Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Oh..." Lin murmured thoughtfully, "But I thought babies that grow slowly only come from the inside of people. Jin didn't come from the inside of Mommy, he came from a painting."

Lin wondered what it was like to have a baby come from inside another, or what it looked like.

Mikhail waved for them to take a seat in the chairs that were on the other side of his desk as he himself sat down.

"I'm a scholar," he replied with a smile. "A historian, if you will, but not nearly so much as Sir Valdemar. I spend my time - or most of it - researching, writing, reading, and translating."

He blotted the page he had been working on, then capped his inkwell and leaned back in his chair. "What about the two of you? What do you do?" he asked curiously, his face lit up with a friendly smile.




"Well," Luthien laughed, "perhaps there are other kinds of races that don't come from inside another person, but who do grow slowly. It takes all kinds to make a world, after all."

She wondered exactly how much Lin knew about natural babies.

So this was one of the people Atalya had suggested to him, Lore though to himself with an equally friendly smile. He watched as Mikhail went through movements once familiar to him, he hadn't had to to blot his paper for so long now.

"I work at a library back home," Lore explained.

In fact doing much of the same thing that Mikhail was doing now.

Mikhail nodded at Lore's reply, blinked at Elnara's, and when Elnara said she had seven children his eyes grew very wide, and he found himself staring.

"Seven?" he repeated in an awe-struck voice. He repeated it again, as if to convince himself that he was hearing the truth. "Seven ..."

Considering he had heard almost nothing of her in over twenty years, this was ... quite a shock.




"So you keep telling me," Earendil chuckled at Lin. "Someday I'm going to try visit you and see if I can't see these races for myself. Either that, or you're going to have to bring them here."

"But you can't bring one of every race back home," Lin replied back.

Since there were so many races she didn't even know all of them, and she didn't really want to bring Shi because he didn't like bipeds and she didn't want him to get into a fight with her friend.

"But I can bring my siblings, but that isn't the same thing, because they're not every race."

Though it was the closest thing to it.

Mikhail relaxed and even chuckled a bit.

"I have to say, you had me worried there for a moment," he laughed. "I'm not exactly sure about the time difference between Arda and Gaia, but I do know that you haven't been gone all that long - in your time. Definitely not long enough to have seven kids, or even just two, biologically."

He tapped a book that lay, closed, at the edge of his desk. "From all the visits we've been receiving from people from Gaia, I've been studying the time difference between the two worlds. You've been gone from here - since you were last here I mean - for nineteen years. However ..."

He slid the book in front of him and opened it, then skimmed a few lines a few pages in.

"As near as I can calculate, mostly from stories from Lin and other visitors - though she's been our most frequent, I admit - you've been gone for less than a single year. Correct?"





Earendil grinned at Lin. "It'd be nice for you to bring your siblings here," he told her, "but I do want to see as many as I can. Someday, I'm sure, Mother will let me visit your world, and then I can see them all for myself!"

Luthien had gone back to her painting by this time, but she was still listening in on the conversation - as evidenced by her soft comment of, "In your dreams."

"Maybe I'll bring Feng and Ryu along," Lin giggled at that.

She hadn't really heard Luthien, if she had she didn't seem to think it would be like that way forever.

"That would be fun wouldn't? Then you could see all sorts of things."

"Forty five, actually," Mikhail nodded seriously. "To tell the truth, I had expected you to look a bit older - even though I know you've probably already stopped aging, and you haven't experienced as much time as we have. Perhaps it was just me, still in my child mentality, seeing you as the bigger ... older sister."

He shook his head slowly. "And yet you're not," he murmured. "You're the same age as Earendil."





Earendil's ears turned red, but he grinned at Lin anyways. "I'd love for you to bring them here," he told her. "Because I really don't think Mother wants me to go to your world."

And really he couldn't blame her, after all there was the time difference - and he was her baby. He always had been. Ruel had been the one to favourite Tinuviel, and Earendil knew his mother had favoured him simply because he had replaced Daeron, after he had been kidnaped. That didn't mean Daeron didn't have a special place in his mother's heart as well: he did; and Earendil was aware that his mother was more protective of his older brother. But because of the reason for it, he didn't mind. He knew he was loved, and that was enough for him.