"...To the what?"

"...It is a place with simulated habitats for sea creatures so people can go look at them and learn about them."

"I don't think we have those. At least not in quantity. I'm going to have to get on a boat to check the dolphins thing. Water breathing spell and an armed escort to check the octopus claim."

"Yeah, you probably don't, they're mostly a science thing come to think of it."

"You have a lot of those."

"Yes, that's what happens when you don't get squished for it. The lovely thing about science is that the more you know, the more you can find out."

"You're making me more jealous than I was already. When I was a kid my mother caught me doing experiments on the television and she gave it to a neighbor and made me read a book about people getting squished."

"...I'm sorry, I'm not trying to make it worse. I have, um, a temper. And I tend to get catty at people who are being jerks about things and your universe is a jerk about things but being catty to you about your universe is. Unhelpful."

"A bit."

"In my defense, normally when a situation like this comes up the people I'm making snide remarks to don't have to live with what I'm making snide remarks about. But--yeah, now that I've noticed I'm doing that I can stop."

"Thank you. Anything else you're curious about?"

"Well, I'd say no, but it occurs to me that I don't know exactly what things you have in your universe that aren't fictional in mine, if you've had the telepathy to notice it for longer. Do you know if humanity's closest relatives--chimps and gorillas and such--are people?"

"...Humanity's whats?"

"...The species that are most similar to humanity," Edie says, not wanting to try to explain taxonomy at this point.

"...If you don't have elves or anything, uh, okay, sure, chimps and gorillas. Not people."

"Right, we don't have elves, of course those would be more similar. Sorry, still defaulting to my original paradigm."

"Anyway, I'm sure subtle artists have been in range of chimps and gorillas before and they are not people. Not that we're invariably great about finding new kinds of people, but we don't treat chimps and goblins like we treat goblins and kobolds."

"Judging by the fact that the legends attached to those words do not exactly inspire positive connotations I'm going to guess not well."

"Not great, no. There are some at my school, it's not perpetually awful, but not great."

"...Say, do you want some reasons not to be jealous of my world? Because I could tell you stories about how people treat each other here that do not inspire jealousy."

"I might just be able to match you."

"Here's the dark side of science: About three and a half decades ago, a country called Germany decided to round up all its 'undesirables'--the disabled, homosexuals, Romani and especially Jewish people--and sent them to death camps. They were forced to stand in showers where poisonous chemicals were piped through instead of water, and those that weren't murdered instantly were worked to death. The guards could kill any prisoner they wanted and no one would say a word against it. They were given just enough food that their starvation lasted weeks or months or years instead of days. Many of them were subjected to horrific experiments. Many suffered from diseases that were horribly lethal but fantastically preventable, if anyone had cared to prevent them. Millions died within the span of a few years."

"The red dragon known as the Bloodletter conquered the entire Confederation of the Wheat Valley with an army of enslaved lizardfolk. She lived on an almost exclusively sapient diet for somewhere between seven and eight hundred years, waged a relentless war against the nearby subterranean elves and recreationally tortured her prisoners of war; eventually the war ended because the remaining elves committed mass ritual suicide in an attempt to power some kind of ritual that ultimately failed. She is believed to have sold several thousand humans to demons and some part-demons in order to secure their help as enforcers and bogeymen. To prevent escape of her subjects from the Valley she kept everyone on short rations and controlled the press and public culture sufficiently well to spread misinformation about fey etiquette and foreign religions, such that anyone who fled into the areas beyond her domain would likely offend a fairy and anyone who managed to get out without meeting one would wind up executed or smitten for blasphemy. The misinformation was so pervasive that even after an adventuring party managed to kill her the entire valley has been at an enormous disadvantage trying to get their education into shape."

"I'm not sure, but I think mine might be worse. Not that I'm entirely objective on the subject--my Dad's a Holocaust survivor, and I haven't always had perfect control over my telepathy."

"Someone did kill her eventually and then some paladins cleared out most of the demons who lingered after that. And even eating a few people every day for eight hundred years doesn't actually add up to millions dead - I guess it's arguable whether spreading it out is better or not."