The ground is surprisingly soft and forgiving. The place is suffused with very bright insistent silvery light. There are bells in the distance.

If she just waits an hour nobody from her world finds her. Can't talk to anyone from home, even Alex. Some locals find her - not human, not quite. Telepaths. They eventually get around to telling her how that works; she can implement the defense now. They are very bad at receiving surprise otherworldly visitors. They eventually send her to someone who is less bad at it; the walk is long enough that she doesn't have much of that conversation even when she revises the look-ahead starting from the premise that she heads that way on her own at once. They don't have cars. She can't read a role off any of them, the hair doesn't seem indicative, the clothes are weird - even gender's a little hard to tell -

She's holding her cane. She gets up. She heads that way on her own, looking firmly like she knows what she's doing.

First few minutes of conversation are friendly enough that she feels bad about dictionary-attacking the poor woman. She has her name, knows the first couple questions she'll ask, she can go from there.

She is comparing a blueprint of an indoor plumbing system to a map of the city and trying to think how to arrange this to inconvenience as few - or as malleable - a share of the population as possible. When she hears someone approaching she turns around.

She doesn't know who they are. 

That's odd. "Nelyafinwë Maitimë," she says, "are you looking for somebody?"

Isabella Swan. I've fallen through a portal into your world; retrieval's not happening, at least not very soon, and I can't contact anyone from home. I don't speak your language yet. I anticipate needing some help navigating.

Portal from another world? 

Okay. Please come on in. We can probably send you home and in the meantime I would be delighted to offer you whatever help I can.

Thank you. In she goes. I'm not yet sure if it's another world entirely or just a different planet. Other investigated portals seem likely to be just different planets but the one I fell into was unusual.

It is an exceptionally pretty office. I can't think off the top of my head how to check the difference and it doesn't much affect my guess of how likely our gods can send you home. You fell? Are you injured?

Not badly, but my left arm's been better. Gods?

I'm happy to sing you something for it if you'd like. Our world was created and is maintained by the Valar; they are very powerful and creating a portal to another world sounds like it might be the sort of thing they could do now that we know portals between worlds exist.

Is singing how healing magic works here?

Yes. Not back home?

Nope. Mages can learn it but they don't have to sing.

And we don't have mages. 

We have mages, and psions, and most people are neither.

How many, out of what population size?

One in a thousand with the potential to be one or the other, never both, fifty-fifty, but most don't pursue it; planet has about six billion people.

So there are a lot fewer of us but not so few we wouldn't have noticed. No mages, here; anyone can do magic but developing new magic takes Years or yéni. You also appear to be a different species.

I'm a human. I'm surprised we're as similar as we are. How long is a local year?

Do you have a convenient point of reference, I don't.

- if in an hour and six minutes and ten seconds she says it's been that long how long will Maitimë say it's been -?

There'd be about fifty of those in a local day.

Your days are about twice as long as mine, Isabella concludes. I'm a psion, incidentally.

What does that mean? Aside from, I take it, that it lets us figure out the length of days - we have 1728 in a year -

That's a very long year. Psions are the sort of magic human who learn to do things that do not have physical effects - except, technically, effects on brains and certain specialized technology. One of the things I've picked up is precognition.

I see. Not the local, useless sort, I take it?

You have local useless precognition? No, mine is very useful.

People get dreams about the future if and only if the content of the dreams will not cause them to change their actions in a way that would prevent the events in the dreams from coming to pass. I don't get any because I'm a very meddling sort of person. 

I can look into my own future at a range of a little over an hour and act based on that as much as I like.

That sounds amazingly useful. So have we already had this conversation, at least the elements of it informative to you?

No, I stopped looking when it was clear it would be a friendly conversation and unlikely to turn up any desperate emergencies that would warrant skipping ahead. It's both distracting and calorically expensive, not to mention socially unfriendly.

Do you - simulate the people, by looking ahead like that? If you were threatening to someone is there actually someone who experienced being afraid -

Conventional wisdom is that there is not, but much ink has been spilled on the subject. As a practical matter it's desperately necessary to have precogs anyway because newly potentiated mages and psions are astonishingly dangerous and would melt about half the planet every time there was an eclipse if no one were checking.

That is very reasonable. ...and doesn't apply here, so if it turns out to involve simulating people the Valar might try to break it. It might depend how it was presented to them.

How would they check?

I'm not sure. They are not very good at explaining the limits of their abilities to us. 

I'd very much take exception to being abruptly crippled by entities who can't even explain the basis for their reasoning.

I don't blame you. You can neglect to mention to them that you have it.

Or, somewhat ironically, check how they'd react, if they'd do it in a timely fashion.

They are millions of years old and don't do much of anything in a timely fashion but you might be able to get at least whether the reaction is positive or negative or conditional on the exact nature.

Nod.

