"You have not said anything that leads me to make that assumption."

"I think all the Valar are doing their best because the way they experience motivations and desires is very different from ours and they don't do otherwise."

"Okay, I guess your story is consistent with 'their best is really bad'."

"It really complicates everything that the people who most famously rebelled against them were -" handwave.

"Yeah, I guess it would tend to make it seem disreputable if they got there first, though... well, maybe it's less obvious that one should get there first before they have such notable strings of bizarre bad behavior on their records..."

"It was less obvious, yes. Not - not impossible to derive, maybe, depending how one sees various things, but much less obvious."

Nod.

Yawn.

He stands. "But I've kept you quite long enough."

"See you tomorrow. Thanks for explaining."

"Of course."


He goes.

She sleeps. In the morning she works on things for a bit over breakfast, then goes to the linguists on her own, lesson plan in hand.

As usual the lecture hall is packed and everyone seems well-dressed and in an absurdly good mood.

"Good morning! I have song lyrics! Anybody have questions before I start?"

- they have a lot of questions but seem maybe a bit arrested by the promise of song lyrics.

"Now, I can't sing very well and I have been here long enough to know that not very well for a human is well below minimum quality here, but since I did get the hang of osanwë after all I can do my best to project audio memories of professional humans singing it while I'm writing up the lyrics."

These Elves are so happy!

They can enjoy various traditional and popular songs, O Canada, and those of Ren's showtunes and English-saturated J-pop May has had enough exposure to to be confident she has all the words to at least the chorus down. She provides cultural notes on them.

Elves hum and invent riffs on all of these which are extremely pretty and ask vocabulary questions -- though the vocabulary they don't know is getting rarer.

Why yes, random Elf, the English in J-pop is grammatically incorrect. No, random Elf, she does not know enough Japanese to explain why those are the characteristic errors.

After they break for lunch, May asks, "So is there an equivalent of this but for like, technology development, science, that kind of thing?"

"Yes. Fluency with the language will help people get the most out of it but it's probably best for it to be separate, and plausibly best for it to be held in Khazad-dum, because they have spaces that fit more Dwarves and they'll pay you for it."

"Is there a limit to how long I can live off largesse, here? Like, are diplomats expected to want the diplomat house next week? Or would money mostly be useful if I wanted to buy weird stuff I didn't care to explain?"

"We're not expecting anyone this year. They might come in your lifetime, they might not - "

"Okay. Probably can't hurt to have money, anyway, unless I immediately have to try to hire an accountant in a foreign language to do weird Dwarfly compliance accounting of some kind."