"Should I warn my people not to shoot birds for food?"

"Just ones that look like this," she says, providing an illusion of a swift, "and we'd be a bit hard to catch."

"And not much meat. All right."

"Thanks."

"Any enemy of the Enemy is a friend of mine."

"I appreciate that philosophy."

They've reached the center of the city, where there's a tower. They climb it. "Is there a reason you haven't turned all the orcs into birds?" Meril says. "They might like it - I'd be tempted - and they couldn't harm anyone if they change their minds."

"I considered that. They wouldn't like it, as it turns out - unfortunately one of the lines in their coerced oath has them swear to 'be an orc' - and also the Enemy can read their minds, so they'd just wind up as spies if they weren't kept prisoner."

"A shame," Círdan says. "I wonder if that oath keeps them in orcish shape as their alliances change? I'd expect them to get more, ah, Elf-like."

"A small number of them are going to try having children once they're settled. The children, if they're born in pain instead of that turning out to be some subsequent intervention on the Enemy's part, will be healed promptly and will not swear any oaths, so we'll see."

"I am eager to see the outcome of that, though I'd never suggest it as an experiment and am loath to permit it. Orcs bearing children?"

"They really, really want to. I convinced them to make it a small experiment because I can't keep up with a large, growing population if I have to heal every single one, but if the babies are born just fine and don't need me personally to grow up pain-free..."

"Then our neighbors grow more numerous." He frowns. "Well, if they become more Elf-like with the generations they'll also reach adulthood much more slowly, and be less inclined to bear children lightly."

"...In most realms it is possible to conceive children as a purely mechanical process, unintentionally. The orcs seem to have that design drawback, to the extent I am sure Vár understood what I was asking. It's possible future generations will recover the Quendi advantage."

"Really? That's very concerning indeed. If they don't marry until a hundred then even if they inadvertently have children after that, the population will grow slowly."

"In order to avoid having children they will need to avoid" er "marrying, at all, at least until I can go to another realm and bring back technological conveniences that separate the processes. It's a substantial sacrifice on their part and I do not yet know how long they will need to make it for the sake of not burying me in agonized baby orcs."

"Perhaps you can ask blond-dog," Meril pipes up. "He was very confident that even though Valinor was terrible, being there had taught them so much they could now do anything at all, and very swiftly."

"They've got a lot on their plates, and I remember very little about the technological conveniences in question, and adapting them for orcs might require a lot of medical study to boot."

"What are they working on?" Círdan asks.

"Other other-realm technology. I can duplicate the science lecture for you if you want a written copy."

"Written?"

"Er, newcomer invention, paralleled in most realms, where words are represented as symbols. If no one here can read I can also just deliver the lecture aloud to whoever would like to hear it."

"I can leave diagrams for all the parts that lend themselves to it; I can attach an illusion to paper and it'll behave as though drawn there, till the paper is destroyed and the illusion stays wherever it was when that happened."

"Why not?" he says.