"You're worried that there are too high barriers in practice to children emigrating? My father ran away from home at twenty-eight and did all right, we can obviously replicate the features of Valinor that made that an option..."

"...how developmentally advanced is twenty-eight for your species?"

He sends an image of someone roughly the age of a human nine-year-old.

"All right then."

"We're fully grown at a hundred. Of age at fifty - I could lower that, but I don't want forty year olds marrying..."

"We don't have anyone on tap whose aging works quite like that so I'll just take your word that this would be undesirable. The main thing is that we don't want anyone stuck with parents they can't stand, partly because we run into this problem so often - alts of my husband are very common and they're not the only ones with this as a feature, either."

"We are very amenable to policies that let children leave bad situations. I don't think Elves in general will be as delighted but they'll be supportive enough of the main policies that'd enable children to live on their own, like transplanting Valinor's ecology - everything is edible and nutritionally complete, that contributes more than you'd expect to freedom of movement..."

"Oh, that sounds lovely, and if it's already being done somewhere might be fairly easy to wish into place."

"That'd be great, thank you, we have a few species' seeds but not enough to pull it off everywhere. And obviously you can import it to anywhere else that'd benefit, it works for human and Elven and Dwarvish dietary needs and Pen seemed all right though she's also magicked even for an angel, right?"

"She is indeed magicked even for an angel; she gets hungry because I didn't think it would be wise to completely dissociate a small child from all the customary sensations her peers are growing up with - although I did tighten her physical ward because she couldn't stand even scraped knees and bent feathers - but she doesn't get very hungry or find it impairing beyond distraction, and if she didn't eat for a while even that would go away. It seems likely to go over well for use in terraforming projects if it turns out that other species, humans especially there are so many, can eat the same things."

"If our Men are the same as your humans they can," he says. "I highly recommend terraforming projects use Valinor's ecology, it's lovely and durable and resistant to damage and requires little maintenance."

"All good traits."

"Nice to feel like we'll have something to offer the multiverse even before we get up to speed."

"Lots of places do, especially if they aren't 'another Earth with no magic'."

"There are lots of those?"

"A surprising number. Only one of them has a native Bell."

"I am terribly curious about lots of different things but I think they ought to wait for demobilizing, aid to survivors of the collapse of Angband, bringing back the dead and building a peacetime civilization. I shall look you up when it's curiosity-satisfying time."

"All right. Jane can forward any messages. I don't think you've been introduced - Jane?"

[Hi.]

He shudders slightly. [Hi.] "Bringing back the easily-retrievable dead is the other thing you might want to do here immediately. I think it may be worth it even though it could annoy the Valar."

"Likely. Lazarus, would you mind having a look at their dead?"

[Something wrong?]

[Enemy can talk in my head, and liked doing it. The internal experience is not identical but it's very close. Don't worry about it.]

"Are their dead likely to horrify me?" he wonders, but he squints at thin air anyway. "Oh, that's hardly horrifying at all. They're just sort of hanging around insubstantially in a physical location which they are unable to leave. And... conscious and isolated and I think something is going on with their sense of time... but they are not being actively tortured at all times by their own inherent magical properties, so that's still better than what I saw in the evil god's evil fortress!"

"Any visible problems with just rendering them alive, or relocating them in catacomb-type storage - perhaps not actually Downside; Pattern keeps something like catacombs on her moon - so they can be more piecemeal rendered alive?"