Whatever just happened did not exactly knock the wind out of May but it seems psychologically similar enough that she's gonna... sit here and see if anybody hops out of a wagon to see if she's all right, before she gets up and starts walking.

She's less confident in this decision but simultaneously less confident in all other possible decisions after inspecting the three languages and not recognizing any of them.

A wagon stops after a couple of minutes. 

The person who jumps out is - very short, and very very hairy, and wearing clothing made out of more metal than there's really a case for putting in clothing if you are not about to have a medieval battle. It's possible they're in fact about to have a medieval battle -- they're armed -- but the body language is friendly.

Unintelligible question?

"Hi, do you speak English?"

- unintelligible question in a different language?

"Parlez-vous Français?"

Nope. Gesture one way down the road, then the other way down the road?

Is "helpless shrug" a useful answer?

From his - their? - the person's reaction it is perhaps not the most useful of answers.

They hesitate a minute, then pull out a notebook and draw a map. It's not a very well-drawn map. It has mountains on one end and a big elaborate city under the mountains and a scribbly city at the entrance to the mountains. It has a road. It has an ocean at the other corner.

Mountain? Ocean?

Headshake. Does that even translate?

Someone else comes out of the wagon. They have a quick conversation that involves some gesturing at Mabel.

Mabel, wagon?

Her prospects of surviving in this strange place without engaging with civilization at all are not great and this seems like a friendly enough example of civilization so far. Mabel wagon, yes.

They seem cheerful about this. The back of their wagon is big enough for a human, even though the seating area at the front is really not. It's carrying barrels of probably-fish-by-the-smell. They appear to be normal barrels but they're somehow cold to the touch.

They make no particular effort to talk to her.

That is reasonable, since they do not share a language. She will find someone more interested in being a language tutor sooner or later. Maybe the barrels are magic; these people could be some sort of critter. Doesn't explain where she is, though.

Her wagon is quicker-travelling than most of the wagons and pulls up to a little rest stop on the side of the road about half an hour later. 

There are three other people here. They look much closer to human, but not all the way there; taller, more symmetrical, elaborately dressed. They're singing an elaborate three-part song while some short hairy people swap out their horses.

The riders in Mabel's wagon walk up to one and ask a question. They turn and stare at Mabel intently.

"...hi. Do you speak English?"

They look disappointed. One of them says something to the short hairy people. Whatever it is, it delights them - one claps.

They know a couple more not-English languages they can try on her?

Nope. Sorry tall pretty people. She will attempt "parlez-vous Français" again but without much optimism.

Nope.

Everyone seems bemused by this but not especially alarmed.

Horses are swapped out and her wagon keeps on going.

Okay then!

It's a very idyllic countryside. Her hosts play a dice game, with unfamiliar metal coins as stakes. 

It's apparent after a little while that they're headed up towards the mountains. It's apparent a little while after that that there's a city at the end of the road, full of grey stone towers.

Pretty.

She's not sure she'd describe it as unearthly per se, but it does seem - less than Earthish.

The wagon stops outside the walls of the city, which are very elaborately artistic up close and clearly don't serve much of a purpose beyond that, as they're easy to hop over and some children can be noticed doing it. Other hairy bearded people come to unload the barrels of fish. There's some pointing at Mabel. There is fetching of a local tall-person, and then - a fair bit of haggling and pointing at Mabel.

Eventually the tall-person is persuaded to pay quite a few of the unfamiliar metal coins.

...May is going to very charitably assume that she has not just been sold, what with the general lack of coercion she has experienced here, but she does eye this transaction dubiously.

Smiling tall person thinks that she should come with him!

Surrrrre, smiling tall we're-going-to-assume-not-a-slave-trader.

The city has winding stone-paved streets and lots of buildings, all of them pretty and all of them according to the same theme; either the whole place was one person's artistic vision or these peoples' tastes are very uniform. There are greenhouses and workshops and a market, though tall person seems to be trying to skirt those in favor of back streets which are more likely to contain painters, short hairy people, cats, and children. He smiles at her encouragingly every once in a while. They're headed towards the center of this town.

She's gonna bolt if she sees anybody chained up or being displayed on a block or anything like that. Till then she follows the guy, occasionally tripping on the stones.

Eventually they reach a side door of a building. It's not locked, though the plants growing over the entrance suggest it is used very infrequently, and he has to cut them away with a knife before opening it.

Encouraging smile!

Yes, you have this much benefit of the doubt, tall dude. In goes May.

It's a little auditorium with benches and desks and podiums up on a small informal stage and a chalkboard for writing. It's full of people. They all turn to look at her, delightedly. 

"Do you speak English?" asks the tall guy very carefully in an uncanny imitation of May's voice.

"Yes. Do you?"

The audience listens raptly and takes furious notes.

"Yes, do you?" he repeats after a second.

"- are you trying to learn Eng- is this some kind of linguistics department -" She sighs and heads for the chalkboard, looking for a clear space.

The chalkboard has only a little bit of writing in the corner, in an unfamiliar alphabet. 

"are you trying to learn Eng - is this some kind of linguistics department?" chants the whole room very softly.

May writes the alphabet, upper and lower case each in columns. She recites it. Then she sings it for good measure. Then she starts spelling things out, including "Do you speak English?" and going on from there.

Her audience diligently takes notes and echoes her softly when she says things.

She guesses she is teaching the aliens or whatever they are English now. She gets kind of into it; she does numbers, and points at various sets of people to explain one of those pronoun charts they use in French class to conjugate verbs and then conjugates some verbs for them.

It's not actually very long before they're asking halting questions, both for the linguistic content - "you are here, I am there?" and for the, well, explanation of what is going on.

"You are of far?"

"Did your horse become lost?"

"Were you trying to come here?"

"I am from very far away! I do not have a horse. I was not trying to come here."

"Where were you going?

"I wasn't going anywhere! I was sitting in one place, far away."

"Is it common where you are from to - end up places without going anywhere?"

"It is not."

"Is it common where you are from that humans cannot interact with osanwë?"

"Osanwë?"

"Edhel - like us - we talk without sound. Humans can normally hear us, and we can hear them."

"Humans where I'm from don't do that! Maybe I can learn how."

"Humans don't do it but humans can hear it and we can hear them, typically."

"Well, I never met any Edhels before today." Since she is no longer writing on the chalkboard, she pulls her sandwich out of her backpack. It is in a plastic bag. Chomp.

They want the words for plastic and for sandwich!

She will teach them the words for plastic and for sandwich!

As they get more vocabulary words it becomes clear that this group of people -- the most progressive linguistics guild of Ost-in-Edhil, which is the capital city of the nation of Eregion, they tell her -- is internally divided over their priorities; in particular some of them really want to know all the words in the English language and some of them really want to know everything she does about electricity, computers, combustion engines, and the manufacture of plastics, and one guy really wants to know how societies run by humans work. The first two groups settle on alternating, while the one guy tries to come up with technology or linguistics questions that get at what he's actually curious about.

Does she know any of the properties of the metal used in the machines that manufacture her clothing?

What's the etymology of 'etymology'?

How do zippers work?

How much dialectical variation is there among speakers of English? Is all English mutually intelligible?

