You're welcome. The Men's settlements look like so - She makes an illusion spread out on the floor. I'm not sure how sentimental they are about the place, actually.

They can return there once the war is over and it's safe. They have houses, that's not bad given where they were starting from. What are you going to do if some of them refuse to leave?

Well, that depends if it's because they like their houses or because Thauron sends somebody to fry the first batch of birds. First case gentle lecturing, latter case honestly I'd let them stay if that seemed like an informed decision.

Do baby Men turn into full-grown birds? Can they even learn to fly?

They should turn into full-grown birds just because of the design of the spell, I didn't make the swifts vary based on target characteristics at all. It will work on pregnant people, it didn't seem out of the question I'd want to be pregnant one day in the distant future. The babies will probably have a hard time learning to fly, though, I may send the families with infants to the Dwarves, it's an easier land route and the Dwarves have some capacity but not enough for everyone. There aren't that many babies.

Tumunzahar can escort your Men if you're worried about the birds, but I don't want to put my city up as collateral and military operations are really expensive.

How firm are they on 'no loans on one's word'? Or maybe I could just call in an IOU for the science lecture.

Apparently their council themselves can't make loans on their word. I explained that I literally can't break mine and they said that was appalling and they certainly wouldn't consider it a reason to extend me credit.

I will try the IOU then. Maybe they have a use for soundproofing or telescopes or something.

I'm annoyed with Macalaurë, a partial stone-song shouldn't have taken him nearly four years. Then we'd have more to trade.

I've been terrible about keeping in touch, he may have had the draft a while ago.

I am not really annoyed with him. The nice thing about my family is that none of us have ever given any of the others cause to doubt we're stretching everything we have as far as we can towards our common goals. Macalaurë probably made the calculation I could earn the money for the city anyway, and he was correct, and once I hear whatever he spent the time on I won't be annoyed. But right now it's frustrating not to have the resources I need to realize my objectives.

This wasn't all on the budget I netted you with songs, I assume, what did you wind up doing?

I wonder if I've been suggesting projects to your family in the wrong order. They managed a lightbulb, maybe they could have gotten very far on computers and be commensurately faster at all kinds of other things.

Computers?

I think I explained computers to you in brief when you were talking about simulation complexity? You can actually get the basic components to work purely mechanically, hang on, let me reverse-engineer some logic gates - She frowns at an illusion until she has an imaginary system of weights and strings and hooks that result in several kinds of logic gate to illustratively tug on. But to get any serious work out of them you have to run them on electricity and make them very very small so you can have zillions of these all working in concert, otherwise it's just a curiosity. You arrange the gates in such a way that they do basic math, and then you convert basic math into simple operations like storing characters or representing a small dot of a large image, then you build in a correspondence between something vaguely resembling language and those operators and you teach it how to move around and manipulate data in that languagey thing. You can get many layers deep depending on the interface clunkiness you can tolerate and the complexity of the task.

That sounds like a win condition, yes. If there were a way to do all of the hard algorithmic work of designing magic items mechanically, you could create them in years instead of decades - or, if you're my father, in months instead of years.

Yeah. But lightbulbs are simple - however badly I explained them, however impressed I am that they had them finagled in three days - and really good computers are complicated, good programming languages and good programs are complicated even if you can get the computer off the shelf. I suppose if you can keep them cool by magic and you only need them for R&D and not for any more domestic purposes you could just build them gigantic, that might shave off some dev time.

I think your entire family is kind of poorly suited to living with other Quendi instead of faster-paced persons. Dwarves are great, but there's Dwarves being great and then there's people who have invented computers being great. I'm looking forward to seeing what you'll do when you can go literally anywhere else.

Father, definitely. Macalaurë, maybe, though if music isn't magic anywhere else I expect he'll stay here. I liked the pace of Valinor fine. Diplomacy done in a matter of weeks is - well, there's a reason Thauron gave you two. It's about winning by information asymmetry instead of by relentlessly and everywhere having reality on your side. I can build a city in three years. I could probably seduce a man in a night. Instead I took two hundred years, and they were very very worth it, and I look forward to the luxury of such time and the space to so approach it.

There's probably magic that interacts with music in some way practiced somewhere in my galaxy, but I'd be very surprised if it worked according to the system here.

Well, there's more galaxies if he gets bored of that one. Telvo?