"Jewelry - nonmagical, spices, fabrics, artwork - what you're most impressed with is probably more valuable information than what I'm most impressed with, but I have a list of things and how easily they're made - I actually just went ahead and ordered everything by person-hours to produce it on this page, and by volume on this page, in case there's a constraint on storage on your end..."

"Storage limit probably not meaningfully, I don't think we'll have any trouble getting enough startup capital to have a whole warehouse." He looks at the pages. "The thing with art is that on the high end it requires more specialized sales work than any of the commodities. Might need a middleman."

"Do you know people? Should I spend a few years in your word getting to know people?"

"I don't know art people, but I'm not sure why it should take years to meet some." Unless you wanted an excuse to live there for a few years?

I wouldn't want to live there any longer than there are high-leverage things to be doing there, and I genuinely don't have a sense of what those would be aside from getting this off the ground.

"So we can find somebody faster than that, but that adds 'managing human staff' to the logistics, which I assume is gonna be different in all kinds of ways from your existing personnel management experience."

"It is probably a skill worth picking up."

"Yeah, true enough. Jewelry's high-end, spices too - ooh, saffron, that's really pricey - and the fabrics here are all really nice too, this looks like a good list to me but I don't have fine-grained commodity pricing information in my head so I can only guess at what's going to be the most lucrative."

"We can modify it as we go. People are really excited about having another venue for their things, though I've have some trouble explaining that we're trading it..."

"The spices you can just peg to local prices - don't undercut the market and then dump a huge volume in, you'll bankrupt people, but you can price match. Fabric might benefit from a middleman too, some clothier or somebody who wants it in bulk. Jewelry and art if we can't find a trustworthy sales rep right away I think I'd want to try auctioning a few pieces to get an idea of how local tastes react to the stuff and price from there, it's less fungible."

He nods. "If I can wrangle it, and we can do a portal to two different faraway cities, we can mitigate our effects on local markets by spreading it out a little and also save people money on shipping."

"Ooh, nice, I was imagining we'd be limited to one. Of course if we pick a faraway city it might take your father, what, an entire day and a half to learn the language?"

"My father, knowing the way he tends to prioritize, is going to ignore the outrageous temptation of your world until immortality's set. But yes, it should not take us too long to pick up the language."

"Two days," amends Kib. "There's two major inhabited continents on my planet, so we can do my city-state and someplace on the Faraway. Hresk maybe."

"I'll ask the Valar, at least."

Nod.

All right?

Yeah, fine. Vaguely trying to anticipate Vala objections to things in case I can shoot them down in advance.

It'll disrupt the bliss of Valinor, that's their big one. Anything that makes us happy and keeps their paradise safe and joyous generally gets a pass.

Okay, so some suitable vetting mechanism for going through the filter to make sure excess humans don't wander in causing trouble that we humans are wont to cause, but ideally one that doesn't get personal Vala attention every time, basically nothing you weren't already going to suggest.

What kinds of trouble are humans wont to cause, aside from trying to invade Valinor?

Seducing princes? Uh, I seem to have successfully not carried diseases but that might just be luck. Humans as a group have a crime rate that... exists... in comparison to people here, if you let lots and lots in you're going to get vandalism and people picking fights and thieves just on pure statistics.

Yeah, it'd be bad for the Valar to have any role in handling that. Perhaps Tirion should invent law enforcement in advance of needing it.

Or make incoming humans spend their first while with an escort who can send 'em back or vouch for them to stay unescorted.

It'd probably be good even if everyone was escorted and vouched for to have a formal policy for resolving disputes that isn't 'send them to the head of the wrongdoer's house who will handle it internally', since that won't work on humans. How do your civilizations do it?