in to bring her breakfast mild concern, but they leave breakfast and depart without disturbing her.

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Aww, if they're going to come in and check on her without knocking then she will have to stop crying in closets and be a responsible grownup all the time. This is kind of terrible, but it's probably a reasonable sacrifice for the sake of negotiating on behalf of all the Liars in the universe.

She eats her food and washes her face off so that probably nobody can tell that she's been crying or sleeping on the floor.

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They come back a while later to clear up breakfast. "Did you sleep well? Do you need anything?"

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"Yeah, fine! Uh, I've eaten so I think that's all I need. Thank you. It was lovely."

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"Of course. Do you know how you'd like to spend your day?"

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"I - think I was supposed to answer more language questions, which is fine with me because then I'll be able to say more things?"

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"I think the King is very excited to speak with you, but if you wanted to sing or rest or anything he'd wait. I know because I asked him how to say that."

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"Oh - uh, it's really fine?" Aaaaaaa Imrainai you need to be a higher-level grownup who doesn't cry in closets.

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"Okay. I will be outside, you can get me when you're ready and I'll take you to him."

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"All right," she says, because she's ready now but it doesn't seem like it'll help her to insist on that.

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Whenever she comes outside the servant will be waiting.

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She waits a few minutes to wash her face again and re-braid her hair properly, then comes outside and follows the servant (aaaaaaaaaaaa) to wherever they're going.

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He has a whole floor of this ship, apparently, and is spinning on a spinny chair in the middle of it. "Hello 97816! How are you doing?"

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- well that's sort of terrifyingly spacious but, y'know, if everyone here is fine with that.

"I'm good! Uh, 'I'm doing well' is technically a better construction than 'I'm good', but a lot of people say the latter anyway."

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"You think of such useful things to add about the words you teach me. Thank you. I have a big list today - okay?"

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Awww, she actually feels really good about that. "OK!"

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So he goes down a big list of vocabulary and is much more fluent by the time he's through with it. "Do the Alteri have creators?"

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"OK, so - technically no, they don't, but there is another species that found them on their planet and gave them space flight and and other advanced technology, a really long time ago."

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"How did they come about without creators?"

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" - I am really really not a biologist, I'm sorry, I don't know where life comes from when someone else doesn't make it. But it's happened at least a couple times."

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"Huh. Who are the people who gave the Alteri starships?"

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"The Carthons. I've never seen one in real life but they're supposed to be these sort of cone-shaped shells, and the tops open up and they have tentacles and stuff. They're aquatic. They've been at war with the Alteri for - I don't know how many years. Longer than the Liars have existed."

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"That's terrible. Over what?"

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"Well, the Carthons colonized the Alteri and then the Alteri didn't like their rules, so they rebelled and tried to destroy all of the Carthons. But the war is pretty intractable because the star systems are so far apart and it takes so long to send ships anywhere."

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He bites his lip. "I don't know how we'll fix that but we will. Endless war sounds horrible for everyone."

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"It's not great," she agrees.

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"Do you have questions about my people?"

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"Oh! Yeah, but I don't know if I know enough to know what questions to ask? And I just - don't want to be a problem. Or anything."

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"Why not?"

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" - because causing problems for people is rude?" she says, looking faintly puzzled. It's also dangerous, under some circumstances, but she is not going to say that.

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"Asking questions can't be rude! One can always not answer them."

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" - wow, OK, that is not how things are where I come from, but if you're sure that's, uh, convenient, thank you."

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"Of course."

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"So. OK. What are the Valar, exactly?"

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"They are the people who created us. They have extraordinary abilities - many of them just exceptional proficiency with things we can do ourselves, but some of it things we can't. They can read minds, they can be many places at the same time, they can communicate instantaneously anywhere in the universe - which is important, because we can't communicate any faster than our ships can travel - and they do not need to have a physical form at all, and can choose any one they like."

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- oh wow OK that sounds terrifying.

"Wow. And they're the ones in charge in Valinor?"

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"Yes. Elves were made on Endorë, but after Melkor was destroyed they invited us to come to Valinor. Some accepted, and their descendants live on Valinor today - unless they've left to found their own colony planet."

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"I see. And - you said something about Melkor before, who was that?"

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"Melkor was a Vala, but the others are good and he was very terrible. He attacked Elves and took slaves and hurt people a lot just for fun. The Valar stopped him."

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"Ah. OK. That's - good that they stopped him."

So Valar can be evil and technically any one of them can always jump ship and the others may or may not be able to stop them next time. That's, you know, not reassuring but not appreciably worse than her previous situation.

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"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."

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

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

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"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?"

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

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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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?"

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

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"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."

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"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."

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

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

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"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."

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

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"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."

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"We'll help the slaves also."

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

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"Do you know what the Carthons might need?"

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"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."

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

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"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."

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

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" - I don't have a way to write it." She seems kind of vaguely embarrassed about this. 

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"Well, we'll adapt the Elven one."

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"OK. Can you, uh, show me how the Elven system works? And I can show you how to write Confederate One?"

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Bounce bounce bounce bounce - "That sounds great!"

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Awwww. "OK!" She - kind of really wants to eat something but that sounds kind of annoying and surely he's going to eat food at some point?

She can show him how Confederate One looks on paper and show him how it looks with hand signs and describe how it looks with lights, when the Alteri communicate with it.

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He is so delighted about this. He gets to work rigging something up that will display the lights on a screen in response to his thoughts. And he shows her the Quenya alphabet, with a symbol for each sound.

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Oooh. She works on memorizing them for a bit and then doesn't know how to write them down so she'll remember them and can study them later. After a bit she settles on writing various Etra La words in the Quenya alphabet, one associated with each letter, with Confederate One translations next to them so she doesn't get confused or forget which words are which.

She writes her name, and writes the Confederate One for 97816 next to it. That isn't really the same thing at all, but it'll remind her what that one is.

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He may not need to eat; it's mysterious. Anyway he asks questions until he can do the writing and the hand signals.

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Well that's terrible, but she's just going to tough it out and hope her memory doesn't suffer very much from the lack of food. (It will. Oh well. She has notes.)

She is happy to answer any and all questions about Confederate One. It's structurally similar to Etra La, in terms of how the words fit together grammatically, but the languages have been diverging for at least a thousand years and at this point they're also fairly distinct.

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Oh awesome! In that case he wants to do all the things with Confederate One that they did with Etra La - starting with a small vocabulary list, guessing sentences and eliciting corrections... in addition to not eating it may be that he doesn't sleep.

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Oh no.

She can go about eighteen more hours without food or sleep or water (or bathroom breaks, she hasn't had any water since this morning so that happens not to be pressing either), and then her comprehension is going to start to falter. She's not going to bring any of this up before then. Talking to him in her own languages isn't a particularly mentally taxing activity, but she can't actually do it indefinitely.

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He has Confederate One down in less than eighteen hours and then does think to ask if she wants to grab food or anything.

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Oh good.

"Yeah! That'd be great."

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"What do you like?"

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"I - like food?"

Aaaaaa.

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"Yes, but what kinds of food?"

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"Uhhh. I - will tell you when I've had some different kinds of food?"

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He laughs. "Makes sense!" 

 

Someone brings them a spread of lots of kinds of food.

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Oh wow that's a lot of kinds of food and she is so hungry. Not dangerously hungry, she knows what that feels like, but pretty uncomfortably hungry.

She focuses kind of a lot on eating at a speed that suggests that the food is tasty but that she is not a starving animal. She offers opinions on various foods, which mostly range from 'this is perfectly fine, I could live on this' to 'this is the best thing I have ever tasted, ancestors, if I ever have to go back to nutrient blocks I'm going to cry'.

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He delightedly gets food-specific vocabulary and promises that her favorites will be conveyed to the chefs.

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If she were less hungry she would think that was kind of weird but she is so hungry and it's so good. And she offers all of the food-specific vocabulary, though her food-specific vocabulary is a little limited by the fact that a lot of her food for the past ten or twelve years has been nutrient blocks and the occasional vegetable.

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That's appalling. The poor people. The Elves will prepare feasts for them for after the Alteri have been reasoned with.

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She finds this incredibly gratifying. She's also getting pretty tired, but if Fëanáro isn't going to bed then that must mean they have more to cover. She has ever worked two fourteen-hour shifts without sleeping in between, and it was miserable and she hated it and she was screaming internally by the end but it didn't kill her so hey that's something.

"We can start on Yahivi or we can do location names and geography and star charts and stuff."

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"Let's do Yahivi!!"

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Oh boy.

"OK!"

They can do Yahivi the same way they did the other languages. Yahivi is structurally and phonetically very different from Etra La, and has a different history underlying it.

She has maybe a few more hours in her before the comprehension problems and limited attention span start getting obvious enough that she can't reasonably cover for them.

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He does not, in those hours, propose they take a break to sleep.

He thinks Yahivi is so cool.

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She thinks Yahivi is so cool, too! Yahivi is her first language and it's not as widely spoken as the others, but she really likes translating oral poetry between Yahivi and Etra La. It's challenging to get the connotations and the flow right between languages, even more challenging than re-composing poetry is in the first place. She's probably not any good at it compared to anyone else, but she does think that it's, like, fun.

It occurs to her that she really should admit to being a wuss at some point, but she's having a really really hard time working up the nerve to do that.

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"I'd love to read some of your poetry translations - you could explain the artistic choices you're making -"

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"- oh wow I can write them down now," she says, like this has never previously occurred to her. "I'll need some time to actually, uh, do that, but once I've done that then yeah, definitely!"

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Bounce bounce bounce!

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Awww man does she have to write them down now.

OK. Well. She has most of the Song of Kalo legitimately memorized, so writing down the traditional Etra La version should be a mindless enough activity that she can do it fairly correctly even on no sleep and with a foreign alphabet. She sounds the words out as she goes and hands her pages off to Fëanáro as she finishes them. A story takes shape, over the course of six hundred lines of complicated poetic form that she's still figuring out how to organize on the page. It concerns a woman named Kalo, a Liar pilot who fought in a war between two Alteri houses. She betrayed her master when she learned that the father of her children had been sold to the other house and was being made to fight against her. The two of them were ultimately captured and executed, but their children survived and went on to have other adventures.

By the time she gets to line two hundred, her brain has pretty much given up on sleep. She's going to get another eighteen hours and then probably she'll just, like, keel over unconscious unless someone makes a point of threatening her with death or something.

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"What a beautiful story, you've got to publish it, everyone will want to hear it - why'd you use this word instead of the other one you taught me-"

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She laughs at this suggestion and hopes that it's only very slightly more hysterical than usual. (Liars do not get published. She's a better storyteller than most people but she doesn't think she's, like, very good.) She can totally explain her word choices and give background on the poetic form.

Her brain is screaming now that it'll give her the end of the poem and then it is QUITTING, OK, it is going on strike, it is going to sit down and it is not going to give her any more mentally costly things no matter how much she screams or cries or begs for them, not until she sleeps, not unless Fëanáro threatens her life or something, which he's not going to do because they're on a spaceship away from his planet specifically so that he can prevent her from being killed.

She gets to line six hundred and twenty six and that is the end of the traditional Etra La form of this poem.

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"Are you willing to do a stage performance? Only I think people should see it live - once they've learned the language - it's exquisite -"

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Part of her brain is cackling madly every time he compliments her writing and part of her brain is yelling stop stop stop, no more things, you were at the end of a fourteen-hour shift when you arrived here and you've slept ONCE in that time, he's not going to think it's unreasonable -

"Huh, maybe! There are - not stage versions, really, I've never been on a stage before, but - there are versions where different people play the different characters. I don't have one memorized but I could probably write one if I knew more about the form. The traditional form for these is oral recitation by one storyteller, or sometimes one storyteller and a chorus, and I can totally do that if you think anyone would want to hear it."

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"I think they definitely would."

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Eeee! (Aaaa.)

"OK! Did you want me to translate it now so you could compare?"

(Noooooo.)

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"Yes, definitely!"

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She gets out another sheet of paper, over her brain's protests. She chews her lip and attempts to force out a stanza. It's a bad stanza, she hates it, it's ugly and imprecise and if she's going to do this she needs to do it better than that.

Her brain is screaming that it can't do better, it can't it can't it can't.

So she bites her hand, without really thinking about it, because sometimes that gives her a few more minutes of sort of acceptable work. It doesn't seem like it's doing anything right away, and so she bites down harder and she pulls her hand out of her mouth and now her hand is bleeding.

