"Haven't heard about it but might not have, yet."

"Do your orcs swear themselves to the Enemy as soon as they're old enough to talk -"

"Most of 'em. Religious ceremony, there's less religious orcs, a lot of those were encouraged to move and then collected when they got there and killed."

"I think ours just makes them all swear but there are probably more of yours."

"Billions. They had - nice functional civilizations, before he showed up and their innocuous cultural ceremony was suddenly a chokehold on the whole population -"

"Whole population of my world is maybe three, four million."

"...Orcs or everybody?"

"Everybody."

"Wow. There are multiple Earth cities with more than twice the population of your entire planet."

"Can you do anything about the tendency of mortals to disintegrate and die inside a century because if you can then I can have a nice large population in a few hundred more years. They're growing anyway, but they'd grow faster without a mortality rate of 'literally all of them we have no idea why'."

"I mean, many people make it past a century now, but not by very much. Also I am not sure population growth in Mirror is something I wish to encourage?"

"You think most peoples' lives aren't worth living?"

"Not the frame in which I'm inclined to consider the question."

"What is?"

"'Is naively extending lifespan the highest-leverage avenue by which to improve the lives of the humans who already exist in Mirror'."

"I mean, no, killing the Enemy is. But I take it that was already understood to be a priority."

"Yeah, but naively extending lifespan might not make second place, although whatever does make second place will probably at least have that as an incidental effect."

"I could probably make more informed comments if I had a better idea of what else we can consider. If I get Curufin in here he could probably make a magic item for it with a couple decades' research, but that doesn't scale well, what other magic systems are there to play with..."

"Nothing usefully portable so far."

"Okay. Anything else that has surprisingly beneficial effects for the local mortals, that we wouldn't have thought of ordinarily in the course of brainstorming what to do with them..."

"What's the existing situation?"

"Uh, have their own cities and provinces for the most part because Elves make less-than-ideal neighbors - we're too picky about the architecture - most people serve seven years in the military, seventeen to twenty-four, and then retire and study or raise a family or do art or something."

"Huh, I had actually expected nastier conscription arrangements than that, although I suppose I don't know what the casualty rate is..."

"Right now there's only sporadic actual fighting. Six hundred dead in the whole last year. If there's an offensive into Angband it'll be ugly but we weren't going to do that until we could be reasonably sure it ends with the Enemy dead."

"Pensioning your humans off at twenty-four is actually pretty good for a society at your tech level. Congratulations."