"She is not! And I cannot say that we really keep up with the times, norms-wise."

"Gotcha."

"We'll work it out eventually, but we have forever, it's important to get it right."

Nod.

Cam resumes checking on various things that need monitoring, including the presence of demons in Valinor (please, please let there be one demon in Valinor).

There are not demons in Valinor.

Then when Rivka arrives for her tour he will not be particularly elated or upset.

"Hello! This building is spectacular."

"Isn't it? Elves: architecture snobs."

"I like the kind of snob who just makes things extraordinarily suited to their very specific tastes! That's the best kind!"

"I'm not sure it's specific tastes so much as exacting standards. I have yet to disagree with them on what things are pretty, just on how much that matters."

"I mean, now that there are demons there's not very much reason not to make things spectacularly pretty even if it only matters a little bit. If cities were designed like this I bet people'd be a little bit happier every day, and that's something."

"Like the opposite of brutalist architecture."

"Yes. Things that lift your spirit just to see them. Are the Elves in?"

"They're in but I cannot guarantee that any particular subset of them will feel like saying hi today. They can probably hear us from here unless they're deliberately behind closed doors though. Hi Elves."

"Hello, Rivka! Once the spaceship's all designed I bet we'd be happy to imagine out a city block for you, if you've somewhere to put it."

"Oooooohh. I imagine I could find somewhere to put it. Nice to meet you."

"Likewise!"

"This is Caranthir, who is referred to in my notes as 'the economics one'."

"Being a periodically dead pop star is a very irregular source of income so I run a couple of hedge funds for us."

        "My impression was that the economy is very confused lately!"

"The markets are confused lately - uncertainty is bad for them and governments sent out annoyingly mixed signals about how they were going to handle the sudden reproducibility of all forms of physical currency - not the U.S. government because I told Nelyo to fix that, but we don't have people anywhere else and markets are global, these days. Anyway, the amount of value being created is doing just fine - better than ever, really - there've just been a lot of bumps in the road to having a decent financial system backing it - and I don't mean to diminish that, it's a big deal, spikes in inflation in Latin America are peoples' savings and incentive to save being threatened, the Dow behaving like a terrified kangaroo on a Lunar trampoline reflects real value being lost - but the economy is way less confused than all of the metrics we use to talk about it."

     Rivka giggles. 

"I really didn't expect it to take this long for currency to get figured out. I was thinking something like 'credit cards only more proactive about requiring identity checks if it's an uncharacteristic purchase'."

"I think the biggest problem is that underground and informal economies all used cash and there were a lot of underground and informal economies, especially in countries where the formal and legal ones had excessive barriers to entry. The credit cards with the eight-digit PINs more-or-less solve the counterfeiting problem but you'll still see lots of wobbling on the transition away from cash. We should've taken over the world and legalized most of the things that contribute to informal economies in the first place - sex work, drugs, illegal immigration -"

      "Was that seriously considered?"

"No, we're Doomed and we'd need Nelyo for it. If we'd found out between 1500 and 1900 that the Imladris lot were alive and friendly we might've gone over there and encouraged them to do it, but after that it would have caused more harm than it could have prevented - Elves aren't very good at ruling humans -"

    "Oh? Why not?"

"Too slow, too trusting, too much - Nelyo -"

"Too much deception required to maintain the requisite level of public buy-in, of public perception that their government is guided by people who have their interests in mind or at least an ideal to which their interests are rightly subordinate. It could be done but you'd need me."

        "...and you're otherwise occupied?" Rivka says.

"I don't want to do it."

"He, uh, has the mother of all PTSD."

"Are there things I should be careful of?" asks Rivka.

         "Don't suddenly touch the Silmarils."

"I'm not sure I've even seen those. Silmarils?"

          "If you aren't sure if you have seen them you haven't."

"They're shiny. Under absolutely no circumstances should you steal them."