Less tired smile. "Oh, they're excellent at that."

"Cool. So if you summon a daeva then when you die you get to be a daeva, there's three kinds. I got murdered this one time, it was no fun but here I am."

"They lose a lot as babies but that's something, it'd be easy enough to have everyone summon a daeva tomorrow - bit harder if the Enemy were still loose, but I'm planning to wait until we can take him -"

"Infant mortality plummets with, like, adequate sanitation and medical care and stuff. If you have the same diseases that's straightforward and if you have different ones less so."

"How do we check?"

"Convenient translation effect might do it, name some diseases."

He names some.

"We have those! Malaria's easy, you wipe out the mosquitoes that carry it and it's gone, most everything else you get through vaccination and sanitation. ...Actually the lack of motive for sanitation implies sorta distressing things about what water quality Elves typically enjoy without humans around. Ew."

"And do you have anything for the having children without meaning to in the first place - we've got a solution but it's not really ideal -"

"Yeah, that's technologically doable - what's your stopgap?"

"Service is gender segregated and we're pretty strict about relations between people who aren't ready to have children. The rates are very low but at the cost of considerable trauma to the people who do break the rules."

"...I am less impressed with that. What traumatizing things are going on."

"It's considered horrifying, because it is, and people will be conspicuously appalled at you and if you broke regulations you'll face the consequences of that. We obviously don't make it more unpleasant on purpose."

"Oh, so not more traumatizing than 'being around Elves with an accidental baby', okay. I wonder what all the Elves in the room will do if I remark that I am not remotely clear on whether my parents were trying to have me."

Mirelótë squeaks.

These Elves will definitely flinch!!

"Sorry, irresistible. Anyway, birth control exists in both 'follow simple instructions' form and in 'medical procedure' form, it's a whole spectrum, the good stuff has a statistically negligible failure rate."

"Oh, good. All right. So if the not-terrible Valar are actually not terrible and willing to accept that we don't want to take their word for it and don't want to be anywhere near them...I think that's all we'd need. Or at least most of what we'd need, and then I could put people on song and artifact research for whatever all the other worlds need..."

"They understand the difference between being trustworthy and being in practice trusted, yes."

"Impressive. My set doesn't - that's - part of what I am correcting for here is that lots of people have in fact been forcibly made to trust them -"

"I can confirm that her set can do the thing even in unfamiliar circumstances. On a reasonable conversational timescale. It came up."

" - how's that -"

"We petitioned them for help salvaging an Arda after having ended the war by striking a deal with Melkor to destroy Valinor with all its inhabitants. They sent a letter thanking Cam for coming to them, requesting an audience, and laying out what his rights would be if they thought the circumstances of the destruction of Valinor merited action on their part, and then they talked to him and decided that it didn't. And I don't even think they were leaning on Mirelótë directly - were they -"

"By the time I heard anything about it Cam was back here again. And they hadn't broken the confidentiality."

"They had alternatives for if I didn't want to go to them, too, I could've hid behind Milliways security talking to a representative or insisted on written communication only."