This is what she signed up for. She makes up imaginary profiles of people on the planets she got to, people who can live longer fuller lives with the stars in reach, one per day. One per day and she'll have loads of estimated impact left unused when she dies. Perfectly reasonable tradeoff and she can still read books.
Someone wants to interview her about Vulcan; they don't want to lose anything that anybody remembers; she gives the interview and then picks up some poetry.
Bella? says a voice from behind her, and it's clearly the voice of a small child, and there's no one present in her cell. Are you Bella? You look exactly like her but we couldn't think - I'm invisible, sorry, I thought there might be monitoring magic or monitoring science or something. I'm rescuing you.
We saw you on the news. My Bella went really pale, because you look like her, and then we looked up everything about you on the science ethernet.
No, I just mean on this plane. We landed near Phoenix, Arizona, because we were looking for something like the climate we'd shifted from, and we were in the south of Valinor which is kind of a desert because the Valar don't look there as often. Bella and Rúmil are both better than me at explaining things.
We can just do another planar shift, at worst, though I'd be really sad to leave this one when I don't even have starships yet or understand how they work or speak all the languages. And you can be invisible like I am, that'd make it hard for them to find you. Or Bella and Rúmil might have a better plan than me, they were working on one.
And he pops back and stops being invisible. One of them will have to do the rest of the planar shifts because he spent the morning doing research on the trees and he is out of mana. "Bella!" he says. "I met the other Bella and she's a nonviolent political prisoner and we're rescuing her and taking her to Davlia and I know you said we needed to think about this a lot first but that felt really time-slidey and anyway we can think about it on Davlia just as well."
"Well, did it seem like she was in a hurry or do we have time to invent a more efficient teleport?"
"Well, her name's not exactly like mine, maybe they're just too different to find searching like that. And not everybody can have copies or whatever she is; if everyone did, there would have been a me in Arda and I feel like someone would have noticed, and there would have to be the same number of people in every plane."
"It's possible that people's copies aren't always politically similar," she points out. "Anyway, I'm not sure who I'd check. Pointy Isabella's mother's name sounds like she might be one of my mother but her father doesn't have a science ethernet record I could find..."
Poor Rúmil. Bella would grocery shop next time but she is slightly afraid there might be a warrant out for her double's rearrest which could catch her. Maybe next time they need food they can be on Davlia and make Pointy Isabella do it. Oh, by the way, Fëanáro went and introduced himself to Pointy Isabella who is apparently a nonviolent political prisoner isn't that nice.
Eventually they have a teleport worked out. Maybe Bella should go get Pointy Isabella out of jail.
Right. Uh, there are alternate planes where the fundamental rules of things in general can be wildly different. I'm from one, Fëanáro and Rúmil are from another. I got to theirs by an accident, and some things happened, and we all decided to find another one we liked better and wound up here and then saw you on the news when you got arrested. And we look just alike except you're greenish and pointy-eared and we have the same name and our mothers have similar names and we were going to be more circumspect about this but Fëanáro went ahead and visited you anyway, so. I can teleport you to Davlia and finish explaining there?
They've arrived already. Fëanáro is even younger than she's have imagined him from hearing his voice, if he were human he wouldn't be older than five. He's holding the hand of a very pretty man who has pointy ears himself but obviously is not a Vulcan. They both have long hair in elaborate braids and Fëanáro leaps thirty feet in the air at the sight of her. "Pointy Bella! Welcome to Davlia!"
"Materia's what I decided to name my plane now that there's more than two to factor in. The plane itself only metaphorically eats people but some things on it literally eat people and the plane in general is very dangerous and inimical to the practice of science."
"You have all kinds of people, and so does Materia, but Arda only has the Quendi, that's us. And it used to be very dangerous but then the Valar invited us to Valinor. Valinor is safe and beautiful and inventing all kinds of things but the Valar are scared and sometimes do stupid things and they exiled Bella so we had to fetch her and then run. My parents are going to miss me so we're trying to figure out how to message them and tell them I'm safe. And it takes forever to grow up, there. I'm a hundred and twenty years old."