Anyway. if you'd like to be returned home at once I should send a messenger for a Vala; if you're thinking you might stay a while I should probably tell you more about the people you'd be staying among. 

As long as my magic isn't going to suddenly stop working I'm interested in scoping out the place, although ideally I'd like a way to go back and forth so my family doesn't worry. It may be figured out from my end too.

I might be able to convince the Valar to set up a portal; we'll see. All right. The world is called Arda; it has two main continents, Valinor and Endorë. Endorë is dangerous but there's no divine interference; Valinor is a paradise but the Valar are a little clumsy with the interfering. To my knowledge the only people in the world are Elves and Maiar - lesser Valar - and the Valar but Dwarves are supposed to awaken in Endorë soon and eventually there'll be lots of peoples - our world has a scripted divine plan.

Is it a good scripted divine plan?

Lovely so far. I have no idea how the rest of it goes.

Somehow I don't think I was expected.

Doubt it. The divine planners are only omnipotent in this dimension - though I might be able to convince them to patch up yours, if it has anything that needs patching -

Plenty of things, but if they're going to do something irresponsible like de-power all the precogs we might want to take our chances solving the problems locally.

Reasonable. All right. ...Elves were invited to come live in Valinor about 250 of our Years ago, some of us took them up on it, my grandmother coordinated immigration and ended up Queen. This is Tirion; it's the major city of the Noldor, though there are people scattered up and down the continent. 

Noldor being?

One of the three tribes of Elves. We're considered the quarrelsome and inventive and intellectual ones; the Vanyar are considered the joyous and reliable and content ones; the Teleri are the traditional and communal and simplicity-preferring ones; they're sort of formed by voluntary association so there's probably something to the stereotypes but they're hardly airtight.

All right.

Should I get you a place to stay in the city?

I'd appreciate that. I will also need to know how to get food and so on here.

You just - walk down the streets and get it.

...you will have to be slightly more explanatory.

I think we're hitting some kind of important cultural difference. If you walk down the streets there will be vendors with carts with food. And if the food smells good then you take some. If you find this unpleasant you could get enough food for two months in one go and then keep it at home.

How are the vendors compensated?

Compensated?

Why do they spend time hanging out by carts distributing food. There are food carts where I live, too, but one has to trade them standard units of value they can then trade for other things in order to receive food.

Oh, they just enjoy doing it. That's a clever system but I don't think it'd catch on here.

So you just happen to have a convenient fraction of the population who really like cooking in large batches and handing the food out.

I wouldn't say it's a very large fraction of the population? But - people like doing something that matters, if one were unusually good at cooking and liked it then sometimes one'd cook and give away the food and get compliments on it because it's satisfying. 

...nothing in Valinor is scarce, that seems like it might be relevant?

That does sound relevant, although I'm not sure it explains the interest in food service occupations by itself.

It's a good way to show off a skill and do something nice for lots of people at once and accrue - hmm, social capital? Everyone who's eaten your food and enjoyed it will go out of their way for you if you need something. I'd do it if it weren't beneath the dignity of my office and so on.

Huh, it's also fairly uncommon in my world for that much social capital to change hands when food is sold.

Maybe that's because you're trading it for the units of exchange and so it ceases to be in any sense a favor owed. Or maybe Elves and humans are fundamentally different. Anyway, people like making food and offering it on street corners and you can get food that way for as long as needed, or if I get you a room in the palace we have servants.

Either sounds fine. I do eat a lot - for a human, I suppose I don't know how much Elves eat - if I'm doing much magic.

I doubt food will be a problem. You can get clothes and supplies and so forth in the same manner. How does your magic work, what can you do apart from the precognition?

I can lucid dream. I can talk to people in a manner roughly like this - verbal only no translation, I would say 'no range limit' but I can't reach anyone from home here so, no intraplanetary range limit. I have an eidetic memory. Current active project is attention expansion and my existing abilities improve in fits and starts as I practice them.

Ooooh I am very very jealous. There's no way to acquire these, people either have them or don't?

On the lunar eclipse closest to one's twelfth birthday one turns up with the potential if one's ever going to have it. ...I'm not sure what's making this place so bright and silvery, maybe you don't know what an eclipse is.

Valinor is lit by giant shiny trees, and I do not know what an eclipse is.

...well, my planet is lit by an enormous distant ball of flaming plasma called the sun, and also orbited at closer range by a ball of rock called the moon, which the light from the sun bounces aesthetically off of, and when the planet is precisely between the moon and sun and casts a shadow on the moon, that's a lunar eclipse.

Huh. What an interesting lighting system. If you don't have gods, who built it?

Stars form naturally over very long periods of time under my world's laws of physics. The sun predates life on my planet. Life also forms naturally over very long periods of time.

That's fascinating. I can't think of anything else to mention, which probably leaves us with misunderstandings that both sides consider too obvious to clarify. Are you wondering anything?

