"Oh, yes, he said it would be all right." She sets it down and backs away so the Elf can take it.

" - I didn't think about that, sorry -" She picks it up.

- Letter to Cam priority azalea: Hi this is Zota I'm in Valinor. It's all right here. They have a thing about hair and they don't want me to be near anyone but it's so pretty. You wanted whoever got this job to write to you? Let's name this conversation Azalea One.

Yes! Thank you and congratulations. I'm sorry about the hair thing, I was attempting machine translation into Thoiga and we're probably lucky nothing else got too badly garbled in the process. Did they actually explain it or just

- They did not actually explain it.

It's a sex thing and the braids are like wearing clothes for humans, if you know how humans are about clothes.

- Oh! Okay. Well, I don't mind having braids when I go outside. She made faces when I put a new head of hair on but she said it was okay. The binding won't let me within ten feet of people but they might summon my friends to snuggle me sometimes or send me home now and then. Will it be okay if I show my summoner this conversation later? She suggested per city mail labels.

Yes, that's fine. All the information I have access to about the cities is out of date. I'm not sure that's the best mail label system; people might just write all eight of them if they don't know which one is the best for their subject matter and it seems like it would make it hard to set up more specialized channels. Also, some people are probably going to want to talk about things that will bother the Elves; I can warn them that Elves are very conservative, but the Elves should also be warned that not everybody will understand exactly how to filter for that.

- Oh. I'll go tell my summoner.

What's her name?

- I don't know, she didn't say.

"Almáriel," says her summoner. "What things are people going to want to talk about?"

"Hi, Almáriel. - I'm Zota, I guess just because you had to spell my name doesn't mean you can pronounce it. I guess he might mean that there are movies where people have their hair down or something like that? I'm not sure what else would bother you, maybe he knows. I can ask. Or you could write into the conversation and I can still add his replies."

"Oh, gosh, yeah, people would be upset to see a movie like that." 

What sort of things are you thinking might bother us? 

Is this Zota's summoner? Hi! I'm Cam. So there's several broad categories of thing. One is things like the hair thing, where it won't even occur to humans or daeva until they're told that there might be a problem and it won't be obvious them how to classify edge cases. We might also be more likely to want to talk about the taboos on a meta level than Elves are. Another is things that humans and daeva know are bad in real life, but like to have in our fiction a lot, and even if it's explained to them that Elves don't like to have that in their fiction they might think that was silly and hope there could be exceptions for fiction they think is really well done.

Oh. It's not that you can't tell a really compelling story about horrible things - you can - it's just that we don't think evoking horrible things is a good idea even when it's a very technically sophisticated work. And in some ways telling a compelling story about good things and good people is harder. I don't think I know what you mean by want to talk about the taboos on a meta level.

I think you might wind up with people who were really curious about the hair thing and want to talk about it in more depth than was comfortable for Elves, but I could be miscalibrated. Most of my information about Valinor proper is out of date and skewed.

I'm not married so I can't be very helpful but I expect you could find somebody who wouldn't mind discussing it in detail or something. You're with the Fëanorians, right? They are not very representative.

I've met most of the Elves who are on Earth, the Fëanorians among them. I've also read a lot of things from Valinor but without context they don't tell me as much as I'd like.

Things are nice here. There are all kinds of societies for all kinds of people. We would mostly have wanted to go to the human world because you are all starving and murdering each other but Zota said that's better now, so people really won't want to go at all.

That's much improved now, yes. Another thing that I want to have clear before correspondence starts up is that humans and daeva - or even just humans or just any one kind of daeva - are not unified. There is no person who is in charge of all of us the way the Valar are in charge of the Elves. It's very important that when people tell Elves things you understand they only have their experience to draw on and might be confused or lying and might have few to no people who agree with them. I'm really worried that some person who is just weird and not representative will write in to the mail labels and the Elves or Valar will get upset and assume it represents a general problem and overreact. That would be really bad, like somebody assuming every Elf was like the Fëanorians.

That makes sense. I can talk to people about how to make sure of that.

Humans and daeva also have very different ideas about how long it should take to discuss, decide, and do things than Elves tend to. I don't want you to be rushed unnecessarily, but it will help reassure people that they and the things they care about are not being ignored if they get a lot of interim reports about what steps are being taken.

Yes, we understand that, we've been rushing to get a correspondence demon for that reason.

I really appreciate that! I've been looking forward to having a way to correspond with Valinor for what feels like a long time to me now. I just wanted to emphasize it. How did you wind up being Zota's summoner?

I was apprenticed to the first person we had doing summoning and she's under observation in Lórien now because she kicked somebody so I was the natural person to step up.

Can you explain more about why she's in Lórien for that and why she kicked somebody?

The first demon we summoned kept touching her even though she didn't like it and he petted her hair and she kicked him. Now obviously there is a philosophical argument to be made that under those circumstances the use of force could be justified but we were still all very worried that influences from other worlds would make us more inclined to solve problems violently. So she's in Lórien and the demons aren't allowed to touch people anymore and we'll see if I find myself inclined to hurt people whenever it might abstractly be defensible.

I'm sorry that happened to her. He wouldn't have known about the hair thing any more than Zota did at first so he probably didn't think he was being as hurtful as he actually was. I tried to publicize the names of demons who would be compatible with Valinor when it didn't look like that was getting navigated smoothly on its own and I'm glad Zota is working out so far. I think you will find yourself no more inclined to violence than you would normally be.

That's good. Zota is very nice and I think even if there wasn't a binding she probably wouldn't touch my hair now that she knows not to. But the Valar kind of want the bindings at least until they figure out how to make all of Valinor indestructible, they want to do that eventually. Indestructibility is a good idea.

Indestructibility is great. It sounds like you're going to work something out with Zota so the bindings don't stop her from ever getting hugs, so it shouldn't be a big deal if it helps you feel safer.

The city by city mail labels aren't a bad idea in principle but people who might send you letters don't know enough about the cities to know which one to use. The point of separate mail labels is so Zota can conjure up the mail in several piles and nobody has to read all the piles. If people don't know whether they should talk to Tirion or Valimar, the same stuff will be in both piles. It would probably be better to have labels for institutions and clubs and interest groups, sort of like the architecture club through which I found Zota.

Okay. We could do, say, media recommendations and political questions and cultural questions and mathematics questions and science questions?

That sounds like a great first pass. Maybe also language questions; humans can't instantly learn languages and daeva can only do that if someone who knows the language summons us. That will slow things down at first while translation is bottlenecked but not in the longer term.