She stares mutely at her injured hand, as though faintly puzzled by this entire string of decisions.

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" - are you all right?"

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"So!" she says, still staring at her hand, doing her best to sort of ignore the fact that her heart rate is elevated and her breathing is shallower and her hand is bleeding and she's way less sleepy now but no less fragile and yes that would be the adrenaline.

"So this is a bit of a tangent, but on the subject of differences between species, the different species I've met all have different amounts of sleep that they need. Like, Alteri don't really pass into a state of altered consciousness, they just sort of rest for a few hours most days and then they're fine, and then they also hibernate for several years between the different stages of their lives. If they put off hibernation for too long then their total lifespans will be shorter. And Sluggards and Carthons don't really sleep at all - Sluggards really don't, I've just heard that about Carthons, I don't know if it's true. And, uh, Liars have to sleep for between five and nine hours out of every twenty four, roughly. The Alteri want us to stay awake and working for as long as possible, but conventional wisdom is that you can't push people beyond fourteen hours of work at a time or have them working on fewer than five hours of sleep, or else you get short-term impairment and lower efficiency, and if you do it for a long time then you cause long-term health problems, and - this is all to say that I'm really bad at asking important people for things because I'm not allowed to decide when I eat or sleep or do anything else really, normally, but I think maybe I have been doing this for more than fourteen hours and think that was maybe not intentional on your part and I may have at some point made a mistake and I am sorry for bleeding on your table."

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" - so you should sleep?"

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She nods.

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"Okay! When you're ready to do more poetry you can come find me up here."

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"OK!" she says, sort of excessively brightly. No obvious disappointment or indication that she's given terrible offense and needs to hide in a closet for the rest of her natural life, that's cool, she can handle limited decision-making under these conditions, probably. She gathers up her notes and goes back to her room, where she wraps her injured hand in a towel and collapses on her excessively comfy bed for the next ten hours or so.

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At some point someone brings food again. 

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Food is such a good thing! She is still kind of creeped out by having people who appear to be domestic servants hanging around giving her really tasty food, but she's trying her best to ignore that.

She thanks them for the food and asks them what else they do around here.

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"I spend most of my time playing games, honestly. Makes the trip go faster."

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"That makes sense!" And it does. As long as they seem... happy. That's all right.

She finishes her food and reviews her new alphabet a couple times and attempts to rinse the blood out of her towel (it does not work), then goes to find Fëanáro.

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As promised he's sitting where she left him. He greets her in Yahivi. "Did you sleep well?"

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Then she will respond in Yahivi (which is delightful, because she doesn't get to do that very often anymore). "I did! Sorry about yesterday. I should be fine now."

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"Sorry for -"

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"Sorry for, uh, attempting to do things I couldn't do and then attempting to self-cannibalize and then bleeding on your table?"

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"How would anyone invent anything new if people never tried to do things they couldn't do? You shouldn't be sorry for that. I guess maybe you owe your hand an apology if you think of it as the sort of thing one apologizes to."

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"People traditionally don't apologize to their body parts and if you do it in front of people then they will think that's kind of weird. But it has taken one for the team recently. So - sorry, hand," she says, giving it a pat. "I am ready to try translating things again without the self-cannibalism."

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"Oh good." Bounce bounce.

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The bouncing really does help offset the thing where people who have their own planets are sort of inherently terrifying. 

Yahivi has a different enough rhythm that Imrainai doesn't generally think that most of the poetic forms she uses in Etra La are very good choices across languages. She knows different forms that work with Yahivi, though, so the translation has its own rhythm and its own structure and its own life. She errs on the side of making things sound natural when that goal conflicts with an exact translation. It's the same story, but different things are emphasized. She can't think while writing, not yet, so the composition process is going to involve a lot of reciting things aloud.

This project takes longer than writing the poem in the first place, since she hasn't told this version enough times to have her favorite constructions memorized. She's not going to finish it today, but she makes some good progress.

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He is delighted and fascinated and wants language clarifications throughout. 

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She is happy to clarify!

She will, in fact, be perfectly happy to compose and translate and analyze poetry for approximately as long as Fëanáro seems interested, provided she has the chance to sleep and eat and occasionally covertly cry in her closet and reflect on the absurdity of her circumstances. She's not going to run out of stories any time soon. She knows a lot of stories and they contain a lot of words.

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Then the trip goes quickly. 

Valinor has two suns. It's green and blue and pretty even from a distance. Another shuttle takes them down. 

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(Aaaaa.)

She will just. Sort of vaguely stick to Fëanáro and focus on the pretty and try not to think too hard about what's going to happen to her.

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A pregnant Elf is waiting there when they land.

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"Oh," he says, "I wondered if they'd fetch you! Hi! She knows three languages! One of them works by lights flashing, I built a blessing for it, you should install it - 97816 this is my friend Mirelótë - and that over there is my son Morifinwë and that over there is my son Nelyafinwë -" 

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She waves shyly at all of the people and focuses on remembering their names and tries to look less overwhelmed than she is. She mostly succeeds.

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"Hello, 97816!" Mirelótë pronounces the foreign numbers fluidly enough despite having no idea that they are in fact numbers. "It's a pleasure to meet you!"

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"It's a pleasure to meet you, too, Mirelótë! I'm - sorry if I'm not saying that quite right."

Do not think about how important Mirelótë probably is, do not think about anything, just - keep making vaguely sensible words, it's gonna be fine.

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"Mirelótë!" he says helpfully with the vowels just the slightest touch different. "Having an accent is also not something Elves usually apologize for."

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"Father! Thank you for coming so quickly."

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"The ship actually went the same -"

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"I told him you would say that. I offered to bet him but -"

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"But why would anyone bet you. Ever."

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"I read a foreign guide to Noldorin politics that recommended losing a bet to you in order to get you to like the bettor," he tells Morifinwë.

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"- that's so upsetting!"

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And by then they're within range of human hearing. "Hello, 97816! Welcome to Valinor. Was your travel comfortable?"

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"Yes! Very, thank you." Except for the thing with crying in the closet and staying awake for like an entire day and trying to eat her own hand, but she's not gonna mention any of that if nobody else does.

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"What do you generally like to do after being cooped up in a ship for five days, I assume it's nothing so oddly serendipitous as 'entertain curious locals' curiosity' -"

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Oh no does she have to have preferences. "Oh, uh, I didn't mind it at all, really. It was impressive that it only took five days."

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"In only five days I assume Fëanáro did not get around to bragging about that, what with three languages to inhale."

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"You have to hear her poetry, Eru's going to give her the Moon."

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"I'll look forward to it."

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"You could see the city," he says to the alien, "on your own or with a guide, or you could rest. If you'd like to start discussing the situation with the Alteri that you mentioned to my father, we're ready to do that, too."

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Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa. How is she supposed to avoid disappointing people when they go around saying things like that?

"I - think I should probably talk about the Alteri, if you think that would be helpful?"

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They glance at each other.

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"Should because otherwise it will weigh on you, should because you think it is time-sensitive on a scale of hours or days, should because you think that is what will most interest us -"

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" - should because everyone I know is enslaved by an alien race that can kill them at will and that's - not great?" she says, uncertainly. 

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"It is not great. We definitely need to know more and address the problem. But it seems like it might take more than a week to decide how to solve it, so it won't make any sense to neglect short term needs if you have them."

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"I'm good."

She sounds only maybe good, but she can't actually think of anything she needs right now. Other than maybe another closet to curl up in, and that seems like maybe the sort of thing that she probably shouldn't ask for.

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"All right. Let's go indoors and discuss the Alteri. Lots of other people are interested and might listen in, if that's all right."

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Annnd there's the politely even internal screaming that likes to form a backdrop for everything else. 

"Yeah! Of course."

She just has to make it through this and then she can hide in a closet for as long as she wants.

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Their palace is extravagant and enormous and astoundingly beautiful. Maitimo takes in her reaction to this and picks a small sitting room with hardly any decorations at all; it's still ridiculous.

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Is she agoraphobic or what? Mirelótë asks him.

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I think it's - ornateness? Effort? Expense? I'm really not sure though.

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Mirelótë sits and motions for 97816 to do so also. "We don't already know whatever you've told Fëanáro during your flight, but he can catch us up in parallel while you tell us whatever else we need to know."

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She does not seem much more than marginally calmer in the smaller room, if she's calmer at all. She sits down carefully in her chair, like she wants to be able to stand up again at a moment's notice but doesn't want that to be super obvious. She clasps her hands in her lap and wills them to be still. They want information, she has information, she can do this, don't think about how important anything is, just think about the information.

"OK. Uh. I don't - know exactly what you're planning to do or what you need to know to do it, but, uh - when I arrived here I was worried that the Alteri would follow me and attempt to conquer or destroy the planet we were on. But - " her brain momentarily stalls out trying to figure out how she's supposed to refer to Fëanáro. She recoils from the thought of using his name in this context, but Yahivi doesn't have a word for a non-dael ruler of a planet. She sort of panics and goes a combination of words that breaks the grammar but is hopefully understandably gesturing at the concept 'male person with a planet'. " - but his majesty the king seemed to think you were meaningfully invulnerable to attacks from them. If you have any sort of instantaneous communication with the planet then I assume it's fine and that something is preventing the Alteri from following me, but - if you have the capacity to defend against them then I thought maybe someone here could do something about our situation."

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(He translates her construction with a funny expression on his face.)

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"This planet has the Valar, who, especially having been warned, can fend off attacks."

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"That's good! So you should be fine then. I - uh, I don't know whether their abilities are primarily defensive or if there's anything else you can - do, maybe. The situation within the Confederacy is - not great."

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"I said we'd fix it."

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"At absolute minimum a lot of our planets can take people who'd rather live here."

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"That'd be really helpful! Except the Liars aren't allowed to go and will be killed for trying. So."

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"I assume they don't like that and would rather live on our planets, so we can take those too, even if we must make some presumptions instead of waiting to be asked."

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"- I don't know how that can be done without giving the Alteri the chance to kill them and without causing immediate societal collapse on most of the Alteri worlds, but, uh, getting them away from the Alteri would be. Good. Probably."

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"Alteri society will collapse when all of the Liars leave? Collapse of what exactly -"

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"Of not having any food, most immediately. They'll run into bottlenecks on manufacturing and childcare and sanitation and shipping and service work and stuff, but before that they're going to starve."

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"Well, we can give them food, once we know what they eat."

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"That's good. It won't prevent them from flying into a panic and attacking people but it's - good."

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"Who will they attack if all of the Liars are gone?"

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"You? Or if you're not available for attacking I guess they just - institute martial law or something and draft hastily trained suke for essential operations, in the best case - assuming you took the Thieves and Sluggards so that no work can be offloaded to the Thieves either - and then on slightly more unstable planets you get coups and countercoups and general low-level warfare as people figure out what they're going to do. Assuming the timescales involved are short enough that it doesn't mean the Carthons just take advantage of their weakened state and attempt to reconquer dozens of planets, in which case they might take some but a lot of them are going to blow themselves up to prevent the Carthons from gaining extra resources or access to the stellar network."

She sounds a little calmer now, like she's considering this as a purely academic question and not as anything that has any particular relevance to her.

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"Can you summarize Thieves and Sluggards?"

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"Thieves and Sluggards are the other slave races. Thieves typically live underground and are mostly used for mining and construction work, though I'd guess they could do lots of other things if they had to. Sluggards are crystalline and sedentary, so they're not good for very much and accordingly there aren't very many of them, but some of them are engineers. Or else they're kept for singing. They're good at that."

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"- about how many of all these slave races in total are there?"

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She bites her lip. " - not a numbers person. There are - like a hundred planets in the network, maybe, maybe twice that outside the network but those'll have lower populations, you'd have more Thieves on the planets with lots of mining and more Liars on the planets with lots of food production and lots of orbital shipyards..." She is so so so so not a numbers person. "Uh, very rough guess there've gotta be at least a couple trillion Alteri and hundreds of billions to a couple trillion Liars, maybe a couple hundred billion Thieves, and some much smaller number of billions of Sluggards? I think. Around there."

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" - that's -"

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"Well, that's too many to straightforwardly replace their labor.

How quickly can they talk to each other planet to planet?"

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At least they don't think she's bothering them for no reason.

