"I'm not actually good at it but it's great when everyone's drunk. Except I think humans are less good at dancing, drunk."

"I haven't met any humans who are good at anything drunk. Does it work differently for you?"

"Yeah, it makes us less analytical but not less coordinated. I'm barely literate if I've had a few but I can dance."

"...Huh. I wonder if there's anyone who gets better at things."

"Maybe! I think some people don't get drunk at all, or drunk only on different stuff."

"Huh. It's really good that the water's good here."

"- as opposed to?"

"As opposed to dangerous and murky."

"Ew. It is really good that the water is not dangerous and murky."

"Yep. Anyway, what else do you get up to in this fine land of neither eating babies nor enslaving them?"

"Like as a hobby? I like flying - not with magic, with hang gliders and light aircraft and stuff. It'll be safer once I can teleport," he laughs.

"You can fly without magic?"

"Oh yeah! After the afternoon lesson I can find someplace around here and show you?"

"Sounds like fun!"

The afternoon's lesson is about common types of opportunities for teleporters to pick up extra work. For example, whenever a new Arda is found, after some sense is talked into the gods, all the orcs get resurrected en masse, millions and millions of them, and they all get deposited in one of these reintroduction facilities where they hang out till they're ready to find whoever they want to find and start with a new life. Orcs are, for those unfamiliar, a slave species created by Melkors by torturing captive Elves so their children's souls imprint their bodies with the echoes of that torture for a couple generations till the final orc product is in constant agony, looks about like so, grow much faster than Elves, and retain the ability to make magically binding oaths of service to Melkor that Loki needs to personally batch-break every time. Anyway, they need a lot of teleporting done around then, to get the orcs out of the Ardas and into Edda range and then from the reintroduction facilities to wherever they want to go, and orcs have their own teleporters but it's good to have more to pick up some slack when there's a big influx like this on a day or so's warning.

What the fuck!

What the fuck.

Even if you could turn something like that into an upstanding citizen why would you bother? - Clearly you can, if they have their own teleporters then some of them are passing the tests, and clearly someone who believes in universal flourishing is trying, but - man, of course no one who wants to rescue orcs finds Sesat's slaves unworthy.

Something about this feels confusing even given caring about universal flourishing but what exactly is the disconnect - not that orcs aren't people, it's already obvious Vanda Nossëo and Mîr are concerned with purely animal feelings like pain - they're not even animals, really, animals can be disobedient - it seems like this should resolve into a question about teleportation law but it doesn't.

...What fraction of the rest of the class is managing some response to that other than mute horror?

They look disconcerted, where they don't look like they've heard it before, but they want to know things like whether their various prospective jobs will pay them for this or if they need separate employment arrangements to pick up this kind of gig (it's a Vanda Nossëo-handled opportunity since Loki has to do the oath thing, apparently), and whether the rescued orcs are ever disoriented enough to be violent (yes), and where the orcs tend to go after that (orc planets; they can live other places, though they are not allowed in Valinors, but they like to have about a dozen kids apiece so they expand rapidly and have mostly orc-specialized colonization apparatuses).

Well, if it's Vanda Nossëo and not random improved orcs or the specific dwarves he's going to work for paying for it then it's not a job he should be looking into yet anyway. Even listening to other people's questions doesn't make him think of anything concrete enough to ask.

That's okay. They can read about the logistics that go into orc resettlement and some other less recurring large teleport-heavy projects like Amentan initial colony waves. And then class is out for the day.

Oh no, he's supposed to go flying now before he can unproductively look up anything and everything about orcs in the hope that some moral philosopher will have answered the questions he can't quite formulate but that definitely aren't about teleportation law.

...It's not a secret test of a general inclination to skip studying to do fun things, is it? Or is it a secret test of whether he'll... protest something about it? Or...

Well. Where'd his friend who might secretly be a spy get to.

There's his friend! His friend is named Ulami and has been all along! "Hi Valan! I found a place with rental two-seat ultralights I know how to fly!"

"Sounds good."

Ulami takes Valan to the place via robot shuttlebus! Valan can sit there in this rental plane, see, and then up up and away they go!

He's in a distinctly grim mood, but less so once they're in the air. Flying is admittedly very cool.

Ulami does this enough to pull off fun tricks! The scenery is awesome! They go over some mountains and a pretty river valley with cute houses in it and a gorgeous forest and back over the mountains to land again. Then it is time to wait at the bus stop to go back into town.