"Thank you very much," Loki says.

"They're not trying to kill us. Anyway, with orcs it's always sort of a 'there, but for the grace of fate, walk I' kind of thing, yes?"

"A bit, yes."

"I actually wanted to talk to you about the animals thing. It's recently occurred to me to be uncertain that animals here are as... in a word, stupid... as animals I'm normally comfortable killing for food. I'm not sure I should be giving a Vala's hypothetical concern for the plight of farmed fish much weight, but... You seem like you'd probably know if anyone would."

"I don't know anything about what you're comfortable with. Basically everything feels an injury exactly like you do, so kill them cleanly. If you talk to someone for long enough they'll start - aligning their thoughts more the way that we do, so it makes more sense to ask questions like 'do you want to live'? or 'what's your favorite thing about yourself', but I don't know if the way they are naturally, where those questions don't make sense, they're less clever. Just less of their cleverness overlaps with ours."

"Do you eat them?" she asks, adjusting an orc's illusory hair for her.

"Yeah. But I'm not really in the running to be a good person."

"Many very terrible people do not cross every line they see just because they might as well."

"Sure. This isn't a line I draw."

"So since it takes you a while to develop enough rapport with an animal to talk to it you can't comment in detail about what they're like before you get to them, is that the upshot here?"

"No, I can talk to them right away, but on their level. I can go - fear, confusion, hunger, security, happiness. I can't chat about moral philosophy until I get to know someone."

"Ah, I see. What's the 'getting to know' process like?"

"More sophisticated thoughts, along with memories, finding ways of comparing concepts I have to concepts they have - like, 'wait', that's something I often want someone to do, and that demands finding a delayed reward that's familiar to them, finding several, introducing them as a sort of category - delayed reward events, that's a thing you and I understand together - and then asking it of them. People who train animals are doing the same thing, just a bit blindly; do you think that training animals makes them more the sort of thing it's wrong to kill?"

"Not in the right sense, although I would generally refrain from eating an animal that was somebody's pet or transportation for other reasons. Training does sometimes reveal intelligence differences between individuals of a species but not generally to a degree I find worrisome in anything I also find appetizing."

"Once the war's over we can throw Ata at the problem, meat'll be growing on trees in a matter of decades."

"If he doesn't get around to it before I'm teleporting we can import something. Too unaesthetic for Asgard but it's been done."

"Yeah, I can't see Oromë ever being tempted. And I owe a lot to him, and he thinks it's fine. But on the other hand, a Vala who's like a father figure to me is still a Vala, they're a bad place to get one's principles."

"Maybe they'll grow up one day but I have the impression they're even more sluggish as a group than Quendi."

He grins. "There were enough Ages before we first walked this earth for the bones of the first things Oromë hunted to turn to stone."

"And yet somehow they weren't yet ready to have real people as their charges."

Tyelcormo's selected people show up at this point. He stops leaning on the doorframe. "Hey! Orcs! These people are here to make sure your trip goes smoothly, please don't bother them or make them nervous! They probably won't travel in line with you but they'll be within the range of our hearing, making sure you're clear of anyone who might not know who you are. They also have gifts for the Quendi who've generously agreed to be your new neighbors." And then he raises an eyebrow at Loki. "Shall we do some forensic archery?"

"Forensic archery."

"We made up words for, I think, nearly three hundred different subfields of study in the immediate aftermath of the spread of literacy. It was a subject of great enthusiasm: forensic archery: contests of archery in order to establish what occurred at the scene of a crime. Even the Noldor couldn't invent that."

Loki snorts as she follows Tyelcormo out and waves goodbye to temporarily Quendi'd orcs.