Oh, good.

Yeah.

Are you going to want to meet them, once they have enough vocabulary to talk to?

If they would like.

Okay. I'm expecting that to take months, though.

That's not a problem at all.

Okay, good.

Any other news? Doriath, the humans?

Now that you're picking up Quenya you can read our reports!

I'm not picking it up that quickly. But if you really want to get rid of me I suppose I can wait until I can.

I am rather desperately scrambling to make sure everyone in this city has everything they need, and it has me all delighted about ways of getting things out to everyone at once. The humans are doing fine, do you want to visit them again sometime? The babies still die sometimes for no apparent reason and it's awful.

Yeah, I've been wanting to check in there - next time Tirinquo seems bored, maybe. I'm glad they're doing well.

Me too. Thank you for finding them.

You're welcome.

Need anything?

Nah. Oh, Tirinquo's probably going to share my room permanently - kobolds don't usually sleep alone - so if you'd been worrying about where to put them, you don't need to.

I am glad that works for you both.

Mmhmm. Okay, I'll let you get back to work.

Likewise. Take care.

You too.

The kobolds keep working on learning Quenya; Rána brings hides and ink when they visit the Ñolofinwëans so they can take notes, and because Tirinquo continues to be much more comfortable with written language than spoken - not that they're very forthcoming in either, but they seem to like transcribing what they hear, and they're willing to answer written questions sometimes, if the possible answers are written down for them too.

That is useful; it is nice to have some means of communicating.

...yup. Though kobolds generally do fine without it.

It is good that kobolds are happy with their lives.

She should probably explain why this topic bothers her so much, if it's going to keep coming up. So, uh: before she came here, she spent like half her life working to get people who thought kobolds weren't people because they didn't speak to stop doing that. Because they'd hurt her tribe very badly because of it.

That sounds like good and important work. 

Since people would quite reasonably assume kobolds weren't people, speech being the only thing that makes Quendi different from animals.

Really.

Oh, definitely.