Hello. Nelyafinwe says you crashed in the middle of Tirion with no explanation from an alternate world where people don't have children and everyone dies horribly and mostly very young?

...Well, that depends if 'eaten by an unexplained snake monster' is an explanation or just an elaboration of the extent to which there is no explanation, but yes, that happened.

Most people if they awakened in a strange land after being eaten by something would assume that dead people go there, but if people in your world die all the time and most of them don't go here, then that can't be the explanation.

It didn't actually cross my mind that I might be dead, although I guess it ought to have. I was not conventionally eaten and landed only with the injury I picked up from tripping in the street running from the thing.

How does a snake unconventionally eat someone?

Its face was a mirror. I just sort of passed through the mirror, I wasn't chewed or anything.

We have servantmaking, but not magic music or non-servant magical objects. We have a sun instead of shiny trees. Don't have any Valar or anything similar to them. There are various consequences to the not having families thing relative to how you organize yourselves.

How many people? Are you typical of them in appearance?

Maybe a hundred million - that's inexact but right order of magnitude - and to the extent anyone's typically-appearing for their species sure, I'm average height for a man, paler than most people, etcetera, but not a real outlier.

A hundred million. That's - I hope you realize what a fantastic advantage it is, to have that many people - with talent normally distributed - what things does your world have that we don't seem to?

Nothing's really obvious so far besides servantmaking stuff, but servantmaking stuff is a big deal, we use it for a lot of things. Having a big population's pretty nice, but we do keep dying and have a lot of problems you seem to have just skipped so I'm not sure it's as much of a head start as it sounds like.

Yeah, tell me about the dying. Does anyone know why it happens? Has it always?

It has always - to animals in our world too - there's injuries and a jillion kinds of diseases, both of which we're getting better at managing and treating, and if nothing gets us early then after like ninety or a hundred years we just wear out and our hearts stop.

Shouldn't happen in Valinor, at least, which gives me some more time to figure out what's happening at all and then stop it. I wonder how to even start researching a process that's unobservable here, though.

I think a lot of problem-solving endeavors will need to wait to be planned precisely till we know how accessible the Valar find the world, that's what it's sounded like - somewhere on the spectrum between 'sorry, Kib, welcome to Valinor, at least it's pretty' and 'why yes we can be emergency services for everyone about to die of anything anywhere in your world now that you have alerted us to the problem'.

Yes, but - have you heard the saying 'none, one, and infinity are perfectly reasonable numbers, but two is ridiculous?'

...In a programming context. Suppose it applies here too. My world might not even be worst off.

So I'm going to get started on death.

Excellent. Can I help?

Maitimo thinks this is a biology problem. I'm not sure, but it's at least one obvious avenue. We're made out of cells. Do you know if you are?

I don't, but if you need some blood or something to see what it's made of I don't need it all.

That'd be great. I don't have anything to collect it with, the palace workshops aren't as good as the ones in my home - perhaps you can come over later this week when I've developed a list of all the tests I'd want to runt through, and we can do it all in one go? How about Elenya? That's the day after tomorrow. I also want to learn the language you're speaking but you can teach me while we're running tests.

Day after tomorrow works for me. He has paper on him, because of course he does; he writes this down.