"As fast as they can move between them, depends on distance and whether the planets are in the network. Outside the network they're limited by the speed of light. Inside - there's some straightforward function but I don't know it. A couple weeks between directly connected stars, roughly, and months or years if you have to hop between a lot of stars. Sometimes they capture Carthon ships and decrypt their communications and learn things faster that way, since Carthon communications are instantaneous."

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"Okay. So we can move faster than they can, that's something, I don't think the Valar can cover every one of those planets and people at once unless they get a new gift basket but we could outrun expected communications along the network as long as we had a quick enough per-planet handling system. If the Valar do not get a good enough gift basket for this we're probably going to need help from orcs and Dwarves just on a sheer personnel basis, I don't want trillions of freed slaves being shuffled along some totally impersonal process..."

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"I could have a trillion copies. I wouldn't want them afterwards but there'll be a merging procedure someday and I can live with storing the data and waiting on it, I bet some people'll feel the same way -"

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"I bet orcs will be delighted that we wish there were more of them."

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"Are there any of them who've been wishing there were lots more of them?"

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"No idea. Mirelótë what are our prospects of a gift basket -"

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"If it helps, she writes the most tragic poetry I've ever heard."

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"Well, that won't hurt. I'd guess low odds of starting with a gift basket, we probably need to plan on not having one and hope that we get one to make things easier a ways in. Won't know till we ask, it's worth asking."

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"Now or once we're a ways in? For more dramatic effect?"

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"Find out everything we need to know to formulate a no-gift-basket plan, then ask the Valar to ask, then if that doesn't work we start without and wait for something personally relevant to our guest to crop up and then send her to the moon with poems all by herself."

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"I'm not that good," she chokes, because she has no idea how a plan can be dependent on the quality of her poetry but she's pretty sure any plan that does is a very questionable plan. "I'm like. OK."

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"The quality of the poetry is a factor but we can't improve the whole endeavor by replacing it with better poetry - Fëanáro, how much have you explained -"

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"Honestly I spent the whole time learning vocabulary. I explained about the Valar but I didn't explain Eru at all."

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"Do you want me to explain Eru now or do you have more than enough to think about already?" Mirelótë asks 97816.

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" - you can explain Eru if it isn't - uh, if you don't have other things you need to do?"

 

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"It's sort of my job, actually. Uh, so there's the Valar, who are very powerful and can do lots of things, and then there's Eru, who is much more powerful, to the point that it barely makes sense to speak in terms of 'more' - he created our whole universe, including the Valar with all their power. He is not the sort of person who should be creating universes. He likes sad stories, and he saw the universe as a place to play out a sad story. We eventually figured this out, and told him that was not okay, and suggested that he consume stories in a less destructive fashion, such as sad poetry, and he agreed, and sometimes he gives the Valar pieces of his power so they grow while he shrinks. That's the 'gift basket' I was talking about. And he still thinks in the same terms that led him to invent a universe set up to be a sad story, and I think he will be very moved if you arrive alone on his moon terrified and holding a present that you are not at all sure is going to help in order to try to save your friends who are in short-term-urgent terrible straits, you see?"

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" - OK," she says. She thinks about asking whether he is likely to kill her if her poetry isn't very good, but she thinks maybe she's not worth very much compared to trillions of people, so it doesn't really matter very much anyway. "Yeah, I can do that."

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"I wouldn't normally suggest anyone talk to Eru, let alone if it was likely to scare them, but it probably wouldn't work as well if you had someone along to reassure you and it almost certainly wouldn't work as well if someone else went instead - you're here first and that's your predominant qualification, you'd be being very brave, you write poetry..."

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"Oh I can definitely do it. Uh, if you think he's not likely to hurt anyone else because I tried. That would be bad. But if it's likely to help and the worst thing is just that if he doesn't like it then he kills me or traps me in a pocket hell or something then yeah, I can totally do that."

She seems weirdly certain of this for someone who was cowering in front of perfectly nice people, like, two minutes ago. 

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"I'm reasoning from narrative and past behavior, and I'd understand if you didn't find that very compelling, but it's neither the sort of thing he's done before nor the sort of thing he seems likely to find amusing, to directly harm anyone because he was asked for help. I don't think he'll harm you, either - or, uh, do the pocket hell thing. I'm not saying it's out of repertoire but he did it by setting up Melkor to be the sort of person who'd do that, not by personal intervention, and Melkor's in prison now. I apologize if it seemed like I was suggesting something that might result in that."

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- wow these people are weird about questions, if even their deities can't be offended by them.

"Oh," she says, deflating a little as she realizes she doesn't need to summon literally all the courage she has right this second. She's trembling a little now, though she still has her hands clasped in her lap and that makes it a little less obvious. "Well - I can do that, then. Try, I mean. If you think it'll help."

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"I think whether you do it or not we'll be able to come up with a plan to free captives on Alteri planets before word reaches other ones and resettle them safely. I do think it'll help."

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"OK," she says quietly. "I can do it. Try. Do you - have more questions about the situation? I know it's - it's a lot."

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"How are Alteri planets organized? Who is in charge? Do they have diplomatic contact with any independent peoples?"

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" - none except the Carthons and I'm not sure that counts as diplomatic contact. Earth - uh, the planet I was orbiting immediately before I arrived in space above one of yours - was independent for a while but it isn't anymore. Nobody's in charge of the entire Confederacy, they have a central government but they don't have a singular head. Houses, the big family dynasties, have heads. Planets may or may not have a singular ruler, depends on the specific system, they have different kinds of governments on that scale. Heads of houses and heads of state are always daele. I'm - not sure I know how to answer the first question, they have governments and they have families and they have markets and they have slaves. The specifics vary."

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"What is a daele?"

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Oh good, an easy one. "Started telling - " uh-uh, no, she's not gonna try referring to Fëanáro again, " - uh, we talked about that some on the ship. The Alteri have nine genders - daele, kriale, visle, nirle, sorle, nanye, kivye, mise, and suke. Not counting monsters. Daele are the ones who can be mothers. Uh, technically mise can be mothers but they can only have other mise and they don't, like, control anything. All of the real political power belongs to the daele, usually, though lower-level bureaucrats are other things."

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"Monsters?"

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"Sometimes they make an Alte that has special qualities and doesn't have a gender. I've never met one but they make them sometimes."

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They have babies all the time, he adds while she is explaining this, over osanwë. Constantly from adolescence to - I don't know if it ever stops, I didn't ask. 

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I'll add that to the list.

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"If the people in charge on each planet agreed to work with us, would there be any other problems or would that solve it?"

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"Um, well, they won't all, but if they did then I guess at that point they'd just have to find some way to replace the entire backbone of their economy, and also find a way to either keep up a successful defense or end a war that's been going on for hundreds of thousands of years?"

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Nod. "How many people would that be to convince on each planet?"

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How do you feel about you and a team of Dwarves replacing their economies with something tolerable? Mirelótë asks Carnistir.

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I'm sure we could do much better. There'll be appalling transition costs - maybe with a lot of help with enforcement -

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We'll find what we need to make it work somehow.

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"That's - I don't know how many, the planets are all different and I don't have any idea how some of the systems work, and - a lot. And you won't convince them all."

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"He's very convincing, but no, you're right - where in the process of trying to convince them do you expect things to break down? Several points of failure is a good answer."

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"Um, the part where you're confiscating their property and responsible for the breakdown of their society and the part where the last time someone conquered them it did not go very well and a lot of them would rather die than submit to a foreign power that has ideas about how to run their society differently? Probably?"

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"Hm, not exactly what I meant - I mean, will they refuse to speak to us, or try to coerce us into behaving differently in some way, or require shows of good faith that involve handing back their erstwhile slaves before they'll accept any other sort of aid like food, or commit suicide in protest -?"

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"They have been known to do the committing suicide in protest thing. Or, uh, blowing up their entire planet, I guess that's not the same thing, but it's - happened. I will be surprised if they don't attempt to attack you. If attacking you doesn't work then I won't be surprised if they talk to you. And then they'll probably attack you again? And - I am having a hard time picturing them not attempting to mobilize for full-scale war under these conditions? I expect some of them to attempt to negotiate in various strains of bad faith, and I expect a lot of others to just - not."

Mathrael would be so much better at this. Why isn't Mathrael here. Aaaa.

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"If the captives just vanished and there wasn't anyone to blame for this or go to war with, but there was enough food -"

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" - oh, then I guess you get general societal disruption and a lot of coups and countercoups and probably they blame the Carthons and redouble their efforts on the existing war. Probably."

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He doesn't look delighted about this possibility.

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"If Eru'd give us resurrection for non-chipped -"

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"I bet he won't."

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"He probably will eventually if only because I think Aulë's going to ask him every few millennia till he gets all his Dwarves back, but it's not going to happen on any reasonable time frame and not to make us able to operate more casually in an operation like this."

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"97819, do you know anyone who might have thought of plans to minimize deaths while reforming the Alteri government?"

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"Um. So nobody has, uh, actual plans. To actually fix things all the way. Because that'd be insane. But - I know some people who know more than I do?"

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"It seems like it's a good idea for us to spend a while planning. If you know people who should be here for that, then we can absolutely go and get them."

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".....how, exactly?"

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"We'd have the Valar do it. They can do a lot of things. I don't know how much my father already mentioned."

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"He explained some things but I don't know how good a picture I have. I just - certain people are important, and removing them might have effects for the people they're around or might lead to problems with their other responsibilities, and - if you take some of the people I know and only those people that will be suspicious, too. But I was on Earth and Earth doesn't have short-term communications with other Alteri worlds, so, uh, I guess I don't know how much it matters?"

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"Can you think of a way for people to vanish without causing problems for anyone left behind? We could cause an accident of some kind, for example."

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" - uh - this is separately selfish but you could blow up the ship I was on. If you can get everyone on it off first."

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"We will not blow it up with anyone aboard."

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"That's where your family is?"

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"Part of it."

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"It seems like a good first priority to me."

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She looks down at her hands. She doesn't think they've stopped shaking but she's not going to unclasp them to find out. "If you get everyone on that ship then you get several hundred Liars and several dozen Alteri, including some who're sort of reasonable and sort of know what they're doing. As these things go."

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"How is it that these things go, what constitutes sort of reasonable for Alteri?"

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"Some of them are more or less arbitrary, more or less likely to take offense at things, more or less likely to listen to inferiors. Or to anyone, for that matter. My work crew leader will be able to tell you more about who's the most reasonable, I have opinions but I don't know as much about any of them as she does. Oh, uh, can you, uh - if you bring them all here at once without doing anything else then the Alteri will be able to start instantaneously killing people, you probably want to find a way to make them - not."

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"Yes, that sounds worth avoiding if for some reason they'll react to being transported by murdering their innocent slaves. Perhaps we can put them to sleep or something."

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"They, uh - even if you separate them, Liars have kill switches in them."

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"What."

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"They. Uh. All the Liars and all the Thieves - really virtually all, anyway - have implants in them that are connected to the central nervous system. If activated they can cause temporary paralysis, intense pain, or death, according to the decisions of whoever controls the, uh, controls." She bites her lip. "Sometimes their supervisors wear the controls. Um, so - if you're going to bring a bunch of Liars and Alteri here then you need to - make sure they can't activate those, somehow, I think."

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"Yes. That will also go on the list very close to the top."

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"If we set the Liars down somewhere with food and water and support staff, are there likely to be other urgent needs?"

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"I don't think so? If there's, like, air, and there isn't hostile weather or anything. They'll be scared, but they shouldn't die or anything?"

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"Can we improve on that with something relatively simple?"

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"Um - having an explanation will help? Being met by other Liars and not just alien possibly-kidnappers might help? But if you're definitely going to run out of manpower and you just need to throw objects at them, uh - off the top of my head I would give them real food and some basic obvious medical supplies like bandages or something, and maybe some blankets and some toys and some simple musical instruments or something? Because that will - none of that is going to help very much in itself, but it'd make you the kind of people who might know what help looks like? If that makes any sense? I'm sorry if it - doesn't."

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"I think that does make sense, thank you. Hopefully we'll be able to get some kind of rudimentary training to the first batch, get volunteers, exponentiate from there..."

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She nods. "Some of them will be good at it. I can help with some. But there's only one of me, so - not very many of a trillion. But some."

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"Some is much better than none."

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"Do you know anything about what the other enslaved people might need? To communicate the same thing?"

