And suddenly there are a couple people standing on a ridge over there. One of them yelps and steps backwards; the other catches him. They're identical. They're weirdly tall. And weirdly dressed. 

And blinking confusedly.

And - pointing and staring at the Sun? Directly at the Sun.

Hopefully they are not too distracting to the climber.

She double-takes, but doesn't slip.

"Hiiiii? You guys okay? Are you lost?"

He responds! In a completely different language. And also - sends something telepathically to the effect of 'I don't speak that one'.

He is still staring at the Sun. He looks confused and suspicious.

"Uh, don't look at the Sun, you'll go blind. Like really. Also wow I didn't think there were bonuses that did that? Are you new? You'll be all over the news. Bellaaaaa are there telepath twins? Yeah I didn't think so but - no really though -"

You'll go blind? What a stupid lighting setup - that doesn't even make any sense, why would you have lights you can't look at -

"Uh, it still, like, does daytime and all that good stuff. Do you literally not know what the sun is?"

I do not know what the sun is. We haven't got one. Where, uh, is this?

"Wwwwwwelcome to Earth? Bella they're aliens. There are Space Gemini on Mount Kilimanjaro. No don't they read minds or something but I might like converge here instead."

Usually osanwë works when people do not have a common language but more than half of those words didn't come through with accompanying concepts I could make any sense of and I am confused.

"Doooon't have a dictionary on me, sorry. Uh. Earth is here? Mount Kilimanjaro is... here-er?"

Okay. Aliens? Read minds? Converge here?

"Aliens means you're not from Earth and reading minds is how you'd be understanding me without speaking the language and converging is my bonus? Like, half of it, since I have to be split up to do it, but."

Do you not have your own osanwë? Are you not familiar with - you are supposed to manage the telepathy, which is a normal trait which everybody has, like so. 

"Nnnnnoooo that's just you dudes."

Uh. Okay. I can - stop, but then we won't be able to communicate until I have learned your language.

"I mean, Bella shouldn't meet you till you can cut it out, I'm less freaked out. Not like zero but less."

- okay. Uh, if Bella can hear you then she's almost certainly in osanwë range, unless your hearing is much better than ours.

"...Bella's my twin? So... no? I think?"

I think the sun emits energy at an intensity high enough to cause cell damage, he says, but looks like you can fix it, so it's not that poorly designed. It's also moving, is that intentional too?

"...intentional? The sun? The sun doesn't intend stuff."

I meant whoever put it there.

But really, as long as it moving and causing cell damage is ordinary, then it's not an immediate concern even if it was accidental or something.

"I have no idea what you are talking about."

The giant cell-damaging ball of light in your sky is moving. Is it supposed to do that.

"- oh it actually isn't, we're moving. Common misconception."

"...hello? Aliens?"

We are trying to figure out whether we should be worried, and your answer isn't very helpful for figuring that out, and I am confused.

"...the sun is normal, uh, far as I know."

Well. Okay. That's good. Sorry. If something like that showed up in our sky it would be very worrying.

"Your planet just sorta... hangs out? Sunless?"

Definitely sunless. I don't know about - hangs out - I haven't ever really thought about it - I guess it can't just go on being world forever so probably, yes.

"Sounds, um, dark?"

Oh no there are Trees.

"Really? How do you have trees without a sun?"

The Vala of growing things, Yavanna, made the Trees and also all the rest of the trees.

"I don't know that - is it a word if there's telepathy? Since it's not in words? I don't know that thingy."

It tries to map to words where it can. The Valar are the creators of the world and the instruments of Eru's will in the universe?

"Dunno that thingy either. Bella the aliens are religious. Yeah. I dunno."

The aliens glance at each other. One of them hops rocks to a less precarious one. Well. It's very nice to meet you.

"You too! So what brings you to Earth?"

This was not deliberate. At all. 

"Are you like, space exiles or something?"

I think probably this was an accident. And I don't know what space is.

"Well, where are you from if you aren't from space?"

Valinor.

"Which iiiiiis..."

Like so: ridiculously bright and glittery and beautiful, intricately carved stone everywhere with glass and metal for decoration but not, apparently, for utility; wide streetsful of tall pretty people. Singing. Lots of singing. Picturesque wilderness. The Trees.

