You okay?

Mmhmm. Found out why the Dwarves are nervous about Quendi; the Doriath ones used to hunt them.

Findekáno told me.

Nod. Not the kind of thing I do very well to be surprised with. I'm okay now, though.

I would have told you if we'd learned it sooner.

Nod. Well, we know now. Dunno what's going to happen when we find Doriath, but at least it won't be a surprise then.

What do you mean 'what will happen'?

...I'm probably not going to be able to handle talking to them? They hunted them for sport, that's not... I don't think I'm going to be able to handle being there, not at all, unless I'm missing something really important about what happened.

Okay, so you needn't go meet them.

...nod. Ñolofinwëans have been pretty enthusiastic about the idea, though. Not that I've really been around since we found out. She shrugs. I'll find out when it happens, I guess.

We also killed a lot of people, you know.

She sighs and hugs her knees to her chest. Yeah, and I don't like that, but I'm pretty sure you had reasons I'd consider good enough - it's not how many, it's why.

I am not trying to persuade you to interact with anyone in Doriath, though I very much doubt they were every one responsible. But we are going to seek to understand if they can be our allies against the Enemy.

Mmhmm.

If you need me to - if I have to wonder if someone... would, or has, or would under other circumstances not see me as a person, I'm going to have a hard time handling that.

I do not expect we will need you to.

Nod.

I spent some time talking to the Dwarves today. I'm really starting to like them. She grins. Told them some things about how kobolds work, and the first thing they wanted to do was figure out how to make having a tribe for neighbors work out okay for everybody.

Good for them! Can it be done?

We think so - it'd depend on the tribe and their situation, if the Speakers wouldn't interact with the Dwarves at all it'd be hard, but probably. The trick would be showing the Dwarves how to set things up to look like good things to steal, and then talking the Speakers into giving the Dwarves some things to set up like that and giving the things back afterward, so they're never actually taking the Dwarves' things.

That does sound like a solution.

Mmhmm. Hopefully it'll never come up, but it's nice that there's a way to make it work if it does.

I can't really imagine it coming up, you prefer very different living conditions.

Yeah. Same thing would probably work for Quendi, too, though. Or humans.

Well, we don't have trouble not stealing things and I don't think humans do. But yes.

I mean if we end up needing to move a kobold tribe here. There's no way a whole tribe would be willing to stay in one of the cities, even if that wasn't a pretty horrible idea, but there's no place without anybody living nearby at all, so we'd need to find a way to keep them from getting into trouble with whoever they were near.

Ah. Yes, that makes sense.