"There's a lot of variance in technology and innate power, so whether there are gods here depends on what your exact definition is, but one can generally do whatever one likes without expecting anything like divine intervention. I was arrested by purely mortal authority. Who, I should mention, are mostly very good at being mortal authority, or I wouldn't be so keen to prompt prewarp civilizations to meet their entrance criteria."
"A few weeks, but Fëanáro's the only one who soaks up languages like a sponge and it took a while to figure out how to use the science ethernet, which unlike talking to people doesn't respond to subtle arts. People have been thinking I'm something called a Betazoid."
"My world doesn't allow science - experimenting systematically on things best case scenario gets the rules changed on you and more than likely gets you killed or worse if you don't stop. But we have fantasy stories about science working and how nice that would be, so I've been calling planes where science works 'science fantasy'."
"I mean, you can probably program a computer to autotranslate to readable quality, if you can get the text in digital form and give it enough of a corpus and starting correspondences to chew on the languages for a while, but I have no idea of the compatibility issues with crystal balls..."
"...Greek. It means 'forethought', but I named the ship that because there's a mythological figure called Prometheus who was said to have stolen fire from equally mythological gods and granted it to humans. And then the gods were irritated with him and chained him to a rock and had his liver eaten once daily by a bird, which is a lot worse than Federation political prison."
"...no, you know what, I think getting sent to Materia is actually a clear win over being chained to a rock and having my liver eaten every day, Materia might well have killed me but I'd have had decent odds of it being quick and instead all that happened was I got my degree and my license and saw some patients."
"Well, I played my time there very conservatively because I didn't trust the Valar to have actually safeguarded me against all the hazards. Didn't cast spells in case all my arcana was too science-infested, or tickle sleeping dragons, or do science experiments. It makes a difference in the extent to which he was or was not torturing me that I thought I was in constant danger, even if I wasn't literally chained to a rock."
"It's about fifty-fifty on planets that have a standard planetary language by the time they hit warp level tech," says T'Mir, "but they're almost guaranteed to have speaking populations of others who just learn the standard for wider interactions. I don't remember off the top of my head how much my computer had to chew on before I could make forum posts with this planet in particular but the Prometheus would have the notes. Or we can, I suppose, just rely on psi and a small language sponge."
"The effect is really sort of soothing if you're not concerned about using your time efficiently," Bella says, "and I guess they wanted people's childhoods to match everyone's sense of how much time was passing, although Eldar take a really long time to reach adulthood anyway."
"Let's at least talk to the Davlians first. They're well positioned astrographically to be the middle of a non-Federation power with enough elbow room and depending on the reception we get they might be a good choice for a culture to introduce refugee immigrants to Warp."
It is bustling with antelopey people. The antelopey people are surprised to see non-antelopey people but are quite friendly when addressed. T'Mir warns her companions that they're oriented around a culture of anonymous accomplishment and it can accordingly be a little hard to find people who are experts in particular things without going through the pseudonymous "science ethernet" of the society.
And eventually Bella has located them a family of Davlians who are very curious about them and the mom of whom definitely does not admit to being significant political shaker in Federation-related shenanigans. The small children will happily jabber at Fëanáro and think it's cool that he can tell what they mean without knowing Davlian yet.
And it turns out Davlian architecture can do exactly that and here is an apartment in a building that looks very spiffy and has a sort of brook running constantly in a groove in some of the walls in lieu of more conventional plumbing and the beds dipped under and flush with the floor. Four bedrooms.
The Davlian family will come up and show them the place and show them where to get food! They have the correct orientation of proteins and a Federation ambassador's attaché back when Davlia was still considering joining up cleared all the staples on a tox screen for both of T'Mir's parent species - which means Bella's safe which probably means the Quendi are safe too. Whether they'll like it is another matter. Here, have a bowl of priv.
