"They - the people who owned me used artificial insemination while I was knocked out for chip maintenance. I think."

"I don't know what that is."

She tries saying something and then spends a while looking at the grass.

"It's a technique for using stored sperm to impregnate someone," says Valentine, quietly. "In my world we use it on farm animals."

"That's - despicable."

"Usually they tell you they're doing it. So you can find someone to help you parent the baby. But - for some reason they didn't even do that this time."

She floats over and hugs the new Imrainai and does not let go for a while.

Hug.

"No one has mentioned stabbing those people, is that already taken care of?"

"We stopped the ones on her specific ship."

"Well, that's a start."

"What - problem is stabbing them meant to solve -"

"That they go around doing that to people?"

"We stopped them from doing that."

"Lot of other people doing that, where you come from?"

" - yes. It's why Eru gave me the powers, to stop them from hurting people."

"So probably at some point we should talk about how magic can help with that, or with - reconstruction afterwards, at least."

Nodnodnod. "We mostly don't have magic. Or - I'd never heard of it, before, but I guess the Quendi have - whatever Eru and the Valar do - "

"We'll probably want different words for that and the thing that these people do."

"Do you have gods?"

"Me? I, uh - sometimes? It kind of depends who you're talking to. The people I work with mostly do ancestor worship, but I know some people have gods."

"I don't think the slaves mostly need Abadar."

"I don't know who they need but they ought to know their options. And Axis is easier for slaves to aim for than anything else."

"What's Axis?"

" - so I don't even know if people from your world reach our afterlives, or if you're too far away. But in our world, when people die, they get an afterlife, and which one depends on how they lived their life and which gods they followed, if any. And many of the afterlives are - you have to have had a lucky life, to get the chance to pursue them. But some of them are available to almost anyone. Axis is the lawful neutral afterlife. It's - a nice place. I can show you sometime once it's unpaused, but it's an enormous magical city with millions and millions of different neighborhoods, and anyone can make a neighborhood if they can come up with rules that make other people want to live there, and they're all connected by portals so nothing's too far even though it's so big, and it's very confusing to navigate at first but you have all of forever. And it's safe, and peaceful, and free, and if your people have our afterlives at all it's very important to me that they know to aim for Axis, and if they don't then it's not as important but they still might benefit from the magic our gods offer their followers."