"I think it's that they start having opinions and getting excited and interacting."

"Well, you can come back and check that out. When you're sixth circle or whatever."

"I think she'll be cute once she can have opinions!"

"They have opinions really early! Mostly about whether you should feed them grapes and whether you should hold them, but opinions are a very early baby development."

"I mean slightly more interesting and coherently expressed opinions. I can't tell if she wants grapes."

"I wonder if it's sort of self-reinforcing, they're not interesting so you can't tell what they're communicating so they're not interesting..."

"Maybe? I think it'd be less of a species universal if it were simple to interrupt the feedback loop though."

"I'm sure someone tried meditating on the merits of babies at least once in surface elves's thousands-of-years-long population decline."

"We met a surface elf at the Worldwound who figures he can design babycare golems, save the elves. I hope he's wrong, though, because he was a jerk and I bet his golems would be jerks too."

"They'd have to be configurable to work at all though!"

"Well, I hope someone else figures it out first, who isn't a jerk."

"And then Osirion can sell 'em to Shazeuni drow - how is that going?"

"Mostly all right. Kicked off a debate about the curfews, because the drow prefer to shop at night, so more stores are staying open, so it's more inconvenient that women can't go out."

"Especially since the drow who want to shop are themselves going to be mostly women, though I guess they could be sending errandboys."

"They mostly get the exception for casters but at some point it's awkward having a rule with that many exceptions, you know. Better to just stop it."

"Well, I'm glad that's working out."