"Ooooh!"

This place is beautiful too, it looks very ancient and uncultivated and natural.

"...it's a mountain."

And it's a lovely mountain! You did a great job with it!

"...I didn't... make the mountain..."

The people who made this world did a great job with the mountain and your civilization has done a great job maintaining it in that state.

"...I dunno what you think is going on here but... no?"

...okay.

Maybe their Melkor did the mountain?

It really doesn't seem like a Melkorish mountain! And even then, it seems like it would be good to commend the not-terrible things their Melkor did, if they have one, so he has a reasonable path to eventually having hobbies which aren't awful.

...maybe they don't find the mountain pretty? They're aliens, aliens would find different things pretty. 

Maybe?

Well, to Quendi sensibilities it is a pretty mountain. I am sorry if it doesn't suit your people, he tells the stranger.

"It's pretty, it just... nobody made it?"

Oh. Huh. Who made the world?

"I dunno? Maybe nobody? Bella thinks nobody and she's smarter than me."

So it just - randomly happened? Who made the people?

"We evolved?"

Hmm?

"From like, monkeys. I mean apes."

...okay, who made the monkeys turn into people?

"Nobody! Probably!"

...I see. Well. This is also a very nice mountain for having happened at complete random.

"Thanks! I think it was a volcano!"

Then it probably was their Melkor! It seems much likelier than occurring at complete random. He doesn't say that. Maybe this Melkor sticks to volcanos and warns people when he wants to explode them. 

Do you live here or were you visiting?

"Visiting, I was like 'I wanna climb a mountain' and Bella was like 'you don't know how to climb mountains' and I was like 'but we've had our birthday so I can totally do it' and she was like 'bad idea' and I was like 'if I get in trouble I can just converge home' and she was like 'you aren't going to get all the way up a mountain in the time you can stay split up' and I was like 'I'll do it over a few days maybe' and she was like 'fine how about Kilimanjaro' and I was like 'cool' so she dropped me off."

...he guesses it would be harder to climb mountains if you hadn't been born yet but it seems like a strange thing to say when someone is contesting your mountain climbing ability.

It also doesn't look like a very hard mountain. Maybe because a Melkorish sort made it it has hidden difficulties.

How long can you, uh, stay split up?

"Like a few hours. I'm actually gonna have to in like twenty minutes but I'll do it here so you aren't stranded."

Here seems like an all right place to be stuck but that's very kind of you.

"You have to go around to a different part of the mountain to get the, like, tourist rest stops, I dunno what you'd eat."

...plants? And possibly animals when we got bored of plants. Does your world have animals?

"Yeah, but..."

I guess if they sometimes turn into people it'd be very dangerous to hunt them.

"Nnnnnno."

I don't just mean because you could accidentally kill a person, osanwë would prevent that, I mean maybe the ones who turn into people care about the ones that haven't and are hoping they'll turn into people soon.

"Extra double no?"

...okay? We won't eat animals if it's important.

"No, we eat animals, it's just... I dunno. Do you know enough English yet that you could not read Bella's mind if she came here, I dunno how fast you learn stuff since you're aliens."

I haven't really been focusing on learning the language but I could try to focus on that. It would still probably take longer than an hour. I could still not listen to her thoughts, or she could learn how to only send the ones she wants to send.

"Oh, you can do that?"

Everybody does that. Otherwise it would be awkward if you wanted to make someone a present or something.

"I... guess? Uh, how do you do it?"

You differentiate the things you want to send and the things you want to not-send. It usually takes a lot of practice to do consistently. Most people have some kind of sensory or spatial metaphor - indoors/outdoors, written versus spoken...

...Alli repeats this to Bella. "Bella says she needs more details."

What kinds of details?

"Kinda details - uh - which is which in those metaphors or doesn't it matter, how much practice, what happens if you get it wrong?"

If you get it wrong I guess maybe you have things public which you meant to be private? It's about how you conceptualize it but 'written thoughts are private, spoken thoughts are public' would be a much more ordinary way of conceptualizing it than the other way around, or 'indoor thoughts are private, outdoor thoughts are public'. We teach it to children and children are slower to learn things but it usually takes months, I think. 

