"Not typically but they don't see anything wrong with it. The bar has a rule against nudity so here they do not. If the bar accommodated Elf sensibilities it would similarly have a loose hair rule but I think the Elves are coping."

"So do they wear hats?"

"Braids. One of our alts can do very tidy braids with magic if you want her to do yours to be nice to the Elves."

"What if your hair's too short to braid?"

"Doesn't come up with Elves. I'm told I look disfigured."

"The two of you have an Elf alt. She's very pretty and very old and said she could get used to humans keeping their hair loose but she said it with an interesting expression on her face and your other alt promptly braided my hair for me."

"You're the youngest but Miranda's only fourteen," Cam tells Bella. "Kib looks eighteen but he's much older and I look twenty-two but I'm much older and Mirelótë looks like an Elf, who appear to be vaguely mid-twenties forever, but is super old. You probably shouldn't talk to Kib, he's had very bad things happen to him and is not as easy to understand as alts usually are and you're not the only one he has available."

"How old are you?"

"Coming up on a hundred and eighty."

"I think that might be too old."

"Mirelótë's almost five thousand."

"That's old enough to not even be too old any more."

"Mingling there is seventy."

"...that is too old to name toys that are not of people or 'mon. Or is the toy of an animal? I guess animals could be like 'mon and you could name toys of them."

"The toy is of a car. I don't think cars are animals but I've never seen a real one. Elves grow slow, I'm not grown up yet though I can pretend pretty okay."

"Growing slow sounds sad."

"Why?"

"'Cause you have to be a kid for longer."

"I like being a kid. I can't think of any things I want to do that I can't do because I'm a kid."

"Well, have fun with that."

"Are there things you want to do that you can't do because you're a kid?"

"I'll be able to do stuff more when I'm ten. I don't like having to get my parents' permission to do things. I can get it, but it's annoying."

"I guess I don't like having to reassure people that my parents aren't -" his face screws up in concentration - "negligent? But in Milliways I don't even have to do that."

"Do you have to do that a lot where you live?"

"Kinda. I'm the prince so people have lots of opinions about how to raise me."