"Anywhere in there is probably good! I am happy with eighteen but I don't know exactly what I'd look like at twenty-two or whatever, maybe I would have liked that better if I'd decided to wait and see. If anybody comes up with a way to roll my husband back I'm pushing for twenty."

"Was he pretty at twenty?" says one of the twins, and then glances nervously at Maitimo.

"Yes he was!" says Kib, not looking at Maitimo nervously or otherwise. He osanwës them an image. "That's how old he was when we got married."

He is very pretty! They both exclaim over his prettiness and then hesitantly say Kib has good taste.

"Thank you! Although personally my favorite things about him are not his prettiness."

"Father says that marrying for prettiness demonstrates astonishingly bad judgment and he'll be ashamed of us if we do it."

"We met because we needed the same sort of books for our ambitious public-good golem projects. Being pretty was just a perk. Especially on his end, he's really not wired to care about how people look that way."

"That's probably a human thing. Elves might not marry for prettiness but it'd definitely be a thing we care about."

"It's pretty convenient that Elves are all pretty, then, otherwise then where would the ugly ones be?"

"People say my mother's not pretty enough for my father. But he thinks she is."

"Well, at least among humans different people have different aesthetics."

"Well, I realize it must sound like it happens very fast but it's pretty gradual if you're around somebody all the time, we adjust."

"I think it's very admirable," he says. "Is the scriber done? What are you working on next?"

"The scriber is done, and I've been mostly catching up on non-work things - I always take a lot of notes about my life and reading those is faster than waiting to dream all my memories and Aydanci saved all the notebooks, so I have them to go through. But I've been teaching people to help make medical golems, and storks. We'll need a lot of storks once the money starts coming in to help the creches take care of all the extra babies."

"Will enough storks save all the babies or do any of them land in danger, or not think to cry..."

"I don't know all the possible places babies appear but as far as I know they don't appear in the ocean or anything like that. Enough storks will make a huge dent but it wouldn't help if a baby appeared somewhere there was about to be a rockslide or something. I think they all cry sooner or later."

They nod solemnly. "And more people'd work in the creches if it paid very well?"

"Yep. Or it wouldn't even necessarily need to pay more per person, they could just have money to hire more people; I'm not sure what the labor market for creche workers is but either way money will help."

"What about once we end scarcity? Will people still be motivated to work in creches?"

"Some people like babies," Kib says. "I don't think everybody in a creche is working there solely because they will otherwise starve. Besides, if you end scarcity servantmakers can make golems to do all the more tedious parts of looking after the kids and there will only be the parts that people find especially appealing like reading them bedtime stories and stuff left over."

This satisfies the two of them. Feanáro comes in a while later and stops short at the door, looking a little surprised and not very happy about it.

"Hi. Is this a bad time?"

"Not especially. I wasn't expecting you."

"Well, we haven't recently corresponded," Kib points out.