"Sorry."

It's hardly your fault.

"We use the same word to express fault and condolences."

And let me guess, you cannot just call a conference to coin a new one and get everyone agreed on it.

"No. If someone decides they need it and comes up with or imports a catchy enough distinction it may spread."

How disorganized! My father would be so fascinated by your language.

"I hope he gets a chance to check it out."

I bet he will someday. It would just be awful if everyone currently alive were dead by then.

"Yeah. Also languages change over time so there's that."

...but you record how they were before, right?

"Uh, to an extent. We have linguistics as a field. A lot of records don't survive, though, and we keep changing media formats these days."

How do those work?

"Uh, for instance when I typed up that thing to show you the printer - that's encoding the letters and the formatting in a way the computer can understand, but that's arbitrary, it can be done different ways and often is. A computer can't understand other encodings. And the parts of the computer, or the swappable storage things that computers can read, can get obsolete as we invent new ones, and then nobody makes things that can read the old ones or keep them around. And in the case of straightforward writing on physical media like clay tablets or whatever they can just get broken after enough years of opportunities to break."

I think that my father would approve of ignoring that problem and trying to stop the dying but I suspect that it would always haunt him a bit.

"It can be mitigated but no one has a really personal incentive to do so, we just don't live that long."

Ugh.

"Sorry."

It's not your fault. But if you have creators I take issue with their aesthetics.

"Don't blame you."

And the Elves explore Vancouver. Even in light of the conversation about money and food they don't seem to have a good sense of time.

Bella does eventually call a halt on the grounds that she has to sleep.

That's okay! Does she mind if they rest in these trees here.

"I'm worried that you'll run into something you don't know how to handle gracefully - in particular I don't know if it's legal to sleep in trees here. If you'd like to sleep in trees I'd rather find you some unmonitored wilderness to pick you up from in the morning."

That sounds great. Thank you.

"You're welcome. Lemme check some forests."

She pops around, comes back a minute later. "Found you a nice looking place with, uh, relatively sleepable looking trees."