He's a Noldo, he says proudly. He'll be a great inventor someday. 

Yeah. Did you get to see the fountain they made? That was their design, more or less entirely, I just did the casting.

He did a really lovely job of it, didn't he! Though the casting is a great part of the project, don't sell yourself short. 

Well, that is my Gift. ...actually, now that I think about it - do you have Inspired Gifts here? I don't think I've seen any artifacts, not that it'd be easy to tell with how pretty everything is.

I have never heard of whatever you are referencing. 

Ah, probably just my world, then; I'm not sure what you'll think of it. It's... basically magic, but not the kind anyone does, it's just something that happens, that every so often someone will get Inspired. I've never heard of magic being someone's Gift before, and it seems to work a bit differently, but usually when someone is Inspired they feel compelled to craft a particular thing, quite suddenly, and whatever it is turns out amazingly pretty and has a few unusual traits, mostly that it can't be damaged. The thing is an artifact; the Inspired person also ends up amazingly skilled at whatever craft they used to create it, when they come out of the crafting fugue, and that's their Gift. The teleportation magic is my Gift; the spell form I use to cast teleportation spells is my artifact.

We do not have that. We speak of inspiration but it's nothing so concrete. 

Nod. So, I appreciate the compliment, but it really doesn't count in the same way.

Lunch is looking pretty done. Shall we go back?

It does not count to be complimented on your Gift? The rest of the tradition seems lovely but that bit seems odd to me. 

You can compliment it if you want to, I'm not going to be offended or anything, but it's not something I worked for - it's something I have, not something I am like another skill would be.

Ah. Here complimenting good uses of skills someone has by fortune is considered very normal. 

Nod. Cultural difference; we have a lot of those. I'll keep it in mind to mention in the talk if there's time.

I am looking forward to this talk tremendously. 

I should go get started, then - I should see where you'll be sitting, first, though, so I can find you when I'm done.

He points out their seats. Good skill with the talk. 

She beams at him again, retrieves her drawing supplies from the bag, hugs Fëanáro, and sets off to look for her new acquaintance.

He recognizes her and waves. Have some ideas?

Yep! I'm more worried about how to organize everything and how much detail to put into things and stuff, I've noticed plenty of differences already.

Do you want to start by telling me those? Then we can think about what orders might make sense. 

Sure, let me see... actually, first - she sets her things up for drawing. This'll help me remember what we talked about, since I expect this is going to get complicated. Anyway, I'll start with some stuff about the world, since that's important context for a lot of the rest. And so she does - sun and moon and seasons, do they have seasons here, and where she lives is all forest, and here's the kinds of people there are in general, and here's the kinds of people that live near where she lived, and here's a sketch of a kobold and a tigerperson to scale, and there are no Valar or Maia or anybody so it's all pretty dangerous and actually that's one of her questions, is how much she can talk about dangerous things or bad things that happened without upsetting people and what she should do instead when something like that is integral to understanding something else.

We too have griefs from Cuivienen. People will be upset and you may want to build in pauses for them to recover but you need not avoid the topics. 

She nods, solemnly. All right. I'll try to keep it light anyway, but some of it really isn't avoidable if I want to answer questions I'm sure people will have, so it's good that I don't have to avoid it.

So: kobolds. There are a lot of differences between kobolds and Quendi, and she's sure she hasn't noticed them all yet, so it's probably best in general for people to assume she's not very much like them. Most kobolds don't talk, would be the most obvious difference from a Quendi perspective - they communicate mostly by body language, and are very good at it - and kobolds are much more people-oriented, is the obvious one to her. Kobold society is structured very differently than Quendi society, in lots of ways; kobolds live in tribes of about a hundred people, except during the summer when all the tribes in an area will meet together; her meetup group had seventeen tribes. Most kobolds won't voluntarily interact with anyone who's not a kobold - she's very strange for a kobold in being able to be calm enough around a different kind of person to talk to them; kobolds in general are afraid of strange or unexpected things, on the basis that they're most likely dangerous.

Kobolds also don't do ownership; the tribe's resources are all held in common. In general, a kobold's tribe is the main focus of their life, directly or indirectly; kobolds don't survive without their tribes, and any work they do will be to support their tribe as a whole - often with a focus on personal friends, or on what they personally want to see the tribe be, but doing something like hunting or gathering or crafting and then not sharing the results would be considered highly antisocial, and a lot of kinds of work are inherently prosocial - healing, childrearing, Speaking, that kind of thing. Kobolds also enjoy the challenge of finding things that are hidden or guarded, and regularly hide things for each other to find; they also like to go take things from other people, as a test of skill, which they don't see a problem with but other people consider very antisocial, so that's a problem. She in particular does not do that thing; she's seen enough of how Quendi do things and feels welcome enough that she's passably comfortable treating shops like kobold tribes' storage piles, but she's being pretty cautious about even that, for now, since she's seen how seriously some people take ownership and she's not really sure about the underlying psychology.

Kobolds are very touch-oriented in a way that's similar to what she's been told about how Quendi are speech-oriented; it's a strong reminder of the fact that they're not alone and that their tribemates care about them. There are conventions about approaching someone to touch them - there are conventions about approaching people in general, in fact, between tribemates it's not usually a big deal but even they can come across as rude or hostile if they approach too quickly, or come too close without waiting to be acknowledged. Yes, this means that people approaching her on the street to offer her things is kind of alarming; she does understand that it means something very different to them, and in the case of being offered food she likes it - handing someone something is a demand, in her culture, but handing someone food in particular is a demand that they take care of themselves, which is actually really sweet and useful while she's adjusting; it's pretty easy for her to lose track of herself with so many new things to figure out.

Hmmm...

Inspired Gifts are this thing; her magic is hers, which is weird, usually it's, like, bonecarving or something. Her actual career that she trained for is as a Speaker, which is sort of a catch-all career for anything that requires talking, but mostly it's about helping various tribes cooperate, since kobolds from different tribes have trouble communicating the usual way. Speaking for someone is kind of a big deal - you can really hurt them if you do it badly enough - so Speakers learn to understand body language above and beyond the usual kobold competence at it, and psychology, and negotiation skills, and that kind of thing; she's kind of middling at those things by Speaker standards; her focus was on interspecies diplomacy rather than any of the usual skills.

He is fascinated and earnestly delighted and worried and impressed to various degrees as she explains. This is going to be extraordinary. We've never met other kinds of people before. And you're very good at interspecies diplomacy.

She grins. Yeah, I've put a lot of work into the diplomacy; it's not a very safe thing to do, at home, but it needed to be done, so. I'd been at it for nearly fifteen years when I got my magic and had to stop, which I think is a pretty impressive run - I don't really have anything to compare it to, I've never heard of any kobold doing it before.

- I forgot to mention that; kobolds age differently than Quendi. We're adults at twelve and fully-grown in our early twenties, and we're not unaging, we only live 125 to 150 years. I'm 31; I started doing diplomacy with the tigerfolk when I was sixteen.

That is important! Can the Valar change it? It'd be a tragedy for you to die...