"My mom likes baking but she'd get sick of doing hundreds of a thing, do Elves not have that problem?"

"Nothing goes stale in Valinor, so even if you only cook for yourself you'd often make hundreds of a thing, all the kitchens and all the recipes are built for it. I suppose some people would but those people would do something else - maybe invent recipes and then suggest the good ones to the people who like cooking at scale -"

"Even if things don't go stale surely they get cool after they come out of the oven?"

"Unless you have a surface enchanted to discourage them."

"Ooh."

"I think magic might've slowed us in developing technologies, because if you want to make everyone's lives nicer you do that instead of doing the sort of things that lead down the road to computers - even though computers are a ridiculous benefit to quality of life and to our magic system -"

"That makes sense."

"We'd have gotten there eventually off the pure math but it'd have taken Ages." Sigh. "I was so impressed with Earth at first."

"Computers?"

"Writing. Libraries. At first I thought you wrote them all by hand but when I learned you didn't I was more impressed because you'd figured out something better, you'd made books abundant - currency's clever, computers are brilliant, the internet wasn't really publicly accessible in 1994 but watching it turn into something that was was lovely - I didn't understand how people who died forever could do one another violence but I triply didn't understand how people who had literacy could do it."

"Violence was on a long term declining trend till capes started happening. But no, literacy didn't just -" She snaps sticky fingers. "- do the trick by itself." She finishes her Ho Ho.

"It doesn't actually make much sense to assume technological superiority implies moral superiority, if you'd asked me why I believed that I would have said I didn't. But - still I was surprised that people could have books detailing all the mistakes you'd ever made and go right on making them."

"I think education does anticorrelate with violent crime? - I miss Rete. I feel really stupid without it corroborating for me."

"You're not stupid. But I miss it too."

"Rete was - really good at all the boring and difficult parts of being how I like to be. It looked things up and it knew what to look up so I didn't even have to slow down my sentences. It could be polite for me in my own voice when I would've been gritting my teeth. It made my life, like, the well-designed video game version of my life, where all the annoying parts are ignored for superior UI -"

Fervent nodding. "Being polite and reasonable is aesthetically correct but most people are blustery self-righteous morons, not being overconfident is really important but humility does not come naturally so obviously actual omniscience or as close as you can get is the most tolerable way of being -"

Sigh. "I have a backup in my knee. Just need somewhere it can go."

"Well, let's go knock on doors."

She shivers. "Mmhm."

Into the Prius. "You should sit in the driver's seat, so you can suggest turns."

"I have no idea how to drive but I suppose that doesn't matter." He sits down. "How do I, ah, suggest turns."

"The turn signal is that thing. Flip it up for right turn, down for left, the car will ignore you if it thinks you are stupid."

"I have access to more information than you," he tells the car, and suggests them towards the nearest unbarricaded suburb.

It insists on detouring around one block and wants to go around the rotary nine times but otherwise obeys him. "Everything I make is like this until it's got, like, natural language processing, then you can argue with it," she sighs.

"It's like a little kid. It's cute."

"I guess." It exits the rotary. Here is the suburb they want.