What sorts of materials can cars run on?

What technology does her society use for people to give input on the functioning of the government?

She is pretty sure most metal involved in most industrial processes is probably steel which she thinks is iron with carbon on it but she isn't sure how to translate that since she doesn't remember the atomic number of iron, though she thinks carbon might be 8. She doesn't know anything about this topic really and should not be taken as an authority on it.

She thinks the ology part is from Latin and means "the study of" and the "log" part means maybe words in particular, no guesses on "etym". It's commonly confused with entomology, the study of bugs.

She has no idea how zippers work but they can look at the front pouch on her backpack while she zips and unzips it.

There is lots of dialectical variation among English speakers since lots of different countries have it as a major first language and it's the most popular second language in the world. People who are technically speaking English don't always understand each other unless they're trying and succeeding at moderating their accents toward a sort of global standard; her own accent is not that far off the global standard, because she is from a country that talks a lot like the neighboring country that produces most of the popular movies.

Cars run on gasoline which is made from petroleum which is icky stuff found underground.

Her society is a democracy; adults - people a couple years older than her - can vote on representatives who in turn vote on policy.

“That’s fascinating. Does it work?”

"Democracy? ...sure. There's a saying it's the worst system of government except for everything else that's been tried."

“What else have you tried?”

"I'm not sure I have enough words to describe it! People have tried having kings - one guy running things and his kids inheriting - and some people have tried doing a thing where 'the people' rule -" She does air quotes, then digresses briefly into explaining quotation marks with chalkboard examples and the gesture as a derivation thereof. "- only it winds up being not quite that because that's so impractical you can't even actually try it... I don't know if it would work if telepaths tried it, maybe it could. Uh, I don't remember other things off the top of my head, usually to talk about this I'd be looking at a reference. Incidentally is one of you going to give me a place to sleep and something to eat at some point, that was my only sandwich."

“The humans native to here can eat all our food, though I think there are other groups of people who have problems with some of them. I can arrange for a house.”

"I'm not allergic to any foods I know but if I see anything I don't recognize I might not try it if it makes foreign humans sick."

“Allergy is the thing where humans get sick because their protective system mistakes flowers for a threat?”

“That’s real?” someone asks.

”Yes. They died of it back before, maybe now they don’t. Or maybe they do more because their protective systems are better.”

"Yeah, those are allergies, some are to flowers and some are to cats or foods or whatever. I don't have any. The protective system is called the immune system. People sometimes die of allergies where I'm from but not usually, we can test for them and there's a chemical called epinephrine they can carry around to stab into their legs if they eat the wrong thing by accident that buys them time to get to a hospital. They're still annoying though."

"That's so horrifying," someone says.

"How common are they?"

"There are lots of humans we can talk to if we want to learn things about humans, go away and bother them and let us ask her about words -"

"Do 'hospital' and 'house' have the same root?"

"I think we'll reconvene tomorrow, actually," he says. 

There are some glares but they stop arguing.

"Hospital and house might have the same root, but I'm not sure. I think hostel is related to at least one of them. And hotel."

She's making herself very popular here. 

Giggle.

"Would you rather your own house or a room in an existing one? I don't think anyone'll bother you in your own house but some representatives from the other linguistics guilds might conceivably take it upon themselves to show up and try to get your attention."

"Why do you have an extra house?"

He looks slightly uncomfortable. "Oh, it's not mine, it's the city's for groups of important visitors from other countries - is there a word for that? when they visit. But they're not here right now."

"Diplomats if they're there to talk about how the countries should behave toward each other? Why are you allowed to put me in a diplomat guest house?"

Way more uncomfortable! "Well, no one's using it and you need a place to stay."

"...yes. Does no one else need a place to stay?"

"Not that I know of? There used to be some Dwarves who didn't have houses but then we figured out how to solve that without making the rest of them very angry at us."

"So anyone can just put people in the diplomat guest house as long as there aren't diplomats there?"

So! Uncomfortable! "- well, anyone could ask me and I'd probably say yes unless there was a good reason not to."

"Why would they ask you. Who are you. - I don't think I've introduced myself, my name is May."

"It's really lovely meeting you! My name is Celebrimbor. People'd ask me because it's useful for coordination, see, for there to be a known person who you'd ask about that sort of thing. So people don't book the houses for different people at the same time."

"You're telling me your job is booking house borrowings?"

"- among other things? Do you want some kind of different housing arrangement, we could just give you some money and you can go buy it from the Dwarves."

"Who're the Dwarves? Were they here learning English?"

"No, they're the other major race of people in this city, the ones who found you and brought you here. They have hair on their faces and they're all very short."

"Then I don't see how I'd buy anything from them. A diplomat house sounds fine, I just want to know if I'm going to be in trouble for being in it if you aren't authorized to give it out."

"You will not be in trouble for being in it."

"If you say so."

He relaxes considerably. 

The diplomat guest houses are very spacious and extraordinarily pretty and have lights that are always on (but can have shades closed over them) and running hot water. On the whole it's very nice for a place for people who haven't invented industry yet. There's a large spread of foods on the table. "We thought probably some would be suitable. None of them are ones we know humans to be allergic to."

May looks them over for anything recognizable. They have humans, not in this city but somewhere, maybe they also have wheat and cows.

Yep! And fish and potatoes and carrots and rice and honey and lentils and clams and a pineapple. Also many non-recognizable things.

"I recognize a lot of this." She helpfully names things. She serves herself some of everything she's pretty sure she can identify.

"Oh good!! Is there anything else I can do for you right now?"

"What should I expect tomorrow?"

"Entirely up to you! I know that the linguistics guild would like to have you back for more lessons, if you'd like that, or there are three other formally recognized ones and probably a few eschewing official recognition if you'd like to go there instead. Or you could have a tour of the city. If you'd like to live among humans I can write to arrange you transit to human lands, though it's a long journey and I don't think the winds are favorable for it this time of year. Or you could just stay and rest a day and consider all of that later, if you wanted."

"Like, will more food be delivered or is there a way to keep all this good overnight, is there a way for me to get a change of clothes..."

"Clothes! I'll have someone send clothes. Some of the food would keep, some won't, but unless you're particularly attached to it I'll have someone pick that up too and deliver more in the morning."

"Cool. Delivery. Okay, how do I find you or anybody else who knows a weird amount of English now if I need anything else, since I... haven't learned to do telepathy yet?"

"My house is right across the street from here, and hard to miss -" he points at what is, sure enough, the most distinctive and largest house on the street, with stone walls of rather spectacular craftsmanship and a roof lined with telescopes.

"It's pretty. Well, everything here is pretty."

"Thank you!"

"What can you tell me about the telepathy so I can see if I can learn how?"

"I would be fairly surprised if you could learn how to do it. Elves can do it from birth, though in early childhood we have a hard time partitioning the thoughts we mean to send and the ones we want to keep private. Dwarves can never do it at all. Humans can't do it themselves at all, but they can learn how to partition their thoughts so only the ones they mean for us to interact with are there for us to interact with."

"I mean learn to do what the humans here do. What happens if they don't learn to partition their thoughts?"

