high-energy physics

[warpfairy]

Federation political prisons are not particularly uncomfortable. She's not going anywhere, but she can read, she's considering taking up an instrument, the only really awkward thing is that she doesn't particularly want to be supervised while she's sweating her way through her next pon farr one way or another but that's years off. That and she wishes she'd taken longer to get caught. But she was running out of the really low-hanging fruit anyway.

This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.

Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.

Comments

[warpfairy]

"What's Arda like?"

[lintamande]

"You have all kinds of people, and so does Materia, but Arda only has the Quendi, that's us. And it used to be very dangerous but then the Valar invited us to Valinor. Valinor is safe and beautiful and inventing all kinds of things but the Valar are scared and sometimes do stupid things and they exiled Bella so we had to fetch her and then run. My parents are going to miss me so we're trying to figure out how to message them and tell them I'm safe. And it takes forever to grow up, there. I'm a hundred and twenty years old."

[warpfairy]

"They exiled you?"

[subtly_artistic]

"Things move very slowly there. I brought a lot of Materian concepts and then built on them very rapidly and they thought I was a bad influence."

[warpfairy]

"The Federation arrested me for telling pre-warp civilizations how to warp."

[lintamande]

Fëanáro bounces. "You're the same! Why aren't people supposed to tell that?"

[warpfairy]

"The justification is that they should be allowed to develop on their own without interference from farther-along cultures."

[lintamande]

"That's really stupid."

[warpfairy]

"They have historical reasons that make it less stupid, but yes."

[lintamande]

"The Valar should interfere less," he says, "but it'd have been awful for them to leave us in the Outer Lands to die. Taking us to Valinor was right. They just should have given us more power over how we lived our lives once we got there."

[warpfairy]

"The Valar are...?"

[lintamande]

"The creators of our world."

[warpfairy]

"These don't constitute a kind of person?"

[subtly_artistic]

"They do," Bella says, "and so do the Maiar, but they're pretty much gods and it's not a really natural category to count them like another species on Materia or here."

[lintamande]

"They're mlliions of years old," Fëanáro says, "and don't understand people."

[subtly_artistic]

"The Maiar vary more. I'm not positive the Valar were operating with consensus either now that I'm not stuck on my plane and I can think about it more fairly. But yeah, they have serious people skills gaps."

[warpfairy]

"Sounds like a serious deficiency in a god."

[lintamande]

"That's why we're here. We were hoping this plane wouldn't have any gods at all."

[warpfairy]

"There's a lot of variance in technology and innate power, so whether there are gods here depends on what your exact definition is, but one can generally do whatever one likes without expecting anything like divine intervention. I was arrested by purely mortal authority. Who, I should mention, are mostly very good at being mortal authority, or I wouldn't be so keen to prompt prewarp civilizations to meet their entrance criteria."

[lintamande]

"We were not planning to overthrow your King. Or equivalent." Rúmil says.

"We would've if he was bad, though," Fëanáro says.

[warpfairy]

"The Federation has a President," she says. "One typically doesn't overthrow those, one campaigns for and elects a different President. You've been here how long?"

[subtly_artistic]

"A few weeks, but Fëanáro's the only one who soaks up languages like a sponge and it took a while to figure out how to use the science ethernet, which unlike talking to people doesn't respond to subtle arts. People have been thinking I'm something called a Betazoid."

[warpfairy]

"You don't actually look Betazoid but they're pretty close to human, cosmetically, and the obvious guess if you display psi. I'm not sure Betazoids would do the thing you're doing where you talk but fill in the gaps, though."

[subtly_artistic]

"I'm trying to practice the language. This is the one it's important to know, right?"

[warpfairy]

"In the Federation yes, on Davlia no. I don't speak the languages here either, though."