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"Um. Not as well. Off the top of my head I think - things to write with and on for the Thieves, definitely, especially if you have, like, wax tablets or soft stone or something? Sluggards would be - happy is the wrong word but music would help, though they can't play it themselves. Um - Sluggards don't have to eat but Thieves and Alteri eat different things than Liars, I'm not sure if you have anything suitable? Oh, uh, they also - they breathe different things, Alteri breathe methane and I don't even know what Thieves and Sluggards breathe, but if you're going to take them off their ships you need to have something prepared on that front. I - know that's not super helpful."

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"Why wax tablets or soft stone? What do Thieves and Alteri eat, do you know?"

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"They can write on them, they have claws. Thiefwords are only written, so if they don't have something to write with, they can't talk. They can use computer interfaces but that's probably more complicated to get right, and they can use paper but it won't read as something that was left specifically with them in mind. Thieves eat - um, these worm things and these fungus things, when they can get them, in practice they mostly eat nutrient paste. Alteri eat animals native to their planets and also, like, lichen and some kinds of mineral deposits. But their biochemistry is different than ours, it's not like any worm or lichen will do."

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"We'll probably have to just have Valar duplicating existing food stores at first."

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"Is it safe to hold the Alteri with other Alteri or will they attack each other?" Could Lórien do a whole planet of Lórien?

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I think not without a gift basket but I'm not certain.

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"It depends on the Alteri? Lots of them will be safe with each other, they live with each other fine most of the time, but I can't, like, guarantee that if they get dropped on a strange planet they're not going to get upset and freak out?"

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"Some guess at the likely rate would help us allocate resources to responding if and when that happens."

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"...they get along well enough under normal conditions but these wouldn't be normal conditions. Probably relatively unlikely to attack each other if they're with their families or coworkers or some other group they know? More likely if they're with strangers or a really large group. And more likely if they feel like they're being, um, overtly attacked. Or controlled. Or contained. Or - something like that. I - really don't think I should give numbers because they're going to be very wrong, but, uh, it'll be at least the same rate as, like, normal rates of violent crime, probably higher?"

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"I don't think we can manage 'unobtrusive'. There's no good in making things overtly prison-y, and except insofar as it's necessary to keep them safe from each other there won't be call to micromanage them, and we should be able to keep them near whoever they are already with as a bare minimum, perhaps even in wherever they already were since they seem likely to be more attached to their homes than the slaves are?"

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"Probably."

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It seems like at this point, the wisest thing might be to sit down with the Valar, discuss some options, and see what information we're still missing - unless there's something you've thought of -

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No, I agree. We don't know enough, but I don't think she knows enough, so we need to start conservatively and be able to iterate fast anyway.

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Nod. "Thank you so much, 97816. I think at this point we should talk with the Valar about how we might approach this. We'll probably have more questions for you, but they'll come up as we plan. We'll also run our plans by you so that you can spot any flaws. But right now would be a good time for you to take a break and get some rest, or explore the city, or do whatever else you'd like."

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The only reason her brain doesn't stall out at we should talk with the Valar is that she has no idea how many Valar there actually are. For all she knows there could be billions, and maybe some of them are the sorts of people who you bug with these sorts of things.

"OK. Thank you. Sorry for dropping all of this on you and thank you for trying to help," she says quietly.

She is - not entirely sure she can figure out how to get anywhere else from this room, she's really actually pretty sure she can't, but that's a dismissal and so she will make herself be dismissed. She stands up and makes her way to the door.

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There is someone waiting at the door to show her to a room.

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Good, yes, excellent. She can follow this person to a room and hopefully the room will have a closet.

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The room does not, actually, have a closet. It does have a balcony, though! And a bathroom with a large tub in addition to a shower. 

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Balconies are the exact opposite of what she wants right now, but a bathroom will do. She'll just quietly but sincerely thank the Elf for bringing her here, then hide in the bathroom and curl up in the corner. There, she will go over the entire conversation she just had, consider all of the dumb things she said and the things she should know but doesn't, think about how little she actually knows about the Elves and whether all of this still might just make everything worse, and maybe for a little while she's going to hate herself.

Eventually she might feel OK about leaving the bathroom. Maybe. Not for a couple hours, minimum.

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No one bothers her.

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Mirelótë says, "So, who's coming with me to prepare a report for the Valar - Fëanáro, were you sitting on any vital linguistic nuances that might affect the quality of our information? I think Moryo should come, since we might need to hire people unless we do just fork Maitimo a trillion times. Even if we do, probably, in a population that size you shouldn't really stake lives on getting along with everyone."

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"And it sounds like it'll alarm everyone to see more than one of the same person."

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"They might have twinning, but trillions is definitely enough to freak anyone out."

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"And Dwarves'll think of some categories of solution faster than we will."

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"All right, I'll come."

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"I don't think there were any vital nuances - she uses elaborate constructions rather than my name, even though I told it to her, I meant to ask her about it when she seemed a little less stressed -"

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"She seems - not disproportionately stressed, but stressed in odd places."

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"Mmmhmm. They must have a lot of rules about - which kinds of concerns you're allowed to bring to the attention of other people, and what it means when you do-"

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"They need to sleep but she tried not-sleeping to the point of self-injury rather than mentioning that."

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"Great."

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"How long did it take for that to come out and how much does she sleep when she's doing it enough?"

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"Took about twice the length they're supposed to go between sleep, and she's supposed to get five to nine hours in every twenty-four - have you gotten the patch with their time system yet -"

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"Yes." Sigh.

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"I want to run plans by her once they're more concrete but we can give her a break until then, at least."

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"Agreed."

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"One thing we need somewhat urgently is a picture of how their planets are interconnected - if most of them are only connected to a few others then scooping up one at a time is promising, but if central members of the network are connected to hundreds of others then we can't do much without the capacity to stabilize a hundred at once."

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"Yes, you're right. It doesn't sound like the sort of thing she'd know but it sounded like we could get one ship without it being a big deal - make it look like an accident."

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"All right, let's take that to the Valar and go from there."

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Mirelótë nods.

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The Valar convene on Taniquetil to meet them; they're all present, or at least a significant share of their attention is.

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And Mirelótë explains that there are tremendous quantities of aliens, many of whom are enslaving many others, who die easily and permanently and some of whom may do it on purpose out of spite if it becomes known to them that they might have to stop with the enslaving. "They are slower than lightleapers, so there is some hope that we could creep along their network learning more before news got to any subsequent targets, but we need a solid plan - and maybe more powers than you currently possess."

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"It rather sounds it. Do you have a specific sense of what would be needed -"

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"Resurrection!"

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"Tabling that line of discussion for a moment, do these seem like peoples we're currently equipped to do right by if we can only extract them safely, or do we also need to be learning the things we learned about Elves..."

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"The latter - and some of them may be uncooperative; it might take a long time to find someone willing to explain themselves to us. I think the situation is fairly urgent, given that we currently don't have resurrection and there are ongoing atrocities and a war, but at the moment I'd expect we'd wrong anyone who came into our custody in a quantity we couldn't handle on at least a one to one basis. We are likely to want Dwarf and orc personnel supplementing, and maybe to fork some people, and even then if we can possibly train sympathetic people from the other world and convert them into more manpower that's a priority both for numerical and for cultural sensitivity reasons."

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"Is the other side of the war likely to require similar intervention?"

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"Our informant is not very well informed, unfortunately. If I had to put money on it I'd bet that they won't be an emergency with the other side of the war looked after properly, but as it is I'd have to bet lives on it."

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"Let's come up with a set of resources that we think would let us handle one planet, assuming no assistance."

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"Enough people to have someone assigned to every single native inhabitant, preferably from a variety of backgrounds. The means to disable the computer chips that some natives use to kill other natives - the means to stop them from constantly having children - medical attention - some kind of administrative setup to replace the war-and-slavery-based one..."

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"Habitats and supplies for the various species, one of which breathes methane, although if we're taking a planet it can be presumed to have some to commandeer. A way to prevent them from blowing each other up or committing uninformed suicide because they think we're there to do something we aren't. A coordination plan for all the variety of backgrounds of our personnel. A way to disable or spoof outgoing messages to other planets."

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"What kind of restrictions on them are necessary to prevent them from choosing to suicide?"

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"Well, the top priority is preventing them from doing it in some way that affects bystanders - mixing the atmospheres, say, or explosions. I do think it's defensible to at least make them sit through an explanation before they do it in some other way, so that also implies being able to keep them from sharp objects - they don't, I think, have our control of their bodies; preventing injury would do enough. Oh, and disease, I suppose, if they have pathogen labs or something and could let samples out intentionally."

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"I - tentatively agree that we should make them sit through an explanation if stopping them doesn't require wresting control of their bodies from them, but that's generalizing from Dwarves and from you all, I'm noting it as the kind of thing I could be wrong about for the wrong kind of alien. We should, once we've seen a few of them, be able to prevent injuries and disease."

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"Yes, I could be wrong. If we wind up with cooperative advisors representing a species who tell us that we must let them kill themselves immediately at any time even under grave misapprehensions we should discuss that with them and take it strongly into account, though given that they don't have chips it is worth being conservative."

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"Agreed. All right. We don't have a way to place someone with every inhabitant of a planet right now. I could do it for a hundred-mile radius, maybe a little less if they were densely packed - all together we could maybe do most things smaller than a planet."

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"I was thinking of starting with a ship, possibly the specific one our visitor came from so she'll be able to vouch for us with at least some people. Of course, it may no longer be where it was when she came here, though if I were them I'd be interested in the disappearance itself."

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"We're already at the site, our visitor having expressed concern she'd be followed by warships. We could shield a lightleaper, go through and take a look."

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"From observation as well as attack?"

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"I'm confident in my ability to shield it against methods of detection used by the societies known to us."

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"There's no way to be sure that's everything they have, but it might be most of it, or what they use when they're not expecting cloaked strangers..." She nods.

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"We'll head out." This leaves everyone five days of planning before contact. 

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About half a day later he visits 97816's room and stands outside the room shouting '97816?'

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Well that's terrifying.

It takes her like four seconds to get from the bathroom to the door. She hasn't been crying recently - she has, in fact, been meditating, because that's what she's supposed to do when she's under too much pressure and she can't possibly stand up under it indefinitely. She doesn't think she's been successful in absolute terms, but she feels marginally less awful and has been able to squash most of the remaining awful back inside herself for the time being.

"Did something happen?"

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"Hmm? No, no, everything's fine, everything's fine, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. Usually if you're at someone's door you ping them over osanwë and without that I have no idea how you're supposed to know whether or not you can open the door. You didn't latch it but you seem like the kind of person who might not. What've the servants been doing?"

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" - oh. You, uh, you tap the door." She demonstrates knocking on the door. "Everyone's sort of just been coming in so I've just been - assuming people will just come into my room whenever. Mostly."

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"Well, you can latch it." He demonstrates. "Then they can't, see. Also I can tell them not to be rude and teach them the tapping trick and that'll probably work but I still feel like it's important on principle that you know you can just latch it."

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"...thank you," she says, copying the latching and unlatching motion. "Our doors mostly don't do that. And I don't think anyone's been rude, really. But thanks."

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"I think they were doing their best." He looks vaguely disapproving. "Anyway, how're you -"

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"Fine! Better. I was - stressed but I'm back to mostly sort of arguably OK."

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"That's good. They're off to get your ship. They're not planning to let anyone kill themselves right away, is that going to be okay?"

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"Yeah. They, uh - I don't think the Alteri will try killing themselves in that situation, really, I just know it's a thing that - the Carthons have taken planets before, and the Alteri do their best to make sure they're totally devoid of any life or useable resources by the time they make it down. But I don't think they'll kill themselves right away if they're kidnapped."

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"And if they do and they're stopped until they can confirm they know what's going on, that won't be horribly awful for them or anything?"

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"...well I think most people don't like being kidnapped? I do not expect them to be having fun. But I think the mass suicides are mostly for strategic reasons."

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"Then we shouldn't worry that we'd be wronging them by preventing them. That's good."

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She nods. "I mean - I mean I think there are some who'd rather die than live under alien rule. To be fair to them. But I think that's - there are things that go into that besides suffering, there's pride and honor and - stuff. But you can only kill yourself once, so - I think a lot of the ones I knew on Yahi would mostly rather be prevented for a few weeks and then left to make their decisions, on the whole. Otherwise they might feel obligated."

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"- huh. I could see myself being like that but you've got to attach it to something that isn't horrible."

