I'll work on it.

Oh, you know what I could do? If you have thin fabric that lets light through, I could embroider a lot of my favorite flowers on it and then I could make a little tent with sticks and thin fabric and then I could hide in my tent and then I think I would be fine. 

Or if you have a loom and wool I could make the fabric but that will take longer. 

If you don't have wool it comes from sheep.

This poor adorable incredibly earnest child.

I think I can get fabric.

That would be great! I can unravel my sleeve to get the thread for the flowers, I don't know how to spin thread that's fine enough for really good embroidery.

If I can get fabric I can get embroidery thread.

I could also just stay here.

The church unfortunately doesn't let people camp out here. If it did it would stop looking this pretty kind of fast.

That makes sense.

It could let people stay if they scrub all the floors and walls every day?

I think if we asked they would just suggest a place that was much less pretty. People here mostly don't care as much as you do about everything being pretty.

That's really good.

Yeah. It seems like it would be pretty hard if we did.

I mean probably then you would make things that you could live with. Or maybe you wouldn't have stopped having farms. Farms're plenty pretty if you're thoughtful about what you're planting. That's why I thought I'd earn a lot of money and then buy us one, I know how they work and they look nice.

We have farms, just, like, big ones with machines that feed lots more people than the little ones. We also have the little ones, but people mostly don't live purely off the food they grow on them.

Also, I admit that subsistence farming beats what I'm currently doing, but I don't think it's really, like, a super great way to live?

The people I have talked to who farm seem happy. It is probably not as fun as being a prince of the Noldor but one assumes that there is correspondingly less responsibility. And I am sad about it compared to being a prince of the Noldor but I think that might be because I miss my parents instead of because farming is a thing to be sad about in its own right.

I think - farming is really important for the kind of society where nobody can read, but this society doesn't really need independent subsistence farmers, and it's hard to feel good about spending all of your time doing something that other people don't really need you to do.

Lots of people do things other people don't need them to do. 

Sure! Just - not all the time.

I do want to help people but it's easier to imagine figuring out how on a farm than figuring out how here.

It seems very possible that we are imagining different things. But we'll see.

Nod.

I'm gonna read for a bit and then we're gonna have to go home. OK?

Yeah. Can I sing here?

Yeah. That's fine.

He walks cautiously forward and sings, louder than he was singing earlier. 

He looks very happy.

Adorable kidnapped probably-being-traumatized tiny child.

She reads for another hour and then lets him know that they have to go home.