Yes, but I'm not sure it's polite to ask.

Well, you can check what would happen if you asked me, and if I go faint with horror at your discourtesy and then pull out a pen and start stabbing you with it you can conclude you oughtn't really ask.

All right.

And if she were to say you look very close to human for aliens but I can barely distinguish genders and haven't gotten a solid read on a single person's role since I landed -?

There are gendered hairstyles. No one would cut their hair off, it'd be really painful to have it as short as yours, but there are distinct differences. Role?

The concept is easily pushed -

Oh! Huh. That's - to the extent it exists at all it'd be private. People will make assumptions in certain kinds of circumstances but one wouldn't acknowledge their assumptions - your way sounds lovely -

So there's no accompanying public social role?

Nope. Sorry.

Well, that's going to be vaguely uncomfortable but I'll live with it. There are gendered roles?

Yes, but informally, and people pretend there aren't. People in power will uniformly be women but everyone pretends it's a gender-wide disinclination and not some sort of rule against it. Healing and nurturing and theoretical and abstract academic fields are gendered male; creation and invention and command are gendered female. What's going to be uncomfortable, is there a way to mitigate it?

It's going to be odd that people won't identify me on sight as a dom and that I can't identify them even by asking the way I could if someone presented ambiguously at home. In roughly the same way I imagine it might be odd if you went to a place where there were no genders. I suppose the local feminine role is possibly close enough - at home most doms are men so I was concerned.

Yes, don't ask, people will think you're asking about their sex life and feel - invaded upon.

Okay.

And that's enough of that; she bounces the hypothetical conversation to Maitimë.

Huh. I am very envious of your powers but I can't imagine using that one much, people make plenty of sense to me anyway. If you claim some position of authority in your home world people will make approximately the right assumptions less the intimate ones, and it wouldn't be that hard to find a husband who was comfortable with the intimate ones if not with the - public role part.

"Professional precog" is a position of status mostly for its rarity and not less open to subs in any respect. If I ever take it into my head to marry an Elf I'll keep that in mind, although I have no idea how I'd filter for it in this environment... is it a standard assumption that people only want to match up in potentially-child-producing ways?

...uh, yes, very much so. Not back home?

Some people prioritize it if they really want kids and don't want to adopt or solicit outside contributions, some people are actually monosexual either which way but they're a minority...

It's one of those things the Valar clumsily have opinions about, and the universe less-clumsily also has opinions about. Most people are exclusively attracted to the opposite gender and if that doesn't describe you you are encouraged to get the Valar to fix it for you.

...to fix it.

You don't need to worry, that they never do without consent and I don't even know if they expect humans to work like Elves. But yes. The divine plan has everybody paired up in child-producing marriages, exceptions to that rule are assumed to be a consequence of the long-ago introduction of evil to the world, most people want to not disgust and disappoint their friends and family and society and so get it altered if it's not what they'd want.

Noted.

I'm working on it. Things change slowly around here and I won't be Queen until my grandmother gets bored.

Interesting manner of succession.

How do humans do it?

In monarchies, traditionally one is succeeded on one's death.

Well, then I'd be waiting forever, this being Valinor.

You're all immortal?

You die?

Mages can do immortality, but by default, yes, we die.

Well. We are immortal by default and are even more immortal in Valinor because if something does kill us the Valar bring us back.

Resurrection may be doable with my magic system but isn't a solved problem.

Maybe your world will want to invite our gods despite their shortcomings.

I suppose it's possible their virtues outweigh their drawbacks.

They do if they're well enough handled. It's what I do when I'm not running the country.

Sounds busy.

It is a delightful job and I feel very fortunate to have been born to it - I'm pretty sure I'd have maneuvered my way in anyway but this way was so convenient -

Sounds it. Most countries on my planet are phasing out monarchies at this point in history.

Oh? In favor of what?

Democracies and republics of various sorts.

I have a very high opinion of my people but I'm better at ruling them than they'd be at it. And they agree with me on that.

My suspicion is that democracy outperforms the typical but not the optimal monarch. If you happen to be an optimal monarch far be it from me to suggest you decline the opportunity.

And monarchs dying would throw some complications into the mix.

Quite.

Are there any other things you've noticed your world has which aren't present here?

I think astronomical features, roles, humans, psions and mages, money, and apparently democracy are all I've detected so far.

All right. Well I'm findable here - or reachable from anywhere, obviously - all silver and most of the gold, someone's here to escort you to a room in the palace until you've had time to pick out a place to live more permanently, please make yourself comfortable.

Thank you. - In-palace food procedure is?

Brought to your rooms.

After having been solicited how? I was about to get lunch when I fell and then I did more magic and I'm very hungry.

Twice a day, but I can tell them to bring it to you more often. She does that. There, done.

Thanks.

Of course. I hope you settle in happily and uneventfully.

