Whimper. Elf thing, orcs don't have it but I do. It's better when it's longer.

"Well, I like it."

He moves his chair away from the table so he can scoop her into his lap and kiss her and play with her hair.

The baby is put on the table with a corncob to gnaw and the orf melts under his hands.

What a good orf. The best. So cute and pettable and kissable and, and delightable.

She issssss.

Mmmm. So good. So good so good so good.

Eventually: "Oh, I interrupted you in the middle of breakfast, didn't I." He snuggles his cozy lapful of orf.

A little bit! It's okay.

"Okay." Snuggle. Kiss. "Would you like to go back to eating breakfast, or...?" Explore the castle some more, be whisked off to another guest room and delighted for a while...?

Oooh you could whisk me. Being wind is fun. I don't wanna be more than a room away from the baby though.

Babies are also whiskable! Like so.

He conjures another nest for the baby in the charmingly decorated guest suite they land in, and then he kisses his orf and carries her to bed where he can delight her.

She is so delightable! Especially if he plays with her hair!

He definitely plays with her hair. Her hair is lovely. She is lovely. He kisses her and snuggles her and rains flower petals on her and touches all her art and is continually amazed by how wonderful she is.

It's so nice and she makes it really loudly clear how nice!

Best orf.

And, after much delight, he snuggles her contentedly and thinks about whether he wants to go bother his swans. He does not especially want to do that. But if he leaves it for another week there is some chance the mountain will explode, which he doesn't want either. The whole pain magic arrangement seemed much more convenient before he had an orf.

Why would the mountain explode?

"- oh, it's - sort of how magic works -"

He has this spell he built, and it makes him and his daughter immortal and supports all kinds of other conveniences like the food conjuration spell and the swan spell and the vast rushing stream of leftover power that he can dip into whenever he wants. But it's made out of pain magic, and pain magic tends to get fucked up if you leave it alone, so he needed a way to stabilize it, and the best way he found was to make it stay stable as long as he keeps feeding it more power, which is fine most of the time because torture is a fun hobby anyway. But now he has his orf, and delighting her is his new favourite pastime, and he is going to have to go back to the other thing sooner than he'd like because he's pretty sure she would not be delighted by the kinds of things he does to keep his spell going.

I mean I can take some shit but I dunno about delighting.

Can you use the baby's, she hurts anyhow.

"She does? Why?"

The tone of his initial reaction is more 'what the fuck, can I fix that' than 'oh, that's convenient'. If he can't fix it then he might as well use it, but still, what the fuck.

It's how orcs work. The reason you can make orcs from Elves is that Elves are souls that project themselves onto bodies, and if you torture a kid with two Elf parents all her life the projection gets fucked up, and the next generation is self-torturing and projects being an orc instead. They can think around it fine, she can still be happy and have fun and do things.

"...Well that's fucked up. Sure, I'll see if I can use what she's got."

He scoops up his orf and kisses her and puts her down again and goes over to where they left the baby and tries to pick up her pain -

- and yep, that's a fair amount of pain all right. If it's consistent over time, he could nearly keep the whole mountain going just by hanging out with the baby a lot - if he found a way to hook the baby into the spell directly that didn't mess her up at all and just funneled all the power away before it could go to waste, she could keep the spell stable all by herself and he wouldn't even have to touch it -

"Okay that's pretty amazing, but - are you sure she wouldn't rather grow up not in pain, if I could figure out a way to do that -"

"...that would be nice, yeah, if you could do it."

He goes back to his orf. He snuggles her.

"It's - I'd sure like to be able to just never worry about feeding my spell again, but it seems kinda more important for your kid not to grow up in constant pain?" Hug.

"Thank you."

Snuggle. Kiss.

He wants her to be happy, and yes a lot of that is because watching her be happy is the most amazing thing in the world, but also he just - wants her to be happy. And that means her kid too, and however bad he is at kids he has at least figured out that you don't torture them.

Snuggle!