"Wow, if she can't be around you for months that's gonna be a pain in the neck. Since she's the one who teleports and this is, uh. ...Africa."

Oh, staying here for a couple of months while everyone learns how to do private thoughts would be no problem.

"I still think you are confused about plants. Unless one of you does turning random plants into food."

Plants are food, you don't have to turn them into it. You can turn them into tastier food, I suppose. What do you mean 'does'?

"As your bonus power?"

I still don't know what you mean by - 

- I might know what you mean by that?

He holds out his hand. He frowns at it. He sends a little shimmering arc of water flying through the air.

Okay that's a your universe thing I cannot do that at home. 

"Oh. Well, you're twins, so I guess here you can?"

...because we're twins? 

"Yeah, here twins get superpowers? When we turn sixteen, but I dunno how old you are if you just got them for being here now."

Older than sixteen - I would have been a little terror with this at sixteen - Telvo, what did you get -

He is making sparks, with some bewilderment. Uh, this. This is neat. Not very useful, I don't think, but fun! I actually think this world is quite well-designed, if in a hands-off sort of way. Good aesthetics.

"Glad you like it!"

Twirly shimmery sparks! Who does the powers?

"...nobody? They just started happening in the fifties."

Your gods are super hands-off.

Honestly that sounds amazing. Just - cool stuff, no explanation, have fun, figure out what rules make sense yourself.

"I guess?"

We're comparing, to, like, 'cool stuff, here is Eru's will with respect to the cool stuff'. Which is important, I guess, if Eru's will is specific enough but if your creators are more flexible and can just - not do that part- then that's great.

"I really do not know how to explain how this sounds off."

...okay. Maybe we'll pick up on it if we're here long enough.

"Maybe! Oh hey do you have names, I'm Alli."

"Pityafinwe Ambarussa."

"Telufinwe Ambarussa."

"Oh, if we're doing full names I'm Alexandra Swan."

It is very good you're here! Otherwise we might have hunted animals. Shiver.

"There might be laws about that or something but the animals aren't people."

I know that, we'd notice if they were people, but the turning into people is still very concerning.

"They're not gonna, that takes like a really long time."

Well. We might be here for a really long time, we don't know how to go back.

"Bella probably can't put you back, she can only work in the gravity well."

In the what? And it's okay, here's a fine place to be for a really long time, my father will probably rescue us eventually even if it takes him a hundred Ages.

"On the Earth except if she were on the moon then it'd be on the moon."

What's the moon?

"Big ol' rock in the sky. I don't think it's up now..." She looks around. "Yeah nah."

...okay. I'll keep an eye out.

"It's pretty. People have been to it."

Cool! Have you?

"Nah, but Bella has, somebody took her up for powers testing."

You don't just ...know? Once I was thinking about it I knew.

"Well, she knew she could teleport, when she thought about it, but she didn't know exactly all the details like what would happen if she were on the moon."

Ah, okay, that makes sense.

"I'm gonna converge here now." Nothing observably happens. "See, my power's this -" Then there's two of her. Then there's one again.

- wow. Weird. Is your soul in - both at once, or...

"I don't understand the question?"

Does your soul split also, or is it just controlling two bodies at once? Like, one way you might be able to tell is, do you have one stream of thoughts, or two which get reconciled later?

"Two but I don't see what that has to do with souls."

...wait, if your gods are really low-key how do you get resurrected if you die?

"...did I say we did that? I am like ninety percent sure I didn't say we did that on account of we do not."

I'm so sorry.

"Uh, thank you?"

That's awful.

Uh, so usually I'd explain souls by saying they're the part of you that survives the destruction of your body but if you can't talk to those then that won't be helpful. So - they're the part of you which has memories and thoughts and experiences. You are a soul, you inhabit a body. That sort of thing.

"That might be an alien thing."

...I suppose that is possible but since souls are the thing that does thoughts and experiences, and you have those, it seems likelier you have them but the difference isn't relevant when you can't resurrect your dead.

"I think our brains do that? We have brains."

