My city-state has people whose job it is to wander around and if nothing else is demanding their attention they will help lost children and mark food service establishments for health inspection and stuff but if someone has vandalized or robbed or punched you, you go find one of those - they wear uniforms - and tell them about it and then they try to find whoever did it, if it's not obvious, and then consequences range from the officer being uniformed and intimidating and reminding you that was illegal to a few days in jail to if it was really bad exile from the city. Some places get nastier than that. I'm also eliding over a lot of stuff with 'find whoever did it', that gets complicated and varies a ton place to place.

Exiling people from Valinor would probably be straightforward enough. I think we can manage people to deliver scoldings for minor misbehavior. I am not expecting identifying miscreants to be much of a problem, we have better senses than you and osanwë and I think Macalaurë has been working on lie-detecting music.

If by osanwë you mean 'mindreading suspects', I may have a problem with that.

I'd like to have strong guidelines about with what scope and under what circumstances it'd be permitted. It's fine to set the bar high enough that hopefully it's never relevant.

Yeah. But anyone who's here long enough is going to learn to keep private thoughts - I'd expect most problematic clashes to come up earlier than later as long as we can give people a pamphlet before they come through, like, you know, FYI Elves think everyone is straight and it's best if you don't disabuse them of this conceit... But it's possible some tendency would be dormant or take a while to be provoked or whatever.

Elves don't think everyone is straight, just that it's wrong not to be. Important difference, that. And I will trust your judgement with respect to the trustworthiness and criminal tendencies of humans.

I didn't exactly study criminology. How much of a disaster is it if a troubling human gets in? Would I be in trouble by proxy, would Lári, would they scrap the portal project entirely instead of just narrowing the filter...?

Someone who steals something? We'll probably be confused, why did you do that when you could have just asked. Defaces a building? Oh, an occasion to make it prettier. We lived in the Outer Lands, we're blasé about harm because it cannot touch us here not because we have no idea that it's possible. If someone is raped or murdered the Valar might scrap the portal project.

I've been thinking less about that because it would be challenging to pull off, strength disparity and so on, but it's not impossible, there are some lousy humans. What happens if someone tries and gets fended off...?

Shouldn't even reach the Valar's attention, and they'd react a lot less badly if it did. They take threats of harm in their land seriously, and actual harm in their land they overreact to, but failed attempts to harm it are - validating of the narrative about this place.

Charming. Okay, so this is definitely worth being careful about but not being too paranoid over, most humans are perfectly nice people and most crimes have some sort of motivation and we can warn them about the obvious misunderstandings so anyone non-straight who can't tolerate shutting up about or being preached at about their sexuality - are we likely to be missing anything else like that at this point, do you think? - can just stay on the far side of the portal.

I think if anything of that significance were present it'd have come up - ah, don't insult peoples' families, they react even more badly to that than to insulting their friends or partners, for the most part.

Okay, "what the heck a family is and that you should not insult them" can go on the info sheet too.

Then I think we'll be fine.

Kib writes things down. I shall compose an info sheet as soon as we're cleared to get this underway.

I apologize for the pace on that. It's in the works.

It's all right, it'll be easier to copy the infosheet hundreds of times when the scribe's operational anyway. I'm coming up on a finished program draft today probably!

Congratulations! I shall leave you to it.

Thanks!

And he does! And he cheerfully works on preparing the petition for a portal and acquiring things to sell through it.

And Kib has to stay up a little late to get his program all drafted but he manages it. Lovely.

(Aly sweeps up a broken dish; Aly works through a programming exercise; Aly is dragged to a party but the hors d'oeuvres are really good; Aly wakes the first stork -)

"Morning."

"I invented storks."