There's tons of humans, and more than five hundred thousand in just this city, and that's too many to keep track of, so we form groups, and they're often about things, like a style of music or a hobby or being from another country but having moved to a new one or something like that. And the groups pick up all kinds of signifiers and injokes and habits. So somebody might decide they like the habits of the people who listen to awful screamy music, and then listen to lots of awful screamy music until they like it and then they can hang out with the people they think are cool.

Huh. That's kind of cool.

I didn't really think about how many people there are.

Billions and billions. When you can speak enough English to hold conversations but can't pretend you're from San Francisco you will probably want to tell people you're from China, there's a billion people in China alone and you look about right and even other people from China won't be able to contradict you for sure because it's so full of all different kinds of Chinese people.

Wow. And they don't speak English in China?

Nope, Chinese. Several dialects of it. You can say you moved when you were like nine and lived somewhere else for a while to explain why you don't know much about China or know how to read Chinese - speaking it could be a dialect thing but they all share writing, I think.

Thanks. I'll remember that once I have enough English to use it.

Are there not that many languages in your world? There's hundreds, maybe thousands, on Earth. English is one of the most popular, though.

The Elves all spoke one language when we started. Now there's seven or so, and some are only spoken in Valinor and Quenya's banned so I've only heard two or three. The Dwarves keep their language secret. I don't know what Men do.

Well, I guess species "starting" in recorded memory kinda cuts down on the linguistic iterations you can have gone through.

Yeah. Men only started three hundred years ago. Elves have had longer but they live longer so the languages change slower.

Humans have been around as a species for millions of years and have had something recognizable as civilization for about twelve thousand.

Yeah, that's more than even Elves. Less than Maiar but on their own they can't have children.

Why not?

They find biological forms really really hard to sustain to the necessary level of detail, I don't think any of them but my mom build them capable of bearing children, and she had a really rough time staying biological to the correct degree for a whole pregnancy and if you forget to do digestion properly or something you'd lose the baby.

And they can't reproduce by budding or something, there's just a fixed number of them?

Yep. Same since Creation.

Weird.

Your way seems pretty weird to me! 

Except for some things I haven't figured out yet - like why the fluffs have emotion-powered wish-granting - our system makes pretty mechanistic sense all the way down based on simple math-y rules. Yours basically doesn't.

Maybe since we're not as advanced we just haven't figured as much out yet.

That's possible, but sapient creatures springing into being at the genesis of a universe kind of definitively fails to make the same kind of sense as this universe does.

Huh. After we've saved both worlds we can run experiments and compare them.

Sure.

Or ask my mom, she might know lots of the things you're wondering.

Maybe, although I might want to tread carefully around your mom and not try to have extended conversations with her.