"Well, then, if they have thoughts they don't care for Elves to notice they probably don't visit us very much. I guess if they wanted they could be particularly credible diplomats?"

"If they don't learn a specific skill about it you just hear everything they think?"

"Yes? That's how it is for Elf children who haven't picked it up yet either. I think it's more of a problem for Elf children because humans mostly don't live among Elves. - you can try not to listen but it's not any easier than not listening to sound."

"No wonder there aren't any humans around."

"I don't think that's the reason, most humans who want to learn it don't have much trouble."

"Oh? How do they do it?"

"You need a way of representing them separately in your head -- thoughts you mean to share and thoughts you don't, that is -- some people imagine some thoughts are outside their head and some are inside their head, some people imagine them in different colors, or tucked away in shadowy corners, some people think in different languages -- and then meditate on that until it's a matter of habit."

"Huh. Maybe if I do that backwards I'll be able to telepath at you."

"Do you have a particular reason to expect that to be true?"

"No, but it would be convenient if it worked, wouldn't it?"

"I guess? I don't mind talking, practicing new languages is one of the most wonderful of all experiences. It's like - holding a newborn baby except without the worrying you'll drop them."

"I could teach you words faster though. Like. That's a pineapple but how am I supposed to tell you what a pine or an apple, both of which are separate things, are, unless I happen to spot one around?"

“Pineapple is a compound word?” He shakes his head distractedly. “Osanwë is useful but you shouldn’t worry if it doesn’t work, I really wouldn’t expect it to be something you are doing.”

"Okay. But I'll think about it and see if I can finesse something."

“- okay. Is there anything else we can get you right now?”

"I think I'm set for the time being. Thanks!"

"It's our pleasure."

He ducks out.

May figures out something resembling a bath since she was on the road in primitive conveyances much of the day and...

...sees if she can hear "public" Elf thoughts from nearby, if she tries it. If they're doing it on purpose...

They seem to mostly use public thoughts to communicate to each other the tune and lyrics of the songs that they sing as they wander around. Lots of people also make it possible to look through their eyes or listen through their ears.

That's weirdly cute, the singing coordination thing. She practices not getting too dizzy listening and looking through other sets of apparatus.

Then she goes to bed.

In the morning a different Elf has brought clothes and a large tray of breakfast foods, weighted towards the foods she ate last time. 

"Thank you!"

"My pleasure! Is there anything else I can get you?"

"Do you know when the linguistics guild meets? I think they're hoping I'll come back."

"I don't know when they meet normally but I'm sure if you'd like to go back, they'll all be there."

"Okay. Can I test something on you? Celebrimbor explained how telepathy works and I think it'll be good for vocabulary if I can make it work."

"Sure."

Testing?

"That worked fine! You know, it's really very strange that it didn't in the first place."

"Humans where I'm from might be different in a lot of ways."

"I guess if some of the southern humans had - different responses to osanwë - Númenor shouldn't have noticed?"

"I think I'm from farther away than that." Om nom breakfast.

"If you're from another world it's strange you're a human at all."

"I agree! It's also strange that you guys and Dwarves are so human-like. But it's probably not stranger that I'm a human than it is that you have pineapples."

"Dwarves are designed after Mahal's remembrance of the Plan, with the alterations he thought wise, and humans are supposed to be in some ways like Elves, though I don't know why the particular design choices that were made won out. I guess the pineapples are just as strange."

"There aren't Dwarves or Elves where I'm from."

"Most humans never meet one and I suppose they get on all right - well, I suppose they don't but that doesn't seem to be why, not directly."

"Hmm?"

"Humans mostly don't get on all right, they mostly die horribly. But it's not like not knowing any Dwarves or Elves is a big problem for them, not that I know of."

"Why do they mostly die horribly?"

"Sort of the ultimate question, isn't it? Lord Celebrimbor thinks we'll fix it someday, not that he'll say so, and I know in the west they say that they get something better once they die so it's all right for all that, and then some people say that Morgoth tainted them and some that they were created that way and I don't see how you're supposed to tell, aside from what sounds nicest."

"No, I mean, what's killing them?"

"Oh, it's not anything in particular -- or it's lots of particular things but they're all a consequence of how their bodies just give out after a century or three. Is that not how it is for humans where you're from?"

"You're saying Elves and Dwarves don't die of old age."

"If that's the falling apart after a while, yeah."

"Is 'a century or three' very approximate? I don't know how long your years are but human deaths by old age don't vary by a factor of three."

"Well, some of them have some Elf blood, and then Númenor was made specially for the survivors of the wars of Beleriand, and the gods changed the humans, too, when they were making Númenor for them. They're taller and more like Elves and live longer, even the ones who don't have Elf blood in them. Elros Tar-Minyatur lived to five hundred but I don't think most of them make it past three."

"Oh, I see. How long are your years?"

"You've been here for a day. There's three hundred and sixty of those in a year."

"Huh. Okay. We have three hundred and sixty five and one quarter day years. Plus maybe some extra hours but those don't come up often, the correction for the quarter day comes up every four years."

"That seems a little inelegant."

"Well, sure, but what are you gonna do?"

"Your designers didn't want a round number?"

"Wasn't designed."

" - I'm having a hard time imagining how that could be. Do you mean the creator's not very like a person with intentions you can understand?"

"No... although now I'm curious if you have, like, laws or customs or anything about discussing creator deities I should know about."

"- uh, I don't know if there's a law about it but people will be very annoyed if you say that Morgoth was great?"

"Never heard of them. Anyway, no, I mean it's not too hard based on what my civilization has learned to explain most things without referring to creator deities, and there's not much reason to postulate them otherwise, so lots of people don't. Some people do, to be fair, they just don't have very good reasons."

"Huh. I don't know if it'd be obvious we were created -- instead of just somehow happening I guess -- if we hadn't met the creators. It feels like it'd still be obvious but maybe it wouldn't really. Maybe it is for Elves but not for humans because it's more obvious why you'd create Elves than why you'd create humans."

Snort. "It's not just that we haven't met a creator, it's also things like digging up fossils - old bones and stuff - showing that we have a common ancestor with other ape species, plus all the stories of creation we have available aggressively contradict each other and don't make much sense."

She seems quite satisfied by this. "Sounds nice."

May has had sufficient breakfast. "Once I'm changed I can go teach some people words."

"Do you remember how to get there or should I walk you?"

"I'm not positive I wouldn't get lost. I'll go see if I can figure out foreign clothes, shall I?"

She nods fervently. "That sounds good."

May goes and attempts to figure out the foreign clothes!

They're not very confusing.  They are, of course, very pretty. There are scarves and ribbons, and then shirts and pants and dresses and robes.

May puts on a shirt and a pants and sticks her head out a window to see if it's cold enough to want to put on a robe or a scarf or anything over that.

It's warm out.

So down she trots in just the shirt and pants. "All set."

"Oh, it would be good if you could wear one of the scarves or the ribbons, too, for your hair. You don't have to if it's - inappropriate culturally or something, just, it's -- typical."

"Uh, it's not especially inappropriate, but I don't know what in particular you want me to do with a scarf or ribbon here?"

