"No one has ever deliberately killed another person in Valinor before! But they took it about how I would have expected them to."

She nods. "Anyway, I am all finished here. ...I was going to say you can walk around outside the room if you want but I think if Melody did not fix the spatial block you would get very lost. I think there is no reason not to undo it now, and you could tell us when you definitely need to be able to go to the surface, but - I am going to ask Foundation just in case." She goes quiet. 

"Thank you. Is Kalira here and are her parents all right, I want to say goodbye to her but I should know if I'm walking into a more difficult conversation than that."

"Kalira is here! Her parents are fine although they are stranded in the Pelagirs for some reason, things got very confusing in the last couple of hours. She would be very happy to see you." 

"Okay." Then once his head is his own he will open the door and try to osanwë her. Kalira? The war's over! Do you want to stop by?

Oh! Someone must have taught her to do osanwë public/private thoughts properly, at some point. Yes, I do! I will come right now!

Great!

- and he will see who else in the facility he can get a read on, just so he knows more about who is here, what is going on -

There are not that many people, several dozen (no Quendi). Most are keeping their thoughts private. The rest, judging by their thoughts, aren't from this compound at all and just ended up back here in the general chaos. They seem to be non-specialists; a couple Healers, the rest non-Gifted humans from Telumë's logistics staff. 

He'll see glimpses in their thoughts of a huge Gate, Quendi filing through and singing - a field of flowers springing up from nowhere - Tayledras mages - Quendi dying...

The mood is complicated. They're quietly triumphant, and also very tired, and - grief, pain, one woman had a daughter studying in Petras when Sauron took the city down in flames - one man is worried about his cousin's family in Karse, he's not sure if they would've been among the sacrifices Vkandis offered for the new god - another woman doesn't even know if her husband, one of the mages who frantically Gated to k'Treva Vale, is alive... At a guess it's only been about eight hours since everything happened.

One woman is currently talking to Foundation. Maitimo can only pick up her half of the conversation, which makes it pretty confusing, but she's...guilty, sad, wondering if they did the right thing...

Obviously they did the right thing. But - he's pretty sure that one of the pieces he doesn't have anymore is the piece that'd feel sad about slaughtering millions of innocent people, and if you have that piece and it's very loud then maybe it's a bit more confusing. 

He leans against the wall listening and thinking until Kalira comes, and then they can talk about birds and he can maybe direct the conversation a tiny bit to be about her post-war plans and how other people are taking the news and so on.

Kalira is kind of hard to redirect. She has very little idea how other people are taking the news, it's not the sort of thing she knows how to pay attention to, although she can tell him that people in the dining hall are very quiet since it happened. She's happy that she's going to be allowed to move back with her parents again; she's very matter-of-fact about the part where agreeing to be friends with Maitimo when he was evil, the second time when he had memories, meant she basically had to stop seeing anybody else she knew; she was allowed to send letters back and forth with her parents and that's almost as good but she says offhandedly that they probably missed her more than she missed them.

"Foundation is very good," she says happily. "She doesn't know very much about birds even though she's a god, she told me gods don't see that kind of detail so well, but I can tell her about birds! I think I want to go south. All the way south, to the sea, to see the birds that were in that book." A little shrug. "Foundation told me it could be dangerous still, even though she's a good god, because she only has lots of power here in the north, and the gods all the way down by the coast aren't allied with her yet. But I can tell people about her and she gave me directions for how to build a shrine to her, so I can talk to her anywhere, and then other people from that place could talk to her too if I told them. I think that would be good. And it's okay sometimes to do things that aren't safe, if they're good things and you thought about it. That's what my ma said when I wanted to be your friend even though you were evil." Uncertain look. "Are you still evil?" 

"That's a good question! I don't really know. I could have asked Foundation but I didn't really want the answer so I didn't. I am planning to not be evil, which is kind of like not being evil? When you get back from the south I will probably have a better answer for you."

