"Right, elves don't have as many."

"Well, not all alive at once, usually."

"Twelve's unusual for humans, too. Not impossible, but unusual with only one wife."

"I had a friend if you can call it that who was third of twenty-three - when I last knew her, might be more by now - and four of them were still alive."

"Gods."

"Very choosy mom. Friend was whip-smart, very charming, and had a bag packed and ready to fuck off to the next country with before her mom got twitchy if she didn't impress all her teachers some year."

"I wasn't very sociable but she made friends with me hoping to convince me to marry her brother. I'm not sure exactly why, she had a lot of answers and most of them weren't funny."

"Looking out for him, maybe?"

"That was probably at least part of it. I didn't wind up actually meeting the guy, I left before she got that far in wearing me down."

"What got you adventuring?"

"Well, I don't want to do the option where I get blackout drunk."

"Do you talk to your family at home, or not so much."

"Not so much."

Nod.

"It's not even that I don't get along with them, I just have, like, so many mixed feelings."

"It sounds like a society in which it's very hard not to gravely wrong your children."

"Sure. And all the people gravely wronging their children were gravely wronged as children etcetera, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"So, lots of mixed feelings."

Nod. "I don't talk to my father anymore but I've turned down anything that'd take me far enough away from home - he'd have drunk himself to death if I didn't keep casting Restoration on him."

"...and you don't talk? You just show up and cast it and leave?"

" - I visit my sister and drop by once he's asleep. I realize this is kind of immature."

"Nah, it makes sense. I think if I were a human I'd have wound up like that but I'm a hundred and twelve and it'd be hard to maintain."

"Yeah, that would be. I keep thinking, you know, he'll probably make Axis, he'll probably be happier there, what am I even doing -"