Follow follow.

Dwarves are, it transpires, short and hairy and friendly; they start talking rapidly to Curufin as they approach. He translates over osanwë: they are concerned with market solutions to the tendency of magic to destroy the world. Also they're pleased to meet him, does he have opinions about market solutions to the tendency of his world's magic to destroy the world?

"Uh, it seems like that depends very much on whether we actually have the correct math now of how much destruction individual acts of magic produce, which, we thought we did before and turned out no."

How had they been trying to track it? 

"We knew by looking at volcanoes and some non-empirical guesswork - I don't know the details - how far down the magma was supposed to be. We couldn't distinguish between upper magma and lower magma, though, so after the holes got that deep we were just assuming the same rate held until one went all the way through - no one looked at it during the period of time it must have hit the crust on the far side."

"And the rate had been the same up to that point?"

"Close enough that it could have been genuine variance in how thick the crust was in different places or undocumented uses of magic. Early on in a given disappearance point's use it does not noticeably grow on its own at all - if it's wide enough; there are some ancient narrow ones that weren't used very much, fell out of use, and weren't checked up on, which were discovered to have grown since then once we knew something was up and checked. Wide ones appear to just disappear things on a per-spell basis. We knew it wasn't a renewable resource but we thought we had a lot of it."

They are sympathetic; pricing it right sounds really hard and enforcement even harder. They are curious about his world's technologies and its governments and how gates are used for trade.

His world has the printing press and steam power and steel and clockwork and assembly lines! He knows a lot about gates for trade; he lived in Gatesnest, a sort of distributed city-state. There are horizontal gates to drop things through and vertical ones to walk or ride through, in all sizes - "although they'll get bigger eventually; they're based around disappearance points that are used in a very controlled fashion and then disconnected - but the rate will be tiny."

Dwarves are fascinated and delighted and have followup questions as fast as Curufinwë can translate them. This one wants to know whether there's a universal trade language and how it developed and this one is curious how straightforward immigration affected governments and this one is really excited about steam power.

"Gatetalk isn't universal but it's really common! People who grew up in Gatesnest or spent a lot of time there picked up bits of nine, ten, maybe eleven major languages and creoled them all together. Senserke, the one I'm speaking and am better at, was one of them, so there's some Senserke words in Gatetalk but it's not one of the more dominant contributors. Immigration seems to cause cultures to - speciate more on things that aren't directly relevant to trade? If you want to live in a cosmopolitan hodgepodge you live in Gatesnest itself, or a place like it, there's a few other nesty places; people who don't want that tend to wind up in places with personality or that are at least really inexpensive. More on a city level than a country level. Country politics is probably also affected in some way but I'm not sure how."

Curufin is maybe favoring the Dwarf who wants to ask about the creole of eleven major languages, who now wants to know if he speaks any of them and if he knows which of a dozen different grammatical rules that sometimes supersede other ones in creoles behaved the same way on his planet and what made a language a dominant contributor and so on and on and on. The other Dwarves still get some questions translated: they now want to know how straightforwardly gates are made and whether their making is policed and by who and which city types thrived most. Steam power one has steam power questions.

Cor can speak Gatetalk but doesn't know that much about it except by examining it via his own fluency. He doesn't speak any of the other ten contributors. He knows how to make gates; it involves traveling to both locations. There are rules about making them because having disappearance points in the sorts of places one may want to make gates is hazardous. He knows only vague things about steam power.

Eventually the tide of questions will slow to a sprinkle of questions and the Dwarves will courteously offer to answer any questions he has.

He would like to know things about Dwarves, and how these Dwarves came to be here among these Elves, and what they think of these and other Elves and orcs and Valar and whatnot.

Dwarves live in underground cities and they vary from Elves and humans mostly in having a much wider variety of family structures and a much wider variety of governments and a general suspicion of governments and a fondness for things which can be achieved through trade and a intense dislike of mindreading and mind-altering magic which Dwarves are all thankfully immune to! They came to be here because they run businesses here, mostly shipping businesses, though they're also sort of ambassadors in that they are willing to sell predictions about how things will go over with their governments back home. Elves are all right and the Noldor are better than Doriath, which used to hunt Dwarves for sport. 

Uh. Wow. On the hunting thing. What is there in the way of mind-altering magic?

The Enemy does it to prisoners, supposedly. He doesn't try to take Dwarf prisoners, they only know that secondhand. Songs do it, some artifacts do it (Dwarves can't get the mind-enhancing artifacts either). Oaths can do it. Dwarves think oaths are kind of terrible. 

"They seem like they could get that way, yes. Once I can do magic more freely I can get rid of them for anyone who wants them gone. What kinds of things do mind artifacts and songs do?"

They think all kinds of things but they really aren't the people to ask, being immune.

Fair enough.

Dwarves get along fine with orcs though they're not reliable trade partners because they don't have fixed places to live except Angband. Dwarves disapprove of Angband and of the Enemy, obviously. 

"It seems awkward to hang out with orcs while having this disapproval of their rather enforced supreme leader."

Oh orcs don't like Melkor either because he keeps sending their children off to be pointlessly slaughtered by Elves.

"I guess that would help, assuming they're allowed to talk about that socially."