"Not exactly, they can always reverse-engineer stuff and invent things the way we do, but it's probably a good idea to stay ahead of them until we're reasonably confident they're not going to obstruct anything important. We should try to learn that early anyway so people don't have to abandon multiple planets in quick succession evacuating for nicer planes."
"Oaths are unbreakable and not in a, a friendly narrativey way where you turn out to have accidentally fulfilled them even if you were trying to do something else, or in some neutral cosmological force way, it's more like compulsion plus intolerable psychological consequences for digging in your heels -"
"Those who have been under the correction of Mandos will not speak of it, and indeed, being healed, remember little of it; for they have returned to their natural courses, and the unnatural and perverted is no longer in the continuity of their lives." He says this steadily, as if speaking from memory.
"I first noticed there was a problem when I heard the reembodied were coming back with fuzzy memories - not even just of being dead, but of things before that. I could clear off the fuzz, but that wasn't quite - everything. Sooooo I gave a really passive aggressive lecture."
Bella nods. "Their priority should be your thriving, and that involves not being in Valinor, it's pretty clear, but that doesn't mean they'll just shrug and figure as long as they can have more kids they're all set. It would be good if we could work something out with the Valar to allow visits."
"It won't work the same way anymore. The Federation caught me and now they've got a procedure to check for 'tampering' and delay or refuse membership for societies that didn't invent or acquire warp on their own and impose trade sanctions; having warp would still be better for some of these places than not having it but it's no longer a ticket to a seat at the galactic table and Federation post-scarcity plenty. There's also a sweet spot of high tech enough to make use of warp equations and not about to invent them next year anyway and I was actually having a harder time finding any that met the criteria by the time I got arrested."
They do. Project list is the evacuation of Materia and possibly partial evacuation of Valinor, figuring out how to create a model planet that causes the Federation trouble, teaching pre-warp societies arcane healing, and so forth. Experiment list is mostly interactions of magic with the species of this world.
Bella, with the most applicable psi, goes out and comes back with priv - "I think they also use money but we're on some kind of credit for reasons? I don't fully understand it -" in case they manage to burn all their Earth groceries. And she gets to teaching T'Mir introductory magic.
"This might actually be the same question as whether illusion sound of magical music would work but I don't know if anybody got around to testing that, I never invented a longer-duration spell than that and you need a lot of practice to push the cantrip version long enough..."
"I'll see if I can etherscape well enough yet to do without reams of paper."
And she shows him Vulcan script.
Well, English has pretty words and people make pretty sentences of them, but it actually has several words that are widely considered unpleasant to hear, like 'moist'. People complain about it but no one has the ability to decide by fiat that it's not what people say anymore. If someone tried to replace 'moist', it would just wind up with different use cases and connotations, like 'damp', and then there would be another word but the one people don't like would still be there because it would sometimes be the most precise word for something being described by someone who didn't avoid saying it.
There are Earth languages that police or used to police what words could officially belong to them. English proved more adaptable even though it's got awful grammar and irregular spelling and a gigantic vocabulary and sounds some people can't pronounce: it is annoying to learn but once you have learned it it will do its level best to be the most useful language for any situation.
"When we came up with the necklace it was shielding us against an effect that Valinor was having; this would be different, trying to accelerate us as an effect of its own. Also at some point you'd run into problems where you couldn't move fast enough to keep up with your brain if you wanted to do anything other than sit and think, so it seems like a good idea to focus on ways to be more efficient that don't have that problem first and then resort to that later if we really need it. T'Mir, ballpark how many languages are there in the galaxy here?"
"...and I think you'd run into a problem if you decided you had to learn them all this week and the best way to do it was going faster. You might be able to invent a magic thing that helps with languages in particular? There's translation magic in Materia, you could try to come up with a kind that teaches instead of just translating."