Thanks. - I'd like to learn the local language, read some local books. What's the best way to do that?

Library's across the street from here, big translucent marble building, can't miss it. "I can speak to you in Quenya and project a translation at the same time; that's probably the fastest way to learn. I'd similarly like to pick up your language, if that's possible."

"Sure," replies Isabella. "Although I tend to learn particularly well from written material so I'd like the alphabet sooner than later."

"I can write it out for you right now -" and she pulls out a sheet of paper and does that - 

"It's pretty!"

"I'm glad you think so! My mother invented it!"

"...what, really?"

"Yeah! Our world's only around seven hundred years old, writing's pretty recent."

"...taking into account how long your years are that is not necessarily far off from how long ago my world invented writing, admittedly, but it's very odd for it to be literally your mother."

"Everything you see was invented by literally my mother. She is brilliant and very prolific."

"Everything? Paper? Hinges? Gutters?"

"We don't have gutters, there's magic for that, paper had in fact been invented before she was born, glass is her, indoor lighting is her -

"Wow. How does your indoor lighting work, anyway, it doesn't look like what we have."

"Magic. How do you do it?"

"Electricity! Uh, like lightning but tame. It's not magic, psions and mages can't make persistently magical objects. Usually. The portals are mysterious."

"Now that sounds fascinating. May I throw some engineers at you to come figure out if they can get it working here?"

"I am not myself an engineer, but I'll do my best."

"They are very clever and can probably get somewhere just off descriptions."

"I can do better than that, with an eidetic memory it's been worth my while to read all sorts of random things, but I can't do much better than that."

Another envious sigh. "I don't suppose your magic can give other people eidetic memories."

"It's not actually out of the question but it'd be very time-consuming to learn to do."

"I would offer you - well, not the empire, I don't know you well enough, but anything else at all that is in my power."

"For an eidetic memory? What do you want to remember that badly?"

"Everyone. I know every person in my kingdom intimately enough to call them a good friend and know what situations they'll thrive in and put them there and someday there'll be too many people for me to do that and I find the prospect terrifying. I want space in my head for every triumph and every tragedy of every person under my rule, I want to know exactly what my decisions mean -"

"...that sounds emotionally exhausting."

"Maybe in a place less nice than Valinor."

"What does the place being nice have to do with it?"

"Well, if I can do right by everybody, then it's not tiring at all to have a very acute sense of them and whether I am doing right by them. If they had needs I couldn't meet -"

...Isabella almost makes a stupid joke, stops, says instead "Well, I'm not sure what you have on offer besides the empire that I couldn't get by asking nicely, but I can see about stretching my magic that way."

"Thank you. Once I know you better I'll probably be able to think of something, I get famously good presents."

Giggle. "What do you need to know?"

"Everything! Don't worry, most of it I get just by talking. The rest I can get by challenging you to elaborate strategy games, if I feel like I haven't puzzled out your mind sufficiently from talking."

"Elaborate strategy games."

"Is that not how getting to know people is done among humans?"

"Not by default, no."

"Well, then I'll win easily."

"That doesn't make it worse at figuring people out with?"

"If it did I wouldn't understand anybody at all, I always win easily."

"So what's the local getting to know you strategy game?"

"It's called Governor, want to give it a try?"

"Sure, why not, it can pull double duty as language exercise if it's as complicated as all that."

"It will definitely do that!" And she explains the rules.

"...So, if you always win easily, does that mean I'm allowed to cheat."

"Ooooh. 

...yes, go for it. That sounds like the most fascinating challenge I've ever heard of."

Isabella laughs. "All right, but I will need the food redirected here to nibble while we play if I'm going to be doing even more magic."

Food is delivered! Rather extravagant plates and plates of it!

Isabella can put away a lot of food, especially if she's aggressively precogging. "Oh, wow, everything's delicious and I'm not just saying that because I'm ravenous."

"I will convey your compliments to the chefs!"

"Exactly how much social capital do I owe them?" she wonders.

"Oh, you're my guest, and everyone owes me approximately infinite favors and is delighted when the opportunity arises to do me one, it'll work out splendidly."

"That sounds like a convenient position to be in but it must be so much work to maintain."

"It hardly even feels like work. Well, sometimes it does - I'm trying to get the entire city indoor plumbing and I am in the middle of securing ten thousand permissions and that part feels like work. But having a book copied for someone because I know they'll love it, or introducing two people who'll be good for each other, or helping some brilliant kid from some northern mining town get an apprenticeship - I'd feel empty without it."

"That's really nice. ...Especially the indoor plumbing part, I was not actually clear before that this place didn't have it, that's gonna be an adjustment."

"The palace has it! To set an example for the rest of my silly recalcitrant city, which will have it in a Year or two."

"Well there's an argument to wear out my palatial welcome if I ever heard one." And she starts scanning ahead for a good first set of Governor orders.