We have brains. Brains are, hmm, the way that you get memories and senses out of the universe, they aren't the thing that is you.

"I think we do that with our brains too? Hey Bella how do we know that brains do personality and stuff -" Pause. "Bella says that if we have brain damage it changes personality and things."

- huh. I don't think that really happens to us unless it's also a soul damaging kind of thing like Utumno. ...do you have marriage?

"...yeah?"

- how do you conceptualize the thing that happens between married people, is it their brains developing a permanent magic link? If one of them died would it end?

"...we don't have permanent magical links?"

What do you mean when you say you have marriage?

"People go to a church or the courthouse or whatever and somebody's like 'do you take this person to be your lawfully wedded spouse' except with more gender in it usually and they're like 'yeah' and then they can file joint tax returns?"

Okay. That sounds like a different thing. Maybe you do not have souls. - I don't think much of that design choice at all.

"Really don't think it's a design choice."

Shrug. 

"Bella wants to know how hard it would be to check if she has the thing with the thoughts."

I mean, we can tell her? I don't know how you'd check without someone who has osanwë.

"Yeah she can come here she wants to know if it'd take very long or be unclear or anything."

I guess it's possible she'd have it when I checked but then forget later, that happens to people who are new at it a lot.

"But if she come here you can tell her if it's good then."

Yes.

"Bella they say yes."

And there appears her sister. They're not identical; Bella is shorter and their faces don't match.

Hi!

"Hi. Is my privacy screen thing working?"

- yes. I can tell you're there but you are not making anything public right now.

"- okay, great. Welcome to Earth! Can you understand me - I'm trying to put that 'public', what I'm saying -"

- yes, I got that. Thank you! I am glad we ran into somebody; there are some confusing Earth things and it'd have been worrying trying to figure them out alone.

"Like, uh, the sun?"

It moves enough to be slightly worrying if I didn't know that was typical! It looks like it's moving such that it might crash reasonably soon. 

"It's... not going to crash. It is very far away. And planets move relative to it, not vice versa; if we collided it'd be more accurate to say the Earth was doing the crashing."

Your sister said that. It doesn't really seem like a meaningful difference.

"It mostly comes up when predicting the motions of other planets. All the planets near here are in elliptical orbits around the sun."

- we do not have ...any of that, I don't think.

"What do you have? How did you get here?"

I have no idea how we got here.

We have Arda. It doesn't move, or at least I can't think of anything for which it's useful to model it as moving, and it is lit by Trees.

"Here trees don't give off light."

Most trees don't, but those two were designed as lighting.

"By..."

Yavanna, the Vala of growing things.

"And a Vala is..."

The creators of the world and the instruments of Eru's will within it. Osanwë also conveys that this is the standard answer. They're magical and powerful and don't usually assume physical form and live in different remote parts of Valinor. They don't do very much now but when the world was young they did lots of design things and fought a war.

"Okay. - how old is your world now?"

A few thousand years old? I don't think they kept good track at the beginning.

"Okay... uh, anything Alli wasn't able to explain you want me to take a stab at?"

The process by which your animals turn into people, and why this is not a reason not to hunt. It really does sound like a reason not to hunt. 

"That takes millions or billions of years. It doesn't happen to individual animals, it's a gradual, generational thing."

Oh, good. ...that's a really long time. I bet my brother could do it in a thousand.

"It... might be possible to deliberately breed animals for intelligence and get people out of it but it's never been done and a thousand years seems like a really short time frame."

He can talk to them! He's the only person we know of who can do that. And as he talks to them, the way they process things gets more people-like and if he did it for a thousand years or so it would not surprise me if they were people? He wouldn't, though. It's hard to know the best kind of environment for a child like that.

"...okay. Do you have other questions?"

The powers are only for twins, and your creators started doing that without an announcement somewhat recently?

"No announcement accompanied the spontaneous commencement of twins acquiring superpowers, nor is it clear from where or from whom such an announcement would have come. It was about fifty years ago. - local years are defined as the time it takes the Earth to make one circuit around the sun, which is 365 days and change, a day being twenty-four hours."

And an hour?

"One second is roughly as long as it takes to say 'one Mississippi' and sixty of those are a minute and sixty minutes are an hour."

