"Periodically I feel the need to restate it when I'm reminded of why or given more reasons."

"My mother isn't dead. She just stayed in Valinor. Not much to be done about that."

"Interpersonal problems aren't the kind of thing magic can solve, or even the kind of thing where trying to solve it by magic anyway fails gracefully," she agrees.

"They aren't very responsive to inventiveness either, to my grandfather's perpetual disappointment."

"It probably failed more gracefully than magic would, at least."

"I think it failed much worse, actually."

"So when I say magic wouldn't fail gracefully I mean nobody would do it because it gets you killed, but mind control is technically possible."

"Who needs that when you can incite a whole city into a terrified and desperate mob, get Oaths, and go?"

"That only works if you're dealing with people who can make Oaths. Not everyone can."

"Right, you're mortal. You don't look much like the mortals around here."

"Oh, right, I copied your uncle's eyes."

"That and - healthier. The mortals here tend to all be hungry and have mottled skin and messy hair. It's because they get sick so much but we have no idea how to fix them. I take it magic helps."

"People don't really...get sick, back home. Not and stay that way, I mean. Disease is pretty much the easiest possible thing to heal."

"That's excellent. Here I think it's rather crippling to them. So many of them die as children, it gets worse if they live in cities but we can't protect them if they don't..."

"I know. I've been--fixing that, whenever I go on a 'heal people and teach magic' trip to a human settlement of any sort. But it's so awful."

He nods. "After the war."

"Yeah."

"Are you all right?"

"Sometimes I get in moods over all the things wrong with the world and the fact that I can't fix them yet. This isn't a particularly bad one, as they go."

He grins. "Me too. When that happens, I come here and invent things. I highly recommend it."

"I think in my case that mostly translates to running around doing large amounts of magic, since inventing things is how you get better at fixing the world and doing magic is how I do it, but inventing molecules is in fact pretty great!"

"I'll let you know if an idea comes to mind for inventing any other ones. Something with a higher energy density than coal would be really useful."

"And I'll swing by for prototype generation."

He smiles. "Great. See you around, though probably not too much, I spend most of my time here."

"See you!"