She is aware of what a totally ridiculous advantage Isabella has and wonders idly if there's a way to introduce randomness into her decisions. She settles for just making plans that work well against an absurdly wide array of contingencies.

This is really complicated in such a good way and adding fifteen versions of the game every time a turn goes by would be completely intractable without eidetic memory but guess what Isabella has.

She is sooooo jealous and also very curious what's happening in discarded iterations and also getting a very good picture of the way Isabella thinks.

"I like this game."

"Isn't it great! How do humans get to know each other, I bet it's not this good."

"There's not a formal designated activity for it. Although playing games as a category is often scaffolding for the sort of conversation that humans use for the purpose."

"We could have pleasant conversation but the party without an eidetic memory here might get distracted."

"I am still capable of getting distracted, that's why I'm working on attentional capacity! I just can recover my train of thought once no longer distracted."

"Attentional capacity sounds great too. Maybe I should acquire some more kingdoms to trade you."

"Eidetic memory actually doesn't require maintenance but most things that are known to be transferable to nonpsions do, FYI."

"How often?"

"Depends on the psion. No two people do magic in quite the same way. On the order of daily."

"That would be inconvenient. Maybe there's a way to combine it with our magic to keep it permanent."

"Ooh, that would be interesting."

"I will suggest it to my mother. She's going to be so excited by you."

"Why's that? It didn't sound like she was lacking in inventive inspiration."

"New languages. She speaks every one spoken on this continent but there's only really a few and they're all related. Entirely new ones without a common ancestor? She'll hardly be able to contain herself."

"I only know the one. Well, I'm only fluent in the one, I've picked up little bits of a couple others."

"Then she will bully the Valar for portals to your world so she can learn the others."

"That could be handy, if she's any good at convincing them to do things."

"She has no interpersonal skills at all but neither do they, it is guaranteed to turn out interestingly."

"...I'm not sure interestingness is the criterion I want to aim at for something as important as 'do Valar-controlled portals to my world exist and if so what is done with them'."

"I understand. But it'll take twenty Years of maneuvering to get something uninteresting and agreeable."

"Well, if I don't get ahold of a mage somewhere in there I'm not going to live that long, so point taken..."

"That short? That's horrifying. I bet I can talk a Vala into fixing it for you, even if it's not wise to ask them to just go handle your whole world."

"Humans live maybe ten of your years unassisted and I'm about a quarter of the way through that. I was planning on getting a mage to de-age me when it became a problem."

"Does everyone do that?"

"Aren't enough mages. There would be if everyone who could be a mage was and everyone who was learned de-aging, but they don't."

"Everything that ages ages ten times slower in Valinor. If we can talk them into extending that effect to your world -"

"...it would complicate agriculture very badly."

"Hmm, fair. Our crops take exactly as long to grow as the Valar please."

"While most humans do die of age-related causes there are also some who just literally don't have enough to eat and that would go up if there was suddenly ten percent as much food."

"...we can export food. How much would you need to fix that -"

"Production isn't actually the bottleneck, transport is."

"Hmm. ...no one's in a hurry, here, so we don't have fast transport, unless we can get the Valar to do portals in a pattern that allows for fast travel around the world - I doubt they'll let large populations of humans come live in Valinor but we can do whatever we want in Endorë, maybe there's a way to set up something there -"

"...and it's not a technical problem so much as an incentive problem, we can get things wherever on the planet pretty briskly even without mage assistance but if you recall the thing about the standard store of value traded for food..."

"Some people don't produce enough value to buy the things they need?"

"Exactly. And there are organizations that collect donated excess for the purpose but they have various logistical nightmares and even the simple 'literally give the poor people money' option has problems in execution."

"How does one produce a lot of value in your world, what sorts of skills or trades or magic -"

"Most applications of magic pay exceptionally well because it's so rare and one has to encourage people - who are around twelve years old, which is early adolescent in humans and not an age known for long term altruistic thinking - to go through frankly very unpleasant and tedious training procedures to be able to use it. Finance - various arcane tasks to do with fiddling with the economy - also pays well; so does nonmagical healing and helping people navigate the legal system and - at the very, very high end, not at all for less famous amateurs - various art."

"So our magic might be one way to do it - what does go wrong if you just give people the exchange units so they can acquire things they need, are they badly governed in addition to that?"

"It can work on a small scale. If you find an individual person somewhere who's, say, having trouble pulling together rent money for the month this one time, and give them a large chunk of cash, they may well be able to go from there with that investment. It doesn't work on a large scale because poor people are often clustered - so you'd have to give money to everyone in an entire poor country and wait for their increased spending power relative to their neighbors to make a difference; it wouldn't do more than affect liquidity a little bit internally, and the poor countries are not often ones that have very casual economic relationships with everybody else - and because it doesn't address the reasons people have trouble hanging on to their money, ranging from innumeracy to expensive addictions to silly status games."

