"If they haven't shown in another few weeks I shall send another emissary to communicate that it's more urgent than they realize. For what it's worth, I wouldn't expect it to be a long time unless, for example, they can take all the extra babies and are debating whether to let us try to pull that off."

"They might not let you try?"

"It wouldn't be a unanimous vote in favor, at least, if they have the power to pull all the babies from your realm here. They might worry about everyone here working ourselves to the point of misery to save more children than we really have the capacity to - which they'd be right to worry about, we would do that, but we'd be doing that because it was worth it to us -"

"I mean, you wouldn't have to wait long for some babies to be grown up enough to be able to help. Nobody on my planet would mind if you didn't send them all back."

"They might also worry about population. Right now our birthrate is just below two - ah, places where babies are born track birthrates. For every existing person, in expectation they will have slightly less than one new person. My parents are overachievers. If the birthrate is below two, then even without anyone dying eventually the population will stop growing. Importing babies who we can grow up so we have enough to help us with millions of babies more will freak the Valar out. They might let us do it but they might not."

"So I guess the question is how viable offplanet colonization is."

"Yes. And since they must not have known there were other worlds I don't know if they'll know the answer to that. But they'll come answer our questions, they just might debate among themselves what to do first."

"All right then. I'm not in a tearing hurry, I want to at least finish you this scribe."

"Hopefully they can at least enable transit back and forth. I would miss you terribly if you were to bounce into our lives for a few weeks and then vanish forever."

"Aww, thanks. I'd miss you too."

"And my father'd put up a screaming fight if they didn't let him go have a try at curing mortality."

"Would that help? Screaming?"

"It might? The Valar don't really understand incarnates and would definitely be stressed to have the crown prince of the Noldor behaving very badly at them, they might banish him to your world just to make the embarrassing problem go away..."

"Oh boy. Well, that'd be fun from a certain perspective."

"I hope they'd let us accompany him. He benefits from having people around who know him well."

"'Us' is you and -?"

"My father has seven sons. You have met me and Tyelcormo and Curufinwë; Macalaurë is the one who you ought to hear sing, and who will be induced to sing for you the minute he hears that you were impressed by my singing; Carnistir's around here somewhere and I could go drag him out and ask him to be sociable but otherwise he won't be bothered to; and the twins are still children."

"Which means they're, what, twice my age? And then some because the years are different? What about your other parent, you do have two, right? ...what's a twin?"

"Ambarussa are around thirty, yes. Twins are two people who are born to the same parent at the same time and look the same. At least, my brothers look the same, not all twins do. My mother would be reluctant to be dragged away from this world, though she might come if she did not trust me to look after everybody."

"...That sounds really crowded," Kib remarks. "Twice as crowded as one at a time, even. You're the designated looker-afterer?"

"I am the designated looker-afterer of the whole nation, and the oldest of my brothers, and without me everyone sort of does all right but they are not their best selves."

"Aww."

"Anyway they'd want me for a family effort to end mortality - I'm no good at science but I imagine the cooperation of the local governors would help a lot and navigating social impacts of various baby distributions would be a mess and my father is not well-suited to that kind of problems."

"Oh, yeah, there'd be loads of politics to wade through."

"With real stakes! I would have entirely too much fun. Hopefully the Valar are helpful and it does not come to that."