"They introduced red contaminants into virtually their entire supply chain. They knew we were relying on their exports to have enough to eat - we have some domestic food production but not enough - and then sold us polluted food and didn't tell us till we'd paid for some of it that it had been mishandled. Even then I'm not sure they were ever planning to warn us; we found out when they had domestic trouble over the same thing, fortunately before the first harvest hit stores. They'd probably love the war ending, although I don't know how the economy will take losing their export revenue... they did export elsewhere but we were the only buyer with enough need that we couldn't meet it otherwise."

"Do you know why they did that?"

"I couldn't begin to guess."

"Are all the countries here in agreement on what kind of contact spreads contamination, what handling procedures are adequate -"

"There are differences but they're minor enough and people are conservative enough that trade's usually unencumbered after initial agreements about it."

"Are they based in scientific phenomena - is there a physical difference between contaminated and uncontaminated things - or is it metaphysical -"

"Well, anyone handling anything will leave behind a few cells and some skin oil and so on, and reds do have both more exposure to disease and toxins than other people and worse hygiene practices, but it's not mostly about that or we'd just be advising everyone to cook the food more thoroughly."

"Yes, I noticed that. Are there procedures to make unclean things clean, or prospects for developing one? If someone is killed and we resurrect them, say, is the new body clean -"

"There are for some things! If someone dies during surgery, say, the surgeon isn't permanently contaminated and they have ways to clean the more expensive equipment. There's a procedure for if someone touches a dead loved one because they aren't sure if they're dead, or if they're overcome with emotion about it. I think a new body would be fine too. And we wouldn't need new robots over and over, robots can be disassembled and washed and and boiled and whatever else, or have disposable airtight covers over them. Reds have a sort of generational uncleanliness because they've been doing the unclean jobs forever."

"So even if they stopped doing the unclean jobs, you wouldn't expect it would fade away over a few generations? Would there be a way to check?"

"There's really not, it's kind of a problem - sort of like how you have to accept that in a sufficiently large handling facility there will be some insects and there will occasionally be a fly egg in a frozen dinner, we have to accept that sometimes something probably happens that isn't noticed by anyone responsible enough to get it walled off and fixed - but we keep it low."

"Thank you. That makes sense. I'm going to go visit the poisoned-food neighbors - it's a rule, to talk to both sides of a war, even in a case like this where there's not any real reason to fear they'll escalate desperately just because there are big shiny ships in the sky - but I'll leave the delegation here, and Uryamirë can get anything you might need from the technology and cultural summaries off the ship."

"Thank you!"

And he teleports a couple hundred miles over, asks the first people he sees in which direction he'll find Voa's capital. 

These confused purple-haired sun-browned people point vaguely thataway.

He repeats the exercise!

Eventually he can find the capital.

He really misses being in summoning range. Now he starts asking after administrative buildings.

You take the 6* train and get off after four stops.

Flat Elves could just ask what it looked like, read their mind a tiny bit, and go there. - he could ask them to pull up a picture for him? He does that.

Sure, a friendly yellow lady will show him a pretty picture of the capital building.

It's not pretty. He teleports on over.

It's a little pretty, although the surroundings aren't helpful.

He walks inside. 

Blue and yellow people bustle to and fro. The receptionist says hello.