"Oh, well, yes, I suppose if you're looking around for evidence that the place was created gemini powers do indicate that, but it's a simple biological category and a simple sidereal category, it's not like the powers only appear for people pure of heart who've been blessed by the Pope, or something like that. And some of the powers appear for edge cases like chimeras."

I do not think we have those.

"Chimeras? Okay, although it's possible they're just unobtrusive. Do you have conjoined twins?"

- no. That's - that's horrifying, oh no, the poor kids...

"- well, nowadays they get split up right as rain when they turn sixteen... but yeah, it's not great."

Who is the Pope?

"Some people think we have a creator and have come to various idiosyncratic conclusions about the properties of same, some more popular and organized than others. The Pope is the person in charge of one of the more popular and organized beliefs on the subject, Catholicism."

- huh. Do they think that for reasons other than 'obviously something this complicated had a creator -"

"There's a bunch of reasons people come up with to justify it but in point of fact a majority of people belong to the same religion as their parents and I don't think there's a significant trend for converts to collect in any one sect except according to which sects have put in missionary time."

That is what I would expect from people except maybe the Noldor and even then, maybe. People don't usually decide things based on convincing intellectual arguments.

"You don't say."

Well, your kind of people could have been different!

"They're not."

Too bad. I could have just come up with a really convincing argument against having wars for stupid reasons when you don't have souls.

"Well, it probably wouldn't hurt."

My people are very contrarian and if you came up with a convincing argument they should not have wars while not having souls, they might get more likely to have such wars if they disagreed with your argument. Which would still not be very likely.

"I guess it could hurt if you worded it very insensitively."

I think I need to learn more to word it at all.

"Yeah. If you're going to be here long-term - as opposed to going home tomorrow afternoon with a Junebug teleporter whose limits differ from mine - you will probably want to learn to read English and check out the Internet."

And what's that?

"The Internet is a globe-spanning library-like thing accessible from computers."

....oooh.

"We are very proud of it! It has weird unpleasant parts because random people can put anything on it anonymously but mostly it's a crowning human achievement."

- maybe the ones who put awful things just because they can are the ones who should not have weapons for killing people?

"...do you want me to actually explain why not that or should I just say 'it's complicated, but in fact, not that'."