"It's a confusing sentence but a hilarious mental image!"

"There's a genre of invented convenience foods where the most significant step in preparation is adding water. And 'just add water' is a line from advertisements for those."

"I'm getting such a picture of your world from these partial explanations and offhand remarks, and I can hardly even tell if it's an accurate one."

"I can tell you more stuff about it more systematically, especially once I have a better sense of here to compare to, but honestly I think this might be more fun."

"You might be right."

"How long will it take to make me a hidey-hole?"

"Not sure. I've never actually dug out a secret underground house before."

"Neither have I. I guess it'd be a good time to try out my earth control spell if that wouldn't be too conspicuous."

"I should pick somewhere that's good for concealing construction anyway... hmm, maybe the old wine cellar, it's an awful little maze and I can think of a few corners where I could build a hidden door without too much trouble."

"I will be a cask of the finest Amontillado. - that is a reference to a famous short story."

"Oh?"

"Guy is annoyed with another guy, lures him into a basement by claiming to have some very nice wine called Amontillado, and then bricks him in the basement."

He giggles. "Ideally once I have put you in the basement you'll be able to leave! Although also ideally you won't actually leave very much because I think pretending you're nothing out of the ordinary will be hard."

"Well, if your language magic made me literate you can load me up with books and maybe something it'd be good to have a rune-spell for, and that'll keep me for a while."

"I will supply you with numerous books. Can I ask you to stay here for a few minutes while I go scope out the awful maze to see where best to start digging? You can think at me if anything unexpected happens."

"Sure thing."

"See you soon!" Off he trots, leaving her alone in the room with her stuff and her invisible gemstones and the comfy furniture and the bookshelves.

She writes down a little chart of the gemstone experiment for future reference and looks at book titles.

Like half of the books in this cozy little study appear to be about horse breeding. Some are instead about human breeding, but, on closer inspection, have horse-breeding-relevant sections. Then there's unicorns, goats, camels... in fact, just about the only book in the room that's not about some form of animal husbandry is The Legend of the Dragon, tucked away inconspicuously on a shelf behind her chair.

.......okay she is going to look at, like, the table of contents of a human-breeding book, and then assuming there's nothing so fascinatingly horrid she must read on, she will read the dragon book.

This table of contents advertises chapter headings such as Common Illnesses, Humans Are Not Unicorns!, Signs of Magic, Training, and A Cautionary Note. Up to her how fascinatingly horrid she finds them.

That's actually all fascinatingly horrid besides the common illnesses and come to think of it she can catch human illnesses and should look through it.

The Common Illnesses chapter starts out with an acknowledgment that of course if you can afford an expert lifecrafter to cure your humans' diseases that's your best option, but, if your budget for that sort of thing is limited, here is some advice on how serious an illness probably is given symptoms, and what to do about it if you're not paying someone to cure them for you.

- Diarrhea: Always a bad sign, but you only need to start worrying if it lasts more than a day or if it's going around the pens in large numbers. Feed the afflicted humans as much broth as they can stand, and make sure someone's cleaning up after them very thoroughly.
- Coughs and sneezes: Isolate the afflicted humans to the extent you can afford; if it's this or that season, wave this list of likely flowers in their face to see if what you have is a human with allergies. If the cough is lasting longer than a few days, or sounds, like, awful, probably best to call a lifecrafter if you want to save the human. Definitely call a lifecrafter if it's spreading like wildfire.
- Fever: Often a bad sign. Isolate in a reasonably cool area, give plenty of water, and call a lifecrafter if more than a few of your humans are affected.
- Gross-looking sores: Are you sure you're not just overworking your human? Fragile human skin gets into all sorts of nasty situations if the human is pushing their squishy body to its limits! If a bandage and a few days' rest doesn't help, it might be time to involve a lifecrafter.
- Skin falling off: Is it red and blistery? Is your human really pale? Do they get a lot of sun? Yeah they'll be fine, this just happens. Fragile human skin is like that. If they're not getting a lot of sun, or other forms of external skin damage like heat or cold or abrasion, then you can start worrying.
- Certain very specific lists of symptoms: Your problem is that your humans are having a lot of sex with each other. Call a lifecrafter and have them check your overseers too, just in case. Yes, even if they claim they haven't been indulging. Not every disease like this crosses the species barrier, but enough of them do that it's worth making sure. Shocking as this may sound, an elf with weak enough lifecrafting skill could potentially even die of an illness they caught from a human!
- Some illnesses present with primarily behavioural symptoms! Often these are not contagious; sometimes they're less an illness and more a matter of the human being sluggish because they haven't been fed, watered, or rested enough, or because they're too hot or too cold. (Humans are fragile!) However...
- ALWAYS call a lifecrafter if you see a human acting listless and twitchy and not responding to commands, no matter how likely you think it is that they're just being insubordinate, and after the lifecrafter has checked every human you own, please go spit on the grave of the idiot who decided to see what happens if you infect a human with unicorn brain fungus. Your human almost certainly does not have unicorn brain fungus but it's REALLY IMPORTANT TO CHECK. The author personally knows a guy whose entire plantation had to shut down because someone thought it couldn't possibly be brain fungus and boom, a year later the humans were keeling over left and right and he didn't have the budget to replace them all. Especially if you're a serious breeding operation that's going to be selling all over the continent, do NOT fuck around when it comes to a possible brain fungus outbreak.

Unicorn brain fungus. Wow. The more you know. Apart from susceptibility to brain fungus, though, she hears Humans Are Not Unicorns! What's the difference, O fascinatingly horrid book author.

Humans are not unicorns! Humans are not horses! Humans are not goats or cats or camels! Humans are not songbirds or decorative plants!

Humans can speak and understand language; humans can think. This is hugely important to keep in mind when breeding humans, because it means that the relationship between a human's bloodlines and their behaviour is infinitely more complicated than that of a simple animal. You can't just breed humans for talent at calligraphy the way you can breed dogs for talent at tracking or fetching or herding, or breed horses for racing or pulling loads.

(There's a four-page digression here about the specifics of the author's particular horse breeding operation and lessons the author has learned therefrom, and the edges of the pages are noticeably worn compared to the rest of the book's fairly crisp state.)

Anyway, when it comes to humans, you sometimes need to put a lot of work into understanding why a certain human is good at a certain thing before you start trying to enhance it in the next generation. Is your fighter good at fighting for physical reasons or psychological ones? Is your laborer very strong because they come from a strong bloodline, or because they've been fed well and worked hard all their life? Is your scribe quick with numbers because of natural cleverness or because they have an abacus? Test these things, don't just assume! Look at the human's close relatives and see if they have similar talents! Try training all your scribes with the abacus and then see who the best one is! Also, stop having your slaves do your accounting, you lazy degenerate. This is why the modern world is falling apart. Nobody writes their own correspondence or keeps their own books anymore. Why, in the author's day...

(There's a two-page digression about how the author feels that young elves these days are lazy, undisciplined, badly educated, and should sober up and quit partying all the time. It's sort of weirdly pointed but whatever sociopolitical subtext the author intends to convey is not presented with sufficient explanation for May to understand it.)