"Just tie your hair so it's not loose, or cover it if you'd like it loose?"

"Is a ponytail like I had yesterday all right?"

"Yes, that's fine. People know that many groups of humans don't observe this custom, it's just, we do, so..."

"Ponytail's no trouble. Don't know how I'd make it stay put with a ribbon since I've never tried that, but I still have my elastic." She goes back to the room she slept in, locates the elastic, and comes out beponytailed.

Then they can walk back on over to the linguistics guild! People stare a bit on the streets.

"Why're people staring at me, is it just that I'm a human?"

"Humans aren't that rare. Probably it got out that you speak a new language and you're from very far away and Lord Celebrimbor thinks you're interesting."

"He was avoiding telling me exactly what his status was yesterday."

Now she's uncomfortable! "Well, it's complicated."

"Would it be easier to explain telepathically?"

"I don't think so, not really. Probably someone who knows more about things than me should try, if it's important to you."

"It's not that important as far as I know but I don't know why it would be so complicated and/or secret."

Uncomfortable shrug. 

"It's nothing, like, bad, is it?"

"I really think you should ask someone else about it probably. It's not any question about Lord Celebrimbor's character or qualifications, if that's what you mean?"

"Is it about... hm... is there someone else who wants his job, or vice-versa? Is he... sitting regent for someone with dementia or something? Is... there a conflict with another state which has something to do with his status?" She remembers to send a telepathic translation for "regent" and "dementia".

"Oh. Not any of those exactly, though I suppose if we made him King it would cause problems with our neighbors? But that's not - it's not as if he'd be King if only they didn't mind."

"Do you have a king?"

"No."

"What do you have instead?"

" - Lord Celebrimbor."

"Are you using 'Lord' to translate a specific title or did you just grab that off the word 'landlord' and figure it was close enough for somebody who... is... in what capacity in charge here?"

"He built the city with the Dwarves, as far as they're concerned he owns the bits of it he hasn't sold to someone else? If he says to do something people do it? If there's a dispute that affects the functioning of the city people bring it to him and abide by what he says, unless they're Dwarves, and even then they'll take him more seriously than anyone else? When diplomats visit they visit to make agreements with him."

"Okay... is he not king because this isn't a big enough place to be king of? Is it not okay for someone to be king of some Dwarves and some Elves at the same time or to be king of only some of the people in a place?"

"No, Eregion's the whole continent, this is just the biggest city, but he makes decisions for the rest of it too. It's - it's really very complicated, weren't you going to teach people English?"

"We're not there yet. Also you're getting English practice. Is this information embarrassing? Is it dangerous? It's not just too complicated for the words you have because you said telepathy wouldn't help."

"We're almost there," she says, after pausing long enough this is almost true. 

"Should I ask the whole guild?"

"No!!!!"

I wasn't even alive back then but there was a war among Elves and hundreds of thousands of people died and it was Celebrimbor's father's fault and no one likes to talk about it because half of them survived it on one side or the other and they're so, so, sad, whenever you bring it up, and it wasn't his fault but he looks exactly like them, you know, and he is exactly like them, everyone says so, except not a murderer at all, and I wasn't even alive back then and you can't just go around demanding to know every secret you hear about and should mind your own business you obnoxious -

And she bursts into tears and rushes off.

Well, May did not have this result in mind.

She attempts to find her way back to the guild place. She gets a bit turned around and tries seeing if anybody is thinking helpfully directional thoughts.

They are not, but someone comes to find her after a bit. "Were you looking for the guild hall?"

"Yes, thank you."

It's even more crowded than the previous day.

"Hi, everybody."

Here are some sketches of animals, can she name them? How about these plants? How about musical instruments? How about systems of political philosophy?

"I actually figured out how to do the telepathy thing if I try, so you don't have to draw everything. That's a goat, that's some kind of songbird but I couldn't tell you the species, that's a cobra... palm tree, fern, rose... I guess that might be a lyre? I'm not sure we have anything exactly like it. That's a harpsichord or a piano, I can't tell which or if it's really either by looking. That's some sort of flute. ...if humans from my planet have invented this philosophy exactly I don't know about it by name, but I guess some kind of, uh, anarchist capitalism?..."

Someone has attempted to translate a popular work of fiction into English and has a bunch of vocabulary requests that are necessary for the translation, from the room in the house where you greet visitors to the apparatus used for underwater diving off the side of a boat-that-looks-like-so to the permanent pair-bond between a man and woman who come together to be one. 

That's adorable. May proposes "front hall" for the first and "marriage" for the third and the underwater diving apparatus she knows about is snorkels and scuba gear but she isn't aware of either of them having to do with any specific sort of boat.

They ask questions all through lunch, which some people bring in for them. If they know anything about the confrontation earlier, no one mentions it. 

She doesn't derail the language lesson about it. She does keep an eye out for Celebrimbor while she is explaining the nuances of tone in the word "well", the American spelling reform, and digressions into French comparative grammar.

Delightedly participating in all of this. Once you're paying attention you notice that once he has a question everyone stops calling out theirs, but he asks questions infrequently enough that it's not really very conspicuous.

It does take her all morning to pick up on the pattern but she pays attention in the afternoon. (And she explains pines and apples.)

In the mid-afternoon he observes that 'residence' is from French when 'home' isn't, and  'agreement' is French when 'deal' isn't, and wonders about whether there was a French-speaking professional class and if so when that was. In the late afternoon he asks whether "concede" connotes losing something as well as learning something and whether there's a word for the learning which connotes that this was desirable. When they conclude for the day he attempts to flee, and fails because the room is packed and has been steadily getting moreso.

May does not know a ton of history but there was some French colonization of her continent like a couple hundred years ago and one province of her country is still majority native Francophone. Also it's classy to say things in Latin, which is the fairly direct ancestor of French; other non-Romance stuff is probably Germanic or stolen from unrelated languages' pockets opportunistically over the years. Concede means losing a conflict especially by giving up gracefully when it's clear you're not going to win, or by making a small-scale step back in a larger-scale disagreement. There are various learning-related words, though it's a little hard to pull one out of her vocabulary for random combinations of verb and connotation without a thesaurus to look at, and alas she did not bring one.

When everybody's leaving, she remarks to Celebrimbor, I figured out the thing.

Hmmm?

The telepathy thing. Like I said I was going to.

Also I offended the woman you sent with breakfast this morning and I'm sorry about that.

- oh. I'll, ah, convey your apology. How did you figure out osanwë?

Well, it sounded like around here the default is that humans have all their thoughts readable and have to learn to privatize them, but none of mine were readable, so I thought maybe my default is different - pretty sure my kind of human has not been interbreeding with your kind for a really long time, or been exposed to ambient thought waves, or whatever else might be going on - so I am deliberately publicizing some things instead, and deliberately trying to listen for things. It's not very hard.

All right. Do you need an escort back to your home tonight?

I can probably find the place.

Curious if you have a long term agenda besides learning English and probably also what I've got on French.

Electricity, probably. If there's something else you think should go first we can do that.

Electricity sounds like a reasonable first pass unless you're missing like... germ theory? Germ theory's probably more important.

