"Um, what kind of work is even available around here? You seem to be less technologically advanced than my home country, but I'm not sure how much so, so I don't know what to expect your employment market to be like." She feels a pang of longing for her old job and wonders if anyone around here might know how her dislocation happened.

"Working on the docks, watching and tutoring children, carrying messages, joining the guard, becoming a sailor. Most people work on the docks. Or you can leech off the workers as a wealthy fop, if you have Elven blood."

"How difficult would it be to get a job watching children? Oh, damn, I would probably need to know things specific to this world to get another teaching job.

Hmmm. I wonder if I could just blatantly plagerise all the books I've read, now that I'm in a place where no one has heard of any of my world's best authors. I'm pretty sure that even copyright lawyers don't have dimension-hopping powers. Mind sharing that printing press?"

"Be my guest! Well, we'll both be some sheltered distaff-line Elrosian girl's guest, but within that constraint, be my guest!"

"Thank you.

Who are the Elrosians, and how do you intend to find a person to host you? How common is it to host people while they do things like writing?"

"Elros was the first King of Númenor, and half-Elf - actually, if you believe the histories, a little more than half-Elf, but it's not a bad approximation - and all his descendents are special, they have Elven blood. They only marry each other so as to preserve and not dilute it. It is not common to find housing by seducing naive young women but I'm very good at it and it always works."

"All of his direct descendants? Such that they all share at least half their blood? That is... Not Done in my culture. It's anthropologically fascinating and I shouldn't judge it and there are people in my own world who have done that, but still - ick.

Are all of the rulers of this country descendants of this one person? What's the fertility rate like around here? And should I assume that partial-Elves aren't universally heterosexual, the way full-Elves are?"

"No, no, it started five or six generations in, with Aldarion and Erendis' marriage turning out so disastrously. They're all very very distant cousins. We don't marry siblings. Partial Elves are supposed to be mostly virtuous like Elves, but in practice lots of lonely girls will kiss you if they're bored, and Elrosians as much as anyone else."

"Huh, OK. Distant cousins are less icky. Do you only kiss girls; bored or otherwise?"

"Yes. Do I look like I want to get married and have children? I'm going to die, it'd be terribly unfair."

"Do all relationships between men and women end in marriages and children? Huh. I guess, if printing presses are new, you wouldn't have the contraceptive pill yet..."

"Yes, that's how the Elves do it so that's How It Is, and you can get away with avoiding it for a while but eventually you'll end up with a child. Women are prettier anyway, I have no idea why anyone risks it."

"My people can prevent pregnancy for as long as we want, so it's pretty normal for heterosexual relationships to begin and end with no marriages and no children. However, it used to be the way you describe, and we still consider it taboo to create a child without marrying your partner.

I have never seen the appeal in having a relationship with a man, regardless of pregnancy. In my culture, women who only have relationships with women are considered a distinct group. Is that also true here?"

"Uh, maybe? I sort of break all the rules and mostly only hang out with people who break most of them, and among us, like, most people only sleep with the same gender, it's safer and vaguely transgressive and so forth. Lots of them will settle down and marry eventually. I don't think people think of it as their defining trait."

"Interesting. I'd guess you don't have any clubs specific to homosexuals, if it isn't considered a notable trait. Would it be dangerous for you if it were widely known that you had relationships with women? Because if you write books about it, someone will take a guess..."

"That is among the least dangerous of the things already said about me."

"Oh, OK. So it's a minor transgression. What are the big things that are said about you?"

"Heretic and traitor are the two that carry substantive legal penalties. Uh, I'm a dishonest dangerous-to-know unpredictable loose cannon busybody troublemaker who thinks she's a Vala, that sort of thing, but that they don't arrest you for."

"It's illegal to not believe in the gods? Yikes. As a member of a historically persecuted religious minority, that rankles.

I can guess 'dangerous-to-know unpredictable loose cannon busybody troublemaker' is accurate, you probably don't believe you are a member of a class of beings you consider non-existent, and there is an obviously logical problem with asking you if you're dishonest. If you're so dangerous to know, why would an Elrosian get near you? Actually, a better question is why would law enforcement let you get near an Elrosian?"

"No one knows what you believe, it's illegal to denounce them in an inflammatory manner and any manner is inflammatory in front of the right judge. And it's not like there are constables everywhere, I just find myself in someone's garden eating their fruit and then introduce myself and then if they call the guards I go try a different house. I'm not dishonest, but I'm not like some Elf who'd never lie."

"...Elves never lie? Is this, like, magically enforced? What about partial-Elves?"

"Dunno and no, they're like us and can lie as they please. Stories say Elves don't lie, but the stories say all kinds of nonsense and I have still never met an Elf. Technically I guess I don't even know that they exist."

"Why do you find Elves more plausible than gods?"

"Many more stories, more recent stories, more specific, more plausible, and the Elrosians are very different from us."

"In what ways are they different? Presumably not more suited to rule, as far as you're concerned."