"...huh," he says thoughtfully. "Are there just going to - keep being more of them forever? Won't they run out of room eventually—? Portals only help if there's somewhere to put the other end."

"The universe is spectacularly enormous. A friend of mine is working on traveling faster than light, and by the time even orcs have managed to fill the universe I am sure we will know how to build new planets."

He laughs. "Wonder if I could build a planet. I probably can."

"It would be a beautiful planet."

"Well of course!"

Giggle. "Have you been into space at all?"

"Well I'm not sure exactly what counts, but I haven't been any farther from the ground than 'flying so high I can't breathe'."

"Higher than that there's no air at all. The view of the stars is incredible, and if you get high enough, you're weightless - weight is the planet pulling on you, but it's weaker farther away."

"Sounds like it'd make it hard to fly..."

"You can't do it by pushing air around with a wing. You can do it by pushing in the opposite direction, usually with a controlled explosion but you could move a little by just bringing along some air or water to spray behind you if you wanted."

"Oh, if I want air or water I can make them. Same with explosions, for that matter."

"There you go, you can explode your way across the sky even absent atmosphere."

"What an image," he says, giggling.

"Do you have - if I'd run into them I'd know the word, do you have things that you set on fire and they fly up and explode in colors?"

"We do have those! Fireworks!"

"Simpler spaceships look a little like that when they take off but don't explode afterwards."

"I imagine they wouldn't be very popular if they exploded!"

"Except with a few people who wanted to try getting reembodied!"

"There have got to be easier ways to try that!"

"Sure, but explosions are pretty."

"Well. True."

"We're really quite obsessed with pretty."

"I noticed that."

"Orcs like to cultivate deliberately un-Elven aesthetics but their cities are still nice in their own way. Dwarves make things that are again differently beautiful, and then there's here. But we're the only ones who really just suffer if things around us are ugly."

"Humans generally don't suffer if things around them are ugly! What are orc and Dwarf cities like?"