Lovely! Then they'll be glass for greenhouses, and glass for various other applications, apparently elaborate glassware and statues are reasonable strategic priorities? An Elf will stop singing to explain that the city has to be pretty.

Yes, the importance of prettiness to Elves has been explained to her.

The city is pretty. It has wide avenues where the Elves are putting in mosiac cobblestones and it has, at last, thick-walled stone buildings including one for humans to sleep in with separate bedrooms and almost perfect quiet. It has better walls, with watch towers. There are nearly three hundred thousand Elves and all of them are rapidly making the city as spectacular as they can.

Kiri decides that she wants to sculpt hot glass with her bare hands. It is a slightly awkward medium and she has to pick it out from under her fingernails but she can get some interesting effects this way, even though she's not a sculptor per se.

The Elves think this is incredibly cool and suggest she apply some techniques from pottery and are eager to get a look at the results.

Sure. That sounds relaxing. She potteries with glass.

Maitimo finds her once things have started to calm down and the walls are thick and there are roofs over every head.  Hey. How are you doing?

Holding up. I'm glad Aleko's here, it'd be harder coping without him.

I can imagine. It's not likely to get much easier but I wanted you to know we're in contact with the local communities and they've agreed to check before attacking orcs.

That's good. Thank you for letting me know.

We're working on producing paper, if that's something that'd be useful to you or Aleko.

I would love paper. I usually process my thoughts in writing, I can do fire letters in the air but it's not great for storage. And Aleko can't do fire drawings.

So he summons someone who comes over with paper. It is sort of rough paper. We're still learning.

This is fine. Thank you.

Are you being kept in the loop about what's going on? Is there anything you'd like to be involved in?

I don't feel particularly in-loop but frankly I'm terrifying and I'd avoid me too - uh, if that is in fact the problem people can go through Aleko, it's not the usual reason people go through him but it is in his job description and he's managing the osanwë thing okay now.

That's good to know! I think you are out of the loop for a less excusable reason, which is that we are very very accustomed to working with each other and not as accustomed to working with you. The current projects that have the most people on them are scouting sources of stone and metal, both of which we need very badly, and making enchanted glowing rocks, which we are hoping will suffice to let us grow crops. We have about a year's supply of food so that's not desperate but it's going to be a very difficult problem probably forever and we're hoping to stumble on something brilliant. We're also getting in touch with the locals, have learned their language - my father's writing a research paper on it because I think he needs the mental break from real work - and there's apparently a very powerful slightly isolationist local kingdom here who might be able to help us. I will tell people to tell you these things.

Thank you. I'd offer firelight for the crops but I'm not at all sure it would be good for them or a good use of my attention.

Doesn't seem likely. You could heat the greenhouses once we have them, just to start with, they should stay warm if they're insulated well. But this temperature is fine for some crops if not the ones we're accustomed to from Tirion and we should probably grow things that don't require greenhouses eventually. Perhaps the shy locals will tell us eventually how they do it.

Hopefully. It's getting very tiresome not having a sun. It's worse for Aleko, unless he's hovering around me he can't just illuminate whatever he wants to look at.

Can we build a sun? What are they made of?

Suns have to be very far away. The sun is fire, but it's well out of my range, and I don't know anything about how it stays up, let alone how one could be put up so as to do that manually.

Yeah, we have not yet figured out flight. It might only be a project of a decade if we were set to it but it doesn't seem like the most important thing.

The last air prime died trying.

Good to know. Project for after the war, then, though we'd test low over the water with someone who's a good swimmer and Ulmo on hand to supervise...