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"I'm sure they have things worth defending," she says quietly. "Liars don't commit suicide very often, but I think that's at least partly because the ones who're still alive have been selected for not doing that."

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"That shouldn't affect new ones, though."

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"No, it - I mean, uh, not a geneticist, at all, but I'm pretty sure babies are like their parents in some ways. So if you note down all of the people who committed suicide and don't make their kids have kids, then fewer people will want to commit suicide a couple generations down the line, even if the conditions you keep them in are really bad."

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" - huh. And they do that deliberately?"

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She nods. "It's - kind of confusing to think about? Because there are other people who could've existed the way I exist and they would've found it horrifying and killed themselves, and I exist partly because I'm the sort of person who won't want to kill myself no matter how bad things get, and - I still don't want to die, at all, but it's kind of not great to think about people taking advantage of that, I guess. Um, they breed us for lots of other stuff, depending on specialization, but limiting disabilities and stuff like suicidality is pretty standard practice for everyone."

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"How strange and awful. I'm sorry."

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"...thank you." People will probably continue to get points with her for declaring things to be awful for a while. "Uh, I'm not very optimized for anything because I'm not really a spacer, my owners just ran out of money for spacers and decided they'd do OK training domestic servants to fix spaceships." She bites her lip, remembering something. " - oh. Most real spacers won't be able to stand up under the gravity here, not safely over long periods of time. I forgot about that. You'll want to give them crutches or braces or wheelchairs or something if you bring them here. Probably crutches, I bet they'd be annoyed by chairs. That's not a genetics thing, that's just that if you grow up in space without much gravity then standing up on planets is hard."

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" - oh, we can just put them someplace without much gravity and long-term the Valar should be able to fix that for them."

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"Oh! OK. That works."

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"Thank you for mentioning it, though. We might not have thought of it."

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She nods. "Sorry for forgetting. I'll let you know if I remember anything else?"

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"That sounds good. You can ask any of the staff to send a message to us, if you think of something when we're not around."

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"Oh. OK. Thanks." This is fine and good and she should remember to do it, she tells herself, because they wouldn't tell her to do it if they didn't want to know stuff. "I'm - not really sure what I'm supposed to be doing right now?"

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"  - relaxing? Decompressing? This all must be stressful - you could go to concerts -"

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" - I don't know what a concert is. Uh, if there's nothing I can do then that's fine, we didn't have much to do on the way to Earth, so I'm good at filling time? I just - don't know what I'm supposed to be aiming to be able to do."

She thinks maybe crying in bathrooms is not actually the most efficient use of her time, but she's not actually sure.

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"Talk to Eru, if you still want to do that. Think of problems with our plans when we describe them to you. Concerts are where people sing and play music and you go to watch."

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"I can talk to Eru. Not right this second, I have to finish thinking of a thing first. And I have to know more about his narrative sensibilities. And I have no idea how to get to the moon. And I know there was some disagreement about when it should happen for strategic reasons anyway. But I can do it."

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"I guess going to perfornances is a ...good way to learn Eru's narrative preferences? But you should do some things for your own sake, too, no one can be a hero all day."

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"...I don't think I've done anything heroic? Ever? I've arrived in a foreign star system and complained about my life and tried to answer questions and taught you some languages and composed some poetry. Heroism is like... when a random alien gets dropped on you and you immediately drop everything in an attempt to save her species from eternal servitude. Or something."

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" - but you haven't been doing anything that sounded like fun because you wanted to do it."

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She considers this.

"...it probably says something about me as a person that figuring out how to do that sounds astonishingly stressful."

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"Well, if you'd rather stay in your room no one will stop you."

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This also sounds kind of terrible. Most things sound kind of terrible. Everything being terrible sounds like maybe not an immediately fixable problem.

"...OK. It'd be nice to have some paper or something?"

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"Sure. Do you draw?"

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"Not very much. We don't have paper very often. The Alteri use it sometimes - they prefer computer interfaces, but sometimes they want paper. It's harder to monitor and it doesn't go out when the power does."

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"Someone's bringing it now. The power sometimes goes out in your cities?"

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"Not usually! Sometimes the equipment breaks down. On some planets the weather causes problems and a bunch of people can lose power at once, though Yahi doesn't even really have weather. I was thinking of, like, on ships in deep space sometimes you budget your generator output wrong and then you have to cut nonessential power use for a while. But probably most people who use paper just like that it's - simple."

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"You can have all the paper you want."

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"OK," she says, smiling. "Thank you. I - want to say I'll see about seeing performances tomorrow, but I don't suppose any of them are in Etra La or Yahivi."

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"Not really. They could try to translate but I bet it wouldn't work perfectly. I could translate for you but that has the same problem. Concerts are easy, though, you don't need to be able to understand music for it to work."

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"Makes sense. Maybe tomorrow. I suppose flying mostly blind is dramatic, anyway. He likes tragedies?"

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"The story he wanted for Arda was awful, though I don't know if he thought so. Most of the things that win his poetry concerts are terribly sad."

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"Huh. It probably would be better if I knew something about your narrative traditions. I don't feel like the stuff I've been writing for you is very sad."

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"Everything about your world is very sad, I think. I could go try to get a book of recent winners of Eru's contests."

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"Not everything about it. Or - you can't tell a really sad story without anything happy in it, I don't think. Probably. You can be miserable but I don't know if you can be sad."

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"Huh. Do you mean that you have to establish the potential for happiness which was lost? But probably there's a way to do that without anyone in the universe experiencing happiness at any point, I'd think."

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"...I don't think so. There are lots of things you can imagine without ever experiencing them, sure - like, like forests or freedom or magic eels that fly through space, or whatever, even if you've never experienced them and even if it's not actually possible for them to exist. Even if you won't imagine them right. But you have to be working with the right pieces, and I don't think happiness is like that. If you had never experienced a feeling that had any sort of positive valence - if it's even possible for a person to come to exist without ever seeing anything that they recognize as good, not even in themselves, and I'm not sure it is - then, then you couldn't tell that person a tragic story because they wouldn't recognize the sadness of it as something notable. It would just - be. Like room-temperature air. A successful storyteller has to make you feel something, and if the emotional valence of the story is the same as the emotional valence of the listener, and it doesn't have anywhere to go, then you can't do it and it won't work. But I bet you couldn't even do something like that to a Liar in real life. I think if you opened a crack in their miserable existence far enough to give them the idea of storytelling - if you could even keep them from developing it on their own, and I bet you couldn't, but if you could, then - well - then they'd find something in the world worth being happy about, and they would end up mourning its loss when it was taken away. I - dunno if any of that makes any sense, sorry."

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" - maybe. It still seems to me like it'd be very sad if someone lived and was hurt and unhappy and never knew that it could be any different."

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" - I guess. It would be, like, cosmically sad, because we'd know that it could have been different for them and we'd be sad about it. But I don't think you could end up with a Liar like that, one who didn't even have the concept of anything being good ever."

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"Maybe not. I think even orcs had that concept when they were sworn to the Enemy, even if they were wrong about which things were good."

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She nods and crosses her arms like she's hugging herself. "I should hear more about the orcs sometime. I wonder if we'd get along with them."

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"Probably, I don't think they're hard to get along with except for Elves."

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She nods. "That's good. I - hope they'll get along with us, too."

 

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"If not we'll set you up somewhere else, it'll really work all right either way."

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She nods.

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"Is everything okay? Well, that we don't already know about?"

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"Uh."

What would it mean for things to be OK? No, that's dumb, that's irresponsibly feigning ignorance. If Mathrael were here, then she would ask if everything was OK, too, and Imrainai would tell her that no, actually, things are not OK, everything is terrifying, and she's scared and overwhelmed, and she's trying really hard to breathe her emotions and her instability out, but she can't, because everything is terrifying, and if she gets this wrong then apparently there are like a trillion people who could have been helped but who won't be, and she keeps getting randomly nauseous and trembly because her body is trying to tell her that whatever responsibility she just took on she should put it back right now immediately.

"Things aren't perfect but I wouldn't want to sound, uh, petty or anything. They're pretty good."

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"All right. Let me know if you need anything."

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"OK! Maybe - maybe tomorrow we can watch a play or something and you can explain what's happening. If you're not urgently needed somewhere and it doesn't sound boring."

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"That sounds good! I'll look up a good one and reserve us seats."

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"OK! Cool!"

So she has another day to pull herself together, that sounds doable. She can pace around her room, intermittently meditate, and mentally order the basic events of the story she's already decided she's going to tell.

When someone brings paper and something to write with, she gets to work writing letters to people in Confederate One. It's tedious and hard because she isn't used to writing, and because Confederate One isn't meant to be written with human hands, but if she works for several hours then she can make all the little dots line up in all the right ways.

For Ves, she begins the first one. I'm really sorry for not coming home. Some things you just have to do, even when they're terrible for you.

She writes five letters, three of them apologies and all of them regrets, and then she goes to sleep.

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He picks out a play that Eru liked. It's about someone tracking down their orc descendants.

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That sounds pretty interesting. Time to see if Eru has good taste.

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The play is very beautifully acted and terribly heartbreaking, as its protagonist stumbles through the universe with a blessing disguising orc faces from them so they can bear to be around them long enough to track down their children. Their children don't remember them and don't like Elves and fragile attempts at a relationship keep being derailed by the limitations of everyone involved.

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She's never seen a professionally acted play before. It is perhaps unsurprising that she cries. Still, she has enough analytical power left over to think about the structure, about what makes it work and which elements evoke which emotions, about what the author was probably going for and how you can tell if you're successfully hitting the right notes on something like this.

(She wonders if her parents will try to find her, after all of this is over. She wonders if they'll ever get to hear what happened.)

"Now, see, that's a tragedy," she tells Fëanáro, after it's over. "It's not the most crushingly tragic core ever - the presentation was amazing enough that you might think it was, but I bet if I found the actual most tragic story ever then with an equally good presentation you'd be able to tell again - but at the center it's a tragedy."

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"I thought they did a very good job, it was terribly sad. Was it useful for you?"

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"Yeah, I got a lot of stuff out of that. I think the thing I have is - well, I don't know if it'll work, I can't match that on a presentation level - at all - but the story itself should be, uh - I think if I'm capable of coming up with something that works then the thing I'm working on should probably fundamentally work. So if it doesn't then it's probably just that I don't have something." She nods. "It was really good. I don't like most tragedies but that was a really good one."

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"Why don't you like most tragedies?"

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"I don't like stories about people giving up. Stories where they get their heads cut off for not, sure, but not the ones where they give up. Not on the really important things. I mean, they have their place - sometimes when you have to give up, maybe you need those ones to help you soften the blow. And sometimes, if you do them really right, they make you a stronger person for having listened to them. But they're still not the ones that keep you going."

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

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"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.

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"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."

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"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."

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"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?"

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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."

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

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

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"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."

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"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."

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"I bet Eru will love it."

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

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"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."

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"...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."

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

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"I guess that doesn't sound terrible."

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"Figuring out planets is surprisingly fun."

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

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

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

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

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"...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."

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

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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."

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

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"Yeah, that seems like a good idea. If we have time then maybe limit it to one a day so I can, uh, digest them and stuff, but I don't know how much time you were planning on having."

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"I mean, the situation is horrible and allowing it to continue is painful but it seems like we should do precisely that for as long as it increases your odds of success. And at minimum we're waiting until we've fetched your family."

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"Then I guess if you don't have anything better to do we're watching a lot of sad plays."

This sounds tiring, but on the bright side, they're really good. And if you're going to be killed by one of your own poems, then watching plays with your last month of life seems like an aesthetically correct thing to do beforehand.

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They watch a lot of sad plays!! About siblings who are trying very hard but just cannot, actually, tolerate each other very well, and who hurt each other trying; about a gay woman who married a man before it was acceptable to do anything else and now has a lonely marriage pining over someone she can't have, while her husband tries to fix things; about someone who cheats on an examination and is forever expelled from the mathematics society which was their only real family.

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The plays are really sad. Sort of heart-wrending, honestly - she's sort of glad that none of the stories touch on things that are really familiar, because if they were any closer to her experiences then they might hurt in ways that she didn't know how to immediately process. She is occasionally unsure whether she can compose something that rivals them, but if she can't, then she's not going to let it be for lack of trying. 

She skips a period. It's probably stress. Probably, probably, probably. She doesn't bring it up to anyone, just watches plays during the day and composes poetry in her room at night and writes a sixth letter and waits for her crew to arrive.