We didn't know that one but Elves don't get sick, really, that one I think will progress faster if we pass it along to the humans.

Yeah, more for humans than you guys, but it's a big one. How does one go about passing on germ theory to humans around here?

We've sent a messenger with our notes so far along the road to Círdan, of the Grey Havens, the Elven city on the sea. They trade with Númenor. It should reach them within a month. You could be there not much slower, if you wish to go to Númenor, but I think they'll progress quickly from the notes, and their navy can share what they learn with the other human civilizations faster than we can ourselves. 

Okay. Thanks. I can go into more depth on that sometime if that will help.

What should I do about dinner, is that delivery indefinitely or what?

Does that work for you?

Sure, if it's not inconvenient for you.

We have the means to make food free for everyone, like they do in the West, but the Dwarves think it'd be a mistake and I think they're right. It's certainly no trouble to do it in a specific unusual case like this one.

You can do that and the Dwarves think it would be a mistake?

Yes. Dwarves think it's very important to build societies where desirable actions get better outcomes than undesirable actions, or you destroy all the channels by which people can communicate what they value and you end up trapped in - bad locally-satisfactory places where no one gets any rewards for looking for a better one. 

There are people in my country who just kind of live on welfare forever but they are not obviously the same people who would be radically innovating anything.

I don't think I pay for my food. I'm not sure. I don't track my accounts. I'm certainly not very motivated by paying for my food. I think there's probably a way to feed everyone without running into those problems, and maybe you found it.

I'm not sure I'd recommend the Canadian welfare system as a beacon of perfect institution-building but it, like, beats torturing people into finding jobs flipping burgers. People wind up motivated by other things to get the high leverage jobs. Like for one thing welfare isn't cushy or very respectable.

Is torturing people until they find jobs a common approach to this problem?

Not literally, but if there's no way to get food for free and you don't have any anything, one gets hungry, you know?

The crowd has thinned out enough that May starts picking her way toward a door.

So there's a few different approaches that have been tried here. There's where people who can make food make enough for everyone and no money changes hands; that works in Valinor and works in places under martial law and could maybe be made to work under comparable social pressure elsewhere but that's a lot of social pressure and - I shouldn't, and don't know if I could.

There's the approach where people all get money and can use it to buy food, which raises the question of where you get the money -- you can try to just make enough money personally off the things you invent to fund everything the whole city needs, but if you offer this -- particularly if you offer it to Dwarves and humans -- you get lots of them and a situation that's very dependent on your continuing to have the income to fund the whole enterprise, and destitution if you ever run out.

There's the approach where you pressure or require all the rich people to help you, but the Dwarves won't if they think you're doing something harmful and distortionary and there are few enough rich Elves you run into the problem with the last thing and besides I don't like having laws that aren't the same for Dwarves and Elves. 

And the Dwarf argument here, as best I understand it, is that there's also the option where you do none of those things. And remarkably, if food is plentiful enough and if you keep working on ways to produce it with less effort, everyone still gets fed, just through their own efforts and those of their families and through the thing where other people can make money by providing them with food. And unlike the other approaches, this one isn't an institution, I'm not deciding who qualifies and how much they get and whether they're cheating and who is supposed to help me pay for it and who gets cut off first if it starts to cost too much.

And some people get hungry. And it'd be unconscionable, surely, to let some people get hungry just because you don't want the hassle of one of the first three solutions but what Dwarves would say is that 'hassle' is the wrong measure of the thing wrong with the first three solutions. I realize it's awfully convenient for me to believe them.

I'm not saying I can't see the argument in the abstract... maybe Elves and Dwarves don't have too many people who are too disabled to get a job or who were being supported by somebody who dies suddenly?

I'm not very good at walking. It's been warm here but in winter at home I get around in a chair with wheels because otherwise I'll just fall over and need to use something like that to get around anyway. And some people are way worse than that at moving around, or they've got a brain thing, or whatever. Or some people are, like, stay at home parents, and then their breadwinner gets hit by a truck, and they have four kids they could handle all right before that but not so much after. Welfare's, like, the safety net, in Canada, and there's lots to complain about but having no safety net is a scary idea.

I think that might be more of a problem for humans because they get sick and die so much, and because most kinds of work are harder for them. If it ever came up I also wouldn't expect any problems from feeding widows with young children, that's not a category that grows because you're incentivizing it.

Elves who are very sick mostly go to Valinor.

Well, you might get people trying to have a kid quicker so they would qualify if anything did happen, but probably not a rash of spousal murder so much.

What does going to Valinor do, do they have hospitals there or something?

The Valar do healing and also all the plants are nutritious and good for you and the weather's always temperate so there's really a limit on how far wrong things can go without anyone interfering to make them worse.

Sounds nice. Sounds like kind of a made up amount of nice, actually, I kinda wanna ask "and are the streets paved with gold" -

- no? Gold's a very poor paving material. There's gorgeous cut gems embedded in the stone, though - like this - sparkly road.

...it's a reference, not an infrastructure suggestion, but that's pretty.

What's it a reference to?

I'm not actually sure what the original is, maybe the legend of El Dorado. People like to talk about things being excessively made of gold as metonymy for wealth they could go grab some of. There is a movie about talking mice in which they say the streets are paved with cheese instead.

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.

Were they too grabby?

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.

Kinda like not having one of those back home.

It sounds really lovely.

Lookit this.

That's -

- how -

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.

Do you happen to know any more details than that?

Not very many.

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.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

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.

Ah. No, none of those.

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 -

I mean, I imagine he'd change his last name. But I'd also imagine nearly as many references in like... comedy media, as in more serious whisperings about whether that was a problem? It would seem sort of funny if Hitler's kid was the president or whatever of... uh... Singapore... and personally inoffensive about it. It might depend on his politics spin, he might have to have his speechwriter routinely decry Naziism in the most emphatic possible terms.

We look almost exactly alike.

Hitler's appearance is mostly famous for the mustache and slightly less so for a very dorky haircut, so that would be fixable in the Earth hypothetical.

Shiver. If it'd help.

I'm not saying, uh, whatever culturally concerning hair-related thing it sounded like I was suggesting.

I knew that! In theory. Human hair is different and has a lot less significance culturally.

I'm glad I showed up with a hair elastic, I wouldn't know how to make a ribbon work and it's too hot for a scarf!

Maybe we can switch to offering human visitors those and they'll find it less of an imposition.

You haven't asked about - where I was at the time or how old or -

Should I be? She seemed pretty clear that you are not yourself personally Hitler Junior. I suppose you could be committing unrelated war crimes of some kind but I don't really have a reason to think so.

You can ask whatever you want, or not, it's just that usually people want to know what they're - 

Shrug.

It's not that I'm not curious if you're up for a history lesson, but her description did not leave me very anxious about this. There was a war, survivors on each side are trying to coexist now, being immortal's probably complicating the heck out of that, hundreds of thousands of people died - I know that's a large number but Hitler's war did in like forty million and I think twelve million of those were, like, civilians he had rounded up and executed because he didn't care for their ethnic background and stuff, not even all war casualties - and you resemble your dad, who at least some factions blame for this war, but even someone reporting that fact to me and emphasizing how much you look like him took care to say that you weren't a murderer.