He pauses and considers for a second. Huh. It must have been very startling.

"When people suddenly had powers? Yes, by all accounts."

You weren't startled?

"No, by the time we were born it was an established phenomenon. We're sixteen."

...your species grows up much faster than ours.

"That doesn't seem particularly strange since we're different species in the first place! It's odd that we look as alike as we do."

- huh, I guess it is. An Elf born that long ago would be this tall now. He gestures around his waist.

"Well, if that works for you."

I do not think I know anybody who thinks they were small for too long or not long enough but maybe people don't tend to notice that.

"I sort of think I was small for too long but that might have something to do with being impatient to get superpowers."

We do not traditionally get superpowers.

"There you go. So, uh, what are your priorities, here, since you arrived accidentally -"

...I am not really sure. Are there problems in the world to solve? If not we'll probably just explore and build a house and pick up some languages to teach my father once he fetches us.

"The world has various problems in it, I don't know if any of them specifically require skills you have. I probably can't get you home because I'm gravity-well-limited but it might be that another gemini's power would do it, if you want to look into that. Uh, I don't know anything about the local government, here, but they might or might not want you building a house here - you're not legal residents, and this in particular is a national park -"

Where would be a better place to build a house?

"I don't really know. Do you specifically want to build it yourselves?"

...I mean, if you have some nice houses lying around that would work too.

"I'm specifically imagining that if we introduce you to some sort of official government, they might find it convenient to put you in a house."

Oh, if that's convenient then that should be all right. What sort of problems are there with your world?

"I mean, we don't have any unusual acute issues on at the moment, so I'm not totally sure where to start."

...uh, if you had landed on our world I would tell you that there is a person who died and can't come back, and we don't have reliable communications with Endorë though we see their dead occasionally and so know that they are doing all right, and the linguistics guilds aren't speaking to each other and one of them actually isn't speaking at all, it's some kind of protest, and a few people with bad memories from the war don't like to visit the quarter of town where Melkor lives.

"People who die here can't come back at all, uh, various wars are ongoing, miscellaneous psychological maladies are endemic..."

Alli mentioned that your dead don't come back. I'm sorry. There are wars ongoing? Over what?

"I'd have to look it up but the usual suspects are borders and trade and, like, sociological conflicts of various subtypes."

...those seem like terrible reasons to have a war even when you can get everyone back afterwards.

"Usually for assorted reasons there are not clear alternatives or the decisionmakers aren't well-incentivized or both."

I'm so sorry. 

I thought that the hands-off creators would be a good thing but, wow, that doesn't sound worth it at all...ugh...I do not know how to solve wars unless you have not invented the concept you should talk things over calmly and not kill people.

"It's been invented."

Then yeah. I don't know. 

Probably we should try to find someone whose powers do involve going between worlds and then the Valar can have a look and see if they can resurrect you and if not - well, I don't know, but with more people working on it it'd be easier to end wars.

"I'm a little concerned that it'd be easy for underinformed third parties to do more harm than good."

It would really surprise me if they did more harm than wars but perhaps they could explain their proposals to both sides first so that anyone could raise any objections to the effect that more harm would result than resulted from the war.

"I guess. Wars often arise in or create really delicate political situations, and sometimes attempts to squish delicate political situations lead to more problems down the line in non-obvious ways, like, 'stop fighting over this land, here, we'll draw this line and enforce it as a border, whoops, that line wasn't repsonsive to where all the representatives of the cultures involved were and now there are neighbors who don't get along and same-culture members who can't easily interact' kind of thing."

...you could, like, Lórien it so everyone can go there but no violence can be done there and you won't see people you don't want to see? But I am not a person who does politics and I have not thought about this sort of problem for very long.

"Don't know what Lórien is."

Lórien is the home of the Vala of dreams, and also a name that people use for him, and the land changes to be whatever suits you at the moment and it arranges that stressful things not come about. 

It's boring. But it much improves on wars and if you go there with people who aren't boring then it won't be.

"Sounds nice, I guess."

It's not terribly boring, it will do bubble baths and springy trees and bizarrely flavored flowers.

"I don't normally rely on the landscape to provide my entertainment."