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They haven't done something like this before so they take a while making sure they get it exactly right, but eventually - it looks to observers like one shuttle abruptly explodes.


It looks to the people on the shuttle like they're suddenly inside a much bigger shuttle.

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Well this is new. Sorta terrifying, if she were a person who let herself be terrified by stuff, but you can't say it isn't new, and Parael is a big believer in the virtues of novelty. There are certainly much more boring ways to die.

She checks the thoughts of everyone in the room at once. She can't process everything that way, but she gets emotions, and in a couple seconds pretty confident that none of the other Liars were expecting this any more than she was. Mathrael silently asks for a report and then is instantly directing people into a more defensible configuration. The youngest two psyons on the ship are too startled to do anything useful, and the third one is sifting through thoughts person by person, convinced that there's a traitor in their midst. The visle and several of the kriale draw their weapons, pointed outward, indicating that they don't immediately think the Liars are to blame (not that this will last, if no other explanation can be found). The other psyon relaxes slightly when she notices Parael noticing this.

If it's not a Liar and it's not the Alteri, then it's someone else. She concentrates on determining whether there are any new minds within telepathic range.

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Nope! Well, yes, but she won't detect them. 

The shuttle settles down onto a nice field of grass. 

 

Excuse me, a booming voice says cheerfully to Mathrael. I'd like your advice on how to introduce myself without startling anyone more than necessary.

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Parael, are you getting that? Anything recognizable?

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"No new Liars within telepathic range," reports Parael, to no one in particular. "Picking up telepathic activity through 572061 Atekri. Not psyon."

 

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"Well, say hello," says Karaka, aloud, a series of screeches and chirps that some but not all of the Liars will be able to understand.

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"Hello." Identify yourselves and your objectives immediately.

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My name is Varda, and I am a member of a species called the Valar, which I believe to be unknown to the Alteri and to the Liars. I moved your shuttle - giving the impression to others it had been destroyed - because I learned of your existence and wanted to speak with you. I can remove the telepathic people from within range of everyone else if that will be helpful. I - pause - have disabled the chips which the Alteri use to control their slaves. I am shielding everyone present against physical violence but confusing and frightening things will still happen if it is attempted. 

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Do you believe that for two seconds?

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Doubtful but not entirely disbelieving shrug, insofar as those are attributes that she's capable of giving to a shrug.

"The voice says - " says the nine-year-old psyon.

Come on, let her talk, thinks Parael.

She's going to mutiny and get everyone killed, thinks the other girl.

The situation is volatile and 572061 is best equipped to handle it.

" - that they - "

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Leave the psyons; move the Alteri.

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From the perspective of the humans they vanish.

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"That's all right, I asked for it," says Mathrael, to the rest of her crew. "Our hosts claim they've been moved. Just keep calm and don't do anything stupid." 

The nine-year-old psyon sits down on the floor and pouts.

"Now we're just gonna talk. How did you learn about us?"

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A Liar came through some kind of gate technology unfamiliar to us and arrived in our space, fortunately near one of our planets.

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"So 97816 is alive, then. Good for her."

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"I KNEW it!"

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"All very proud. What did she tell you about the situation?"

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She explained that the Alteri have slaves and are at war with another people not known to us, and gave us as much context on those species and that conflict as she knew, and thought it would be good if we fixed it.

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"Well that sounds very nice," she says, not bothering to keep the skepticism out of her voice. "I'm sure I can tell you more about how one might go about doing that when I have a better understanding of your abilities."

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We're hoping so. Is there anything that should be resolved immediately before we start discussing that?

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"Nothing we can't handle, if you've given us the run of the ship. What exactly did you do with the Alteri?"

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They are in an atmosphere that should be safe for them. They're upset. We're attempting to communicate that we are not going to hurt them but since we are kidnapping them and going to war with their society of origin the truthful reassurances all sound a little empty.

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"I imagine they would. Lisael, I think we're going to be here for some time, get the people who just came off shift something to eat. Savret, Yon, take some people and search the administrative wing for intel, while that's a thing we can do. Everyone who wants to can... go outside, I guess."

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Ves has just come off a twelve-hour kitchen shift, but she immediately takes off for the administrative wing anyway.

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"Noting this now, if you're going to be talking about anything important in a place that isn't here, then you should probably make sure that I'm in that place. And that the other psyons aren't."

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I think it's reasonably likely that we can make your form of telepathy voluntary, if that's relevant for long-term planning. I do not yet know how. 

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"- I guess that's not totally unbelievable coming from telepathic aliens. Doesn't really sound like the sort of thing that would stop 950357 from reporting on everything you say."

You're mean.

      You're a traitor to the cause, kid, 's how it is.

You're a traitor.

     I'm a lot of things, kid.

"I think you will have more options later if you discuss military strategy somewhere else."

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"That seems reasonable." She hands off responsibility for the crew to one of her lieutenants, then lists four units - herself, Parael, the leader of the Liar engineering team, and the ship's doctor - who she thinks are likely to have useful input during initial discussion.

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And then they are somewhere else. It's outdoors - grassy and peaceful and quiet. There are seats and birds flying in the distance.

Will this work for you?

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"Works just fine."

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Thank you so much for your patience.

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"Well, thank you for the... grass."

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The environment can be something entirely different if you'd like.

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"No, no, it just seems premature to thank you for deactivating the chips until someone has independently confirmed that you have. So. You wanted to know things."

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Yes. 97816 has been very helpful but I don't think we have enough information to be confident in our next steps yet.

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"Understandable. The chip deactivation and the teleportation will certainly be helpful, but if they're limited in any way then I see how there would still be logistical issues. And I'm a little unclear on your end goal, here."

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We'd like everyone to be eventually settled safely on a planet governed according to rules and principles they like. We have very limited capacity to move people around as I've been doing, and expect to be able to deactivate chips at scale.

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"I see," says Mathrael, though she is not really sure she does. "And your - anti-violence field, I assume that can't be extended over an entire planet all at once?"

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Unfortunately not. 97816 is pursuing an appeal to the power that might enable that but I think we should make plans that will assume we will not have it.

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"Then you may have to fight it out. Liars are by and large unarmed, and Alteri don't take invasions lying down, so that will likely lead to massive casualties even if you're also able to deactivate their means of blowing up planets."

"Can you deactivate their weapons, or is it only the chips?" asks the engineer.

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We'd need some weapons to test with but it'd be surprising if we could not do anything. We would like to avoid deaths as much as we can. 

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"Well, you'd even the playing field, if they could be limited to hitting people with blunt or sharp objects at close range. Not enough to prevent deaths, but enough to prevent a series of extremely boring massacres. If I were trying to defeat the entire Confederacy with minimal casualties I would want to see whether the Carthons could be of assistance, unless you're planning on dismantling their society simultaneously."

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We know very little about them.

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"Well we're not exactly experts here, as you can imagine. They're mortal enemies of the Alteri, but prefer not to kill them if they have any other options, though they usually don't. They are pathologically horrified by lying, and by anything that looks, sounds, feels, or smells like lying. They live much longer than either Liars or Alteri. They are approximately technologically equivalent to the Alteri, though they are also the only power to possess the ansible, and are therefore capable of instantaneous communication over arbitrary distances. This last could easily be strategically relevant."

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We have some instantaneous communications but a technological solution might be preferable and is quite impressive, we don't have it ourselves. We do have the capacity to travel faster than lightspeed between worlds.

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"That's cool, faster than lightspeed is cool. The Alteri also have that, so you might want to discuss specific speeds. Also I have a concern, you said you're letting 97816 do diplomacy?"

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Our method takes about six of your days to reach any destination. She's going to speak to Eru, who has the power to make this all go more smoothly if he sees fit.

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"Oh, that's cool. - have you considered that 97816 might be, like, one of the worst possible people to do that unless it's very time-sensitive."

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Why is that?

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"There's, like, a fifty percent chance that she's having a breakdown right now because someone looked at her funny."

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"There are circumstances under which she might be fine. If it's time-sensitive then she's likely their only Liar option, and if it isn't, then we can talk to her and determine whether these are the relevant circumstances. There's no sense in discussing it now."

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You can discuss it with her and decide if you think there's someone more suited, but there are advantages to it being her. Would you like me to take you there now? It's five days' travel from here; I cannot instantaneously move distances like that.

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"I see. ...eh. What do we have to lose?"

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"Earth."

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"You're not wrong. But Earth is only of strategic importance if whatever forces have protected it are capable of providing a safe haven indefinitely. We don't know any more about their intentions than we do about those of the, uh, Valar, who have comparable abilities. Any other attachments we may have to this planet are sentimental. Under the circumstances, this seems worth pursuing, even at great risk to ourselves."

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"Agreed. At least we'll have very interesting deaths."

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I will set that trajectory. Should I communicate anything to the other humans? I'm discussing with them what they'd like to do as well.

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"I can go back even if we don't want to seclude the psyons," says Parael, after Mathrael is silent for a moment.

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"You're welcome to try, though I don't think the bulk of the crew finds you much more trustworthy than the rest of them. Less, if anything. I think we will have to rejoin everyone else at some point, and keeping the psyons out of any networks for the foreseeable future is just a cost they're going to have to eat." She sighs. "We thank you for your consideration, Varda, but if I've taught them anything, then I expect them not to believe a message is from me unless they hear it from me directly."

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I could impersonate you, if that would be helpful in some way, but I'm also happy to just take you back.

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Well shit.

"That's good to know, thank you. We'd prefer the latter right now."

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And they're back.

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She considers waiting for some more opportune time to discuss things, but Varda doesn't seem likely to stop monitoring any of them any time soon, so now is probably as good a time as any to say whatever she's going to say. 

"We're leaving Earth," she announces, with all the authority she can muster. "Sorry about the sudden change of plans, and to everyone who's leaving someone behind on another ship, but our hosts are pursuing the defeat of the Confederacy, and I think it's in our best interests to help them in whatever way we can. All previous outside duties are hereby terminated; we'll be restructuring responsibilities as we figure out what needs doing."

She sighs, and thinks, and comes to a decision. "You know what, everyone who isn't a squad leader, take a day off. We'll regroup this time tomorrow."

There are questions, of course, and concerns, and people who are very certain that this is all a trick of some kind. She responds to questions aimed at her as well as she's able. She learns in broad strokes what they've been able to pull from the Alteri computers, and resolves to go over as much new intel as she can over the course of the next few days. 

"Alright," she announces, eventually, when everything that requires immediate attention has been dealt with. "Varda?"

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Yes?

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"I'd like to speak to the Alteri, if that's possible. You'll want to give me a second to put a biosuit on."

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That won't be a problem.

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So she puts her suit on, takes a few deep breaths, and declares herself prepared to see how the bugs are doing.

The bugs are not pleased with the situation, as one might expect. They have demanded answers from Varda and been very dissatisfied with what they've received, and they are similarly unimpressed with Mathrael's declaration that she will be commanding the Liars on board the ship indefinitely, without answering to Vakaran. She thinks she succeeds at not completely closing diplomatic ties with their (former?) masters, but she does make it clear that the Liars are now free agents, insofar as that's possible with some kind of alien deity ultimately controlling everything they can and can't do. 

For the rest of the voyage, the majority of the Liars attempt to get their strength back up for whatever lies at the end of their journey. Mathrael goes through the logs they've confiscated, reading journals and planned work schedules and what's known about the gate. 

She finds records of all the women who have been impregnated without their knowledge over the course of the past two months in Vakaran's personal computer terminal. She is outraged. She is tired. She doesn't know that telling anyone while they're stuck like this will do any good. She expects the psyons to reveal the secret, immediately, but they don't - Parael because she goes as Mathrael does, the nine-year-old because she sides with her master and does not want to reveal his plans without his knowledge, and the small ones because whenever Parael and the nine-year-old agree on anything, that thing is not a safe one to question.

She waits.

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She's available to answer questions and provide tasty snacks if anyone will take them. They jump. They arrive above Valinor five days later. 

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Mathrael breaks down what she's found for the other Liars once they're in Valinor space, hoping that from this position they'll have the option to do something about it. She leads with the gate plans and what she believes they imply about the structure's workings and origin. She ends with the fact that eighty percent of the crew's fertile women have been impregnated without their knowledge, apparently on the orders of Vakaran Atekri, who seems to have kept his decision secret from most of the other Alteri on board. 

