"Okay. Can I test something on you? Celebrimbor explained how telepathy works and I think it'll be good for vocabulary if I can make it work."

"Sure."

Testing?

"That worked fine! You know, it's really very strange that it didn't in the first place."

"Humans where I'm from might be different in a lot of ways."

"I guess if some of the southern humans had - different responses to osanwë - Númenor shouldn't have noticed?"

"I think I'm from farther away than that." Om nom breakfast.

"If you're from another world it's strange you're a human at all."

"I agree! It's also strange that you guys and Dwarves are so human-like. But it's probably not stranger that I'm a human than it is that you have pineapples."

"Dwarves are designed after Mahal's remembrance of the Plan, with the alterations he thought wise, and humans are supposed to be in some ways like Elves, though I don't know why the particular design choices that were made won out. I guess the pineapples are just as strange."

"There aren't Dwarves or Elves where I'm from."

"Most humans never meet one and I suppose they get on all right - well, I suppose they don't but that doesn't seem to be why, not directly."

"Hmm?"

"Humans mostly don't get on all right, they mostly die horribly. But it's not like not knowing any Dwarves or Elves is a big problem for them, not that I know of."

"Why do they mostly die horribly?"

"Sort of the ultimate question, isn't it? Lord Celebrimbor thinks we'll fix it someday, not that he'll say so, and I know in the west they say that they get something better once they die so it's all right for all that, and then some people say that Morgoth tainted them and some that they were created that way and I don't see how you're supposed to tell, aside from what sounds nicest."

"No, I mean, what's killing them?"

"Oh, it's not anything in particular -- or it's lots of particular things but they're all a consequence of how their bodies just give out after a century or three. Is that not how it is for humans where you're from?"

"You're saying Elves and Dwarves don't die of old age."

"If that's the falling apart after a while, yeah."

"Is 'a century or three' very approximate? I don't know how long your years are but human deaths by old age don't vary by a factor of three."

"Well, some of them have some Elf blood, and then Númenor was made specially for the survivors of the wars of Beleriand, and the gods changed the humans, too, when they were making Númenor for them. They're taller and more like Elves and live longer, even the ones who don't have Elf blood in them. Elros Tar-Minyatur lived to five hundred but I don't think most of them make it past three."

"Oh, I see. How long are your years?"

"You've been here for a day. There's three hundred and sixty of those in a year."

"Huh. Okay. We have three hundred and sixty five and one quarter day years. Plus maybe some extra hours but those don't come up often, the correction for the quarter day comes up every four years."