"You keep pointing this out when I say true things it has no bearing on."

"I feel like it's important that you're not participating in a cooperative spirit here."

"Suggesting delaying resurrections until the mysterious security situation is resolved is markedly Findekáno-esque, congratulations."

"Thank you? I think?"

"I think it's very romantic that I find you in lots of different universes."

"I mean, it would be, if we weren't cousins."

"We seem to always be cousins. Even among the Quendi, for whom it's very rare for a man to be widowed or to take two wives."

"Do you always have six siblings even in societies where that's an unusual number - is that ever an unusual number -"

"In my society that's a very unusual number, is it normal here?"

"Bit low, really, for people who can afford to save all their babies."

" - you're going to run out of space."

"The church encourages people to aim smaller and to not remarry if they already have at least three but there's only so much you can do."

" - you can and really should do a lot more than 'encourage people to aim smaller' - if they're averaging eight your population must be eight times what it was when you were born -"

"Poor people average fewer and some of them starve in bad years but yes, we're growing pretty quickly. I don't want to make laws about it because people won't follow them and then where will they end up."

"They have afterlives that they are sorted into according to behavior in life," she tells Aitim. "This country in particular aims at one that requires everyone to be law-abiding to a degree that seems challenging for the species."

"Okay but you can't just ignore the population thing, we tried that for a long time and we had horrifically bloody wars about it once it reached an unignorable state."

"Once humans invent reliable contraception they prefer right about two, it's very convenient of them. It actually dips below two for a while but then the selection pressure pulls it back up to two before they go extinct. Takes another couple thousand years to pull it up above two much and even then it's not very much nudging to keep it at two."

" - in that case why'd you kill twenty-five billion people?"

"Lost my temper."

"Was there a justification that would've made sense -"

"I mean, none that wouldn't have been very very terrible but I could imagine - being responsible for enforcement of a population treaty which ended up taking a war that ended up killing that many people, if there was an interstellar empire of the kind of person that my world has."

"What was the justification you were thinking of before she explained herself?" he asks Mirelótë.

"No, I was thinking of the time billions of people died and stayed that way in my world, with the reasoning being that Melkor had tortured them all sufficiently expertly and in sufficiently accelerated time that none of the ones we tried as rescue forks wanted to be alive. Every now and then someone tries it, if they think they've just got a really indomitable will to live and their forks would too. And they all stop that in fairly short order."

" - I think your evil god might be more competent than ours or something. Or ours aren't aiming for that."