Kalira scrunches up her face. "I think Foundation might not give you a straight answer anyway. I tried to ask her if you were still evil and she said it's a concept humans think in and not a concept gods think in? And then when I asked if we would still be friends later she tried to show me Foresight. Someone in the dining hall says her Foresight is less confusing for humans to look at than it was with other gods, because they made it to be that way, but it's still really confusing and I couldn't tell what it meant. But she said that it didn't look like you were going to hurt people and that if I wanted to be friends with you then that was a very good thing for me to do. So can we still be friends?" She looks wistful for a moment. "Are you still going to think birds are interesting? Most people don't and most people aren't evil so I wasn't sure if you only did because of being evil."

"Of course I am still going to think birds are interesting! None of the facts about birds have changed at all just because I am not evil!" This is half a lie but gives her a better set of predictions about him than the truth would. It's - oddly freeing, to feel allowed to steer the world a little bit like that, he mostly had been trying to avoid it lest it look like misbehavior. 

Kalira beams at him. "What are you going to do now?" she asks. 

"Probably I am going to leave and wander around and see the world and figure out what I want to do. I can sketch any rare birds I run across. I might help sing to peoples' crops, apparently lots of people are in disarray because so many people were killed in the war between the gods."

Kalira nods, seriously (being sad about everyone who was killed is the sort of thing you're supposed to do, and so she is sad, even though it's not interesting.) 

"I think all my cousins are dead," she says simply. "My ma and pa were scholars at the mage-academy in Petras before they went to work for Leareth who came back as Telumë. I think the other gods who decided to help make Foundation were very clever because when Sauron exploded Petras, they made it so our side got all the blood-magic instead of him, but it's still sad. They're going to come back but I asked Foundation and she thought it would take a long time because all the gods are very tired. She said 'tired' isn't quite the thing but it's what translates best." She looks down at the floor. "I think all the birds in Petras died too and maybe they won't come back, though." 

"Probably not. I'm so sorry. I don't know if birds have souls and so are the kind of thing that could come back. In Arda I think they do not, they are just made of the stuff that makes them up and if you destroy that then there's nothing that could come back."

"I think they must have something because Animal Mindspeakers can read them, but - oh, I can ask Foundation." She goes silent for ten seconds. "Foundation says that they have - mind-stuff, the way it works in Velgarth almost everything alive has a little bit of that, but it's only a tiny bit and it doesn't - hold together at all when they die? Like it does for people? So you can't bring back the same birds again. That's very sad." 

"That is very sad. I wonder - hmmm. Does it not hold together specifically because there are complicated things that human brains do that bird brains don't do? Because some birds are at least as smart as a little human baby, birds can talk and learn and make friends - so it can't just be about what the brain is doing - Quendi get souls three or four weeks after we are conceived but I have no idea what the equivalent in Velgarth is." Foundation? Do you happen to know?

The sense of a shining city in the distance comes to his awareness again. 

This is complicated and depends on facts about the world specific to Velgarth; I think it is different in Arda. In Velgarth, souls are much smaller than the total of a being - much of the living being's processes are only in the brain - and their size is proportionate to the eventual adult complexity of said being, but the slope of the relationship is greater than linear. A little human baby has a much 'larger' soul than an adult bird even if their brains hold the same intelligence.

Pause.

This system may be subject to change. The Shadowgod has already worked with Mandos to change how this works for humans, so that they can be brought back more completely.

Maitimo has no idea how he feels about birds. Probably if birds dying is actually bad then he should be all in favor of it, and against efforts to retrieve bird souls so they can go be birds again. Though Melkor and Sauron weren't particularly in favor of death, really - death was Eru's style of awful thing - 

"Foundation thinks maybe we could learn how to save birds that die. Probably not birds that have already died, but - maybe someday."

Glowing smile. "Maybe I can help with that!" Her expression is now that of someone who's wondering whether they've discovered their life's purpose. 

"Maybe! It would take a lot of magic research, I think. Improving human resurrection took another god of death and resurrection."

Kalira nods. "All right, I think I want to go talk to Foundation about that now." She stands up and smooths down her dress and gets the very polite, slightly stilted expression that she usually does when having any social interaction other than 'talking about birds.' "Is this saying goodbye then?" 

"I bet I can osanwë you from pretty far away, because we are friends. A couple hundred miles, maybe. So until you go south I will be able to tell you a little bit about my adventures."