"Good. They're dumb and bad and you're nice and your brain is sparkly."

"What makes a brain sparkly, exactly?"

"It works really well. Papa's brain is sparkly and Dr. McCoy's brain is sparkly and yours is sparkly differently but it's still sparkly."

"I think it might just be Quendi. My brain is pretty bad for a Quendi."

"What do you mean?"

"Most of them are much smarter than me."

"How do you know?"

"I can't read, practically everyone can. My father invented writing. My father can invent anything, he's ridiculously gifted at art and engineering, and several of my brothers take after him - and whatever they do do, they're the best at it. I can talk to animals. Maybe that's what you're seeing."

"You can't read? Then how come you can talk to Bar, she talks with napkins."

"I can if I try really hard, and she talks in a special language my father invented for me because I was too dumb for the normal one and it's easier to read."

"...That's not how that works. That sounds like dyslexia, not being dumb."

"Odette said that too." I don't really care that there are mortals as bad at reading as I am.

"Dyslexic people aren't dumber than people who aren't, I could tell." She pulls her hands out of Huan's fur, props her fists on her hips and scowls at him. "You're not dumb. You should listen to your me."

"You should meet my father, kiddo. My - ah, my you - hasn't met him either."

"Do you mean he said you were dumb or that you weren't because if it's the latter you should listen to him too and if it's the former I should meet him so I can punch him." Getting punched by a six-year-old mortal would probably not be a big deal under most circumstances but this one is very determined.

"Please don't punch my father. And he didn't say that I was dumb, he invented me the special alphabet so I could read despite being dumb. You should meet him so you can tell what actual smartness looks like."

"You're not dumb. And even if he's way smarter than you that doesn't make you dumb, Scotty isn't dumb just because Papa and Dr. McCoy exist."

Sure, kiddo, just dumb for a Feanorian. Shame that's all I care about. "I'm sure Scotty's very smart."

"He's pretty much average, really," she says dismissively. It does not occur to her that this might be an unhelpful thing to say at the moment. "He's not as smarty as Sarah, who's dyslexic."

"Okay. All these people are Men?"

"We're mutants." This is an important distinction! Really.

"Okay. I'd be upset to be mistaken for a Vanya, that's fair enough."

"What's a Vanya?"

"Uh, I'm not clear on the difference between Men and mutants, but if they're different kinds of people who look different and do different stuff and live different places, that's sort of like the Noldor and the Vanyar and the Thindar and so forth."

"We mostly don't live different places. I just live at a school for us. Lots of mutants have human parents."