He switches songs only once Kib is safely on the ground, and jumps. "On the one hand, Mandos. On the other hand, looks pretty cool, doesn't it?"

"It does at that!"

"I can commission you a ring of grace. Fëanáro can make you one too but if you're not on speaking terms with them. It'll be done in about five weeks."

"That'd be nice. It'll even still work if I do go home."

"Is that still undecided?" He sounds absurdly hopeful. "Yes, I suppose Fëanáro would have tested that. It should work anywhere. For going somewhere dangerous I'd take rings for grace, reflexes, healing. Doesn't cure the thing where you die, though."

"It does not. And I might well rather not die alone the one way than the other, it's not like I left a boyfriend back home."

"Perhaps I was being excessively indirect because we do these things through like five layers of indirection around here but you are really cute which is why I invited you to a concert and then told you a secret which could ruin my life and dying alone is really really not in the cards here!"

"A popular pastime is prompting third parties to comment on the appearance of the object of one's affections, which is something they'll do readily enough because the Eldar talk about beauty a lot for reasons unrelated to flirting. But the way we do it is stupid, you needn't. You could tell me more about golemmaking constraints, that was pretty cute."

"I have never actually heard that before. Do you want to come actually look at the golem, I'll be more coherent with my notes on hand, or is coherence less cute?"

"Not usually. Perhaps if you were distracted for interesting reasons. I'd love to come look at the golem, is it back at the palace?"

"Yep. The chassis is almost fully assembled now, I might tweak the hands but I've got it in puppetable condition to test its fine motor control."

"Wow, that's fast. What can you edit if you notice problems in testing?"

"Once I actually turn it into a golem I basically can't edit it. But when it's not a golem yet and I'm manually operating it, I can notice if there's a snag in a wheel or if a finger's shaped wrong, take the part out, fix it, keep going until it can move smoothly through all the range of motion it needs. And then I just have to get the program right."

They reach the golem. He's impressed by it. He asks questions and watches testing.

The golem (well, puppet) waves at him. Kib has it write a sentence. (In the common; he's not that good at Quenya yet.)

"This is amazing."

"Thanks!"

"And all in the space of a week and a half -" he scowls at the palace doors. I want to kiss you. But doors that wouldn't be suspicious were they closed are sort of the minimum security requirement. Can I show you around the walls tomorrow night? It's really pretty up there and you owe yourself more breaks.

Sure. And this isn't that fast, I sleep less here than I usually would at home and I've been compensating for time feeling weird here.

I commend your thoroughly average and unexciting pace, then, I couldn't do this in six weeks and there's no reason I shouldn't be able to do this part if I understand you rightly.

I think I may be cutting corners on aesthetics that Elves wouldn't? But nobody has to actually look at the scribe except when they're giving it books or taking them away, so I figure it's all right as long as it has really good handwriting.

He laughs. See, that was calling us snobs with bad priorities with the appropriate number of layers of indirection. You'll learn Tirion flirting after all.

Kib laughs too. How does one normally pick up the skill? Or find anyone to practice on?

Observation, or desperate ingenuity. I was sufficiently bad at flirting with men when I was younger that I in fact had a reputation for flirting with men. Everyone's kindly assumed I grew out of it. My boyfriend is much better at subtlety and no one has ever had a word to say about him but that has its own costs, namely that no one will ever guess you are open to being propositioned.