There is no significant dispute about who's at fault. 

Definitely don't have enough information to contest that, though there's a saying on Earth that history is written by the victors.

I think people are often fair-minded about the possibility there's plenty of fault to go around until you start sacking refugee camps, and that seems like a reasonable enough position to me. 

I concede that I can't immediately explain that one charitably.

It was very terrible, and they're all dead now, and hopefully we've learned enough it can never happen again.

It seems to be... a problem of not having enough information, somehow?

Yes. If people'd known how to be better then they wouldn't have been - that.

...huh?

I don't think people start out intending to be mass murderers. If they know soon enough that they're on a bad path they can be more careful and more responsible and have a better system of advice and counsel in place and put checks on their own power and not turn into mass murderers.

I mean, I don't think newborn babies are like "I'm gonna grow up to be a mass murderer" but at some point it does seem sort of... a little much to assume they were just confused and incompetent.

They were very competent. And they knew. But I think there was a point where if they'd known it'd end like that they'd have done things differently. We hadn't had a war before, people hadn't really thought about what it'd mean.

Huh. Okay.

They had flaws but they could have worked on them. At some point. It may have been a very very long time ago.

How long ago are we talking here?

Couple thousand years?

For when they could have started personal development projects or for when they actually did all this?

The war began almost two thousand years ago and ended about fourteen hundred years ago. Probably the best time for the personal development would've been before that.

I still don't have like, a book's worth of context on the local stuff, so I probably shouldn't keep making unenlightened Hitler comparisons.

I certainly don't mind?

I think Hitler decided to round up and murder twelve million people of ethnic backgrounds he did not care for because this was in fact his goal and he would not have been in a position to tell in advance that a personal development project ought reasonably aim away from that.

- well I don't think that...the people who did this... were making exactly the same mistake as that. Because that sounds like a pretty easy mistake to avoid making.

You'd think. I don't wanna say people commit genocide all the time on Earth, it's still, like, noteworthy, but we do have to have a name for it.

- do you want the whole story? I'm not the best person to tell it but I can, if that's easier than - trying to build a lot of bridges between concepts that don't quite line up.

If there's a better person to tell it I don't wanna make you go through it all the umpteenth time.

I don't mind. I don't mind thinking about it - I need to -

Valinor had three tribes of Elves, each ruled by a King. The Kings were the men who'd first visited Valinor and then returned to persuade people to join them there, and they built Elven civilization in Valinor and resolved disputes and - I don't actually know when the concept was introduced that kingship should be inherited, but it was introduced by the Valar. They know bits and pieces of the divine plan, but not only do they not know very much of it - it sometimes seems like they know specifically inconvenient bits of it.  Elves sometimes have the capacity for prophecy ourselves, and it works self-protectively; you don't see things that'd inspire you to change them. But the way the Valar's foreknowledge shapes things is beyond that. If they'd said that kings chose their successors from other tribes, so that the peoples did not become too separated, we'd have done that, or if they'd said that the people - elect the kings like you do it -

The King of the Noldor was my great-grandfather. His eldest son was my grandfather. My great-grandmother died giving birth to my grandfather. It's said that this is because he was an unusually gifted child, and took too much out of her. It's said that he carried the Marring of the world into Valinor. It's said that she foresaw his future and it killed her.  People say lots of things. And on this in particular - the first evil in all of Valinor - the more convenient narrative was shifting all the time. 

My great-grandfather remarried. He had other sons, they didn't get along. My grandfather ran away as a child, married very very young, they reconciled only tentatively and much later.

- I'm sorry, this must all seem terribly irrelevant.

It did occur to me to wonder how the definition of relevance expands by the time you're thousands of years old but it's not like I have another appointment.

It's important because it's where they made mistakes. My great-grandfather favored his firstborn. Everyone did, he was a genius. The best in the world at - I wanted to tell you 'everything he put his mind to' but only because then it'd be less obvious - he was the best in the world at linguistics. He invented writing. He learned the language of the gods, which no one else has succeeded at. He added tens of thousands of words to Quenya and there was a debate over every single one of them. He was the best in the world at engineering. He invented metalworking techniques, he invented magic artifact compression techniques.

He was brilliant, he was ambitious, he understood things clearly, he worked constantly - that might have been one of the errors. Most Elves sleep at least every other day and spend some of their time resting and singing and interacting with other people. It's important, lack of sleep causes people to have a harder time separating their own internal experiences from their model of the world and improves pattern recognition at some cost to spotting patterns that aren't there. And if you go too long without interacting with other people then it's easy to find the things in your head more compelling and more important than they are, it's easy to get worse at the skills involved in interacting with people and then the barriers to doing it go up and the pattern is self-reinforcing. 

People didn't know all of these things back then but they knew some of them and just gave him a pass on everything because he was the brilliant tormented tragic gifted crown prince. That was - he was making all these gorgeous things they enjoyed, while there was obviously something wrong with him, so that was the narrative that sat most comfortably for a long time. 

Humans can't sleep that little. Every other day would be unsustainable even with, like, drugs, I think. - you probably knew that.

If you want to imagine how concerning an Elf who sleeps less often than every two nights is I think the right reference for a human would be - someone who rarely sleeps for more than three or four hours? 

Okay.

He shakes his head distractedly. Anyway. The King never clarified the succession. This was because, while my grandfather was his favorite and everyone's favorite, he was clearly not temperamentally suited to be King. No one said so, of course. They had not succeeded in cultivating an atmosphere where you could. I don't think they were trying, because -- there are so many people who have opinions about you, when you rule, and hearing all of them all of the time if they're unfiltered is very upsetting, since cruel things cut deeper than compliments, and so there's an instinct to not have to hear upsetting things about the time. And that's all it takes. You just have to clearly not particularly want to hear upsetting things and there they are, all gone.

My grandfather was not suited to be king but nobody talked about it. The King was hardly going to name someone else his heir. It'd destroy their relationship, and also it'd feel absurd and insulting, to try to give someone else the right to rule my grandfather. And then my uncle Maitimo was born. My uncle Maitimo was as intelligent as my father but socially gifted, too, and he picked up on all of this at a very early age and helpfully positioned himself as the person obviously qualified to actually take over when the King retired, and so it shaped up that the plan -- which no one spoke of, as it'd involve acknowledging things they weren't acknowledging -- was for my grandfather to become King and then pass it down after a symbolically appropriate but certainly not long, stretch of time to his firstborn, who was more than worthy of it. 

This was a fine plan in some ways but some of how it worked depended on how it wasn't explicit, and that created a lot of space for people to believe they were acting on the King's will, later. 

If I die or am incapacitated or if the people close to me doubt my judgment or wellness, there's a group of five people here, three Elves and two Dwarves, who are to make decisions in Eregion in consultation with Cirdan, our neighbor. If it's an emergency then they each have absolute authority in different domains, with my advisor Nismal in charge. Everyone knows this, little children know it. There are probably problems with this way of doing things, too, just no one's discovered them yet.

I can't instantly come up with a problem with it assuming it's worked this long and all the people in question live forever.

He nods fervently.

