"Do you know the way down there or would you like me to walk you?"

"I mostly remember it but it'd be easy to get lost and I don't have proof positive that I can actually work the grace song on myself..."

"I'll go, I should stop by my family more anyway."

"You should?" Kib asks, heading out of the workshop with his clock.

"I'd prefer to. They do not come up to Tirion very often even though it's hardly far at all."

"Why is that?"

"Politics. Which I find seem even sillier when I have to preface them by explaining what the familial relationships that are causing such trouble even are."

"It does seem to sillify things."

They walk through the streets. They are offered various goodies. People mostly clear out of Maitimo's way and he can change his posture so they do it entirely.

That's an impressive trick. Well, assuming it's all posture and no telepathy. Kib nibbles on things; it might be a while before Fëanáro doesn't-break-for-food.

He has now seen enough of Kib food preferences to recommend things! And they can take a few to go, and he'll grab some desserts for Ambarussa on the way.

"Is it common to refer to twins with a plural like that? Just because they were born at the same time?"

"It is not. My mother gave them both the same mothername, which is totally unprecedented and a little strange really, but we just refer to them as Ambarussa collectively most of the time."

"Mothername?"

"How do people in your world get named? Here the mother picks a name and the father picks a name and the child selects which to go by, or can go by yet a third if they want. My mothername is Maitimo and my fathername is Nelyafinwë, which is why people who aren't my family will refer to me as Prince Nelyafinwë."

"We get usually two names from whoever's got a name idea they want to use at the creche. They try to avoid overuse and strictly avoid duplicate combinations - I know another Akibel but not another Akibel Mowar, and she goes by the feminine nickname Aki, not Kib, my creche was kind of mad about unisex names. We can go by either one but the first one's typical, as are shortenings. Some names are more common than others - there's a creche downtown where every year they name somebody after the first governor of our city-state, other names get made up - especially if they mean something in the vernacular, people go around being called 'Nutmeg' or whatever - or revived after falling into obscurity - 'Alymbel'."

"Akibel is a very pretty name. Quenya doesn't quite have the sounds for it."

"I've noticed there's a bit of an accent when people say it."

"Father will be very annoyed with me. A phoneme not being native to Quenya is no good reason not to speak it perfectly the first time you hear it or, if you can't do that for some reason, you ought to practice all possible phonemes so you can't be surprised by one."

"Your accent's not bad, some other people have been tripped up when I introduced myself."

"Quenya has a very restricted set of sounds compared to your and I think most languages. We did that on purpose because we thought it sounded prettier but it does disadvantage us."

"What other languages have you got around here?"

"The Valar speak Valarin but no one's been able to learn it but my father. The Vanyar say they speak Quenya and we speak a confused dialect of Quenya but we say it's the other way around, and call theirs Quendya. Telerin is mutually intelligible but quite different. And then there's the language that only very old people speak that we had in the Outer Lands."

"There's tons of languages at home. The common's catching on more and more around where I'm from, creches are no longer making a point of teaching people more niche languages and it's not typical to bother picking one up on purpose."

"You have tons more people, it makes sense you'd have more languages. The common is spoken everywhere?"