"They take the Prime Directive very seriously and will definitely want me in custody. I am almost positive they won't attack Davlia over it. Taking my ship back is only illegal as a direct result of my not being allowed to go places because I'm supposed to be in jail; they don't claim ownership of it per se. So they'd take the opportunity to perform a rearrest if possible but it wouldn't compound the crime of jailbreak. Or is that not what you mean?"
"They won't have any idea how I got out and will probably suspect someone in orbit of the moon of having transportered me with a cloaking device or something on the ship to explain why they didn't see it. Taking Prometheus will be more obviously not a stealth transport, especially if there are people aboard to shoo. You three aren't Federation citizens and belong to what is technically a prewarp civilization to which they are unable to practically return you unless you choose to go; that really ties their hands as long as they're obeying the Prime Directive. Visiting a prison moon without leave is technically illegal, probably, but Fëanáro's a minor and he didn't actually break me out so he'd not get more than a warning even if he were their jurisdiction; Bella's probably guilty of a territory violation for unharmonious purposes or something euphemistic like that. You I don't think they could nail on any charges at all except maybe conspiracy and that would be very hard to cause to stick to a non-Federation citizen who is not occupying Federation space. If you go commit crimes on Federation soil or station - of which taking my ship for me with my permission isn't one as far as I know, I'm not illegal to associate with or run errands for or anything - then they can certainly stun you and lock you up while they figure out what to do with you, with Fëanáro much more likely to get away sans arrest with any nonviolent crime than an adult."
"It would not be particularly difficult for them to declare you effectively postwarp once they know you can do interstellar teleportation, but it'd give you a head start. And then they'd still be trying to arrange diplomatic contact and treaties rather than enforcing their laws on us."
"...I don't think I've aged since the Valar booted me and they weren't being sufficiently blatantly malicious to actually strip me of the anti aging protection, so I'm probably good for a thousand years, but it hasn't been long enough that it would be really obvious if I just happened to be one of those people with a young face..."
"...anyway, any of those words would indicate that we wouldn't fight with people who belonged to the whatever with us," says T'Mir, "and none of them strongly suggest that we wouldn't fight with other people, I'm not aware of a noun in English that does that, we'd have to start prepending adjectives."
"I don't think the Federation are going to just call it 'that thing Davlia and Isabella T'Mir and her alternate universe double and the Quendi are running', so I'd like to have a name to present to them before they decide to call us the Counter-Federation or something like that."
"Monetary economies are useful for a lot of allocation problems if you have a large population. I like the Federation model, really - I like almost everything about the Federation except how unwilling they are to let more things be the Federation. And their genetic engineering policy."
"...your home worlds probably don't have genetics to begin with. Uh, the reason cats have kittens and not puppies, and people look like their parents, and so on, is because of descriptions of how to build their structures encoded into every part of the body. The instructions get shuffled around when people have children but it's still half from each parent, in two-parent situations. Genetic engineering is the science of shuffling the instructions around, or editing them, on purpose instead of by luck of the draw, traditionally to make children turn out stronger or smarter or prettier or healthier or all of the above. Genetically engineered people are called 'augments'. There was a war some augments started, and now there's so much bad feeling about genetically engineered people that no one is allowed to have it done or seriously study it."
"The Federation is a republic, and so are most of its member states, republics or democracies with various structural customizations - it's possible to qualify for membership without average citizens voting being the central feature of your government but it requires special circumstances. Ferenginar is I think a plutocracy. The Klingons are an empire, ostensibly, but haven't had an actual emperor for a while. Cardassia's run by its military. There are planets that organize themselves theocratically or are governed by a noble class without centralization or implement various buggy attempts at meritocracy or technocracy."
"The basic idea of a democracy is that you vote on things - there are various ways to register and count up votes, but the simplest to explain is that the most popular idea wins. The basic idea of a republic is that the main or even only idea you vote on is who should, as their job, decide about all the other things. If we were going to be a monarchy I am not sure it is obvious which of us would be the monarch, which seems awkward."