There's an evil god. Or, well, there's a god whose domain is causing as much suffering and destruction and death and horror as he can, and so everyone calls him the evil god, and I don't feel like they're being very unreasonable. When free he spends most of his energy building and running enormous, elaborate torture prisons for hundreds of thousands of people. If you torture Elves for long enough you get very different-looking creatures, called orcs, and if you do it the right way they're in constant pain without you doing anything and you don't have to torture them. He made orcs and now there are millions of them. His name is Morgoth, in the language spoken here. He was in prison when this whole story started.

I assume you're about to describe a jailbreak.

No, they paroled him.

I assume I do not particularly need to observe that this was one of the mistakes in this story.

Seemed a safe bet.

They didn't - we didn't - he'd been in prison a very long time. He said he regretted it deeply. They thought they could contain him on parole. It didn't seem right, back then, to have an infinite sentence for a crime, no matter how horrendous. It seemed like maybe no matter how bad things had been we ought to be capable of making them better, of welcoming the people who did them back into society. 

That's not how it works. Some people need to be gone from the universe forever and it's not even particularly because they deserve it, though in this case it was. But - a mistake made for good reasons, unlike most of them. Most of the time we were just being conflict-avoidant or overconfident or carried away with our own cleverness. Here we were trying to be good. 

She nods.

He was let out on parole. He ran around doing errands and earnestly complimenting people, nothing we knew to find suspicious. 

There was another thing that had gone wrong at the same time. 

My grandfather -- and my uncle -- shared a fondness for being so extraordinarily clever that no one else could ever follow what was clever about their plans except for the astonishing success rate. They did it because they got tired of explanations, I think. They were brilliant, and things were obvious to them that it took weeks to spell out to everyone else, so instead you just said - trust me - and you were right, every time, and eventually people just learned to trust you. 

Instead you should explain every step of your logic on anything important, even when your internal experience is that everyone is being a dull idiot who doesn't get it and is trying not to get it just to spite you and has clearly not devoted even three of their brain cells to actually listening to the very clear explanation you have just given them. Because - it's not just about getting what you want on one occasion, it's about, in general, whether the people around you will notice mistakes when you actually make them, and they can't, if you've repeatedly trained them to believe that literally everything you do is the next inscrutable move in a brilliant game that'll come to a satisfying conclusion in front of them in a few minutes or a few years. 

...that sounds very time-consuming but I suppose proportionately to how overelaborate you're trying to be in the first place? Who-all do you consider yourself obliged to explain to?

Ideally anyone who's concerned? In practice mostly the advisors I mentioned previously and Círdan and my insurance company. It is time consuming. That's why it's tempting not to do it, which is why they did not do it, which is why later when their capacity to plan well was - fundamentally compromised on a lot of levels -- people still trusted them and followed them and ignored obvious evidence that the limb they were following them out onto was a very shaky one.

Maybe you can save time by mostly delivering written copies. Why your insurance company?

They're very precise and rigorous and well-calibrated and hate it when I do risky things. It seems like a good thing to have in one's life, an insurance company.

Maybe yours are better at things than ours, nobody speaks very fondly of them at home.

Huh, then why don't they switch?

They're all like that. Also for medical insurance in particular I think there's a problem where you can't get them to cover anything you already had so if you're like, diabetic, you're stuck unless you marry somebody who gets insurance through their work and can tack you on that way, or something. I have never personally shopped for insurance and the medical insurance problem is mostly an American thing, Canada has socialized healthcare, but there's lots of Americans on the internet so one hears about it.

- I don't offhand know the exact thing that's wrong just from that description but if you let some Dwarves in and didn't arrest them unless they did any physical violence it'd probably get straightened out pretty quick.

I believe there are non-physical-violence-related regulatory complications to insurance.

That'd do it. 

Anyhow, Morgoth. He arranged for rumors to reach the right people, he arranged for people to overhear conversations that were either about something else or never even happened at all, he persuaded my great-grandfather's younger son that my father meant to have him expelled from the city. He persuaded my grandfather that his half-siblings were plotting to usurp him. And of course, just like that, he made both true.

...did he have one of those prophecies telling him that would work, because that seems like a plan you'd have to be really confident in to bet on.

I don't know. He took a thousand years going about it, to be clear. Maybe many other comparably complex plans failed without a trace.

I guess that'd do it.

Yes. The specific mistakes there were avoidable but the general situation was an evil god taking a thousand years to find whatever mistakes there were, and you can't plan on not making any, not on that kind of timescale.

The King's younger son called a public meeting and urged the King to denounce my grandfather. My grandfather drew a sword and threatened him. The King didn't do anything - that was a mistake, you should have law enforcement in kingdoms and it should apply to important people no matter what - and the Valar stepped in and banished my grandfather from the city for a hundred twenty years.

...okay. Did the Valar have some formal relationship to the government or did they just sort of do whatever because they were gods?

The latter. 

That can't have helped with having law enforcement apply to powerful people at all.

The King was very angry. My grandfather was very angry and - off-balance, he had a lot of things he needed pulled out from under him. Of course sometimes that happens to you if you threaten people with a sword. But - 

- the city sorted itself. People who felt my grandfather was being done by wrongly left with him. Instead of an exile, a - mass relocation. The King went with us. His younger son he left to rule in Tirion. 

I guess that was another mistake, or maybe several of them. If one of your kids threatens to kill another one of your kids and then you have to pick sides probably you should pick the victim's, though personally I solved this by not having kids, and I think that maybe mingling the personal and the political is inevitably bad.

Did the king instigate the mass relocation or did he just decide to move when it was clear a bunch of people were gonna?

I think there was a lot of complicated dancing towards the brink of consensus but he could certainly have made it not be a mass relocation if he'd thought it was a bad idea.

Mistake: if your population is experiencing a lot of tension don't put all the people with one view in one place and all the others in a different one for several decades, I think it polarizes things worse and makes people forget they were friends and neighbors.

I guess you could technically follow that advice by having it be more than several decades? I'd hesitate to blanket forbid secession.

That might've been better. Well, we needed to be unified to stand a chance against Morgoth but it would've been better aside from that. But no one thought they were emigrating, they thought they were waiting out the Valar and then going to come back and set things right. 

Some decades passed, and the Valar decided to host a feast and celebration at which there'd be a reconciliation between the two brothers.

Do they throw good parties?

The consent of the participants would probably improve them.

Ah. That does seem an especially important ingredient if you're trying to throw a reconciliation party.

They ordered my grandfather to attend. He did. They didn't order the rest of us to attend so we all stayed home, in protest. I was three hundred at the time -- it's hard to give equivalent human ages because our development isn't just slower human development but I looked like a human ten-year-old.

Morgoth caused a cataclysm that extinguished all light visible from the surface of the world -- there's a story there but it's complicated and not directly relevant -- and in the dark he came to the little city we'd built and he murdered the King in an exceptionally gruesome manner and he destroyed the city and all of our possessions and then fled the continent.

He fled with one possession of particular importance. My grandfather had been working on a project that'd let Elves live outside Valinor. Valinor has healing properties, and sustaining ones; Elves who have lived there cannot live elsewhere indefinitely, not by any means we know of. He'd invented one. It was a light source and a magical artifact focus and it replicated many of the properties of Valinor, and he was sure he could get the rest out of it. They were called the Silmarils and they looked like this -

Sparkly.

