"Then maybe I shouldn't try to sneak my mother in while you're out of the main bar area somehow."

"- hm?"

"I want to talk with her. I was going to do it while you're not around but actually maybe it'd help."

"Do you mean your actual mother or Maitimo's -?"

"Nerdanel - she's already reembodied, I checked -"

"Then I imagine if she'd had something to say she could have done. I guess she might have been shooed without my noticing or something."

"Would've seemed like you were busy, since you were in fact busy. Also - I get the sense Elves are a bit - hmm -

- it might occur to her in a year and she might take another to get around to it?"

"There is that."

"In some respects I am jealous of my alt but not that one."

"What does he even write?" wonders Cam vaguely.

"Lately entirely treaty negotiation things. Before the war, by volume mostly political stuff that I didn't have enough context to follow - well, straightforward enough to follow on the surface, complicated enough I couldn't guess what the long-term aim was - something like three hundred letters a day thanking people for bringing zoning and permit disputes to his attention and inviting the parties to submit a comment on upcoming laws, I can't imagine he didn't have some goal besides 'be well-known for making civil court disputes vanish to the satisfaction of all parties' -"

"And this is the sort of thing that gives you useful insight?"

"I said by volume. That's - not zero information but he clearly has some cognitive enhancements I'm missing, I couldn't keep track of all those people and I'd drive myself crazy trying to add them all to my mental roster.

There's correspondence with his family, there's carefully veiled correspondence with his boyfriend, there's a plan to modernize Endorë that I can outright crib from in places and also made it very obvious that he's me -"

"Yeah, the chip things they have let them load up all kinds of enhancements, I was very tempted to get one but there's the whole 'become copiable' thing. ...I don't know if it would've made it into writing that he broke up with the boyfriend."

"Their letters since the war have been excruciatingly diplomatic, comparable to my alt's writing to Thingol, so -"

Nod.

"You'd think a society that doesn't even have inheritance to worry about would kind of get over caring so much who people're sleeping with."

"Nope. They're very much about monogamy and enforced-by-dubiously-voluntary-mind-control heterosexuality. Also they can't look at advertisements for shampoo without blushing."

" - shampoo?"

"Elves have, instead of a nudity taboo, an unbraided hair taboo. I didn't notice it right away, nobody commented on my very edgy haircut."

"Oh, that explains some things."

"Oh?"

"I was wondering whether there was a chip thing for not being distracted because at some point my alt would have said 'can you make yourself a shirt you're really hot and I am trying to conduct a war' but I guess he wouldn't have, necessarily."

"I mean, he didn't ask me to add a couple feet of hair and keep it braided, either. He mentioned once I was his type, that was all."

"There could also in fact be a chip thing for not being distracted, seems like the kind of thing you might do in a hypermonogamous society of very pretty prudes."