I mean in theory. It works on, like, farm animals and stuff, I think. This is most of what I know about it.

Uh, we can look into it.

Thanks.

If you don't come up with anything he wants to wait until I'm, like, twenty, which I'm fairly certain doesn't actually solve any of the primary problems with this situation but I guess it kind of makes sense as a preference.

If that's not what you want I think you gotta talk that out with him, your maturity is not something Nelyo can establish on your behalf.

I mean I didn't say it was.

Just - see if you guys can think of anything.

We'll try.

Thanks.

Karen is going to skip out on building houses today and hide under the blankets in her room, actually. Let her fellow house-builders judge her as they see fit.

If they judge her they do not mention it.

Karen can actually only sulk for so long. If no one gets back to her for the rest of the day, she'll go back to building houses tomorrow.

It takes them a couple days but they come up with a list of possibilities. She could, uh, use her hand? Or a cloth? Or a ceramic apparatus of some kind? While doing a headstand, maybe? This is clearly not an issue Elves have given a lot of thought before.

Karen hates everything in the entire world.

She knocks on Ryan's door.

"Hey."

"Hi. The Quendi have some ideas but they all sound kind of dumb and none of them have any reason to believe that any of them will work. I think they've never had this problem before. We can try them, if you are not going to budge on 'having sex is a terrible idea', but I expect low success rates and a lot of bodies to pile up in the meantime."

"I mean, do you disagree that having sex sounds like a terrible idea right now?"

"I think any plan that involves murdering babies will always be a terrible idea. But I also think waiting around is a terrible idea, and - this is the terrible idea I'm going with."

"You know that typically people have to have sex for several months, maybe up to a year, before they get pregnant, even if they're both healthy and trying?"

"Yes, I know that."

"Is there, like, an amount of 'no actually this is horrifically traumatizing me' at which you'd decide, bad plan, make them find a different human, or is the idea here that it doesn't matter?"

"There's - probably some amount of being horrifically traumatized at which I stop having the fortitude to independently decide to do plan things. No one is making me do this."

" - so, like, pointing this out doesn't seem to be very likely to solve anything at all but there are a lot of ways to get an isolated sixteen-year-old to do things without actually forcing her, especially if you are a bunch of telepaths."

"Everyone I care about has told me that they don't want me to do this. Everyone I have talked to is in favor of letting hundreds of thousands of people die so that we can do this same thing to some other person who they care less about. And, look, if someone felt like this was the best solution but they didn't have the fortitude to do it themselves instead of forcing someone else to, then I don't even know how much I could blame that person, because this is sort of terrifying. But - I have leapt into hell to slay demons because I didn't want other people to die, OK. I have shot my best friend in the head. I have gotten really really good at shooting vampires in the eyes with crossbow bolts. I have killed lots of people because I didn't know how to contain supernaturally strong serial killers. I have illegally broken into classified government files to investigate whether the US government was doing unethical experimentation on people from other dimensions. I have - been given a magical destiny and no one to hold me to it and immediately started risking my life to fight evil, long before I ever ran into Alex, and - I think this is a bad plan, OK, I think I'm going to go to hell for this, and if you don't want to join me there then that's entirely legitimate and I wish you all the best, but - no one is making me be this person. Insofar as this is a terrible decision it is my terrible decision, and I am making it without anyone else's encouragement or approval, so - 

" - if you don't want to then fine, we'll find someone else, I am aware that this is not really in any sense a reasonable thing to ask of someone, but - make that decision for you, all right, because when the world is on fire I think I prefer being the one to make decisions for me."

"Okay.

Sure. Fine."

"Oh. OK.

"I'm gonna, uh, wait, and see if I can figure out how my cycle goes and - then maybe we only have to do this - not that many times. OK?"

"Yeah. Though, uh, normally people - work up to it - and don't try to have sex the first day they touch. If you know what works for you it's probably fine."

"I will get back to you about this."