"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."

"...Although your family is significantly prettier than average, and also significantly less foolish...hm...where would you rate Marille and I in terms of prettiness? Maybe there's a relevant correlation we could rub in the faces of people who care about prettiness but not non-foolishness."

"Dunno, my cousins are stunning and stunningly stupid, the lot of them. And the Vanyar are supposed to be the fairest."

"I guess you're just really lucky then."

"Or you're biased. If everyone thinks the princes are the prettiest it's like, maybe their standard for prettiness includes prince-ness somehow."

"I suppose it's possible that some people would have that heuristic."

"Most people, I'd think."

"Yeah. I dunno, my feelings about you being a prince mostly boil down to being grateful it's not making anything awkward."

"I mean, I try pretty hard to project that I'm not an excitingly powerful prince."

"Congratulations, it's working!"

"I have no idea how the rest of them manage it. It seems in bad taste to ask, somehow."