And the elves, right? The Quendi mentioned elves.

Yeeeah that happened too but she doubts it was useful the same way, elves are actually sort of awful.

Practice at dealing with people you think are awful is probably character-building.

True, but her Quendi don't think the Dwarves are awful, so it might help with some things, but it doesn't help with this.

The Dwarves tentatively don't think the Noldor are awful either. A bit silly and impractical, but they can't help that, they're Quendi.

Some of that's probably cultural? She's curious what things they're thinking of.

They have genders, isn't that weird? It's like some sort of guild thing and you dress to signal which one you're in and they use different words for people in different ones, it's completely baffling. Also they're very convinced that there's only one kind of sex-relationship and they have silly tastes and they sing all. the. time.

Pfft.

Genders are a biological thing, not a guild thing. They're weird, it's weird that they don't keep it private and that they think it matters, but, that's what that's about, the other species she's familiar with from home do the same thing.

...Dwarves don't keep it private, exactly, but wearing coded clothes for it is a bit much. If lots of species do it then lots of species are weird.

Agreed, definitely, but it does apparently work okay for lots of people.

The relationship thing she mostly can't speak to - the Valar apparently gave them some rules about that and that doesn't seem to have done them any good at all, but she's not sure how much of it is that - and their tastes are about as far from Dwarves' as the species she's familiar with's are from each other, and she kind of likes the singing - kobolds don't sing as often and when they do it's for different reasons but it's still nice.

That's a fair enough analysis.

Yeah. Pretty standard different-species stuff, really. If they'd noticed them causing problems or making mistakes, that'd be more worrisome.

Well, they don't use a very effective economic system, that's a pretty serious mistake, but the Dwarves are used to everybody making it.

Huh?

Oh, Quendi don't use sensible principles for distribution of goods at all, and varied between 'fascinated' and 'politely indifferent' when the Dwarves tried to explain them, and are running their society really badly as a result but no one except Dwarves has ever gotten that right.

...possibly they were talking to the wrong Quendi. Did they try Findekáno?

Yeah, they did! ...there's a lot to it beyond 'use money for things'. Having Kings, for example, is a bad idea, and having Kings assign people work is a terrible one.

Hmh.

The head of the other tribe of Quendi might be more interested, but it also might be a really bad idea to suggest it at all, she'd have to know more to know.

People should do what they want to do, instead of have someone telling them, but of course if people don't have any way to coordinate their activities then you get problems like 'Austri would prefer to get potatoes if they're going to be scarce, but prefer to work in the forge if lots of people are getting potatoes.' So what prices are is a form of information about what other people are doing, and as long as everything has a price everyone knows what everyone else is doing no matter how people there are, and they can make informed choices about what they want to be doing, and this works out much better than telling them.

That's actually kind of like how kobolds do things, except kobolds live in groups small enough that they can figure out what needs to be done by just watching. It doesn't work so well when there's a war or emergency, though, at least the regular way the kobolds do it - you can't just look at the supplies and who's doing what and figure out what it'd be most useful for you to do if there's something weird changing what the tribe needs.

Prices catch up pretty fast to changes in what the tribe needs, and actually warn of it in advance if there's any way to predict it. Unpredictable things can still cause temporary changes, but even then it's not good to manage them by telling people what to do.

Hm.

Well, she's still not sure it'd be a good idea to suggest, but she can probably figure that out.

There's also the thing where she'd have a really hard time with being expected to do ownership like that, but if it's not her tribe picking it up she can probably still avoid it.

Yeah, the Quendi said not to tell her about payments for her magic.

Mmhmm. She appreciates that they're being so nice about that.

The payments are really important because otherwise people won't be able to make their own coordinated decisions, but if she doesn't want to know how much is in her account, or if she wants it transferred to the Quendi or to other people, that's not a problem at all.