"There'd be kids around for the girls, there'd be more people around in general, they have some basis for hope they'll survive the end of the world - Dwarves're immune to all mind-affecting magic, so the Enemy finds them kind of boring -"

"Sounds good."

"The problem is that the Enemy doesn't find us boring so we might be a target, I don't know how much they'll want -"

"...as hazard pay for taking us in? Uh, healing's usefully transferable, languages are too if the immunity to mind magic doesn't hedge it out... maybe whatever goes with being too hot is useful if we figure out what it is..."

"Yeah, we can at least check whether it transfers like that and make a bid. I think the languages thing will be really popular."

"It's pretty handy. I guess if I didn't have it osanwë would have done, since the opacity lets it through."

"Dwarf opacity doesn't, it caused a disaster back when they first encountered some Beleriand-native Elves. Well. To the extent one feels comfortable blaming that on the opacity instead of the Thindar."

"What happened?"

"They decided they weren't people. And they hunted them for sport."

"You asked why no one stopped us when we went to Doriath? Well, part of it was the reasons we gave you, but also part of it was that everyone hated them."

"Poor Dwarves."

"Even after that'd happened the Dwarves had a population in Menegroth, making weapons for them, because defeating the Enemy was important, and then they asked for payment and the Queen said the next disgusting cripple to demand money from her was getting thrown to the orcs and someone stabbed her and the Thindar retaliated by killing every single Dwarf in Menegroth, there were two survivors -"

"Oh my god!"

"My sister married a Dwarf, her spouse, her children -"

"- were in Menegroth?"

"No, actually, it got worse from there, the two survivors didn't know they were the only survivors, just that they were the only ones who'd gotten out, and they went home, and Tumunzahar mobilized and marched out to Doriath to demand an accounting of what had happened, and of course were fired upon, and stormed the whole city looking for any other survivors and there weren't any and then they turned around and went home and the Thindar ambushed them crossing a river, and were more careful that time, no one escaped -"

"Oh no -"

"It didn't make it right to go after them when they started waving a Silmaril around a year later but it did make our people terribly disinclined to stop us-"

Nod.

"Anyway. Dwarves're very - what they'll do if we show up is ask some representative group of people how much money they'd want to be indifferent about having us there and then they'll let us know how much they'd want and then we can stay if we can manage it."

"...I don't think I've noticed any money in use around here."

"When we had kingdoms we used it, though mostly not internally - Valinor didn't have material scarcity, we never really got around to developing an economy - but anyway, 'healing' and 'translation' are things we can pay in -"

"And they'll have an idea of how to price it?"

"Yeah, they're really good at that, there'll be a couple days of internal bidding and then we'll get offers to handle various shares of the logistics for us."