Yeah, stuff fails all the time. Sometimes people attribute it to fictional creatures called gremlins, mostly jokingly.

We don't actually have any of those.

I'm honestly not sure if I'm surprised or not.

We have lots of things! But nothing that maps closely onto that idea.

What do you have?

Tons of stuff - nymphs and sylphs and ogres and elves and goblins and giants and kobolds and dwarves and yokai and lizardfolk and gorgons and merfolk and I'm forgetting at least half of the sapient species there are.

Wow, that's a lot.

The Imperium's majority human, but where I went to school and lived are fairly cosmopolitan areas. I wound up with a reputation my first year of college for being good at explaining human customs to nonhumans.

Bet that came in handy in Valinor.

Occasionally!

I think I was pretty good at explaining stuff, but, skewed audience.

Skewed?

I basically never tried explaining stuff about Kilaiuossa to someone who wasn't a Feanorian.

It's weird having his name be a demonym.

I guess it would be if you only knew him as a smol.

If the smol comes here, I wonder what he'll think of my being his counterfactual daughter-in-law.

He will probably want to know all about his brilliant counterfactual children and how good at things they are.

That, I can tell him--oh--his fifth son's name is literally "Curufinwe Atarinke."

...Seriously? "Hello, my name is I Am My Dad Again"?

He is, though!

Bella laughs.

And I'll tell you one thing--Feanaro is way better at raising a smol of himself than Finwe was.

I'd hope so.

He was still really fucking broken when Finwe died, though.

There's some really complicated feelings there. I don't fully understand it.

I miss my parents--my real parents, my this-time-'round birth parents are nothing to write home about--but I coped a lot better than that. Or was better at repressing my lack of coping.