Ah. We travel frequently.

"Do you guys want to come home with us, this place is scenic but I'm starting to feel the lack of chairs."

Sure, if that's convenient for you.

"I can only take one non-sister passenger at once, who's first?"

Twins shrug. One of them steps forward.

And now he's in the living room of a house in Phoenix.

He blinks. He blinks more. 

"Welcome!" And she goes back and gets her sister and his brother.

Politely blinking Elves!

"...so, this is our house, our mom will be home in a few hours and we'll have to figure out how to explain you to her but in the meantime welcome, can I get you anything to eat?"

I don't think so. It's a very interesting house. Did you build it?

"No, people mostly don't build their own houses here."

Maybe they are too busy having wars, he says privately.

It can't keep you that busy, can it?

Some people don't build their houses at home, if they don't like architecture or construction.

"Building houses, especially ones that hold up well in the weather and have electricity and plumbing, is a specialized skill many people don't have time to pick up and some people don't have the physical ability to carry out."

That makes sense. In Valinor houses just hold up fine but in Endorë they don't do that.

"Valinor doesn't have weather?"

It has weather! It doesn't have decay, except in certain places for plants that need that to grow.

"That's... interesting. Valar again?"

Yes. They don't like things falling apart, it apparently gets exhausting after enough Ages.

"Huh. Okay."

How do you keep libraries, do you have to recopy everything every few centuries?

"...recopy?"

- oh, the way decay works in Endorë, parchment deteriorates over time so eventually old books would become unreadable. Endorë doesn't even really have books, probably partially for that reason.

"Watch this," she says.

She goes over to a bright green-shelled Mac in the corner of the living room and turns it on and opens a document and types in 72-point font "WE INVENTED THE PRINTING PRESS AND NOW WE HAVE THIS SORT OF THING". And then she prints it and the printer on the desk spits out a copy.

They quite evidently cannot read it but they pick it up and examine it delightedly. 

That's so much more precise! You could do such intricate lettering things! Wow!

Bella giggles.

"Do aliens not have printers?" asks Alli, who is microwaving leftover sweet and sour chicken.

We don't have that! Even looking at it I do not know how to build it. If you want to build one with us that'd be very interesting!

"We don't know how to build most of the objects around us. We buy them. Single people don't create most of the objects we use, they are made by systems of people working together. With machines."

- isn't that really stressful?

"I'm not sure how you mean."

I wouldn't like being surrounded by things I didn't understand and couldn't build or fix if I needed them. I could use them but I couldn't - use them as extensions of my brain.

"I took woodshop and I would rather use an IKEA bookshelf than the one I tried to make, like, wow."

- well, as long as you're happy.

"Does this mean you don't want to learn how to use the computer?"

Of course we want to learn how to use the computer!!

"Okay. Let's see, what doesn't require learning to read... Minesweeper has numbers but they're color coded..."

She shows them Minesweeper.

Elves are confused about what mines are but happy to play Minesweeper. Uh, if she doesn't know how to build a computer is there someone who she could introduce them to?

"I don't know anyone who knows how to build computers either but if you wind up going to the government or going public they could maybe put you in touch with whoever?"

Okay. That would be interesting but is not urgent.

"Cool. So, you seem very polite about the telepathy so I'm assuming you aren't mindreading the neighbors, but I don't know what your range actually is..."

If people don't know to keep their thoughts private then they'll have things public they didn't mean to, we won't listen. Ah, if someone is right there and mentally shouting we might catch something anyway? I haven't interacted with people who don't have osanwë before, I'm not certain about that. But not listening to Alli was not a problem. I don't know your units of measure.

"Here to the window," she points, "is like ten feet."

...a number of those sufficiently large I can't calculate in my head.

"Five thousand two hundred eighty feet is a mile."

- okay but we don't use units of measure that precise for distance so I'm not just converting to ours, I'm trying to go from 'a distance I can travel in an hour on horseback' to those.

"...I do not know offhand how fast horses are."

Yeah. Anyway, whatever it is for strangers, it's about thirty times that for people you know well. I can sometimes do forty times that with Telvo.

"Well, in any event, there aren't mindreaders here so please assume nobody but me knows to keep private thoughts."

