There'll be quite a market for healing. They're intrigued by everything else but there are no buyers except as novelties, though lots of people want novelties. They have suggestions for ones she should get in the future, though: spells for a sure grip, for extra strength, for clearer vision, for resistance to heat?

She writes down the suggestions in case she finds anyone short of projects. Healing she can do her way one-time if anybody needs it right now, and also copy infinite songs for; she's abstractly curious what the market will make of these options.

A secondary market will spring up for waiting in line for healing songs.

Ha! Dwarves are great.

Maitimo also likes them, or is at least pretending; he spends the first day listening intently and then starts talking with people in line, about what they do and how they chose it and what its most satisfying bits are, and he turns out to have dozens of stories about mishaps in the forge as a young child and projects he'd completed but not quite to his satisfaction that perhaps they'd be just the talent for and the story of how in Valinor they'd clumsily advanced the art of metalworking and the story of how, and why, they'd begun forging swords.

Everyone's friendly. She has been invited to several peoples' homes for dinner.

That is lovely. She will go to dinners. Maybe she can make guesses about the family structure like that.

Unfortunately, dinners are uninformative on the family structure point! After several dinners the known Dwarf family structures seem to be 'ten adults and no children', 'eight adults and two children' and 'four adults and no children' and the adults are not discernibly of different genders. Luckily by this point she's well enough acquainted with one of the Dwarves who invited her to dinner, a miner named Rathsvith who recently came back from an extended stay in Menegroth and who everyone else accordingly seems to think of as an expert on pink hairless types in general.

So Loki tells Rathsvith the funny story about when she was vacationing on Midgard and her translation magic glitched on gendered words, ha ha ha.

Rathsvith is confused about what a gender is.

Why, gender is this set of social constructs that many cultures perch on top of biological clusters associated with reproductive role. Genders are very popular and most people have one, although she has some complaints with the social constructs that came with hers.

Ah! That explains why some Elves persistently wear different clothing and hairstyles than other Elves! He'd thought it was a guild affiliation thing before he realized Elves didn't work and probably didn't have guilds.

Nope! It's this other thing! Did they figure out the pronouns all right or is this like her Allspeak glitch?

They didn't really talk to the Elves much and had not noticed that there was grammar associated with the guilds and can't reliably enough identify the guild on sight to make much use of the information, but still, that's all right. It's rare they're talking to Elves about other Elves anyway.

Fair enough. So Dwarves just don't do this thing at all, huh? Well, it seems to work for them and is probably saving them a lot of hassle, good job Dwarves.

Yeah, having a group identity is very nice but guilds seem like a much better way to do it, being voluntary and not related to private personal information.

If only Loki's mother felt that way. This does seem to mean that one has to learn private personal information about one's acquaintances before one can get anywhere on the process of finding someone with whom to start a confusingly-grouped family of adorable bearded children, though; if she may ask, how does that work?

So children take two, but are very tiring for two and it's typical to have more people agree to roles in the children's life, and then either parent could have more partners, and often all of these people would live nearby for convenience.

What a pleasantly broad-minded system. (Loki is so fond of Dwarves.) Would Rathsvith like an explanation of the nuclear family or did he (they? would Rathsvith prefer pronouns that do not specify a gender or ones that default to the one Dwarves in general visually resemble?) figure it out more or less from Menegroth?

Rathsvith thinks it's odd to use grammar that signifies that he can technically bear children and thinks it doesn't really matter which but one pronoun should be picked for all Dwarves. The Elf way seems to be that there's a party declaring that two people are going to have all of their children together, is that basically it?

That's not basically it. Variants on the nuclear family are common in many cultures and while they do typically involve a party and having all one's children together, other popular ingredients include exclusivity, romance, permanent cohabitation, and acquisition of one another's relatives by proxy. Elves also do a creepy soul thing! Most people do not do the creepy soul thing.

He is politely fascinated. He does in fact know some people who are exclusive, have romances, had all of their children together and permanently live together, and it seems like a very reasonable arrangement. The creepy soul thing seems unreasonable.