"I think I will probably keep these."

"I'm glad! It's very rewarding to see how much you like them!"

Flutter. "In our early history before we'd invented money Elves operated our economy almost entirely on it being rewarding for people to appreciate things. We do use money now, although differently than it's used here."

"That sounds like it would've been nice."

"Some people complained about the introduction of money. I think we would have kept with the gift economy if we'd had a smaller population - it was so cozy. But Dwarves convinced us that markets were the only sensible way to handle large amounts of information about what people wanted to have. So we do basic income."

"'Cozy' is a good word for it."

"You'd just go out for a stroll and everyone would give you stuff!"

"And - I like it when people are happy that I made them nice things, I've known that for a while, but until you came along I hadn't known what it was like when they're also not terrified of me - I think I could've been very happy in a society like that. Well, as long as I hadn't grown up in it. Nobody deserves having me grow up near them."

"Tempestuous childhood?"

"I was a horrible kid and an even more horrible teenager. If you wanted to say I'm still horrible I wouldn't argue but at that age I was a lot worse."

"How so?"

"Well, I killed my own father because I was impatient to get at his empire, for one."

"That implies some interesting things about the succession rules."

"It was right after my self-dedication. Under the circumstances, nobody was going to argue with me about whether murdering him invalidated my claim. And then I discovered that running an empire is actually a lot of work and I'm not any good at it, and it took me a while to put together a functional government that didn't need me for anything, and by the end of that I was starting to notice things like 'the law of the empire works much better if I at least mostly obey it'..."

"The king of the Noldor is planning to abdicate in his eldest grandson's favor after that grandson has raised his children."

"That sounds so much friendlier!"

"Rather. I think the kings of the Teleri and Vanyar aren't planning to abdicate at all though, they don't have superior candidates in mind."

"Makes sense, if everybody's immortal. When you don't have to worry about dying you also don't have to worry about succession in the event of your death."

"Why did you think you wanted an empire?"

"Because being Emperor means being acknowledged to have power, in a way that just happening to be absurdly powerful doesn't."

"Hm. What's important about that?"

"...I'm not sure how to say... it's... the thing that things being important is for. I'm a lot less - caught up in that - than I used to be, but mostly because there's no reasonable way anyone could make me stop being Emperor. And no way at all that anyone could make me stop being absurdly powerful."

"...I think things being important bottoms out at the flourishing of sapient life in general."

"...?"

"As an example of something else things could be important for."