"Yeah, there's that, I guess you could really snowball if you put your mind to it."

"It might be the reason for the difference in the power the King has here and the power city governors have in your realm."

"I'm not sure that fully accounts for it but it could be."

"I don't actually know the extent of it and can't speculate too helpfully."

"Something for me to keep an eye out for, I guess. And maybe there will be a way to make me immortal and I get to start playing the 'quietly accumulate political capital for a million years' game."

"Even I would get tired of the game after that long. A few thousand and you have all the leverage you are usefully going to have. But that is a terrible lot of it."

"So what are you going to be doing in a million years?"

"There being worlds other than this one, which the Valar can under the right conditions send us to, changes the equation a little. My ambitions had not previously extended beyond the Kingship."

"That's true, I'm looking forward to anybody else who got snaked finding an interworld transit mechanism, although I bet lots of places don't have any and the ones that do may not make them as accessible as the Valar are."

"Yes. I imagine it's hard or this wouldn't be the only occurrence either of us have ever heard of. But still, making a paradise of Valinor is no longer a sufficient life ambition."

"It should be useful for whatever ambitions do turn out to be interesting, though."

"For example, you can export bagsful of diamonds to take advantage of offworld economies!"

"And if a situation requires a few hundred thousand highly coordinated people who can follow complicated orders without much explanation as long as they're confident in our shared goals - and that is a thing that lots of situations in fact require - here they are."

"That's a lot of people. What situations tend to require that?"

"Producing a lot of magical artifacts and now, I suppose, golems very fast at need if we find a world that requires them - once you know how to make stork golems we could produce a hundred a day - coordinating aid to refugees if there's a war in some world - old age is not something that would ever have occurred to me, I don't know all the ways that worlds can be bad..."

"I could probably invent something like a stork from scratch but they've got a way to recognize others of the same make and exchange information - what roof symbols creches are using, what areas they've covered - might still be worth it if people churn out hundreds of my version though..."

"We can do thousands, if it's needed."

"Creche capacity would need to scale accordingly. Maybe every stork would need to come with a bag of gems so they could hire extra help until the extra large batches of kids were grown enough to produce their share of creche workers. Nah, that'd crater the market..."

"We can do things other than gems. What else is materially scarce in your realm?"

"Lots of things, but things that are valuable in the quantities a stork can carry are fewer, they're designed to haul babies, not freight. Some metals, some spices, it's a little trickier to sell art but art can go for a lot and you have some absurdly nice art here, I think musical instruments are expensive..."

"Can we set up a location somewhere where Eldarin goods are traded for currency, and then the storks can just carry currency?"

"If the Valar want to serve as a trading hub or they can set up something permanently portalish? Yeah, that's totally doable."

"I wouldn't expect them to have concerns. They - have really awful blindspots, but they generally desire that we have the freedom to pursue our goals and your world's really urgent."

"Then yes, I can invent a new breed of stork and we can load them up on the proceeds of sale of various exports to cover twenty years of much expanded childcare."