"Can't say it particularly haunted me, though I thought it was cool once it was invented. We didn't have books for a long time after that."

"Why not?"

"Very very time-consuming to scribe, and we didn't have books worth of things to say yet, or the concept we should be striving for that. It was all scrolls."

"You have all those songs, I'd think you'd write those down - or was music notation later -"

"Later. Not all that much later but it definitely didn't occur to people right away, and some people thought you couldn't possibly capture the real spirit of a song that way..."

"I think you're probably better at memorizing music than humans are even not accounting for practice."

"I think we have better memories in general, I've never heard of Elves forgetting big parts of their lives and we're all very old compared to humans. And I can remember more names than any human though I can also remember more than any Elf I've heard of."

"I wish I had a better memory. There's a decent memory artifact whose owner will sell touches but they're very expensive, I never saved up enough for it."

"I'd have been all over that. What's the drawback?"

"All your hair falls out."

"...What? That's one of the most harmless artifact drawbacks in the world!"

"...okay, I'm the worst girlfriend in the world, this should have come up a long long time ago - Elves. Have a thing about hair. I would rather lose my hand again than my hair."

"Oh. I mean, I noticed everybody kept theirs long but I didn't know it was that big a deal."

"It's really really sensitive, touching it is considered intimate - they shaved mine so I have fewer triggers around that than around a lot of other things but it's still - not a pleasant thing for me, anymore, but for most people -"

Nod.

"You also usually tie it up, having it loose is - sort of like the human taboo on nudity -"

"Elves don't have a taboo on nudity?"

"No?"

"That would have been nice to know - do Dwarves - my world has the nudity taboo but I would have gotten over it I am too hot all the time -"

"I'm so sorry, I should have thought - I think we're all flagrantly going around violating some Dwarf taboo on beardlessness and once they don't mind about that they won't blink at much else."

"I will ask a Dwarf to be sure. Should I be putting my hair up -?"

"Everyone's used to humans not doing that. I find it distracting but I'd find you terribly distracting anyway."

"Would I be usefully less distracting with my hair up."

"Can't say I've ever minded you being distracting."