Shades - and shines, which are the same principle but spots of light and are more popular because you can get them in colors - get used a lot in theater and art, and you can also program them to do things without being constantly puppeted and then you can use them to send long-distance messages or keep time and stuff. They're not my focus, I just made one as an example because golems require parts and are really time consuming.

It's useful and I can see how it'd be very pretty. Tyelcormo - my brother - is awake if you'd like to go talk with him, but it's hardly urgent if you'd rather go rest and get acclimated.

Haven't established where I'll be resting.

There is a guest room here for you! I sent Capuraldë to check and she confirmed it should be no trouble.

Oh, well, that's convenient. I don't need to crash right now, if your brother isn't a long way away now seems like a fine time to check his shademaking ability.

I shall tell him to walk in our direction and then he won't be a long way away. He gestures down the palace hallways and then sets off.

Follow follow.

He pauses at the door. Have your shades for back outside? Tirion is a very glittery city. We may have gotten a little carried away, building it.

Kib puts his shades on. It looks like the shadows that would be cast by tinted glasses, only without any glasses.

And they go outside. There are still very few people on the streets of Tirion. The ones that there are scramble to a respectful sort of attention. Maitimo picks a boulevard and walks down it.

So what's a brother, anyway?

...and those are?

The people who bear and raise you.

Apparently! I am also confused. Among every species that I have heard of, an adult male and an adult female having intimate relations can result in the female getting pregnant, and then some time later having children. Is that not a thing your species can do?

...Animals do that, if I remember right. Humans don't.

Ah. Do humans awaken as adults? The first Elves did that, but we've had children ever since.

No - that'd be a lot more convenient, but no, we appear as babies.

...where? And how?

Just sort of around. It's really hard to actually catch a baby as it appears without camping out at a good spot for months on end, generally one has to find them later on, but they can be most anywhere sort of tucked away. Somebody anonymously invented a kind of golem that goes and listens for crying and brings the babies back to the nearest creche, that's done wonders for population stability now that it's not all hikers stumbling over infants tucked into hollow logs or whatever.

That is the most horrifying thing I've ever heard.

I mean, I'm kind of grossed out by the idea of babies being caused by sex in sapient creatures, but I'm trying to be open-minded here.

Our way, no child is brought into the world unless there are two people who wanted it to exist and who want to raise it, and none of them slowly die of exposure and starvation alone in the woods.

I guess there are advantages to that system. We get kind of used to it being a fact of nature that sometimes babies die of exposure and starvation alone in the woods, we can't find them all - there do seem to be new stork golems occasionally, somebody's still churning them out in batches, we just don't know who.