"And people think that personality is -" inherited"...if your father has it you are likely to also have it. I am not sure if this is accurate. I think I am very like my father but I might think that anyway."

"How would you know, if you're all also raised by your fathers?"

"Well, that is probably the reason that people have personalities like their fathers."

"Apprentices are both chosen and raised by their teachers so it's hard to say whether the similarities are learned or selected, but it's probably both."

"I wonder if apprentices are more like their teachers than children are like their fathers. That would be interesting."

"I would need to meet some fathers and their children to have a guess."

"I will introduce you to my father. He will be excited about the language. I have six brothers so you will also get to see how brothers are like each other."

"I will also need to meet more of your species so I know how much of it isn't just you being different from humans as a group."

"You can meet anyone you would like! What I was saying about being the governor before I got distracted by explaining families is that anything I say is the law unless the governor says otherwise, so if you are having problems settling in here you can let me know of them and they will stop being problems."

"That is more power than governors usually have at home."

"I assume if your governors had the same power that governors have here, everyone would not die."

"...that would require a different kind of power than the political kind of power where people do what you say. We can't just have somebody going 'you, stop that dying thing you're doing', it wouldn't work."

"If people were dying here I could focus all our resources on learning how and fixing it."

"For some reason it is actually not considered a very urgent problem by most humans. I mean, they're glad when any specific thing that kills people is addressed - it's good if you eradicate a specific disease or put up a guardrail along a cliff or invent storks - but old age, nobody's seriously working on, and there's not an obvious way to start."

"I would consider it an interesting problem and suggest we study lots of biology until we make sense of it, but it is too urgent to make a science project of and we should probably just ask the Valar."

"Good plan. If they can do it."

"It depends a lot on where your world is. But it would surprise me if there was nothing they could do. They are very powerful - not politically powerful."

"I'm not actually sure it makes sense to ask 'where' my world is, things are so different here, it seems like a parallel universe more than just another planet."

"Then it might be there's nothing they can do and we'll need to make it a biology project after all. They can still help us learn the biology faster."

"It might turn out you can't actually get between worlds without snake monsters, I don't know."

"Then a snake-monster breeding project. Independent of whether you want to go home it is - not good, to me, that there is a world where everyone dies, where babies die so awfully. I will want to explore this even if we do not see any obvious ways."

"That is entirely reasonable and I support it, just want to sort of calibrate your expectations. The Valar apparently didn't already know about my world, which limits how obviously accessible to them it can possibly be."

"Yes." He frowns. "The shops will be opening soon, at the Mingling. What would you like to do first?"

"I was expecting to be tired by now but I'm not. Change of clothes, I guess. And I could use some notebooks and pens."

"I should return to my study and finish the letters that had me occupied, and then we can go out and acquire clothes and notebooks and pens, and anything that interests you as we walk by it, I suppose. We can pick up something to eat then as well."