He smiles faintly. "We could send Charps over with lots of seeds and instructions on literacy and so forth, and claim they're servants of Melkor, and that his main teachings are to learn and question and not start violence..."

"You think he's not micromanaging them much?"

"I'm not sure who it is but either way I'd rather be demanding of their attention."

"It might not take much attention to sweep through and denounce the Charps."

"We could send humans prophetic dreams from a hundred miles off if it were safe to get that close..."

"...sketchy," remarks Kib.

"Moreso than letting them be toyed with by the Enemy without even being presented with other information?"

"No, just enough to give me the willies."

"I promise 'pretend to be a god or magic force of nature' isn't my preferred approach to interacting with newborn species. I tried bringing them presents, remember?"

"I remember."

"Getting within osanwe range may not be safe anyway."

"Yeah. Is writing letters possibly enough to get the acquaintance necessary to boost it?"

"....no, but getting acquainted with a Charp and then borrowing its senses might be, if that's even possible at all..."

"I don't think that works, nobody's been able to do osanwë with any golems and Charps aren't that special."

"I bet it'd work on a sapient golem but we also don't want to send sapient golems into danger areas any more than we want to send our troops. Hmm."

"Yeah, also that's an unsolved problem yet."

"Question is whether it's worth solving. What are you working on now?"

"Trying to figure out if I can let golems pass updates between their conspecifics without having to get in range of each other, maybe via something courier-style to carry the updates."

He nods. "Good luck. You're getting copied on updates from the humans, yes?"

"Yeah."

"Then I'll steal no more of your time. ...hug?"

"Okay," Kib murmurs, and he holds very still.

And he murmurs to the golem that it's fine and he holds him and rests his head on Kib's and lets himself believe it's real for a second and then collapses in his chair and gets back to work and reminds himself how unlikely that is.

"I love you," says Kib, and he goes.

The humans are taught all kinds of useful technology. They are being talked around into a war with a neighboring tribe of Elves.