"Davlia's a sort of pseudonymous democracy," says T'Mir. "So there's their example to point to. I suppose the question is partly to what extent we're discussing the governance of our own member world and to what extent we're discussing the organization of the entire Elendil."
"Depends on how much terraforming we want to do. If we just need an uninhabited rock with an atmosphere and no anomalous ambient effects, a couple days, tops. If we want one with a pleasant climate and a nice continent/ocean ratio and edible plants and it has to be pretty, potentially much longer. There might be something appropriate I've already surveyed, if you want me to look through my history?"
So she rummages through her history and finds some options! This one is a moon around a gas giant. The gas giant's pretty nice to look at. The moon would be comfortable unterraformed but doesn't have edible plant life outside the oceans, which at least means imports wouldn't have a lot of competition. It's not convenient to Davlia, it'd be several days at high warp, and it's not near anything else either. This one is full of organic life, which has a certain aesthetic to it but does present a potential hazard. It's got rings and it's near Davlia but also a little close to the Romulans, by and large not super friendly. This one is downright Earthlike except for very low gravity; maybe they could fix that with magic so their bones don't dissolve. It's been flagged for possible Federation colonization, but they haven't established a base camp yet so they could take it and be only provocative, not warlike.
"That we're grateful for their aid and a place to live, that we are establishing a new neighbor of theirs as a first step in the creation of an alternative to the Federation, and that we'll visit regularly and more regularly once the evacuation of the people in current danger is complete?" Rúmil offers.
"Billions but not everybody is likely to want to go, especially not if they'd have to join the sort of place we'd design and make according cultural compromises. For instance, I assume killing and eating people will be illegal. I'm nervous about establishing communication - I'm not sure it'd be dangerous for them to receive it and it seems firmly established that my universe can't or doesn't reach outside itself and 'nearby' planes. We might have to be vague about the advantages of the Elendil. But figuring out a way to ask is better than just kidnapping people en masse."
"Killing and eating people will definitely be illegal," Fëanáro says firmly. "We can just tell them that there's always enough food and that it's safe for everyone and that you don't have to work and can work on anything you want and nothing will hurt you, we don't have to explain starships or genetic engineering."
"Who should be called first and by whom?" Bella asks, once that's done.
"Oh, Fëanáro," she says. "I did. Are you okay? Are all of you okay? We're petitioning to get Bella let back into Valinor-"
"No," he says, "this world is nicer anyway, it has another Bella and it has starships and we're getting a planet and saving everyone in Materia and founding an alliance and there are billions of languages."
"And no danger?"
"Nope."
"...can I talk to Rúmil about that? Not right now, maybe later?"
"Yeah. He's here. We're in a starship. I'm sorry for scaring you but I had to get Bella."
"I know you felt that way. We love you. We just want you to stay alive."
"Well. I'm alive."
"Fëanáro, please come home. Just to visit, if you really like your world better. Come home and tell us about it and we'll talk."
"The Valar might not let me leave."
"Then you could build starships here."
"I don't want to come home until I'm grownup."
"And we don't want to miss you until then."
"I - I don't want to go anywhere the Valar can decide to move me when I don't want to be moved, again," Bella says. "Even if they say that I can stay this time. I don't even know if I'm still alive because they managed to protect me or because I didn't provoke my universe on its own turf. I'd probably stay here with my copy even if Fëanáro and Rúmil decided to go back to Valinor. My copy is really cool."
Davlia has some trade tentatively starting up with the Federation. They haven't had to explain that they have the missing prisoner and her magically vanishing ship. A few trivial enchantments on some things for useful Davlian purposes and they'll be delighted to solicit seeds for favorite crops.
Hoofed people are actually not that common on Materia, and evacuating satyrs would be... complicated. ...Several species on Materia are going to come with really weird sexual norms compared to what Quendi have going. Like REALLY. Like if they started by importing nymphs and satyrs with population: Bellas, Quendi, and Davlian architects, um, the nymphs and satyrs would, um, starve.