Of course. We can also explain how, if they want to learn.

"That should definitely be included if you go public, but the onus is pretty much on you because there's six billion humans and two of you."

What are some things we should consider about going public?

"Uh - might be dangerous. It could help on that front that you're lower-tech than us, makes you less valuable targets, but there's six billion people and some of them are nuts with guns and some of them might want pet mindreaders. You'd get a lot of attention and correspondence if you gave people a way to get in touch with you; I think most celebrities and superheroes have people to handle their mail because it gets overwhelming. There'd be a lot of interests colliding over contact with your world even if they managed not to fight over you in particular."

...what is a gun? 

"...high-tech projectile weapon."

...I am confused about what that has to do with anything?

"Sometimes, mentally unstable people attempt to kill others, disproportionately including famous people."

" - that is really worrying. Why would they do that?"

"Mental instability, aforementioned. Or sometimes political motivations."

 - I think that maybe you should stop them and get them help and make it hard for them to have access to weapons.

"Yes, we as a society have this as a goal."

I am confused about why it's hard. Are there, what, dozens of them?

"Yes. And they are not always identifiable before the part where they try to shoot somebody."

That seems like an argument for going public.

"...why?"

Well, if you have dozens of people who will at some point kill a random person, and no way to tell who they are until they kill a person, then it seems much better if they kill us. Since we have souls.

"No."

...why not?

"There's not a fixed number of future murder victims."

...are there a fixed number of unstable people who cannot be identified until they kill someone?

"Not really. People just have a variety of thresholds of - stress and opportunity and so on - at which they'd kill someone."

I do not think Elves have that.

"That sounds nice."

Your way sounds kind of terrifying!

"We didn't exactly pick it from a list."

It's a good thing your creator doesn't mind people saying he did a terrible job.

"Still don't think we have one of those."

It just seems hard to imagine this happened at completely random by accident.

"Why?"

Accidents usually look a lot less - orderly and purposeful? And less inclined to use categories that we think of as categories, like 'twins' or 'sixteen'?

"I don't think you need a creator for numbers. We have a biological explanation for twins, occasionally somebody double-ovulates and both get fertilized and bam, twins. Fraternal twins like us, I mean, identical ones like you it's one embryo and it gets jostled or something and splits up really early on."

I meant the magic, not the things themselves, the things themselves are surprising but swamped by there being anything at all, and habitable worlds in particular, and people living in them in even more particular.

"Oh, well, yes, I suppose if you're looking around for evidence that the place was created gemini powers do indicate that, but it's a simple biological category and a simple sidereal category, it's not like the powers only appear for people pure of heart who've been blessed by the Pope, or something like that. And some of the powers appear for edge cases like chimeras."

I do not think we have those.

"Chimeras? Okay, although it's possible they're just unobtrusive. Do you have conjoined twins?"

- no. That's - that's horrifying, oh no, the poor kids...

"- well, nowadays they get split up right as rain when they turn sixteen... but yeah, it's not great."

Who is the Pope?

"Some people think we have a creator and have come to various idiosyncratic conclusions about the properties of same, some more popular and organized than others. The Pope is the person in charge of one of the more popular and organized beliefs on the subject, Catholicism."

- huh. Do they think that for reasons other than 'obviously something this complicated had a creator -"

"There's a bunch of reasons people come up with to justify it but in point of fact a majority of people belong to the same religion as their parents and I don't think there's a significant trend for converts to collect in any one sect except according to which sects have put in missionary time."

That is what I would expect from people except maybe the Noldor and even then, maybe. People don't usually decide things based on convincing intellectual arguments.

"You don't say."

Well, your kind of people could have been different!

"They're not."

Too bad. I could have just come up with a really convincing argument against having wars for stupid reasons when you don't have souls.

"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt."

My people are very contrarian and if you came up with a convincing argument they should not have wars while not having souls, they might get more likely to have such wars if they disagreed with your argument. Which would still not be very likely.

"I guess it could hurt if you worded it very insensitively."

I think I need to learn more to word it at all.

