"That's the festival? What kind of work does she do?"

"Mostly sculpture. I should show you -" he steps outside. There are people in the garden, sleeping arm-in-arm at the base of a tree. He gestures at them.

Blink. "...they're sculptures?"

"They are! These days she does more abstract work but her technical skill is unparalleled." He says this very proudly.

"I would've thought they were real until they'd been asleep for like a day, wow."

"Even to Elven eyesight -" which had been established in the previous barrage of testing to be much better than his - "they are convincing."

"Wow," Kib repeats, shaking his head. "I'm afraid you're going to be terribly underwhelmed by my world."

"Nothing in Valinor matters. Everything in Valinor is very nice but there is no invention I can perfect, no discovery I can make, no solution I can engineer, that will meaningfully change peoples' lives because everyone's lives are good. I have borne this without resentment but now I have a gateway to a life that actually touches other ones and I do not think I will feel underwhelmed."

"I'm just saying we don't have art like that dozing around. But yes, as an outlet for that particular frustration my world is perfect."

"We'll make things pretty as we go, don't worry, we can't help ourselves."

Kib laughs. "I've noticed. You don't think you'll faint of shock when you enter a city built by people who don't care nearly that much if things are pretty and don't have nearly that much time on their hands anyway?"

"Your language was not cultivated by a linguistics guild trying to maximize its beauty and yet I learned and enjoyed learning it."

"...is that where Quenya came from? Wow. Cities have more fundamental constraints on their setup, though, humans do respond to aesthetics in language and we can do that without worrying about moving a load-bearing consonant or running into a grammatical zoning law or having to pay maintenance costs on excess nouns."

He laughs delightedly. "I will forgive your people your city and not even tamper until we've cured death. Then I might tamper though."

"Humans don't object to beauty a bit. You might find us difficult to talk into compromises for it though."

"I am very willing to bribe you. We'll also want to check while there whether song magic works."

"Ooh, good question."

"Is that all? If we leave now we'll be back in time for the festival..."

"Sure, we could leave now."

"I had someone pack my things, they should catch us on the walk to Tirion."

"And I have few things here and doubt my teacher has cleared out my room yet. Although I do want to pick up some diamonds so I can purchase most of the contents of a bookstore."

"I'll have that brought, too, unless you mentioned it in earshot of Maitimo."

"I don't remember if I did."

"Well, worst case scenario we'll have two of them."

"I don't remember exactly how much diamonds cost but as long as they're trivial to come by I will want more than two to be sure I can cover everything."