Dante looks back through the napkins.

"… Bar mentioned that sometimes the establishment withholds doors from people. For often unspecified reasons."

"Exciting. Could someone specify some reasoning that I could argue with so we don't have to save seven billion people by ourselves?"

Silence.

"Okay then," she says, with quiet and understated fury. "If I am the only Elf allowed then I'll damn well be the only Elf necessary."

Gosh.

(Dante is trying to be careful not to let anything leak from his private thoughts.)

"… On the bright side, we maybe do have a chance of saving the seven billion people."

"We should have more than a chance," she mutters, "we should have all of the resources of Arda to save them all, but if we don't get that, then I guess I'll make do. Okay - how does this place work specifically, what information can I get from Bar, is there a good place to sleep besides those chairs over there, and is there a place I can aggressively make beautiful to go sing in when I get stressed...?"

"You can get lots of information from Bar – she can get books from worlds known to her and loan them out so long as they're published, you can buy nonmagical nonweapon nonliving objects for – what was the phrasing – reasonable currency-dependent prices, there are rooms upstairs you can rent out, and there's a backyard with trees and a lake that you, uh, can at least sing in but I'm not sure if it covers 'can aggressively make beautiful'."

"The backyard will do if I don't end up wandering back to my world through it. This is probably a stupid question, but explain currency, please?"

"… There's a big organization at least in the country I'm from called the Bank of England, and they're well-trusted, and people walk around with coins of various shapes, sizes and metal content as well as notes – rectangular pieces of paper – with various quantities of value written on them, and each of those entitles people to a certain amount of I think gold from the Bank of England were they to try to trade them in, so people give them to each other in return for various services or goods to try to incentivize each other to do things."

"... Uh. Okay. Why?"

"Why… do people use currency? Um. I think because just taking stuff would be infeasible – inconvenient, to say the least – and you don't always have exactly the thing that someone else would want in return for something, so settling on a standard… currency… makes trade more convenient?"

"Okay, but - why is trading even necessary, if you're, I don't know, a baker, and you like baking, why don't you just bake however much you'd like to and hand out what you've made to everyone that needs or wants it, instead of demanding they give you something you don't want in exchange? If everyone does that, everyone just. Gets what they need. ... Is this not how it works in your world. This is how it works in my world."

"This is not how it works in my world. In some places it would not work, I don't think, to just bake large quantities of things and give them out – it would result in lost product if there wasn't sufficient demand, and most people would not like to just – bake – their entire lives and then rely on the goodwill of other people, and – there is not really enough of things to go around? I guess maybe that would be different, with different incentives, under a different model."

"Oh. Uh. We have enough things to go around. I live in Valinor, which is a paradise made by the Valar for Elves. That is probably why I am so confused - so this is a, a distribution method? Of limited resources? But then they have to acquire currency all the time by doing things other people want, what if they don't want to do things for a while and want to take a break? Can they then not exchange currency for things they need?"

"If they have currency saved up and then take a break, that works fine, they just – keep it and it might change in value but the stuff they don't spend on rent, or accommodation or travel or food or luxuries while they're on their break, that stuff can still be used after they come back from a break? … Our breaks might be shorter than you're used to, though, people don't tend to have more than a few days off work at a time, unless they're unemployed or in education or retired or something."

".... I think I don't know enough about the factors at play here to really comment on. That. But it sounds like the logistics are less than ideal, and I will probably want to try to fix it once I stop your. Dying randomly problem. Your dying randomly problem takes precedence."

"I think it probably does but it could be tangled in this a bit – part of why I ask about the inoculation is because there are some diseases we can defend against but mostly only using barrier protections, like nets to keep bugs away, and – well, distribution is a problem getting present vaccinations supplied everywhere, but vaccinations might be easier to distribute, longer-lasting, more effective and so on, than other protections."

"I think you keep expecting me to, um, understand all of the things you're talking about, and I only vaguely have a guess at what diseases are, they are bad and can kill you and vaccinations prevent it? But I do not understand the basic details, here, how do diseases commit their murder, are they malevolent? So please back up and explain everything to me like I am an Elf from paradise that has never known strife in my life. Since that's what I am."

"Um." Pause. "They attack, in various ways, the little components that make up our bodies? Some of them they – cannibalize the cells and put them to work making copies of them, I think that's viruses, and I don't remember the details of the others – but they're not so much malevolent entities, they're too small and simple to be described like that, they just… have a goal they are trying to achieve and as a side effect end up doing all sorts of horrible things to us which can result in death."

"That sounds terrible, and it is probably a horrible idea to want to give them little closed off disease sanctuaries to do their thing in peace in, but Eru help me that is absolutely what I thought of first. So they... eat people... but they are very small. Do they. Jump? From one person to another? Like murderous grasshoppers? Where do the vaccines come into play, here?"

"… It's mostly through contact, with infected people spreading it to surfaces or directly to other people, but some of them have particular requirements to transmit – some come in, uh, bodily fluids, as opposed to just on the skin. Vaccines teach the immune system – automated defence system? – what the diseases look like so it can get rid of them – uh, kill them – faster."

She attempts to visualize this. It's hard.

"How small are they, and - how does everyone get an immune system, do they have to buy one?"

"The immune system is natural, comes with the body and gets trained on things as a child – we don't get any feedback from it, not directly, but sometimes we get fevers when fighting off certain diseases? That is, our body temperature rises. In terms of size, they are… uh, literally microscopic, which I think is nanometers but I'm not totally sure – could look it up?"

"... You keep giving me details that are sort of distracting from the new concepts I'm trying to grasp, and while I appreciate knowing all of the details eventually, before I have a grasp of what an immune system is I don't need to know about, um, fevers just yet. Thank you, though, I know this is hard to relate. I'm sorry I'm not getting it all immediately."

"– Right, I should just – try to answer questions as they come up, not preempt." Nod.

Nod. "Thank you. Okay, so - everyone has an immune system that fights very tiny critters to keep the person safe from them. It figures out how to do this during childhood, and vaccines teach it how to handle certain, specific diseases efficiently. Is that all correct?"

"I think so, yes."