She reaches into the fridge and comes up with a tomato, then goes into the cupboards and drawers for a cutting board and a knife. She sets them down to one side of her. "Dice that, and I'll get the eggs started."

He cuts the tomato into something resembling cubes, taking a bit longer about it than someone else might have. 

"I still haven't got a good idea what rel'he do with their time. Besides a lot more sex than el'he probably."

"We do magical work. Investigations, permanent lights or heaters, things like my sledge project, cosmetic modifications to others' bodies..."

"Kind of a wide range there. Can magic do cooling?"

"Yeah, that's how the fridge works." She takes some eggs and cheese out from it, opening the door wide so he can see the Hymnos runes on the back. "You have to remember to ke it every so often to keep it cold."

"Gonna be honest, I'm trying to find some kind of idea or product I can usefully... Import. Do ships use, uh, sails? Ooh, how do you copy books?"

"By hand, though you can satura-anske most writing if you know it exists."

"Printing press. Arrange stamps in a frame, then use levers to press them into ink and then into paper repeatedly, make three thousand copies of the same page, then rearrange the stamps and do it again until you have three thousand books' worth of loose-leaf. I'm not sure how bookbinding works but from what I understand it's the easy part."

"Intriguing! I'll have to bring the idea up to Rosalie. In the meantime, frittatta." She cracks an egg into thr pan, steals half of Teddy's tomato bits and mixes them in, and sprinkles shredded cheese overtop. "Let that cook a couple minutes and it should be good."

"I'm glad. There's also radios, which transmit sound over long distances... Could probably make some without too much fuss with Earth books... The rest of the tomato's for yours, I guess?"

"Yeah, you only need half of one. We can do long-distance communication pretty well with the Hymn already, the rel'he'ar is global with sections per town. The shaldea organize that, too. They wear a lot of hats."

"Radios might be different enough to synergize nicely. El'he can't use the message boards directly can they? And you can send music over them."

"- if you can send music over them, I wonder if you can send Hymnos commands. I suspect not, there would be no heartsong involved, but..." She shakes her head. "And yes, radios might be useful for el'he, that's true."

"That could be useful. Might be, like, hackable, though. I'm not an expert on radios specifically. Not an expert on anything really. Uh, I've been wondering, if it's not rude actually - how much older than me you are." He winces a bit.

"I'm thirty-four. Young for a rel'he."

"Yeah, I put that together when you told me about the body commands. It's obviously great that rel'he can live a long time but it's not what I am used to."

"What... Happened to the remote administrators from history?"

"The last one was a thousand years ago. She lived to be five hundred and thirteen. She didn't keep a diary, but you can read her autobiography of the war; it's entitled "The Destroyers And Me." She didn't have any major advances to bring us, and I'm not sure she was from the same world as you, but..."

He shakes his head, shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath.

Five hundred years. It seems... Almost sad. People live longer here. Longer, but not forever. So close to a body that would last forever, and yet-

"But not forever. Even if I could figure out how to give... Everyone that, not forever."

"Not forever. But... How long do people live where you come from?"

"Longer is better! I know. Just... Eighty or so, but a fair amount of range. A hundred is rare. Sixty is... Not that uncommon. Cancer, heart failure..."

"What's cancer? We have heart failure in the very old, but..."

"Cells in the body getting damaged in a way that makes them replicate out of control, and the body's self-defense mechanisms failing to catch it."

"Doesn't happen to us, Heartsongs keep the body in tune with itself. Do you have other diseases like that?"

"Sure. Well, 'cancer' is a big bucket of things that are technically different. Autoimmune issues, allergies, uh, we can do organ transplants and blood transfusions but those risk rejection, hormone balance things... I don't know every incredibly rare disease or syndrome that's ever existed, though. Oh, if we're going by deadliest, there are strokes - blood vessels to the brain get blocked - alzheimer's where the brain sort of... Degenerates, I think. Lung blockage. Diabetes is something about your blood sugar. I'm not a doctor." Also he's a little depressed now.

"We have strokes, mental degeneration in old age, lung blockage, sugar sickness. Sugar sickness isn't treatable here so far as we know, we haven't found the cause to fix it... I don't know what an "autoimmune disorder" is, but we have allergies. We can't do organ transplants or blood transfusions. We're kind of behind you except that Heartsongs make our bodies function more effectively in the first place, sounds like."