"Hmm. Would those people do well if we moved them into a system like ours, or would they - I don't know - take from others and never contribute anything -"

"Some people would do that. Well, depending on what you mean by 'contribute', you might have a broader definition."

"It doesn't take much in the way of resources to give people a happy life in Valinor, but we'd have to do this in Endorë and I don't know what it takes in Endorë - I'm debating whether it's a good idea to set up a kingdom for humans here and try to solve their problems that way or just to make a lot of money and try to act within the structures of your world."

"You'd probably meet with some political resistance siphoning off substantial human population. Probably not insurmountable." She remembers that she was writing up a set of Governor orders and finishes them.

Right, yes, that. They can figure out how to solve the people literally starving to death after the game, they're not going to fix it today anyway.

Uses some of the same skills anyway. What a nice game this is. So fun to cheat outrageously at.

She can't have any plays that come to fruition within a dozen moves or they'll be foreseen. It's an interesting constraint. Gets harder towards the end of the game, when most things have quick payoffs.

And Isabella has no such limitations, and she can avoid anything that will be obviously noted and countered within that time, although there's interesting she-knows-I-know-she-knows going on...

It's definitely the most fascinating game she's ever played.

...Isabella starts laughing a few minutes in advance of her victory.

Well of course she would.

It does not make her any easier to counter!

She would presumably have refrained from laughing if laughing prompted Maitimë to think up a way around it!

Not necessarily. The look on Maitimë's face was just a little too fantastic to resist laughing about. Anyway here is the last turn.

That is in fact pretty fucking brilliant. She is delighted and annoyed in approximately equal measure.

"I like this game," chirps Isabella.

"I bet you do! I am terribly curious what it was like from your end."

"I usually had to try about fifteen things to find a good one. Never would've been able to keep it straight without the eidetic memory."

This is an extremely complicated stare but 'jealous' is definitely among the emotions in it!

Isabella's beaming is extremely uncomplicated!

"All right, congratulations, I will demand a rematch sometime but for the time being I have indoor plumbing to negotiate. Do you want the Valar told about you or not?"

"Hm - I'd like to wait a week to see if the portal's figured out from Earthside in that time. After that I'd rather navigate the Valar than let my brother keep worrying."

"Sounds good. How long is an Earth week?"

"Seven Earth days. So, about three and a half of yours."

"All right. Please do make yourself comfortable."

"Will do. Thank you very much."

And she goes off to her room and eats and contemplates magic.

And it does not get any less bright - if anything, it gets brighter - but eventually the light changes colors from silver to gold. People bring her food. People bring some changes of clothes.

...the clothes here are weird. Do they have anything that isn't swishy, she will trip on things that are swishy.

...she could wear riding clothes all the time but that'd be weird? She could not wear clothes, if she really doesn't like them, but that'd be approximately equally weird?

Well, and humans have a nudity taboo. Weird like rude or just weird, because presumably tripping every ten steps would also be weird, there is a reason she walks with a cane.

Not rude. They can get her riding clothes.

They do that.

And they are thanked politely.

And the next day Maitimë drops by and beams at her and hands her a silver ring and says "these are enchanted for grace, people usually get one if they aspire to go running through the treetops or attempt particularly complicated ice skating routines, it occurred to me that you might like one!!"

"You did mention you're famously good at presents. If it can let me walk around without stumbling that's some impressive magic." On goes the ring.

"It would astonish me if it can't at least do that. I went and bothered some friends about using local magic to try to make psionic effects longer-lasting and they are interested in talking with you, as is my mother, if you have the time. Oh, and I got you a book of magic songs!" She removes it very carefully from her bag; it's thoroughly wrapped, and written by hand. "You won't know our music notation but once you've had the chance to pick it up, magic songs are delightfully fun."

"I have the time. I'm not anything resembling a musician, I imagine that might inhibit my ability to use magic music?"

"I'm not either and I've never had any trouble - you do have to be precise but you needn't be my sister."

"By 'not anything resembling' I mean that even if this were in my own world's musical notation I wouldn't be able to turn it into accurate sounds."

"...might be another species difference? I can sing them through for you if you're interested in checking whether you can pick them up."

"I'm not sure how whether or not I happen to have learned to sightread music would be a species difference?"

"I don't know anyone who can't."

"...do you in fact have to learn it or are you born with innate musical-notation-reading skills."

"No, you have to learn it, but you learn it about the same age as you learn to read, often even sooner..."

"Huh. I suppose if it lets you do magic it'd make sense for it to be a particularly high priority."

"Yes, and also singing's just - it'd be hard to go a week without it."

"Okay, that's also very different. The last time I sang anything was a month and a half ago and it was just 'Happy Birthday'."

