"I resent that remark, I beat you fifty-three percent of the time!!"

...Kib laughs. "Pardon me."

And then they can cuddle in the grass until someone tells him Cam's arrived.

Cam arrives! He has brought Loki.

"I've been looking forward to meeting you!" he says cheerfully to Loki. He has not let go of Kib, why would he do that. "We would like to request a proper catch-up on galactic technology and politics and then I'd be delighted if one or both of you could stick around while Kib gets acclimated to the world of the thinking."

"A proper catch-up on galactic technology and politics, huh, that'll be trivial to deliver in an hour, where do you want to start?"

"What's everybody doing, perhaps with an emphasis on things servantmaking's plausibly useful for - Maedhros thought we could sell golems and various automata and there might be a niche pet-dinosaur market - things for Kib to do that the Enemy couldn't benefit from - what is a computer -"

"There's all kinds of exotic animals that would make very popular pets if they would, say, refrain from eating their owners, dinosaurs being just one option. Automata could generate electricity cleanly for free, that'll be big. There's probably ways to set up elaborate shine-based this-and-that for low-infrastructure-situation communication but I'm not the servantmaking expert. Golems are so generically useful that I'm actually not sure where best to apply them, I'll keep an eye out for things they could do that are not being satisfactorily done elsewise. Kib, you're the lowest-tech-background Bell apart from Iobel, who has a full-time nation-running job, so you'll make a reasonable interface person for low-tech non-Ardas we meet and want a Bell on scene for, Edda's lousy with those. Computers are basically logic gates," she illusions up a set of mechanical ones, demonstrates, "in non-mechanical form but this suffices to illustrate the idea, tons and tons of them all lined up so they can do math and so on for several layers of abstraction until you can program them to do information-handling in loosely the way you program the programmable servants and display it in any of various ways but typically visually; combine with other tech for golem-like things and long-distance transmission of complexly recorded information and stuff like that. Do you have a nickname yet and if you tell me it's a number I will roll my eyes at you."

"...might have been my first instinct, it'd be a friendly jab at my father, but I suppose everyone else would have had the same instinct and the same father. So no. Not a fan of my given name, but that's probably also universal."

"Not universal, but not unique either. Maedhros named all the Space forks when I complained, the yous were doing numbers and the Findekános were doing letters, I don't understand how a species can be so fixated on aesthetics and go with a naming scheme like that, it's tacky."

"Island," murmurs Kib.

"...yeah, I like that."

"Awwww."

"I nicknamed my Findekáno too - letters of the alphabet, honestly - he's Pterodactyl."

"Which is how he rescued me from Angband."

"That's adorable. Excellent, thus you are named. Anybody name the worlds yet? Kib?"

"This is Shine and I'm from Stork."

"Ah, the self-aggrandizement method of homeworld naming. Bella and I did that too."

"'smug' looks very good on him. And the storks were objectively the best thing in the world."

"The conditions necessitating them are weird, though. Babies! Appear! Out of nowhere! What the fuck!"

"I recognize that Stork is a minority but I'm still not used to 'Babies! Grow! Inside of people! As a result of sex!' being anybody's normal."

"I had a bit of a meltdown when he first told me - my first reaction was that Valinor'd adopt them all, and then we realized the population disparity'd make that impossible - when the Darkening happened Findekáno at least briefly considered whether getting immortality and no more babies dying of exposure in Stork was more important than fighting the Enemy, the math came out pretty close..."

"There are Little Valinors in Stork with some immigrant Elves trying nobly to continue the project."

"Yep. Delegated it to people unable or unwilling to come fight the war - might have sent more people with them, honestly, if we'd realized we were risking much more than mere death - and we only actually needed around twenty thousand people, one per battalion, once we had the assembly lines up and running..."

"The assembly line. A noble invention. I can make you batches of stuff sufficiently specified if you need any but I imagine that's not your current bottleneck."