"I'll have someone bring food right over."

"Convenient."

"I suppose. How does that work at home?"

"Well, you can get food delivered but it's a luxury, most people cook for themselves or eat at restaurants." He has the habit of publicizing what he means to say.

"In Tirion before the war there were food carts everywhere, you'd go for a stroll at lunchtime and pick up things. Here we have -" rationing often enough to be hard on enterprising food cart vendors.

"That sucks. Is there rationing right now?"

"This year's been all right."

"If I'd come here for any other reason I'd offer to go fix blights or whatever." Sigh.

"Doesn't sound worth it." Curufin thinks that if different worlds have different magic systems we shall be omnipotent sooner or later, we'll get the blights then.

"Yeah. I just really miss being able to do magic casually. Some things are really elaborate - getting here was, the oath erasure will be - but I could also just - perfectly roast a chicken leg by dropping a little sheep blood on it and chanting, say. Since it does burning and you can just back off a little on how much burning."

Maybe if it eats a whole planet nothing happens subsequently and once uninhabited worlds are found your world can return to casual use and we can employ it for disease control.

"Maybe."

I am a bit nervous about finding out but that's just all the more reason to have collected absurd amounts of magic by then.

Nod. "Hopefully most forms of magic don't eat planets at all."

Ours don't! They're very slow, though, not particularly human-suited.

"Oh, does singing a magic song take all day?"

"No, but writing them takes decades."

"I don't sing especially well but it would be nice to have some magic I could use casually."

I'd be happy to teach you a song - there's one for walking on water, one for making it rain or making it warmer or making it colder, one that causes the people around you to fall asleep, there are mood ones for therapeutic contexts...

"...I'd probably better not try to walk on water. I'd trip and quit singing and drown probably. Temperature songs sound neat."

Please don't trip and quit singing and drown, it'd be an awfully disappointing way for our one shot at interworld contact to end.

And he sings a song that makes the room warm.

"That's really pretty."

"Thank you!"

"I will need to hear it a couple times to have any hope of reproducing the tune let alone the lyrics but oh well."

I can sing it several more times. I suppose learning our musical notation is not the best use of your time.