"Your acquaintance with him is the reason you've been giving the names, while you speak?"

"Yes. Was I right?"

"Yes. I was confused who'd have given that advice and not various - other advice which might be inapplicable due to cultural differences or something."

"- hm?"

"The kneeling. You're thinking of it oddly. And possibly something about how people are dressed? - we're not offended, but it was an odd combination with knowing things about me that most people don't know."

"It's... been a long time since anyone I interacted with was particularly choosy about being knelt to. I haven't been paying very much attention to anyone's clothes... probably you're picking up on my trying not to look at people's hair, actually."

"Oh?"

"Please don't worry about it on my account, Dwarves and orcs don't have the same hangups about it either and I'm capable of pattern recognition which indicates my species is the odd one out, but we do not cut it short and we do not wear it loose in front of people we are not married to."

Nod. "That's probably it. If you happen to be stuck here for a while your servants can cover theirs."

"That would be kind of them."

"Is there anything else you will need, if you're staying here a while?"

"I sleep every two or three days, I eat - I don't know whether to expect everything you eat here to be safe for me but I can test little bits to check anything I don't recognize. If some of your guest rooms are not at least as pretty as what I've seen so far I need one of the prettier ones or a decorating budget. Or both."

" - you do," he says, a little wonderingly. "We haven't met peoples who need things to be pretty before."

"I could just go around with my eyes closed constantly singing but I believe this would be inconvenient. I have one of the higher tolerances for ugliness as we go, by which I mean I can spend an entire day in an orc city at a stretch and don't need to make adjustments to my soul that causes the orcs not to look like orcs to do it."

"Most people have to?"

"No, most people in Arda are orcs. Most Quendi need the soul adjustment or smaller doses or wouldn't attempt tourism in orc countries in the first place."

Nod. "Humans don't need things to be pretty in order to survive. Just food, water, ideally interaction with others occasionally, and physical touch when we're very young."

"I've never actually heard of anyone dying of ugliness and I'm sure Melkor has done the experiment but it's distracting and unpleasant."

"Melkor's your imprisoned evil god? He sounds like he'd fit right in in Hell."

"Perhaps he would."

"You must have some questions about how things work here."

"I'm very curious about the magic here, what it can do and how it's learned."

"There are two main kinds. Arcane magic is innate, or learned through study; divine magic is granted by the gods. Abadar empowers the pharaoh with divine magic. It can do - quite a lot of things, it might be easier to get you a book and a spell that'd let you read it. We mostly use ours to speak to Abadar, observe our people, assist our advisors, and raise the dead."

"I'd be delighted about a book. Observing your people takes magic?"

"Well, if I go out into the streets then I mostly see them kneeling. If I use a spell I can just watch them about their business."