"They have translation magic."

"It might not work on encoded Quenya."

"...cute, but no, I didn't pick up enough to have a conversation, and anyway I bet Curufinwës are good at codes too."

"Probably." Sigh.

"Thanks for the thought, s'pose."

"Do you want me to - stay with you? I don't have magical powers unless you think you can teach me some of the songs or something, but..."

"I don't think that'd necessarily help."

"No. Not necessarily. I'm sorry, would you prefer to be alone?"

"Yeah. I think so. Thanks though, you seem very decent and I'm only partly convinced that that's a worthless filter."

She walks him to his room and then goes back.

She's there alone with the guards. 

"He went to talk to his god."

"It must be inconvenient to need to do that aloud."

"Oh, do they? I thought he just didn't want me watching. Or interjecting."

"I suppose I don't know." Sigh. "So, what should I be imagining about being a hive-mind, is it like having a lot of forks and being in constant telepathic contact with the ones in range or is that inadequate to understanding it?"

"I don't think that's it, no. You could - imagine disagreeing with a fork, right, if you had different experiences and came back into contact - we mostly think as one entity."

"How's that?"

"I'm not sure I have a good analogy for you. If you imagined having a million times more working memory, and it let you - do you have musical instruments where both hands do something different -"

"Yes."

"So you could do that with a million times more limbs. That's closer than imagining separate people telepathically connected."

"Is there latency, though?"

"Yes. In practice the thousands on a planet are more coherently one entity, and everything happening elsewhere comes in later."

"So the planets' batches are like thousand-armed forks of each other?"

"I'd want to talk to someone with a fork before I answered that confidently but maybe. When the updates come in they generally- fully propagate across everyone, you don't have planets that disagree on things either."

"How's that, what's making you more similar than forks? Something about the averaging process within a low-latency area or something?"

"I don't know how your forks work. We're not just sharing thoughts with each other, we're also sharing things that are lower-level than that? Skills, connections between contexts, what's salient..."