"Is there something for 'sing'?"

"Yeah -" Like so.

"They're half-mortal, I don't know how quickly they'll pick it up, but that'll help a lot."

"Are Elves really fast with languages too?"

"My mother could be conversant in a day and fluent in a week, in anything. I'm about half that fast, mortal adults are really slow usually-"

"...compared to that yep."

"Compared to their own lifespans. We tried to fix mortality - could have done it, if we'd had a little bit more time -"

"- more time to what?"

"For the relevant researchers to stay alive. Our magic system is powerful but very, very slow - complicated things can easily take a mortal lifetime - my mother might have been able to do it in a few decades but she was killed very early in the war, my sister could have done it but not that fast but - she's dead too -"

"Oh."

"Everyone's dead. Two hundred fifty thousand of us crossed the ocean to fight this war and there are - maybe seventy people alive now."

"- in six hundred years nobody's had kids, or -"

"Not in wartime, no."

"Oh."

"That's another Elf thing. We - this is no world to bring a child into."

"I think most humans don't consider the fitness of the world for children before having them," nods Annie.

"Well, they also don't get a choice. Elves can't have children except by the deliberate will of both parents."

"...in my world we have medicine to prevent it if we want but it's not totally perfect."

"...if you'd gotten here a century ago she'd be delightedly asking you how to do it so we could reverse-engineer it, we find it very upsetting how they don't get a choice, but now there's only a handful of mortals who aren't slaves of the Enemy and we have no resources to develop new medicines anyway."

"I don't know how to do it, I'm not a doctor or a pharmacist or anything. I think it involves messing around with hormones somehow..."

"Well, luckily it doesn't matter."

"I guess."

"Kids still looking for food?"