"The babies slowly turn into people and lots of people really like watching them do that. Also they are soft and nice to touch."

"Babies are very good. Though I'm told humans don't think so as much as we do."

"Babies are screamy squashy grubs that take several years to ever be more pleasant than not to be in a room with. I'm pretty sure this is just, like, the elf opinion in general, because drow solve this problem with slave labor and surface elves solve it by slowly going extinct."

"Wow that's horrible."

"Your poor children!"

" - might actually explain the near-universal evilness, children in neglectful orphanages all grow up with serious issues."

"No, I don't think so, lots of little drow children are sweethearts and the slaves mostly in fact do their jobs, I think that's the vicious propaganda campaign asserting that Pharasma is really racist because our ancestors got cooties from Rovagug and will condemn us all to the Abyss no matter what we do so we'd better get in good with any demon lord who'll have us and hope that helps when we get there."

"...is that true?"

"Not as true as I was led to believe but I can't rule out it applying to drow who die of anything other than infanticide with data I already have. It just, you know, doesn't matter that much in the grand scheme of things whether Pharasma has that exact drawback."

"I am reasonably confident that's false. It's false for orcs, at least, the other race frequently characterized as always chaotic evil."

"Good to know."

"How did a species that hates babies evolve in the first place without being, like, R-selected bugs or something?"

"Beats me, we're originally from another planet and I don't know much about what it's like there. Maybe we like babies in the right climate or on the right drugs or something."

"How determined are drow to do slavery instead of just paying people to look after their kids and so on?"

"There is a lot of slavery. Even if you don't count drow men it's like half slaves down there. I don't know where the money'd come from to start paying for that much labor if you had to do it suddenly. Maybe a ton of trade with weirdly benevolent and non-racist surfacers if there are those to hand could make it work, I think it's at least a lot cheaper to grow food up here, but I don't know that there are enough weirdly benevolent non-racist surfacers."

"Andoran's making a really spirited try."

"I mean, sure, if you want to call sending people to show up and murder all the drow they see because the drow are getting in the way of taking their slaves 'benevolent and non-racist', they're great at it. I'm not saying I can't see why the strategy appeals but people still die when they do that."

"I'd offer to try ourselves but we don't really grow that much surplus food. - I guess conceivably Cam could terraform the whole desert while he's here? Could you?"

"We are sure putting a ton of projects on my plate for the next five days. If you want it to be sure to stick I'd need a lot of climate data and reasonable confidence that your climate isn't magic or anything, if you want the quick solution of a whole bunch of pioneer species seeded wherever I see sand that's easier but might just not work for some reason I can't precisely anticipate."

"This seems more obviously worth a couple hours than a full day but it'd be really helpful to our ability to do things internationally if it worked."

"When I've done the IUD continuing education thing I will be doing heavy programming shit to integrate the translation software and maybe if I hit a point where I'm stuck I'll go out for a flight and drop seeds, sure. To be clear, I might easily have way more than five days, I just have no way to be sure unless they think to write me a letter." He holds out his hand; it remains empty. "They haven't yet."

"Thank you."

Another person appears.

"Sleep," says a guard.

She doesn't.

"Not my kind," reports Mirelótë.

"Tongues."