"Yeah that'd be the sticking point."

They debate other methods of checking, but fruitlessly.

"Are you sure you have dug below the lowest natural elevation?"

They are sure of that!

"Yeah then I don't have any other ideas besides 'ask somebody who'd know' or, like, 'gate to a vantage point where you could see it' which has sort of a bootstrapping problem."

At least Melian finally learned to read so writing a letter is an option.

"I suppose it's technically possible she would just consider it harmless trivia!"

Did he hear about how Melian got her husband.

"Hasn't come up."

Her husband was King of the Lindar and had slipped away from his guards to meet his boyfriend and instead got lost in the woods and ran into Melian and that was the last anyone heard of him for two hundred years, when he reappeared totally enamored with her and has been her devoted husband ever since.

"They take their editing away homosexuality thing really seriously, huh."

Dwarves are confused. Curufin has to clarify. "They don't have gender," he says, "their telling didn't have gendered pronouns, I added them."

"Oh. The comment stands but now I'm curious about the lack of gender thing!"

Uh, about a third of Dwarves can get pregnant and if that's what you're looking for it's not rude to ask but asking in other contexts would be pretty weird really. They don't really understand what other species get out of having genders and they have no idea what the Valar get out of mindcontrolling people into having gender preferences in dating.

"Eh, it's mostly cosmetic. - Not the Valar's thing, I don't know what their stake is either."

"There are no activities between two men or two women that result in marriage and the Valar disapprove of intimacy outside marriage. It's not a rule here, but of course there aren't many of them, since if the Valar caught it they'd have edited it."

"Do they care in species that don't have soul marriage or has it never come up?"

"Hasn't come up, humans started existing after we left and Dwarves - well, one of the Valar made Dwarves so he at least can be assumed not to care when it comes to Dwarves."

"You have to assume these things? There isn't a formal summary of Things Valar Think Are Their Business And Their Detailed Opinions?"

"There's all kinds of formal writings but the Valar think weirdly, it takes effort to derive their opinions from their explanations."

"Fun."

"I just wish we'd gotten out sooner."

Nod.

"Anyway. Anyone else you want to meet -"

"I... think I have no urgent conversational needs till orcs show up."