"Would that help? Screaming?"

"It might? The Valar don't really understand incarnates and would definitely be stressed to have the crown prince of the Noldor behaving very badly at them, they might banish him to your world just to make the embarrassing problem go away..."

"Oh boy. Well, that'd be fun from a certain perspective."

"I hope they'd let us accompany him. He benefits from having people around who know him well."

"'Us' is you and -?"

"My father has seven sons. You have met me and Tyelcormo and Curufinwë; Macalaurë is the one who you ought to hear sing, and who will be induced to sing for you the minute he hears that you were impressed by my singing; Carnistir's around here somewhere and I could go drag him out and ask him to be sociable but otherwise he won't be bothered to; and the twins are still children."

"Which means they're, what, twice my age? And then some because the years are different? What about your other parent, you do have two, right? ...what's a twin?"

"Ambarussa are around thirty, yes. Twins are two people who are born to the same parent at the same time and look the same. At least, my brothers look the same, not all twins do. My mother would be reluctant to be dragged away from this world, though she might come if she did not trust me to look after everybody."

"...That sounds really crowded," Kib remarks. "Twice as crowded as one at a time, even. You're the designated looker-afterer?"

"I am the designated looker-afterer of the whole nation, and the oldest of my brothers, and without me everyone sort of does all right but they are not their best selves."

"Aww."

"Anyway they'd want me for a family effort to end mortality - I'm no good at science but I imagine the cooperation of the local governors would help a lot and navigating social impacts of various baby distributions would be a mess and my father is not well-suited to that kind of problems."

"Oh, yeah, there'd be loads of politics to wade through."

"With real stakes! I would have entirely too much fun. Hopefully the Valar are helpful and it does not come to that."

"Are there a lot of politics with fake stakes to be had?"

"Everyone in Tirion will lead happy lives even if I badly mismanage their taxes and infrastructure, truth be told, so all the stakes are arguably fake. But we play games of politics with even more fake stakes."

"You have taxes? You don't have money but you have taxes?"

"It doesn't make sense to run the country off 'the King asks for things needed to build the roads' so everyone's supposed to contribute a certain amount of their effort and talent to public works things every year, unless they have a good reason not to. That is one of the things money would be very suited to but I can't think how to introduce it."

"I can't either, you can't exactly peg it to the gold supply..."

"You can make it known that these pretty trinkets are worth so much of the Crown's time and can be redeemed with us at will and traded among one another, but our time is a very limited resource and there's not enough of it to be the backbone of a money system. And I haven't thought of a better idea yet."

"Yeah, and only one of me, and until more people know how to program, pets are the only transferable servants that don't take forever to make..."

"I can force everyone to start using some kind of trinket for transactions but they'll be annoyed about it and I don't know that it'd have the desired effects."

"I don't think it works if they don't want the trinkets."

"Well, you can artificially create demand in horrible coercive ways like demanding everyone bring me so many trinkets at the end of the day, but I can't think of a useful way to do it."

"Maybe some kind of game with a prize? Most trinkets gets - some scarce desirable thing."