One of the three tribes of Elves. We're considered the quarrelsome and inventive and intellectual ones; the Vanyar are considered the joyous and reliable and content ones; the Teleri are the traditional and communal and simplicity-preferring ones; they're sort of formed by voluntary association so there's probably something to the stereotypes but they're hardly airtight.

All right.

Should I get you a place to stay in the city?

I'd appreciate that. I will also need to know how to get food and so on here.

You just - walk down the streets and get it.

...you will have to be slightly more explanatory.

I think we're hitting some kind of important cultural difference. If you walk down the streets there will be vendors with carts with food. And if the food smells good then you take some. If you find this unpleasant you could get enough food for two months in one go and then keep it at home.

How are the vendors compensated?

Compensated?

Why do they spend time hanging out by carts distributing food. There are food carts where I live, too, but one has to trade them standard units of value they can then trade for other things in order to receive food.

Oh, they just enjoy doing it. That's a clever system but I don't think it'd catch on here.

So you just happen to have a convenient fraction of the population who really like cooking in large batches and handing the food out.

I wouldn't say it's a very large fraction of the population? But - people like doing something that matters, if one were unusually good at cooking and liked it then sometimes one'd cook and give away the food and get compliments on it because it's satisfying. 

...nothing in Valinor is scarce, that seems like it might be relevant?

That does sound relevant, although I'm not sure it explains the interest in food service occupations by itself.

It's a good way to show off a skill and do something nice for lots of people at once and accrue - hmm, social capital? Everyone who's eaten your food and enjoyed it will go out of their way for you if you need something. I'd do it if it weren't beneath the dignity of my office and so on.

Huh, it's also fairly uncommon in my world for that much social capital to change hands when food is sold.

Maybe that's because you're trading it for the units of exchange and so it ceases to be in any sense a favor owed. Or maybe Elves and humans are fundamentally different. Anyway, people like making food and offering it on street corners and you can get food that way for as long as needed, or if I get you a room in the palace we have servants.

Either sounds fine. I do eat a lot - for a human, I suppose I don't know how much Elves eat - if I'm doing much magic.

I doubt food will be a problem. You can get clothes and supplies and so forth in the same manner. How does your magic work, what can you do apart from the precognition?

I can lucid dream. I can talk to people in a manner roughly like this - verbal only no translation, I would say 'no range limit' but I can't reach anyone from home here so, no intraplanetary range limit. I have an eidetic memory. Current active project is attention expansion and my existing abilities improve in fits and starts as I practice them.

Ooooh I am very very jealous. There's no way to acquire these, people either have them or don't?

On the lunar eclipse closest to one's twelfth birthday one turns up with the potential if one's ever going to have it. ...I'm not sure what's making this place so bright and silvery, maybe you don't know what an eclipse is.

Valinor is lit by giant shiny trees, and I do not know what an eclipse is.

...well, my planet is lit by an enormous distant ball of flaming plasma called the sun, and also orbited at closer range by a ball of rock called the moon, which the light from the sun bounces aesthetically off of, and when the planet is precisely between the moon and sun and casts a shadow on the moon, that's a lunar eclipse.

Huh. What an interesting lighting system. If you don't have gods, who built it?