This is a long stretch of beautiful countryside, rolling hills and ancient tall trees and deer and rabbits and babbling brooks and everything.
Its most distinctive feature is a road. The road is the width of two wagons, laid with neat cobblestones, heavily trafficked - one can see six wagons on it right now, going in both directions - but not worn down in the slightest anywhere. Every hundred and twenty human paces there's a marker with an inscription in three languages.
Valinor is full of excessive wealth you can grab, that's its whole - that's what made it work.
Humans aren't allowed there, though.
Elves are very cooperative and rule-abiding and humans are less so. That's not the official reason, though, the official reason's just that it's not the divine plan.
Charming.
She's gotten out the door by now and is sidling without much briskness in the general direction of the route back to her house.
Well at this point it'd be silly to send a escort that's somebody else. Also probably he should just have done this himself in the first place and not left her pestering random well-meaning young people about the war.
He joins her.
The divine plan seems like it's very cruel sometimes but children sometimes think their parents are cruel.
That's my planet.
Some people set some stuff very, very on fire under an enclosed capsule with some people in it and they went up and took pictures.
Not very many.
Uh, there's a Newtonian law of physics about equal and opposite reactions... the fact that it is Newtonian probably means that it's wrong because this other guy came along and corrected his math or something? But I think it holds in the general case and explains why you can explode yourself upward.
People invented airplanes first. That may have been important. I remember seeing something about airplanes on a list of common misconceptions so you should not assume strongly that anything I know about airplanes is accurate as opposed to plausible falsehood.
There is no air in space and it's kind of hard to make a capsule that will not let all the air you brought along out but I think maybe less hard than making a deep-diving submarine since that's more atmospheres of pressure, just the other way.
There's also no gravity and this makes drinking and going to the bathroom and writing with pens difficult and also tends to make people throw up.
I don't remember the gravitational constant and since I don't even know how I got here or how far away here is I couldn't assume it was the same anyway but I think you can use that and the masses of celestial objects and... stuff... to figure out where they will be, so you can land on the moon if that is what you are trying to do.
Everything in space is really far away from everything else in space, it takes a long time to get to the moon and way longer to get anywhere else.
Did you get a full answer to your questions from my assistant earlier or did you still want one?
I wouldn't call it a full answer but it was enough to get me to shut up about it for the time being?
I'm happy to discuss it more if you'd like. I never meant it to worry you.
"Who is in charge and why and what does being in charge consist of" is a very weird thing to refuse to talk about in my cultural milieu unless something is fishy but I am no longer worried that actually you are refraining from accepting formal power because you are simultaneously in debt to three different mafias that can't collect till you have access to specific royal treasuries and being puppetted by a step-relation as an open secret and secretly dead yet being played by a body double and might have to marry an undesirable foreign princess if too many people called you by a more elaborate title.
I didn't think any of that sort of thing was individually likely but she wouldn't say, like, 'no, we're just awkward because he's related to some people we have cultural divisions about and formal power is mostly cosmetic around here anyhow'!
I don't - know if you could possibly have anything culturally analogous, I think maybe humans have worse options and end up somewhat more inured to humans committing atrocities, maybe it's - harder to pick out in an instant the greatest monsters in all of history.
Nah, we have an agreed-upon greatest monster in all of history. I don't know enough more-obscure history to know if the title should reasonably be contested but anybody in... maybe not literally the world, but certainly a billion people, could identify who the consensus one is. I don't think he had any kids though.
And if he had, and one started a business and became richer than most nations and then built a city and hundreds of thousands of people moved there -
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