"We can modify it as we go. People are really excited about having another venue for their things, though I've have some trouble explaining that we're trading it..."

"The spices you can just peg to local prices - don't undercut the market and then dump a huge volume in, you'll bankrupt people, but you can price match. Fabric might benefit from a middleman too, some clothier or somebody who wants it in bulk. Jewelry and art if we can't find a trustworthy sales rep right away I think I'd want to try auctioning a few pieces to get an idea of how local tastes react to the stuff and price from there, it's less fungible."

He nods. "If I can wrangle it, and we can do a portal to two different faraway cities, we can mitigate our effects on local markets by spreading it out a little and also save people money on shipping."

"Ooh, nice, I was imagining we'd be limited to one. Of course if we pick a faraway city it might take your father, what, an entire day and a half to learn the language?"

"My father, knowing the way he tends to prioritize, is going to ignore the outrageous temptation of your world until immortality's set. But yes, it should not take us too long to pick up the language."

"Two days," amends Kib. "There's two major inhabited continents on my planet, so we can do my city-state and someplace on the Faraway. Hresk maybe."

"I'll ask the Valar, at least."

Nod.

All right?

Yeah, fine. Vaguely trying to anticipate Vala objections to things in case I can shoot them down in advance.

It'll disrupt the bliss of Valinor, that's their big one. Anything that makes us happy and keeps their paradise safe and joyous generally gets a pass.

Okay, so some suitable vetting mechanism for going through the filter to make sure excess humans don't wander in causing trouble that we humans are wont to cause, but ideally one that doesn't get personal Vala attention every time, basically nothing you weren't already going to suggest.

What kinds of trouble are humans wont to cause, aside from trying to invade Valinor?

Seducing princes? Uh, I seem to have successfully not carried diseases but that might just be luck. Humans as a group have a crime rate that... exists... in comparison to people here, if you let lots and lots in you're going to get vandalism and people picking fights and thieves just on pure statistics.

Yeah, it'd be bad for the Valar to have any role in handling that. Perhaps Tirion should invent law enforcement in advance of needing it.

Or make incoming humans spend their first while with an escort who can send 'em back or vouch for them to stay unescorted.

It'd probably be good even if everyone was escorted and vouched for to have a formal policy for resolving disputes that isn't 'send them to the head of the wrongdoer's house who will handle it internally', since that won't work on humans. How do your civilizations do it?

My city-state has people whose job it is to wander around and if nothing else is demanding their attention they will help lost children and mark food service establishments for health inspection and stuff but if someone has vandalized or robbed or punched you, you go find one of those - they wear uniforms - and tell them about it and then they try to find whoever did it, if it's not obvious, and then consequences range from the officer being uniformed and intimidating and reminding you that was illegal to a few days in jail to if it was really bad exile from the city. Some places get nastier than that. I'm also eliding over a lot of stuff with 'find whoever did it', that gets complicated and varies a ton place to place.

Exiling people from Valinor would probably be straightforward enough. I think we can manage people to deliver scoldings for minor misbehavior. I am not expecting identifying miscreants to be much of a problem, we have better senses than you and osanwë and I think Macalaurë has been working on lie-detecting music.

If by osanwë you mean 'mindreading suspects', I may have a problem with that.

I'd like to have strong guidelines about with what scope and under what circumstances it'd be permitted. It's fine to set the bar high enough that hopefully it's never relevant.

Yeah. But anyone who's here long enough is going to learn to keep private thoughts - I'd expect most problematic clashes to come up earlier than later as long as we can give people a pamphlet before they come through, like, you know, FYI Elves think everyone is straight and it's best if you don't disabuse them of this conceit... But it's possible some tendency would be dormant or take a while to be provoked or whatever.

Elves don't think everyone is straight, just that it's wrong not to be. Important difference, that. And I will trust your judgement with respect to the trustworthiness and criminal tendencies of humans.

I didn't exactly study criminology. How much of a disaster is it if a troubling human gets in? Would I be in trouble by proxy, would Lári, would they scrap the portal project entirely instead of just narrowing the filter...?

Someone who steals something? We'll probably be confused, why did you do that when you could have just asked. Defaces a building? Oh, an occasion to make it prettier. We lived in the Outer Lands, we're blasé about harm because it cannot touch us here not because we have no idea that it's possible. If someone is raped or murdered the Valar might scrap the portal project.