[Is it okay if I send you questions or should I direct them elsewhere so you can have a break?]

Feel free to send me questions, it'll still be a break.

So Isabella helps the teenagers settle in and reports on Elf-related things to the government and sends Alex on errands and sometimes sends the rafting Maitimë inquiries about this and that.

It is very a break. She comes back very refreshed and with an enormous pile of work which she sets to doing or delegates to the cousin guilty of stealing her away from it in the first place.

Isabella hasn't actually met this cousin, should she?

"There are a lot of people you should meet, I've been remiss, I'm terribly sorry - but yes, Findekáne's lovely, there aren't many people I can just give half of whatever I'm doing and expect it to get done well."

"That is such a Fëanorian compliment."

"In that it's informative and flattering, or is there some other characteristic that makes it so?"

"Informative and likely to come across as flattering to only a tiny fraction of people, who my cousins collect like magpies might in some place more starved for sparkle than Valinor - have you seen Valimar? Glittery. You must be Isabella."

"I have not seen Valimar and I am indeed Isabella!"

"I apologize for not meeting you earlier, I picked a terrible time to journey to the edge of the world and somehow missed excitement by doing that. Nice to meet you. Maitimë had a lot to say about you."

"Oh yeah? What's being said about me?"

"Very Fëanorian compliments. Apparently we got lucky in first persons to fall on our world. Apparently you can beat her at Governor."

"I cheat."

"Well, so does she, being Maitimë's cheating."

"That's an interesting way to put it."

"And, put that way, being Isabella's also cheating, probably."

"That might be the highest of Fëanorian compliments."

"I will cherish it forever."

"But then she has less incentive to surpass it! And she's very inventive, you'll want to be taking advantage - anyway, I actually came by because your accounting is either irresponsible or just incomprehensible -"

"No, that's the Earth way to do bookkeeping, scale the numbers down by a million and play around with it and you'll get the idea -"

"That was the first thing I did, and isn't the only thing I'm missing - what are you even going to do with all of this money -"

"Fix things. I can take a look at it, it's possible there's inconsistencies from when Laurië switched contracts - you should go for a singing career, you'd be good at it -"

"Do you in fact need twice as much of those very large numbers or has Laurië got it covered."

"Couple projects are funding-constrained in the medium term - if we can de-oath orcs we may need a lot of psions -"