"Huh. I spent several hours singing after that game of Governor. It's how Elves - process."

"...are there designated losing-at-Governor songs or something? Hours of them?"

"No. See, I never lose at Governor, haven't had time to come up with any. One sort of - improvises?"

"...huh. Anyway, if you sing me magic songs I will of course memorize them - although most humans can't do that on one listen - but may not reproduce them particularly well."

"Well, I'm happy to try if you're interested."

"Sure. ...Is this book handwritten?"

"...yes? How else would a book be written?"

"Printing press? I did guess you wouldn't have printers like modern Earth has, they require electricity, but you could've had the printing press."

"We don't have the printing press. Should we get on that?"

"Might depend on whether you expect to have enough contact with Earth to skip ahead to electronics. The idea of the printing press is that you have small molds of the mirror images of the shapes of the letters - it will help that you have a short alphabet - and then arrange them in a box and then smear them with ink and then press paper down onto them. It's good for making a lot of copies of a thing."

"Sounds clever, yeah. Well, this book was written by hand so take care with it."

"Will do. I can read it without touching it, even."

"Oooh."

"It does take as long as reading it while touching it - precogging is a little like remembering things that haven't happened, but that spreads out if I want to make multiple decisions within a prediction or if I actually want everything in range and not just an overview or a specific moment - so I usually don't bother, but I also usually don't handle handwritten books, so."

"Well, if you want to touch the book it won't crumble on you, but we do handle books with a lot of care and if we're not borrowing from Earth we will probably try that printing press."

"Glad I could help advance the cause of mass media."

"Books are important!"

"Yup! Although I do recommend getting in on the electronics, because computers are arguably better."

"We are going to be all over the electronics."

"I didn't even tell you what computers do yet."

"You said they're better than books!"

"Yeah, but you have a lot of confidence in my statement for someone who doesn't know how or why!"

"Even if they're merely as exciting as books we will be all over them. Valinor is boring. Alien technology would be exciting regardless of what one could actually do with it."

"Fair enough."

"Song?"

"Song! What kinds of magic do they do?"

"Uh, healing, focus, concentration, mood, weather, balance, crop growth..."

"...how do the focus and concentration and mood ones work exactly?"

"There's a target effect, and if you sing it, you induce the effect, and it goes away a few minutes after the song ends? I can bounce you what it feels like if you'd like."

"That doesn't itself induce the effect?"

"Not unless you're going to have trouble distinguishing being bounced an emotion from actually feeling that emotion. Small children get confused sometimes and you're not supposed to bounce people emotions absent any indication you're doing that, for that reason, but most people don't find it hard to separate out."

"Hm - just to be safe I'll look ahead -" And then: "Okay, seems fine."

"...do you still need me to do it, or -"

"I only looked at one example of the mood one, I'd still like the others."

So she bounces her what various songs feel like.

"Interesting. ...Anyway normally I'd be all over the balance one but somebody gave me a magic ring, so how about healing, that sounds fun."

"Someone gave you a magic ring? How generous." And she starts singing the healing song.

Oh pretty.

You should really hear my sister, she's astonishing.

I might expire of loveliness.

Are we good enough to acquire units of exchange back on Earth?

I think so. There's probably a lot of complicated marketing and so on going on in addition to raw singing talent but I bet it could be made to work.

My sister would take very quickly to marketing herself.

I'm not sure the market would know what to do with somebody who presented as nondynamic, there's that.

That big a deal? She'd probably be happy to pretend to be the one that doesn't involve cutting your hair off, then.

That's strongly culturally mediated - and people manage to come off as doms with long hair or subs with short hair and switches do all sorts of things. But by default long hair in my culture is a sub thing, especially worn down.

So 'switch' is a thing but 'nondynamic' isn't? Do people just - not have sex that isn't about power -

Uh, kinky people do?

...huh.

I mean, kinky relative to Earth, I don't want to impose our culture on you or anything...

I assure you I wasn't feeling imposed upon, I was trying to guess the degree to which people here are likely to have preferences they don't mention in public for social acceptability reasons and the degree to which this is actually some kind of species difference.

It seems unlikely that it's innately exactly the same. For one thing the gender skew is, not overwhelming, but pronounced, and it's not the way around you have it. In humans - who aren't pressuring their teenagers to pretend anything in particular - the division's about sixty-thirty-ten, with the sixty being subs in girls and doms in boys, the ten being switches. Historically there was a lot of pressure to pretend it was universally gender-matched or close to it so switches would round to whichever and other people would outright pretend; that's eroding these days.

Yep, that part wouldn't fit. All human societies are like this?

There's different spins on it but yeah, pretty much, it'd be really weird to find a human society like yours.

Well, we'll have fascinating cultural exchange and everyone can be informed Elves keep their hair long because it'd be horribly painful otherwise, not as a show of - anything in particular.

How would it be painful, exactly?

