"It's not a luxury humans have. We try to" incentivize "ours to wait until they're stable and can support them, but 'wait until the war is over' not so much. At least the Enemy doesn't bother human children."

"Incentivize. Why not?"

"Can't make them swear to things. He tried manipulating humans, earlier, but - well, we were better at it, and that was when he could interact with them directly."

"Eru dropped humans on the world at the start of the war with no knowledge. They had a language, that was it. Enemy found them, taught them stone buildings and scared them with monsters and tried to build a -" community ritual practice around a particular narrative about the deities? - 

"...religion?"

"Religion based around worshipping Melkor. Then he fabricated evidence that the monsters apparently killing -" ostensibly random -"humans at night were some nearby Elves and led them to war against the Elves and so on. Eventually we made contact with them and - Elves are not inherently suited to governing humans but we thought it was important enough to put a lot of effort into picking up and we offered them citizenship and they overwhelmingly went for it and now when new human tribes show up worshipping our enemies we can say 'that sounds nice, we pension human citizens off at 26 and after that you can spend your time however you like'. They don't end up spending it worshipping Melkor."

"Ostensibly random. What unsuitedness do you have?"

"Because of oaths we didn't have law enforcement beyond 'can you swear to tell the truth and clear this up for us, and if appropriate swear to avoid reproducing the circumstances under which you acted wrongly'? We're more cooperative - hard to say how much of that is the Valar's mind control - likewise with being more pro-social - we have much lower rates of mental illness and disability - we had an economy structured on the assumption people'd spend fifty years learning the skills to do their chosen careers -"

"This doesn't take much of your lifespan but it still sounds annoying."

"We derive a lot of satisfaction from deep expertise - anyone who can sew a tapestry can also make the loom and gather and spin the thread and collect the plants for the dyes, anything you do you do in perfect awareness of all the tradeoffs that went into the materials at every stage. Elves don't find it annoying. Perhaps even long-lived humans would."

"I guess I can see the appeal but it seems an onerous requirement."

"If someone made beautiful tapestries in ignorance of the materials we wouldn't decline to display them. In practice Elves with thousands of years of experience are also faster and more able at many of the crafts we prize, but we've gotten better about making sure people with the talent can get instruction suited to their patience."

"Fair enough."

"It has improved significantly over the years, we're happy with it now."

"Cool. Is that why you pension off humans, we're never good enough at anything?"

" - a substantial portion of humans are not good enough at things that they can reliably earn enough money to support themselves and their families by doing those things unless we tamper aggressively with the markets, and if the desiderata is that they all have enough to live on it makes more sense to do that directly. Some of them don't do things. Lots of them do, just less constrained by putting food on the table."

"Cool. What do they do till they're twenty-six?"

"Mostly the army. That's the other justification for pensioning them, it's safe work now but that could change very fast if the siege ends."

"And you only want the younger ones in harm's way or something?"

"We want nobody in harm's way, but once they have kids it's particularly horrible. And we owe them for taking the risk, so generous pension policies."

"In my world lots of people have kids younger than that."

"Army's set up to make it - difficult to pull off - and they're encouraged to wait. We found that older people have much lower rates of child abuse, neglect, medical complications during pregnancy..."

"Huh, okay."

"Mind, I'm not the policy person, you could get more specific answers from them. I've met maybe a dozen humans and only because I showed up to pester them about their languages."