"I mean, I have it basically solved, I just don't visit much. They live."

"Yeah."

"You manage there."

"Yeah. People being terrible mostly doesn't get--intrusive--on a regular basis, and Marille would be miserable if she had to leave--learning things is really, really valuable to her--and I'd be miserable if I had to leave her in the long term. So I manage."

"What'd you be doing if more of her work was portable?"

"Probably move south and see if I can actually find something I want to spend enough time on to get really good at instead of just okay."

"Makes sense."

"Dunno which part would be nicer. Tirion wouldn't be so bad if only I were good at something."

"Yeah, I felt that way a lot when I was younger."

"I'm glad you found something. Even if it's not a very Tirion-helpful thing."

"It's totally useless. But it's being totally useless with a Vala, gets Tirion off your back a bit."

"It's not totally useless. People do have to eat. Especially people who also hate Tirion and would like to travel with you for a while to get away from it and didn't ride with a Vala."

"I mean, we could eat plants."

"This is better."

"True."

"Also your skillset was presumably highly useful during the revenge cycle and that was excellent."

"Sure, that's a really useful thing to be able to do, get into prank wars with random strangers."

"I'm not a random stranger, my sister's one of your dad's apprentices!"

"That makes her a non-random stranger! I'm probably that degree of acquaintanced with half the city!"

"I'm not random because I fail to be Tirionesquely terrible?"

"Well, now you're not random. But when glittered I had rather little information."

"You had the information that you looked even prettier than usual. But I take your point."

"Yes, true, I knew you had some reasonable aesthetic tastes."

"But that probably doesn't make me non-random," she concedes, "since out of the many things that are wrong with Tirion 'lacks aesthetic value' isn't one of them."

"Stunningly pretty fools, the lot of them."