Elf hair's really, really sensitive. Well, the scalp is. If my hair were cut like yours and anything made contact with it, ever, it'd be fairly debilitating overstimulation.

Huh. Well, people who just like having long hair back home can read dom if they carry themselves right and dress the role. Helps to have the hair up - for the silhouette.

Probably some new styles will come into fashion.

To the extent that Elves want to be legible along this axis you don't even have to humans, sure.

My brother would like it here.

Oh?

He doesn't usually tell people but under the circumstances I don't think he'd mind - there are nondynamic humans, they're just rare. He's one. Presents dom for convenience but vaguely exasperated about it.

Presenting dom is more convenient?

Both in its own right - people sometimes assume subs are helpless or stupid or naive or whatever - and because he's a boy and it fills in some gaps in how he moves and talks and such when people are trying to figure him out.

I hadn't thought about that, that does seem like a drawback to a system where it's all public -

Yeah. Enlightened modern people don't discriminate like that but not everyone's enlightened and modern, you know?

I can imagine.

So Alex pretends he's a dom and people mostly buy it. It helps that he's not interested in dating, that'd make it way more complicated.

Well, if he wants to date an Elf, they won't be confused by that at all. Or is he categorically not interested in dating?

Categorically. Some nondynamic humans do have interest but not him.

I don't know how the Valar will feel about having humans here, we'll have to see. 

I didn't realize that was likely to be its own point of contention.

We can do anything we want in Endorë. But Valinor is perfectly blissful and the Valar are very insistent on it remaining perfectly blissful and I have no reason to rudely assume humans would be worse at that than Elves but - I think things would go very badly if Elves were less prosocially inclined as a society.

Unfortunately I don't know how much of that is humans per se and how much of it is historical accident.

Yes, it seems like most people might be happy and prosocial if they were immortal and so was everyone else and they lived in a paradise.

Yep. Well, except anyone adversely affected by boredom, you did say it was boring here.

People who find it dreadfully so go dinosaur hunting or hang gliding or cliff diving or something. 

I don't like being bored and those aren't the sort of thing that would unbore me.

What's the sort of thing that would unbore you?

At the moment I'm having lots of fun with being on the ground floor of interdimensional contact.

Me too, it's exhilarating. And your world has problems more serious than boredom. I want them solved, of course, but I can't deny being on some level delighted that my choices can actually make a difference for once.

Well, the lack of indoor plumbing could be construed as a problem. Does Endorë not have non-boredom problems?

Endorë has problems that I have no leverage on. I was going to fund people to go there and fix things eventually, but probably in a hundred or two hundred Years.

Why that long? - And how does funding work in a nonmonetary gift economy?

Shipments of food and supplies and necessities? And no leverage because we don't even have boats that can traverse the ocean between the two continents yet, though I've been assuming your world probably does, and the Elves in Endorë are shy and wary of outsiders.

We've got boats that do that, yes. And aircraft.

Oooh, you've got flight? I want to fly.

It's less exciting than it sounds, only mages get to actually fly. Everybody else gets to sit in enclosed pressurized metal tubes with wings breathing recycled air and eating peanuts, and it's remarkably unpleasant for the stunning technological and global-interconnectedness achievement that it is.

That does sound unpleasant. Maybe with a combination of magic systems we can do better.

Sounds great.

What exactly can mages do?

Depends on what they focus on. They can teleport, or just - rise into the air and fly around on their own - or turn into birds, some of 'em - whatever.

I wonder if anything happens to Elves of the same age if they're living in your world, but we really shouldn't check.

Why's that?

Twelve human years is just over one of ours. If a one-year-old got magic -

The danger is controllable if the new eclipsed hasn't eaten in a while. The people who accidentally set everything on fire or mindwipe a million people are the kids who sneak snacks because two days without food is too hard for them, or miscalculate which eclipse is theirs and think they're safe and have dinner. And psions can lock down magic so it can't leak out; and then the eclipsed Elf could get unlocked and go into control training at some later age.

Mindwipe a million people?

New eclipsed aren't weak, just uncontrolled. You'd have to live in a densely populated area and completely ignore the not eating for two days thing to reach a million, but last eclipse I worked precog I caught one of those. Million's an estimate.

That's terrifying. Could most psions do that on purpose, then, any time they wanted -

No. It's not technically impossible to reach back into uncontrolled magic after getting it into control, but it'd be almost like trying to have a seizure on purpose, and very hard to aim or scale up like that. There are pisons who deliberately learn combat psionics but it's its own specialization, most psions don't pick it up.

Nod. ...that's another piece of information likely to panic the Valar.

The existence of combat psions or the risk posed by new unlocked eclipsed?

Either one, more the latter.

Precogs manage everything scaled up. The million-person wipe is the worst I've ever run into, other than that it's fires and traffic accidents and stuff, bad but little.