"Yeah. If you're going to be here long-term - as opposed to going home tomorrow afternoon with a Junebug teleporter whose limits differ from mine - you will probably want to learn to read English and check out the Internet."

And what's that?

"The Internet is a globe-spanning library-like thing accessible from computers."

....oooh.

"We are very proud of it! It has weird unpleasant parts because random people can put anything on it anonymously but mostly it's a crowning human achievement."

- maybe the ones who put awful things just because they can are the ones who should not have weapons for killing people?

"...do you want me to actually explain why not that or should I just say 'it's complicated, but in fact, not that'."

Can I guess? There are ridiculously many of them and they're not guaranteed to randomly shoot people just bizarrely likely and ... maybe the guns also have harmless uses so it's very sad to take it away from someone who was going to use it for artwork or theatre?

"Artwork or theater in particular aren't so much the thing but there are hobbyists and hunters, and also this country in particular has messy history with respect to gun ownership."

...people not being randomly killed is really important. And you can hunt without, uh, guns.

"Yes. I know. Do you want to guess more, or do you want me to explain, or -"

An explanation would be helpful.

"Okay, so, in many countries, gun ownership is tightly regulated. This does reduce the rate of gun violence but it's not clear that it affects the murder rate - insofar as they differ, it could be a lot of things, and they don't differ strikingly enough or on a suggestive enough schedule relative to those laws to have settled the issue. People can just stab each other with kitchen knives, and there's black markets for things that are prohibited to own. And this country in particular is based around a history of having violently revolted against a monarchist regime on another continent that was ruling it remotely, and in the process of establishing itself it - the United States, where we are now - decided it was particularly important to list rights that every individual citizen has. One of them, specifically because of the violent revolution thing, is the right to have guns around, explicitly in case further violent revolutions are necessary. There are some obstacles to casually owning guns and in particular to carrying them in a way that isn't visually obvious, but since this is framed as a right, a lot of people consider it really intrusive to talk about taking the guns away because of other people who might do bad things with guns; it would be sort of like - I don't know if you have any analogous situations, it sounds like your world's really different, I'll make up a few analogies in case any of them stick. It'd be sort of like saying no one can have children because some people abuse theirs, or that people can only have sex with chaperones supervising because some people commit rape, or that you have to hire a professional to do everything that might require a sharp object from opening packages to chopping broccoli because people sometimes use kitchen knives to stab people. There's enough people who feel strongly that being allowed to own guns is a really important right to form a voting bloc, and we're a representative democracy, so people who want to attain political power can't antagonize those voters too badly."

...we would probably not have children if some people abused them and we couldn't think of a way to stop that aside from everyone not having children. We would definitely prohibit kitchen knives. I'm not sure about the sex thing, I think something's different there because - oh, because you don't come back if you die. I think if we did not come back if we died and people were forcing people then we might require marriages to be witnessed but probably not subsequent relations.

"Okay, well, to a human perspective banning kitchen knives is obviously ridiculous and banning guns is less so but a difference in degree not kind, most anyone would find the idea of not being allowed to have kids because of what other parents did intolerably offensive, I don't actually know what the heck you're talking about with the last example at all, laws that are staggeringly unpopular are impossible to enforce."

If someone tried to force me to have sex I would just die. Since dying is worse for your species, presumably some people wouldn't be willing to do that. No one in our society does ever try that as far as I know, but that could be because they know that obviously the person they attacked would die.

"We don't, uh, die of that. It's bad but not fatal."

- I mean, you wouldn't have to, Elves would just universally choose to, which is a choice that makes more sense when being dead is fixable.

"- wait, at what point in the process are you imagining an opportunity to commit suicide?"

...if they, like, clearly were not going to stop?

"If Elves just don't have this problem maybe you are supposing there is more - general wherewithal than is typically involved? In most situations in which somebody might be trying to rape me I wouldn't be able to handily kill myself."

...I am confused by that.

"I mean, I in particular could just teleport, but... most people can't?"

...right. Uh, one thing I might do specifically is stop my heart? Or I think I've heard that's unpleasant and takes a little bit of time so maybe stop blood flowing to my brain?

"Humans can't do that."

- oh? ...I would expect it to be hard to, like, walk, if you couldn't do that.