.........reasons. She has never had to explain this before. Um. They should make sure to have Materian humans around before importing nymphs or satyrs. On the plus side if they get domestic nymphs and can bring their fields too those crops don't need... conventional... maintenance?
"Nymphs and satyrs are sort of literally powered by sex, they don't actually have to eat although they do it anyway, they just have to - have lots of sex. Which is why we need a population of other kinds of people around because I'm pretty sure it doesn't count nutritionally amongst themselves."
"I have just never had to explain this before! It's common knowledge on Materia, I don't even remember how I learned it, and it never came up in Valinor." Sigh. "As far as forcing people goes I'd worry more about elves, who don't need it as food but have a cultural - thing - that doesn't work that well in contact with anybody else with different needs and is kind of unpleasant even amongst themselves. This is surface elves, I'm less sure about subterranean ones."
"If the event would force a soul bond, and is unwanted, you die. The parameters on both 'would force a soul bond' and 'is sufficiently unwanted' are unclear to me - it might just be that you can die if you prefer that to being soul bonded, might be involuntary - and there are things I would prosecute as unlawful that result in a soul bond but don't count as unwilling enough to kill you."
"Oh, yeah, they vary plenty - and most of my exposure was to college-age elves, they seem to mellow out a lot after they hit their hundredth birthdays, there's a thing where stuff they do before that doesn't 'count' as far as other elves are concerned anyway. I think that's purely cultural and some of them start acting like serious adults when they're in their twenties same as humans."
"Probably not. And noble dragons keep their promises - I don't think they metaphysically have to like with Quendi oaths, but they just in fact do - so I might let one of those in if it promised to be law-abiding and I thought we had the right law set for sure. Dragons are just the kind of thing that may eat you in proxy of the universe if you fuck up, and I'm not totally easy about - letting them out?"
"Depends how we pick them. My parents aren't. Their friends... aren't, but might surpass us in some specialty, since we haven't been doing combat magic and I'm not a very offensively powerful subtle artist. A lot of people if we insist they leave their magic items behind won't be anything special but would have threatening magic items."
"Eerily similar personalities down to how we format our thoughts when we're working on problems and the notetaking habit. She's basically me with different starting conditions, and not all that different, similar parents except her dad was a Vulcan and they're apparently kinda odd."
"I mean, if they'd only banished me to the Outer Lands we still could have communicated. I could have said 'I am okay, you do not have to steal any boats, especially not by means of swords'. And I make sure I call him on it whenever he guesses something silly about what I'd say in some situation, so maybe eventually he'll have a model of me he can consult even if I'm not around..."
"Well, most people won't just be ordered around, you have to convince them that whatever you're doing is worth their attention, and some people are much more convincible than others but also some attitudes of mine made it easier for me to make the value of my work apparent, and less impatient, and better able to ask help when I needed it even when my needs were less obvious."
"They fought and stopped Melkor; no one else could have done that. They created the world and might actually be necessary to it, I'm not sure. And even beyond that - no one has died in Valinor," Rúmil says, "no one goes hungry or wanting for anything at all, everyone can study anything that interests them and usually find a Vala or Maia who will help with the research insofar as they're able - and on some tasks, they're tremendously able. Even with the slow pacing we are growing in leaps and bounds as a people. When they err they err very badly. But I don't think even Bella wishes she'd been summoned to a Noldo tribe besieged by monsters in the Outer Lands, where death was permanent..."
"...power levels in Materia are prrrrretty much calibrated by how good you are at killing things, maybe if you have a soft specialty how much money you make. It's hard to evaluate us on either scale. If we go by something like mana capacity we're, maybe tenth or fifteenth percentile among people you can call wizards, now, but that underestimates us because we've got better-customized spells."
It takes a little finagling to get the computer to accept earpiece calls, and it's slightly awkward to call T'Mir's mom and explain what's going on and ask her to buy Federation-computer-compatible music players for someone to go pick up (Davlians are working on getting system compatibility between their computers and Federation standard, but it's complicated work), but presently they have a device singing in every field.
