"Wise. Well, I appreciate your attempting it." He sighs. "The news here: some of the plants we tested after the Sun rose seem to be thriving, so we're now cultivating those; we're setting up an armed camp for mining around thirty miles north of here, we have limestone and therefore have started on more glasswork, if there's anything glass you might need. We're trying different approaches to parchment. In Valinor nothing ever decayed; here, things do so quite rapidly. Your friends are alarmingly obedient, so much so that several people have come to me with ethical qualms about demanding labor from them. My expectation is that they feel safer around us if it's obvious to them that they are useful to us, but if you disagree we can discuss it."

"Make them take breaks," Loki says. "Lunch, and a few fractions of an hour they may place wherever they like but are obliged to take, days off once every week or two if you can afford it and they're here that long. And see that they're doing educational work when it's available, so they'll be able to settle - the island will have them living densely compared to any settlements here and they'll need to be able to use it efficiently. Farming, construction, manufacturing the tools for both. I can talk to Vár if you like but I wouldn't have you keep them idle and I'm not about to chide them for being cooperative... I'm afraid I can't remember what we treated paper with in Asgard to make it last and wouldn't know how to manufacture it if I did."

"...Well, you don't need to pamper the orcs more than you are your own, assuming it turns out their needs are more like those of Quendi than like mine; that was just me reciting union labor practices from, what was it, the maintenance crew or something like that on Asgard. What happens to the paper in the span of months? I would expect it to last longer than that even if all it was were wood pulp. Do you have some kind of mold or are you just noticing imperfections I wouldn't be able to see for years?"

"The latter, probably. If there's even the slightest deterioration noticeable in months there's no point using it for something as time-intensive as writing books."

"...Would it help if I taught you how to make a printing press? I suppose that's only really useful if you want a lot of copies of something."

"What's a printing press?"

Loki produces visual aids. "You make a lot of backwards alphabets on little pieces like this, and assemble them into a tray for each page; and then you smear them with ink and," the illusion demonstrates, "like so. It won't make the books last any longer but if you needed redundancy for something."

He watches intently. "Well, once we figure out how to make the books last, I'm sure being able to copy them quickly would be useful. We don't have the movable type, we do sometimes engrave a page and then stamp it for copies. Like for wedding invitations, once it became a fad to have written ones."

She nods. "I'm sorry I don't recall anything more useful."

"I wonder, too, but apparently it's not quick. And they do have to swear to be orcs. Maybe their children will look different."

He looks troubled. "It doesn't seem right to let children be born to orcs."

"I don't remember how to make birth control, either, and I do not know that they would like it."

"Birth control?"

"Quendi do not, I am told, have children by accident. In other realms that happens all the time unless something is invented to stop it, and while the something is doing its job one cannot have children on purpose, either."

"By accident? What, like you could just wake up one day married and with child?"

"...I didn't say anything about getting married. But it's not a magical process in the same way as it is for you, so avoiding it is, sans invention, a serious sacrifice for most people."

"And this invention makes it impossible to bear children." He bites his lip. "Even if you knew how to do that, it'd be a terrible wrong. But it might wrong the children, to let them be born to an orc community."

"One can remove the invention in some specific-invention-appropriate-way when called for. But it does seem like the orcs might find it intrusive, especially if they were not invited to remove it."

"Are orc children born suffering? Do you know?"

"I don't. I should ask Vár. That and whether they have only intentional children."

"She's - she reminds me of an Elf child. Astonishingly carefree, for what she's been through. Father says the oath-switch probably wouldn't work if it's given just so we'll spare their lives, so I told her it's important that she not just walk them all through it, that she really convince them it's the right thing. And -"

"Quendi child," Loki corrects. "And she thinks it is. She's a natural missionary."

"We're fated for every endeavor we begin to end in ruin. You seem fated to good fortune. You could have run across any of them, first."