I think that if once you have some of a thing going without it kills you, we don't usually call that a healing property, more a thing with, like, withdrawal symptoms.

It very much angered my grandfather. Reversing it was his highest priority for nearly a thousand years.

Does this all mean you have an expiration date in spite of being an ostensibly immortal species?

It means we'll have to go back someday. 

Right, I guess that works, go have a spa day and you're good for another few millennia.

No, uh, they don't let people leave. We'll have to go back and then we'll live in Valinor again. The departure last time was - very very bloody, and it's no longer possible at all.

Unless I fix it, right, but - but you need to hear this story before you form an impression about that -

Or if May fixes it! She doesn't say that. Okay.

They rode on horses to the gods' feast to tell my grandfather what had happened. The rest of us stayed -- you couldn't see anything, you couldn't do much of anything, and the air was very heavy and full of particulate matter that settles in your lungs where there's no good mechanism to get it out and you just feel it there all the time. - this happens to humans too but they don't feel it, it just kills them.

We waited in the dark for a week. 

I do not know much of what happened at the gods' feast because all the people telling the story were telling a story, even more than people usually are. I know that the gods were demanding my grandfather give up the Silmarils, that they might be used to restore light to Valinor. I know that when my grandfather heard that his father was dead he departed the feast into the dark alone, and was gone for several days, and they were afraid he'd killed himself. They found him covered in blood, cold, alive, and he told them that they needed to return to the rest of us quickly so we could go off to Middle-earth, follow Morgoth, stop him, recover the Silmarils.

When he came back he was speaking so quickly I couldn't keep up and I usually could, I was always one of the very few people who could. It was the most important moment for him to explain himself and he couldn't do it. We needed to establish an independent Noldorin kingdom outside Valinor and we needed to recover the Silmarils to do it. Morgoth had the Silmarils, had perhaps orchestrated most of the last thousand years to have the Silmarils, and if he knew what to do with them the war was already lost, because they were a tool powerful enough to win it, in Morgoth's hands perhaps a tool powerful enough to remake the whole world however he desired it. He didn't think Morgoth knew what to do with them because the world was still here, but Valar are slow. Maybe Morgoth was being slow. The stakes were unimaginable in every respect but that was the respect in which they were highest. And no one could know. The Valar didn't know what the Silmarils could do. Our people didn't know what the Silmarils could do, beyond 'heal us'. If Morgoth didn't know yet -- and he might not know yet, every day we weren't dead made it likelier he didn't know yet -- then he could never, ever know, and if everyone knew he'd find out somehow. He said he hadn't told even us, for this reason.

And then he said that it could not possibly be hidden that the Silmarils were so important, that a war we were fighting for the Silmarils would look different from a war we were fighting for some other reason, that of course we had to keep the innocent people alive and be just and good and worthy of the weapon we were reaching for but that it wouldn't, really, look very much like a war where we weren't reaching for it, and so the thing we needed was an explanation for reaching for it which wasn't the true one no one could know, and that that explanation was going to be that they were very important to him and he considered them his own children and the only things of beauty in the universe, and he would swear to recover them from whoever would claim them, whatever the cost -

I didn't explain that. I should have. Elves can swear things. We can make promises that bind our future will, that make us incapable of turning back on our word. You can be slow in fulfilling it, for a while. You can be careless, if you're not introspective enough to catch how you're being careless, in which case you can't. 

He was going to swear to recover the Silmarils and war with any who withheld them and he wanted his children to all swear it too and then everyone could accurately predict them -- which was important, people get hurt when you're not possible for them to predict -- and also no one would have cause to wonder why the Silmarils, why at that price, if they didn't already know, which they probably didn't since the world was still here.

I've - said it the way I understood it at the time, so that you see how -

How did he know the Silmarils could do all this stuff? It didn't sound like he ever, like, tested them...

He'd tested some of the smaller things, they worked the way he expected.

I think he may have been wrong, about the big things. Maybe not - he was so rarely wrong about that sort of thing - but it may have been a possibility that loomed until it seemed nearly certain. He was wrong about a bunch of the other pieces - Morgoth had no idea. We wondered if everything, including the discoveries that led him to make the Silmarils, had been arranged by Morgoth so he could steal them later. That wasn't the case. Morgoth wore them on a crown on his head. We have no indication he tried very hard to do anything other than that. 

The mistakes were - all of this was new information for us while he'd known for years, been worried about it for years, so our objections seemed likely to be - and typically were - things he'd thought through a lot more, that made it frustrating to him when we raised them. This information should already have been known to sufficiently trustworthy people, so they weren't all reasoning from an enormous disadvantage under time pressure. There shouldn't have been time pressure. Even if he was right to think there was a chance Morgoth already knew how they could potentially be used, this strategy was only useful if Morgoth didn't know, so the plans to stop him - which were urgent - should have proceeded with urgency and this plan - which mattered only if things weren't urgent - should have waited on years of reflection. They did talk about it for weeks, but it was weeks we spent forging weapons and armor and marching back to Tirion and half-expecting the world to be consumed at any moment, we didn't get any distance. They should have told more people. More confidentiality wasn't worth having fewer inputs, we had trustworthy people.

And - and they were thinking about it entirely wrong? At its best it was a plan to take on an enormous liability as a distraction, and a lot of cleverness should have gone into minimizing the liability. Picking a wording that bound them to as little as possible, and a plan to arrange the circumstances where it'd be relevant wouldn't arise. They weren't thinking about it as a liability, they were thinking about it as a sincere articulation of their priorities and intent, but you shouldn't swear to even the sincerest of articulations of your priorities and intent because priorities and intents can change where oaths can't. 

Yeah, oaths sound pretty bad in general, I don't know if I've ever occupied a state of information in my entire life sufficient that I'd endorse taking one.

Me neither. But - we were trying to do something nearly impossible and he thought he saw exactly one way to do it and it was this and - and he wasn't usually wrong, people weren't in the habit of trying to notice ways he was wrong. They were used to trying to follow the logic, because it was always right, the error was always on your end - you'd get in the habit of trying to discover your error rather than looking for one of his -

He was sleeping even less and he was making such leaps and it was so hard to follow his explanations and those should all have seemed like warning signs, but they - seemed like reasons for urgency instead. He needed this to move forward. He needed this in order to trust people. Not that he said that, I think we knew enough to have been alarmed if he'd seemed to be deliberately leaning on that. It was just obvious if you knew him. And it was thrilling to be needed by him, because he'd never really needed anyone...

They did the oath. In a big public speech, everyone saw it. It made people upset and angry, the ones who didn't trust him as much followed his brother instead, he wouldn't explain himself, but lots of them still followed him. They trusted him. They knew he had a plan and his inner circle tacitly encouraged that, implied that he did have a plan, and people assumed they'd evaluated the plan more carefully than they really had. I think they thought they'd evaluated the plan more carefully than they really had. There'd been all these failures of imagination - we'd never had a war before, we'd just had our first murder -