Don't know. Your home, or - mine before the war -

Lírnith told me some stuff about you in Valinor, it sounded like you were busy with all kinds of cool stuff, I would've wanted to help -

Yeah, I - was - bleak pain and horror - Eru, if I'd known what I'd become -

Sorry, I - didn't realize how painful it'd be to think about what things used to be like -

If you'd landed in my world I would have thought that was very interesting because I didn't know other worlds existed, and the university wasn't letting me study artifacts but other worlds could be just as useful, so I'd have wanted to go meet you if there was a way for me to do that.

I always aspired to be very meetable.

So I'd have showed up and wanted to know all about Elves and magic and stuff, I guess, and I'm both intensely magically biased and have only seen you in brief flashes and through other people's eyes but I probably would've still noticed you're beautiful...

It'd be - really useful to sort of get an orientation on your kind of magic, it's a lot more - arbitrary and force-of-nature-y than ours -

I've read a lot of books on artifacts, we could have swapped magic facts. It's not totally arbitrary though, there's usually some connection to whoever left the artifact. It'll be related to their actual hobbies or disabilities or fears or talents or whatever somehow.

How do you leave an artifact?

If somebody dies, there's a very small chance that their favorite thing will become an artifact. So it's often jewelry or art or books or things like that, not so much toasters, and never things that come in pairs like shoes.

Huh. - I'd have been horrified about people dying. Before the war there weren't humans, and Elves don't die, not really, not forever, and in Valinor they didn't die at all, I'd have been terribly upset at the idea that enough people had died for there to be a lot of artifacts in the first place -

Humans have been around for a couple hundred thousand years. Although they didn't leave many artifacts in very early history - smaller population and fewer valuable possessions.

The oldest Elves are almost eight thousand. That's - wow, that's a long time -

No humans have been alive that long, the oldest known artifact that does immortality is only twenty five hundred years old and only one person has touched it.

Must have a hell of a drawback -

It is, but also he swallowed it and nobody can get it out of him.

Wow. ...what's the drawback, why would anyone do that...

He can't move at all, or be moved, he's stuck where he was when he stiffened up. And he's too durable for people to scratch his nose for him, which is according to telepathic touched very irritating. His mom left the artifact when he was four, it was a jade pendant, he didn't know what it was or decide to make this tradeoff - a lot of artifacts are found by accident by the bereaved, people try not to leave them - wedding jewelry's paired so it won't turn magic, for instance.

Oh no. Oh no. That - sounds awful. Uh, okay, if you mentioned that I think I'd ask if he had people coming to sing for him and read him books and so forth all the time and if not if we could set that up, and teach him osanwë so he could communicate at least with me and any other Elves without having to use fully-telepathic couriers, and then I'd probably try to think how to ask a Vala to actually fix it -

He's a tourist attraction. People go talk to him and there's some telepaths in the area who he can talk to and there's usually a TV on. I read an interview with him and he cracked jokes and stuff and seemed pretty okay considering. He's not four any more, he did grow.

That's good. Shudder. A Vala still might be able to fix it. 

That would be good. If they decided they wanted to do something outside of Valinor.

It would have taken some doing and meant I couldn't go around kissing you but it might've been achievable.