She is slower than the mirror-faced snake, and for some reason it is choosing to chase her, and she is not in dense enough forest to lose it by going up a tree or between a couple too narrowly spaced for it. So it catches her before emergency services can turn up.
And then she is somewhere else, in a not particularly attractive room next to a person who looks sort of off somehow.
"Excuse me," she says, taking a step out of his personal space.
"I'll grant you that but if it keeps up at this rate you're going to run out of guest rooms! What did turn out to be the other one's story, anyway -"
"He says he's also visited Arda but had a worse time. You two should probably, at some point, talk."
"All right. Should I do that before I get to work on the translation?"
"I'm unclear on whether - you've seen a problem exactly like this and think we can dramatically improve peoples' outcomes if we just knew about it, or if it's less promising than that."
"It might be that Dwarves are also just inherently more law-abiding or better able to interact with complicated systems or something than humans and copying them won't help with... whatever issues you are attempting to address with slavery. I think the process of translating the book would be a more systematic way to shed light on that and any other adjacent issues than just guessing."
Nod. "For what it's worth, slaves get the decent afterlives at the same rate as everyone else if they're not mistreated, and mistreating them is illegal, or I'd be treating it as much more of an urgent priority."
"It does seem likely that afterlife sorting as a priority has some policy implications and this could be one of them somehow. The book won't have anything to say about that."
"It's certainly our top priority but we'd still be interested in how other societies do things."
"Our pleasure. - my impression is that he had a very bad time in Arda. So just - keep that in mind."
"He attributed Valinor's peace and happiness to mind control and - beyond that, I can't really point to anything specific - he just seemed like he expected everyone to be manipulating him -"
"Mind control? Oh dear. That's - I suppose it's not the most reassuring thing I could say if I tell you they stopped, is it, but they have, and I don't think it could conceivably have accounted for all the peace and happiness, most of that is just our natural dispositions, which I suppose you could call mind control by Eru if you want to equate alterations after the fact and initial design?"
"He's a human, though, they haven't done anything like that in much longer than he could have been alive unless he's some sort of human who ages much more slowly than your kind."
He does this.
"Hello. I'm Mirelótë Ambela. I was also transported here by some kind of snake creature."
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