Forced impregnation is not an unusual occurrence; failure to inform the women in question is. Those from houses Atekri and Tellari are outraged that they were not informed that they needed to find husbands, and that those already married were not allowed to bear the children of their partners. Those from House Festri are outraged that Atekri appears not to have consulted Festri's leadership at all. There's a lot of outrage going around.

The Liars would like Varda to know that they are outraged.

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I can only imagine. That's horrifying. I am so terribly sorry. I - what a nightmare. I can consult with the rest of the Valar to determine whether there is anything we can do -- a way to safely delay the pregnancy until the parents are ready, maybe...

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"We'd appreciate knowing what our options are. We do, in any case, still need to determine whatever it is you plan to do about the broader situation."

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Yes. I think that presently waits on 97816's interaction with Eru.

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"I see. 97816 is also on the list of affected people."

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That is despicable. Do you have recommendations about how to tell her? Would it be better if you did so?

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"I expect so. Unless, I suppose, whatever she's doing is the sort of thing that would be negatively affected by having to think about this right this second. I admit I'm not exactly clear on what she's doing, but there are circumstances under which I could imagine a short delay being the right call, depending."

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She is going to petition Eru for assistance. 

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"Could you please tell me anything about what that means."

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Eru is the nearly-omnipotent creator of our world. He sometimes entertains petitions, particularly if he finds them poetically compelling. HIs assistance would enable us to free all of the Liars with vastly reduced casualties.

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"...you want her to recite poetry for a god with literally trillions of lives in the balance."

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We think Eru is very unlikely to respond in a way that makes things worse.

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"That's good, anyway. I... think I wouldn't tell her about the pregnancy until she's done what you need her to do."

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I am reluctant to do that, but I can conceive of how it could be best under the circumstances. I'd want to discuss it with some people who understand incarnate species better than I do.

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"I wouldn't keep it from her for more than a few weeks. Eventually she'll notice anyway. It just might be best for her to process one very important thing at a time."

Beyond that, her concerns are mostly with resettling the rest of her people and with talking to whoever might need her input into the whole war thing.

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She nods.  I can take you all down to solid ground, if you'll find it reassuring.

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"We might. I warn you that most of us don't have 97816's tolerance for planetary gravity."

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Thank you, yes, she mentioned that. I'll arrange it and arrange to manage that.

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"Sounds good."

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This person who understands incarnates better than Varda does is herself pregnant at this time. She looks suitably grave about the forced pregnancy business.

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I don't know what to do. I tried thinking of things but they all seemed horrible. We need to decide what to tell - or whether to tell - 97816 immediately.

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"It's possible Eru would enjoy telling her himself," Mirelótë points out softly. "Or - hinting about it, which he can't do if she knows."

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Ah.

Varda buzzes, which all of the Valar learned how to suppress at least a century ago. She stops once she notices it.

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"But we can inform her - I like your pregnancy-freezing idea - as soon as she's come back."

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Okay. Thank you. Buzz.

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He stops by to check how 97816 is doing and let her know that her friends and family have arrived safely.

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Imrainai is, like, seventy-five percent sure that she's pregnant. She has decided not to mention this to anyone on the grounds that maybe they won't let her do the thing if they know, and even if they do they might make a big deal about it and then she'll have to deal with that instead of just dealing with composing poetry, and it's actually hard enough just to compose poetry.

"That's great! I'd really like to see them soon, then, but I also think I'm probably ready to compose the poem whenever you think it's a good idea. I don't know when you wanted me to do that."

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"I think we don't want to rush you but don't expect any of us will be more prepared if we delay further."

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"I'm good! And I would talk to everyone now, except that if I do they're going to worry, and then I'll have to think about them worrying, and maybe it would be easier to just do the thing now and tell everyone about it when I get back, unless there's some other reason for me not to?"

Also if she talks to everyone she might be less cool with the whole heroically dying thing.

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"That plan makes sense to me. Are you all right?"

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"Yeah! Well. Not in all senses. But I'm mostly OK. Uh... can I ask you a favor? Not, like, a big favor."

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"Of course. I mean, I might not do it, but I can't think of any things I'd object to being asked for."

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Medium-deep breaths. Calm breaths.

"So I'm sure nothing'll go wrong in a way that would make this at all necessary, but I wrote some letters to give to some people, just in case for some unfathomable reason I should happen to not actually come back in a timely manner? And it would be cool if you could hold onto them, just in case certain things that will not happen should happen to happen anyway."

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" - oh. Of course. .... would you like a hug?"

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"...that might be good."

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He steps forward and scoops her up. He's very tall, really.

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This is good. It would be totally overwhelming under most circumstances, but one of the cool things about knowing you're about to die is that you get to be scooped up by important people without worrying about the effects that this will have on your long-term relationships with them, because you will be dead.

She's small and human and scared and immensely sad. But she's going to do this.

"Thanks," she says, eventually. "I need to eat something and then go up first thing in the morning, however going up to the moon works. I'd say I could go whenever, but it's a long poem."

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"Eating and sleeping first makes sense, then. We're very proud of you."

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She laughs weakly. "Well. I try my best."

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"Is there anything else you might need?"

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She considers.

"...no. I think I'm good."

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"All right." He does not stop hugging her.

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Well then she will just be hugged for a while. This is good. She may have gotten super deficient in hugs over the past couple weeks.

Eventually she will decide that she is done hugging and and attempt to get herself unscooped.

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"Good night! Let someone know if you do think of something you need."

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"OK! Night!"

It takes her until he is definitely in the process of leaving to decide that she actually does have something else to say.

 

 

"...Fëanáro?" she asks, in the tone of someone who is not actually entirely sure whether she is allowed to use this word.

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"Yes?"

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"...language lesson. Slaves have numbers. Superiors have titles. Friends have names. ...My name's Imrainai."

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"Imrainai. It's a very pretty name. Imrainai."

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She smiles delightedly.

"Thanks. ...I'm good now."

And she goes to bed.

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In the morning there's a breakfast, as normal, and people waiting outside for her.

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She meditates and eats her breakfast and idly taps out a rhythm on her plate. She doesn't review what she's worked on. Doesn't need to. She just needs to be in a headspace where she's able to know for a fact that she can do this.

When she's ready, she goes outside to meet the people.

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"Good morning. We're going to walk to the shuttleport, and then fly up. Is there anything you need or anyone you want to talk to first -"

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She shakes her head. "I'm good." 

She genuinely doesn't look scared, this time. You don't have to be scared when you're dead.

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They head up. It takes about two hours.

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She doesn't say anything to anyone. She fidgets in a sort of weirdly focused way. She composes other things in her head, things that match, things that put her in the right headspace. She waits.

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The moon is pretty. Not in the way Elf cities are pretty; it's wilder. There are drifting eddies of dust. She probably knows enough about atmospheres to know that there shouldn't be drifting eddies of dust in places that don't have one, but there it is. The Elves get out without any kind of pressure suit; there isn't air, but one can breathe just fine.

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Weird. Very weird. But he won't want to kill her before he's heard his gift, so she's going to not worry about the weird.

"Which way?"

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They look startled for a second. 

"Oh," someone murmurs after a second, "she can't see that far - he's over there."

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"Ah. Thanks. I'll - see you."

She probably won't. Oh well.

She walks. 

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It's kind of a long way. Elven vision must be extraordinary. Dust swirls in impossibly elaborate patterns around her feet.  

 

He looks human, when she sees him. He's sitting in the dust, drawing on the ground with his fingers not quite touching it. He's wearing something a spacer might wear.

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She smiles when she sees him. She's - scared, OK, yes, but scared the way you are before doing something very difficult that you know, absolutely, that you have prepared for as well as you possibly can, and now you just have to see whether your very best is enough. She feels like her whole being is humming.

"Hello, storyteller."

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"Hello, Imrainai!"

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"I brought you something. I hope you don't have anything else to do today."

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"I may do other things but I promise that the narrative will be here while I do them."

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"All right, then."

 

The longest performance she's ever given was six hours long, and she got through it by the skin of her teeth. This one is thirteen, and has been ruthlessly edited down to a form that a single Liar is theoretically capable of recomposing in one sitting. Most of the material isn't original to her, but it's been strung together in new ways, tweaked and reworked to form a coherent whole.

She takes a deep breath and tells Eru her story, the story of the Liars, the story of the universe.

She tells him that very long ago there were only the stars, shining in a sea of endless blackness, singing their star-songs to one another over the vast distances of space, unchanging and undying (they thought - the stars could not have known that they were mortal). They gathered planets to themselves, great clouds of dust and stone and molten rock, billions of worlds with rocks and millions of worlds with oceans and thousands of worlds with life, all of them listening to the song of the stars. And then, in all the great expanse of all the universe, it happened that one of the worlds sang back.

She tells him that the Carthons appeared in their oceans, leading sedentary lives for millions of years. They moved and grew as slowly as trees, completely unable to explore their world themselves. But they sang to each other, through the oceans, as the stars once had. They grew to love truth dearly, each reporting the others' songs exactly as they had been sung to them, not daring to change a single word if it would threaten their ability to know the truth. In time they gained the ability to manipulate their environment, and created machines that could do what they themselves could not. They learned to move. They learned to fly ships into the endless blackness. And they sang, full of the joy of discovery and the love of one another and the certainty that their perfect honesty allowed them. They went to space, not to conquer or to colonize, but to learn the shape of their universe.

(She signs things with her hands here, silently overlaid on top of her other words, only during the parts of the story that she's told so many times that the story and the rhythm and meter and rhyme all come flawlessly, even when she's just barely paying attention to them. Her hands give voice to the Carthons, to an endless chatter of excitement and discovery and of reports on all things beautiful and wonderful in their world.)

She tells him that, in their endless travels, the Carthons found another species, with another kind of mind. The Alteri were cosmic infants, confined to a single planet covered in endlessly warring city-states. They were violent and cruel and capricious, and yet they sang. They sang of their love for their brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, of their loyalty to their houses, of their endless desire for glory, for honor, for greatness, for achieving that which had never been achieved before. The Carthons saw them and were horrified and delighted, in equal measure. They thought them feral children. They thought themselves adoptive parents. And so the Carthons tended the Alteri planet as their most precious garden, pruning slavery and inequality and scarcity away, utterly certain that beneath their many faults their charges would one day shine like polished silver. Eventually, they came to the conclusion that Alteri society and even Alteri biology were horrifically destructive to them, preventing them from being truly good. In their love, in their mercy, in their compassion, they sought to end the existence of a divided hierarchy of genders, ultimately seeking to destroy both marriage and the dynastic system in the process.

(Her hands say different things here; now they are the voices of the Alteri. They are wounded and furious, in such pain that they can scarcely express it. Legitimate and illegitimate complaints are woven between each other with no distinction whatsoever made between them. They swear by all they hold sacred, by their houses and their ancestors and their heritage and their honor, that their children shall not suffer as they have suffered, not even if the whole universe must burn for it.) 

She tells him the story of those Alteri who led the fight to be free of the Carthons, and of those Carthons who fought to maintain control over their wayward children. There are many players with many names and many distinctly developed personalities, all of them mythic figures by this point. It's complicated and intricately plotted, but it's one of the easy parts - she's told the revolution stories many many many times, because it's high drama. The emotional valence is different than it usually is, though. She spins her lines just so, highlighting things she usually doesn't, emphasizing the virtues of even her villains. She does not stop to mourn them; there isn't time, not in this story. She lets the bodies pile up and the sacrifices weigh on each subsequent generation, on both sides of the conflict, tension and despair building even as the Alteri claw their way back to freedom. And it is never freedom for everyone - as the great houses rejoice, they once again crush others under themselves, the lesser Alteri whose misery has been forgotten by history.

(Her hands are other voices, now. The doubts of the Carthons, the fears of the Alteri, the desperate aching need on both sides to save their children, the pain of realizing that they may not control the future. As the spoken poem leans more toward the Alteri, her hands give voice to the Carthons, who realize to their shame that they have unleashed something horrific upon a previously peaceful universe.)

She tells him of the enslavement of both the Thieves and the Sluggards. In this story it is a desperate act, born of the heartfelt desire to free enslaved Alteri, for the Alteri believe that all of their own people should be offered some measure of honor, not humiliation and squalor. The Thieves, in particular, suffered enormously under Alteri rule, for a long time losing even the power of writing (and therefore of communication in general), leaving them completely unable to so much as communicate their love to the other members of their herds.

