"Oh, good," says Lagl. "My family thought I was silly to want one. But sometimes it's nice."

She smiles. "It's really nice." 

"So what are you gonna want to do, longer term?" asks Kunol.

"Dunno."

"My power is noisy when lots of people are around. I might apply for a wish to fix it or something. It doesn't turn off."

"Your power?" asks Lagl.

"People aren't quiet even when they're not talking. Everything they say and mean and want and can't say and don't want is all jumbled and screaming."

"Like osanwë?" asks Plumub.

Lagl and Kunol are not thrilled at that idea.

"Different. I think. Maybe. I can't not."

None of the orcs are sure if Elves and Ainur can not.

"Does this thing have a subspace transmitter?" Plumub asks Lagl.

"Yeah. Why?"

"I want to call my therapist."

"Your therapist? What does your therapist have to do with anything?"

"She wished on subtle arts and took classes in Warp."

"Oh. Yeah, okay."

She curls up, miserably.

"You okay?" Kunol asks.

"Dunno."

"Do you not like therapists? Some people don't."

"Not really."

"Plu, she doesn't like therapists."

"Mine's -"

"She says she doesn't like them!"

"...well I don't know what else to do about always-on osanwë she doesn't like!"

"It's okay," she mumbles. "I don't like the screaming more."

"I mean, we could just try to get it escalated straight to the Empress," says Kunol. "She's not an orc, that wouldn't be orcs failing to manage orc things."

"It doesn't batch," says Plumub.

"Are you sure? Hey human, are there lots of you back home?"

"With my power?" she asks. "There's lots of humans. Planets and planets. There's the Reavers, which are people like me the Alliance drove insane. More insane than me. They took the planet Miranda. It's theirs now. There's thousands and thousands of them. There's lots of people like me. A tenth of a percent of the population. But most of us aren't trapped listening to all the screaming. They can't hear anything, not consciously. I could intuit things before, but not everything. Core population is over thirty nine billion. Border population's nearly seven billion. Rim's got about one billion."

"...okay, that's kind of gotta go to the Empress," says Plumub.

"Ugh. I'll subspace Representative Buth," says Lagl.

"What're they like?"

"We haven't met them," says Kunol. "She'll get somebody in Buth's office and they'll get her on the comm and she'll talk to the Empress about it. Buth's all right. From the Interregnum."

"Interregnum?"

"Uh, huh. I never tried to explain the Interregnum to somebody, I don't have kids yet. So... orcs're a created species. A god called Melkor made us. Melkor did his... thing... for a while. Then he was put in prison for hundreds of years by the other gods of our world. Then they let him out and he did some more of his thing. But orcs still existed, in between, and things were sorta different then. Buth was born about fifty years before the end of the Interregnum and then died ten years in and when everybody came back she ran for representative."

The idea of 'when everybody came back' is... Interesting.

This world has a lot of weird stuff.

She nods.

"I died when I was like four, so I don't remember all that much from then," Kunol goes on.