Everyone is proud of it. It really is beautiful. It has a not-exactly-a-palace central administrative building which is a glorious mishmash of everyone's favored architectural styles that somehow comes out quite well. Fëanáro developed a variant grease spell that lets him go wildly skidding around the floor.
The Valar want all Ilúvatar's children - which is currently the same thing as 'all Quendi' to be safe and wish they'd stick to places where they can definitely find their way to Mandos but agree that this could not wisely be enforced. There's still a city in the works in the Outer Lands. There might be visitors to this planet but probably no one would stay.
"...Uh, Ranae thinks there is a decent chance she is possessed or something and a demon or something is imitating my voice but agrees that a demon probably wouldn't be able to summon her to a place like what I described and says I may do it after she's had a few hours to write letters and pack."
"Not exactly, I'm just not sure what it'll be like having them here. They're - comfortable with being small, they brought me up to be small for good reasons, and here I am founding an Elendil and sciencing wizardry... T'Mir's going to be very weird for them..."
"There's arguments for Pax and English and Davlian and Quenya. Not all humans in Materia speak Pax, not even a majority, although that's most of what we'll get if we start with my parents and go by word of mouth. English makes us an easier refuge for genetic engineers and other people who want to leave the Federation, which interests T'Mir. Davlian because by the numbers they're the most populous founding members of the Elendil. Quenya because we're sort of modeling it off Valinor Only Better."
The twin bottlenecks are finding approvable immigrants, and qualified summoners and their mana. It's very slow.
The Federation is beginning to take more notice of their behavior. They would like to establish communications and consider trade opportunities. They have sent a Starfleet vessel about it. May they come down?
Well, do they promise not to arrest T'Mir?
They do promise not to arrest T'Mir.
So here's an away team in primary-colored Starfleet uniforms.
Fëanáro is happily explaining Quenya and Pax and Davlian and everything else he's been trying to pick up since his home world made contact with Davlia - he knows not to say 'since I developed planar shifting' - and no not all Quendi pick up languages as fast as him but most of them are pretty fast at it, they have excellent memories. He's nearly a hundred and twenty one Earth years but yes, by the standards of his people he's a kid.
(T'Mir volunteers that she's got a below-average but still similar to a full Vulcan dose of her own variety.)
"The gods might send you home," he says. "They can be awful and mean; that's why we left. And they might change things so it's harder for other people to leave which would be bad. But I feel like if all that weren't true and you could just go walk through Tirion and then meet them, they'd be delighted, and it'd be lovely."
"Warp doesn't have gods," T'Mir reminds him. "It probably sounded to him like there's a powerful species oppressing some Quendi somewhere and it won't be at all obvious that they're doing it with godlike power instead of by tricking you into thinking they have it."
"Apparently my having departed the Federation for a viable alternative instead of just generically fleeing - and the fact that they know now that they want to look for evidence that warp equations were planted in a society - mean they're no longer interested in rearresting me. New Vulcan wanted to invite me to some kind of ceremony about it. I may go."
"Betazoids are less prone to using sensory modalities the way you often send mental images by psi. Ferengi and similar species are immune to their - or Vulcan - psi, and may or may not block osanwë. There's not a known way for a non-psionic, non-immune person to block a Betazoid from their current thoughts, whether they're meant to be private or not; the defense for those people if they require one is to think about things they don't mind being read. I think those are the major differences."
"...Vulcan used to be a very violent planet, and then everyone started doing the kind of meditation that lets them suppress emotions and it became very peaceful. I usually prefer to have my emotions, but they're usually pretty nice; it's preferable to have the off switch. I'll walk you through a book on it to start and we'll see where you can get with it."
"Resurrection?" he says.
"So there are enough Vulcans and they don't do that. And because they might die if they don't get married."
"I see. Yes, let's work on that."
