"Thanks. Oh, infrastructure. Humans have higher needs than Elves for safe drinking water, and we still get disease outbreaks sometimes - what should we be reading -"

"Uh -" Search search. "- nothing pre-Revelation is going to be up to the highest available standard of information, post- it's all 'have you considered summoning an angel'... Bar's recommendation would probably be better than mine."

"Will summoning an angel work? It doesn't here..."

"Sorry, I should have thought to warn you about that when Findekáno grabbed the book, so you didn't waste time. Summoning doesn't work in Milliways and might only work in worlds that have daeva realms associated. Only way to check if it works in your world is to try it there."

"It's all right, it was an entertaining afternoon. Congratulations on Revelation, by the way."

"Thanks."

"Is there any reason I shouldn't hold my door so you can check if summoning works in Arda right now, if it'll be useful for future planning?"

"General conservatism about having doors to worlds with active Melkors open more than necessary, general mistrust of you personally..."

"Mistrust on the grounds that people who have any bad traits have all of them? I haven't been deceptive in the slightest."

"It seems unsafe to assume anything more generous than 'few to no scruples, lots of game theory'. I would rather not find out experimentally if you think you can get somewhere interesting by stranding somebody in Mirror, say."

"Okay. Can daeva be imported from worlds where they are summonable, if we can't summon natively?"

"I would be moderately surprised if something would stop me from walking out somebody else's door."

"Okay, that's probably enough to be going with to start. Bar, can I have breakfast and lunch for two? And a book on water treatment from some world that doesn't do it with magic we don't have and that doesn't have people dying of cholera and so on..."

Crepes stuffed with cream cheese and smothered in powdered sugar, and fruit salad, and cocoa! Picnic basket! Something entitled Water Safety, Distilled!

"Thanks! Nice meeting you properly, Cam. And, uh, me. I'm in range to hear you upstairs, think of me if you come up with more questions."

And upstairs.

And once he's out of Elven hearing. "Well that was interesting."

"What nuances am I missing by not being you?"

"If he was lying I couldn't tell, is this what it's like to be most people all of the time? He was lonely, he stuck around longer than he'd intended because conversation was nice. He has a much-improved model of what we want to hear, obviously."

Snuggles. "I usually cannot tell when people are lying unless I have independent information. Although in this case we have that and still didn't come up on any discrepancies. I did okay at partitioning, I take it."

"You were great. Lovely civil conversation where the evil thing only came up where relevant. I think he was mildly surprised by the fact the conversation did not descend into yelling over his boyfriend."

"What'll he derive from that...?"

"Uh, candidates: I talked you around to the boyfriend thing not being that big a deal - we are interested in positive-sum trade and willing to not be all 'have you considered how you not being murdered by us is positive-sum' about it - he successfully identified the things that we care about and as long as he's doing good at them we'll let him keep the boyfriend -"

"Last one won't hold up very long if it's that."

"Won't it? If he's telling the truth about everything else improving on him will be a really hard problem, and we can make it clear we disapprove and offer tech and toys as bribes for stopping but are we in fact prepared to try anything other than that."

"...might depend on what we walk out of here with..."