(Her hands are Thief voices, crying out to fallen gods for deliverance. They go unanswered. Her hands are the voices of the Sluggards, insofar as the contents of Sluggard songs can be even vaguely rendered in Confederate One. Their song is one of mourning and of the acceptance of their fates. Her hands are the voices of the Carthons, running through justifications to the listener, crying as their once-children force them to choose between being slaughtered and slaughtering the objects of their love, along with all the innocents that have been captured to maintain their way of life.)

She tells him that it was not enough; the Thieves could not lift all Alteri out of poverty and obscurity. She tells him of the crowning achievement of the greatest Alteri minds, of the technological advancement that would, at last, allow Alteri society to become something beautiful and justifiably dear to all Alteri, even the lowest of the low.

She tells him, at last, of the Liars.

The Liars are unique among the peoples in this story - they have never known freedom, and cannot mourn the loss of it. This does not mean that they have never known happiness. They weave it in their hearts, out of hopes and dreams and madness, building new worlds for other less-real pieces of themselves to explore and delight in. They exist in constant pain, and more than that, in constant exhaustion. They persist by feeding each other exceptionally comforting lies, by living on air and interrupted dreams. They speculate, dimly and confusedly, about what it would mean for everyone to be safe and well and for the pain of their existence to reach a level they can bear. They refine the arts of poetry and narrative, unlocking more of their power with every subsequent generation, until a randomly selected Liar can do what she has done, laying line after line of poetry with near-flawless meter for hours upon hours of story, spinning up quilted epics from a patchwork of ancestral stories whose authors (insofar as any of them had single authors) have long since been forgotten. Their tragedy is that they cannot consider doing more than imagining better circumstances - they've lived on lies so long that they've become addicted to them, unable to break their shackles rather than merely sing on in spite of them. She tells him stories, of course, of those who tried, including an abbreviated version of Kalo's tale. She offers a handful of other tightly-spun myths that have been ruthlessly edited down to their simplest forms, sorted so that their heroes become weaker and less capable and meet worse fates over time, as the Liars collectively become less and less capable of taking useful real-world actions, retreating further and further into poems and songs.

(Her hands no longer sign things. Her throat and lungs and stomach ache, but mostly she cares that her brain is screaming to be allowed to rest, because she's pushed it to the very limit of its attentional capacity and held it there for longer than she thought possible. She does stumble, sometimes, but not often, and never for more than a single moment or line at a time. Her training and certainty carry her forward, even as her heart aches in her chest and she worries that she might collapse before she reaches the very end.)

Eventually she thinks she's gotten the story of the universe across, successfully weaving in the idea that every player in this story has been or will be destroyed by their very best qualities - the Carthons by their mercy and desire for knowledge and equality, the Alteri by their ambitions and pride and love for their own, the Liars by their stories and their resilience and their hope. This is where the thing that Imrainai calls a tragedy would end, but her story does not.

She tells him that there lived a woman who fell in love with a star. She loved him for his beauty and for his song and for his constancy. In time she learned to sing his star-songs back to him, and in return he sang to her, specifically, answering her questions about all the people and empires and aliens that he had seen rise and fall. His songs were immensely sad, for the stars had seen all the universe in all its suffering, and had been weeping for it for millennia. The woman was so moved, thinking about someone trying to keep singing under that many eons of sadness, that she decided to go and be with her beloved, even though she knew that it would kill her. She thought that if she brought all her song-magic to bear at once, then perhaps she would be able to hold her beloved close to her for a single moment, before the magnitude of his light and power and splendor simply obliterated her. She hoped that, for at least one moment, the two of them would be happy.

Her beloved was horrified. He begged her to turn back. When she refused, the star grew panicked; he tried to shrink away from her, tried to make himself smaller and colder and darker and less magnificent, desperately hoping that he could turn himself into something that she could hold without instantly dying. When the woman reached him, he was a tiny dying husk of his former self, too cold to sustain himself. She flew to embrace him, hoping that her touch would save him. You can't, of course, warm the stars with your hands, not even the dying ones. Even in his last moments of life, he was still too hot for her to touch without burning herself. But because he knew that she would die without him anyway, in the freezing cold of space, he returned her embrace, and then he died.

But the woman didn't. Her body was heated from within - gently at first, and then like a deadly furnace. She realized that there was a star-child inside her. Naturally, you can't hold a star-child in your body for any great length of time, no matter how powerful your magic is or how small and cold its star parent was when it was conceived. With the last of her strength, she prayed to her people's god of life and death, knowing that he would kill her in exchange for any request he granted. She asked that her child, at least, be spared from the consequences of her mistake, and that it be allowed to live freely, without a master, as its father would have gone on living if she had not caused his demise.

The god asked her what she had brought him. A few moments of her already-ending life? What was that worth?

And so, with her dying breaths, as the star-child burned her organs and the blackness of space froze her skin, the woman sang. She was a master poet, and was able to pitch her appeal perfectly to her audience, even if the audience was a god.

The god let her die. That was only fair. But he lifted the child out of her body, cradling it and raising it as his own, telling it stories of its mother's bravery and foolishness and love. And as he watched this half-Liar, half-star child grow, he grew to love all other things that reminded him of her, and began to look for a way to free humanity. And so he seeded a planet with life, one Liar life for every life that he had taken in all his years as a god of death. The people of this planet grew up free, without alien masters, and called their planet Earth. It was the people of Earth that built the massive gate in space, although they were never quite able to bring the project to completion.

She tells him how, ten years ago, Earth was finally conquered and brought under the joint control of the Alteri Confederacy and the Carthon Empire.

(Her mind is on fire. She internally begs herself for assurance that it will not be much longer, that everything will be all right very soon. She digs her nails into her hands, since she can't bite them, stabbing herself hard enough to bleed, letting the pain give her the final burst of clarity she needs. She doesn't stop composing her poem for a moment.)

She tells him that several weeks ago, an Alteri slave named Imrainai Tellari was unknowingly impregnated on the orders of her master, with no thought for whether she was ready for a child or whose child in particular she might be ready for. By coincidence or fate, this slave passed through the Earth space gate and was taken to Valinor, home of the Elves and the Valar, who believe that individual lives are worth more than planets and that all true stories will end in triumph. She tells him how much she has loved living here, how important it is to know now that there exist people who live freely and try to do right by each other. She tells him that she has never, in all her life, wanted so badly to be allowed to go on living. But she's less than a rounding error, one story in a pile of trillions, and the more she wants to live, the more she wants her entire species (and the Alteri, and the Carthons, and the Thieves, and the Sluggards) to be able to do the same. To experience this same overwhelming sense that things might be able to get better.

She wants her child - if she has one - to live, and to be free. Even if she isn't there to see it.

(Her bleeding hands sign the translated lyrics of a lullaby, in which a baby's mythic and apparently nearly immortal mother sings goodbye to all the stars in the universe as they wink out and die, at the end of all things. She acknowledges that she can't stay forever, but she promises to hold her baby for exactly as long as it takes the heat death of the universe to destroy all that remains of her.)

 

  

She pauses. She breathes. Her voice shakes, when she speaks again, either from nervousness or from sheer physical exhaustion.

"Eru Ilúvatar, creator of the most beautiful story characters that I have ever seen or heard of - I have told you a story. The very best story I have. Will you tell my child a story, in return? One with a world that she likes as well as I've liked this one?"

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The man listens. 

He weeps.



"I want to help you, Imrainai," he says. "I will give you a shard of my power." And he reaches out to touch her hand.

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That seems - good, probably?

She holds very still and lets him do that.

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"Now," he says to her solemnly, "you can make anybody do anything you want. I hope this helps you help your people."

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- well that's terrifying. You can't say it isn't helping, though.

" - thank you," she says, quietly.

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His hand dissolves in hers. So does the rest of him. 

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Okay. Well. 

She's alive.

 

She walks back the way she came.

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They're waiting for her.

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She's trembling.

"He said that - he gave me the power to make anybody do anything I want."

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" - oh.

I - guess there is probably a way to use that really carefully to end the war."

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"Yeah. Probably."

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"It was a beautiful story. Very terrible, but very - deep."

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"Thank you."

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"Do you want to go back to Valinor now?"

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"Yeah. I think so."

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So they get back on a shuttle.

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She's very quiet on the way down. She doesn't sleep, even though she's very tired now.

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The Elves sing. Mostly about her story. They seem to have all heard the story and not the conversation afterwards.

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Weird.

It was a very good story, though. She's glad it wasn't lost and she's glad she didn't know that anyone else was watching at the time. Insofar as 'glad' is an emotion that she's capable of feeling right now.

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They land in Tirion. Fëanáro and his family and some other people are waiting for her.

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"- is he going to help?"

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"He said that he was going to give me a shard of his power. And then he said that he'd given me the power to make anyone do anything I wanted."

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"Did he say anything about... how you do that, precisely, or is it something you could conceivably do by accident."

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"He did not say any other things, really."

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"He didn't say anything else?"

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"He said - " her voice takes on a slightly different tone - "'I want to help you, Imrainai. I will give you a shard of my power. Now you can make anybody do anything you want. I hope this helps you help your people.'

"And then he vanished."

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"Okay. I have no high confidence predictions from that. He didn't start with a shortage of ways to make that happen. Aesthetic guesses would probably be something like being able to influence coincidence so people get railroaded into choosing to do things as you like - rather dangerous to try or rely on - or maybe just seeming like an authority when you issue commands, like he used to do to the Valar all the time, which is safer to check but still a potential mess like... every possible implementation of that. Ugh. I'm so sorry."

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Nodnod.

"I'm - going to not try to use it until people have decided what I should do with it. But I don't know whether it's happening anyway."

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"You might not want to phrase things in the imperative till we learn more. Or... dwell on wanting people to behave differently."

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Nodnod.

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"If we're very lucky the Valar will be able to get any detail out of him."

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"Okay."

...she's just going to stand here quietly until someone tells her what to do, she thinks.

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"Did you want to go back to your friends from your ship?"

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"I - kind of want to sleep. I guess."

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"Okay. Let's head back to the guest room here, then."

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She can follow them back to the guest room, then.

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"I suspect you want me to leave you alone," he says. "So I am going to annoyingly stay, for ten more minutes."

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"....I appreciate this, because this would be moderately reassuring, except that I don't actually super want you to go, and - also I kind of want to see people take actions that lead me to believe that I am not accidentally mind controlling everyone around me, which probably kind of complicates the process of figuring out whether I'm accidentally mind controlling everyone around me."

(She sits on the bed and shivers and tries very hard not to want a hug.)

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"- gosh," he says, smiling. "That does seem really tricky. Hmm - we could fork me, and put one fork in a hologram machine talking to a projection of you, somewhere far away from here, and then one of me can stay here talking to you, and then if their behavior diverges we'd have some information."

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" - you're really very good."

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"Oh, I didn't make the holograph machines, some other people figured that out while I was working on lightleapers."

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"Not that. Although I suppose it's good that someone did. Just - wanting to help."

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"Everyone's going to help. There's a lot to do."

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"Yeah. That makes sense. I guess I meant - not minding interacting with me. Even though the whole thing is kind of creepy right now." 

Unless she made him not mind. Aaaaa.

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"I'm really curious whether there's a range or a - granularity - limit or if you can just want all the Alteri to stop having a war, and all the Carthons too."

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"Yeah. I guess I am also curious about this."

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"But probably you should sleep first. And eat. - and talk to your friends from the ship, I think there was something important they were waiting to tell you until after you'd spoken to Eru."

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Nodnod. "Yeah. That makes sense. I - really am tired."

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"Nine minutes. I don't want you to bite your hand again but I want to do the test the way I thought of it originally."

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She laughs a very little bit. "One minute won't hurt me."

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"We're all very proud of you."

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"Thank you. I guess - at least he really liked it."

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"Yes. I think he's - well, I think he wants you to succeed. He's just kind of horrible even when he's on your side."

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"Well. If we succeed then I think it'll probably be worth it."

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Nod. 

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"I just - I don't want to hurt anyone. Or - overwrite anyone to be more convenient to me. And - maybe I also want things that conflict with that, but - I don't want to be - unsafe."

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"I think probably if you can't control it you'll have to live on a very specialty planet which people are warned about before visiting but lots and lots of people will choose to have a version there, really they will, you won't be alone."

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"Well, if I really can't control it, then I definitely won't be."