"Normally, Vulcans are betrothed as children so there's no last-minute scrambling, the elder of the pair reaches the relevant age, they can sync up their cycles via telepathic contact during sex which leaves an enduring psychic bond that is considered equivalent to marriage, and then they make sure to be convenient to one another every seven years. There are ways to shuffle partners around, if the match is disagreeable to the principals - my father and mother were not engaged as children; his intended had to find someone else.
"I was not betrothed as a child either - my mother thought it would be barbaric - but even if I had been, when Vulcan was destroyed many people were left widowed or without their affianced. The Council is acting in loco parentis to pair us off. It's possible that they are typically announcing this to people beforehand but I did not make myself available to them in a - lucid state - and was thus surprised. I can only assume they knew my schedule because I provided it as medical information to my mother in case it was ever relevant and I couldn't disclose it."
"Yes, each time, but marriage isn't the only alternative because the telepathic contact part is optional. They'd found someone on almost my schedule, delayed my intended departure to pursue alternate treatment, and expected that would be that, but I managed to call Bella. Who then had to duel my affianced as though competing for my hand, because otherwise he would have died, but fighting is an acceptable substitute on a biological level - if seldom orchestrated to leave both parties alive in the state of nature. She put up enough of a fight to calm him down, knocked him out, and hauled me to my destination."
"No, that's exactly the sort of thing I'm considering. I don't want to make an enemy of the Federation or its members, but a carefully moderated statement - perhaps a series of them, this and genetic engineering and the Prime Directive, say, so it doesn't look like I'm taking my original grievances beyond the bounds of appropriateness - could coax its approach closer to ours, or lure worlds into the Elendil."
"It depends on why they leave. Voluntary exit by a qualifying member, no, they just downgrade membership into alliance. If they flagrantly violate a membership requirement - if they institute a caste system or practice slavery or commit war crimes or something, and they don't accept the appropriate penalties and inspections and top-level restructuring - then it'd be less friendly."
"Vulcan mores are about what is logical, in contrast to what is driven by instinct or emotion. Obviously, this approach is very susceptible to different opinions about what tradeoffs are appropriate to seek what goals, but I have a case to make, even if there will be a faction of the opinion that the continuation of the species and acknowledgment of Council authority should supersede what are after all merely my feelings about whether I should be married to a complete stranger. My argument will probably have to be mostly that the Federation would not admit a species that made a habit of this practice and Vulcan's founding membership should not logically grant it special status, and they must stop or exit; they'll choose the former if it does come to that."
"It seems also that not informing someone in advance, as a policy, only makes sense if you expect that they wouldn't give informed consent, and that the only marriages that would be undermined by changing their approach are marriages that the parties would not have so given their consent for, and that the parties being Vulcans might have logical reasons for declining which the council denies itself any chance to become informed of."
"There are very few Vulcans left, and meditating through a cycle is widely considered illogical and most will have already had opportunities to remarry or re-betroth as appropriate, and even if there are a dozen like me they will be spaced out at irregular intervals over a seven-year span. I do not think this is likely to be urgent to the point where it must be handled clumsily in order to get results sooner."
So she goes off and does that. The one about the prime directive is first, but the one about her attempted forcible marriage is second, once she's gauged response. (The first is delivered in standard emotional range. The latter she decides to show off her ability to drop in and out of suppression very fast.)
Well, the genetic engineer is probably not a Federation spy, although it's possible he traded his way out of prison by agreeing to turn spy for them - not a characteristic tactic but not that unlikely. They can do background checks - they can do this really thoroughly with science-ethernet-connected crystal balls - and they can invite people to be mindread before they are offered access to anything sensitive?
Well, she doesn't want to let spies in and they might really try to come in but she also doesn't want to abuse mindreading, and besides, if they want a large population they can't realistically run all of them past Bella, who is the only person who'd be able to suss out a spy determined to hide.
...anything moving back in Valinor? Interplanar crystal balls are really hard, she is sorry she cannot send Fëanáro's parents cute pictures, but she's taking a bunch to send when she can...