"The word I learned from you, the concept in relation to - whether our world took adequate precautions about your world's hereditary uncleanliness thing -"

"I used it in a list, how do you know that 'pathogens' means that and 'chemicals' doesn't?"

"Unhelpful or secret."

Frown. "Uh-huh."

"Avalor thinks our precautions are adequate but she is two, if there is a list somewhere of procedures we could be clearer on the whole thing."

"There's not really procedure for finding aliens in a wardrobe. Through a wardrobe. In some blues' house no less. I got woken up in the middle of the night - don't get me wrong I'm honored and thrilled and stuff - to grab all vaguely detecty things in the entire science department and put 'em on and come through."

Shrug. "Fair enough. If we didn't have the Valar I suppose we'd be very confused and concerned also."

"And the Valar are -"

"The designers."

"How many species of intelligences are there here?"

"Five, six, depending how you subdivide them."

"What's the edge case?"

"The Valar have, uh, smaller less powerful cousins that are arguably the same thing."

"...and the other four things are you and..."

"Orcs - I guess you could call those another edge case, they're Elf-derived, Ents, Dwarves."

"Elf-derived?"

" - someone took a lot of Elves and tortured them and bred them with other things and got horrifying monsters."

The visitor is stunned for a moment.

"He got arrested."

"Oh... good." He's assuming death penalty, that would be the natural thing to do.

"It was a Vala - no one else is that good at, uh, I don't have the words, monster-making-through-breeding."

"I'm not sure there's a word for. Monster-making-through-breeding."

"This continent is only Elves, we don't get on with orcs and Ents were a side project of Yavanna - a Vala - and Dwarves are a side project of a different Vala - Aulë -"

"How many continents are there on the planet?"

" - oh, it's not a planet. It's flat. The Valar were experimenting with gravity. And there are three."