Yeah, but I did use to do serious archery before I fixed my clumsiness.

I'm going to be a bit sour once they have the guns working. Just a bit, mind you, but -

You might be able to transfer your accuracy to a sniper rifle. Make shots from a few miles off.

That's a thing guns can do?

Yep. Fire between heartbeats. You probably wouldn't even need a scope.

We need saltpeter, do the Dwarves have opinions about where it can be found?

I can ask.

Aside from that the King thought it was mostly a precision problem. Perhaps you can discuss it with him.

Maybe, but guns are pretty scarce on Asgard, I won't have much.

There's nothing I'd love more than to visit Asgard and try all your weapons and monsters and enemies, except I can't because I'm not a girl. I wonder if this is how Irissë feels all the time.

Sigyn gets to fight things. It's not as bad as being a girl who wants to do magic. And I don't think the bilgesnipes will know the difference. I didn't have the impression that the problem was nearly as bad for Quendi, anyway?

No one would exile a child over it. But I had to talk at Oromë for a couple hundred years before he agreed that there wasn't anything objectionable about Irissë riding with us, and he took me when I was only a child and practically useless. And my grandfather also had two daughters, one of them older than Nolofinwë, who didn't feature in the succession dispute because it just didn't occur to anyone.

Well, I'm not sure adding more participants to the dispute would have helped anything, but yes, that is a problem.

That's among the reasons I didn't point this out to people. That and that politics is stupid and my aunts had the right idea.

Well, Nolofinwë seems to do all right... and I think I am prepared to say of your father that at least on a typical day he probably makes a better king than a subject.

Amusement. He'd have passed it on to Maitimo and managed to mostly be neither, if things hadn't all fallen apart at the worst possible minute.

I'm much more prepared to say that he'd be vastly better at 'neither', but that does not seem to be in the cards in the immediate future.

He is a quick learner and will grow into the best King our people have ever known. He's not as quick a learner with this kind of thing and didn't grow into it quite fast enough, but he's not Elf-paced about even his weaknesses.

Unfortunately, politics is iterated. The best politician with a damning legacy can and will be outperformed by the mediocre one with no such handicap.

I am rather separating your father's roles as king and engineer, here.

I don't think you can. His style of leadership is entirely about evaluating which projects need to happen and who can make them happen, which he can do very quickly, attracting the most capable people to those projects, and pushing himself on whichever element would otherwise be the one delaying a plan in coming together. It would be a very very unusual political arrangement that gave him the latitude he needs without amounting to 'he's King, someone else does the administrative tasks and the public relations'.

He sounds more like a corporate leader than a political one, actually. Of the high-powered interstellar commerce type, not the Asgardian, but I've met the breed.

The interesting kinds of leadership are vision and execution. Everything on top of that is just phrasing things delicately and looking wise.

The distinction I'd draw is that a corporate officer fires people if they don't behave how he likes and a political leader has to tolerate them or punish them - the equivalent to firing is exile and that touches much more of a person's life even in the relevant sort of economy than what job they work. Not that being fired is not a punishment, especially with the kind of money people in the second tier of those companies can make, but it's not as - personal. I think I would very much like to set up your father as the executive of an galactic engineering concern, I think that would be great.