" - well, if you didn't know very much about me I think it'd be pretty reasonable to hear all of that and assume that I did as much as you can reasonably expect a person to do, but if you ever get to know more about me and end up feeling like actually I could have been reasonably expected to do a fair bit more, and you want an apology -"

"I will keep that one on hand if I ever feel like I want it but if I ever do decide you ought to have done more than you did I'd be more in the market for an explanation."

"I can try that too but I'm never very sure of any explanations you can't sail ships with."

"That's fair enough."

"I'm sorry we made you nervous when you arrived."

"It looked a little like that one Dwarf was selling me to that linguistics guild guy for a bit and I was just kind of giving them the benefit of the doubt."

"It - oh!!! 

Dwarves will always rescue stranded persons or people in need or danger but if you tell them that there's no reward for that since it was the decent thing to do they'll feel like you're - insulting and undermining one of the most important pillars of society, which is that decent things to do are incentivized. Slavery is illegal everywhere."

"I did eventually figure out I had not been purchased! I just couldn't figure out right away why else money was changing hands."

"It's not even that Dwarves are pessimistic about the nature of people -- I guess they are a little, more than Elves, but not as much as humans usually -- it's that -- imagine how you'd feel about it if there were a fine for rescuing people?"

"I read an article once saying that in some jurisdictions you have to pay for people's medical care if you hit them with your car and so some people would back up and hit them again to make sure they were dead and there'd only be a funeral cost. I don't know if it's actually true but it's the sort of thing that could be true somewhere."

"Dwarves are good at not making that mistake, not because they're mostly murderers but because they have a dislike for laws that'd favor them."

"Yeah. Anyway, I could imagine someplace on Earth having it, not explicitly, but effectively, expensive to rescue people."

"And that'd be sort of awful, right?"

"Yes."

"So just imagine feeling like that about all economic efficiencies anywhere and you'll predict Dwarves really well."

"I think if humans tried to implement a rewards system for rescuing people you'd get people pretending to be in distress so their friends could rescue them and split the money later, on the one end, and a pervasive disagreement about who exactly should be coughing up for the rescues on the other. I bet Dwarves have a solution to the second thing but you might all be handling the first thing just by being weirdly lawful people."

"I mean, usually the rescued party pays, it's just that no one wanted to badger you about payment when you didn't speak the language and weren't responsive to osanwë and were clearly from very far away."

"So how'd the guy who did pay get involved?"

"Well, the Dwarves said that they'd rescued this fascinating person and they could wait around until enough communication was established to negotiate the reward and someone heard this and went 'why don't we just settle it now' because they wanted to ferry you off to our linguistics guild before any of the other linguistics guilds heard."

"Well, that's adorable."

"We have a lot of linguistics guilds."

"You'd probably have to if it's a very popular hobby, you'd get too crowded in the one place."

"No, it's not that, every one split off because of a passionate linguistic disagreement."

"Really? Like what?"

" - so, historically, the name for our tribe of Elves in Quenya, the language spoken in Valinor and used for literature and history today was said "Ngoldor". Some people started saying "Noldor", which is how Númenoreans and most native speakers of Sindarin say it, there was a schism over that."