She had been in the middle of telling a joke, and then suddenly she was someplace else. She's been attacked by an illusionist before--a kidnapping attempt when she was a child--and she freezes, looking around to try to situate herself and figure out who would be so brazen as to attack the Duchess de Chelam's party.

The background hum of conversation disappears, replaced by--what is that sound? He looks around, alert, trying to make sense of his perceptions. His wife had been across the room, and now instead is lying back on the hill with him, obviously worried.

The hill is full of animal burrows. Small ones, so probably nothing too dire lives there. There is a little wooden awning over there under which there is a water bowl and a manger full of hay, not enough for a horse. The place is fenced in. There's some people in the distance, going into and out of the reptile house.

He reaches over and squeezes her hand.

She calms down. He, at least, is real; together they can figure out what else is.

They slowly stand up, and he will walk towards the people, checking to make sure she's following closely behind. How challenging does the fence look, to him?

The fence is designed for prairie dogs, and is more concerned with preventing burrowing out than climbing out. Still, it's tall enough to be genuinely prohibitive for an adolescent who thinks it'd be a laugh to go hassle the animals. Let's call it a DC 22 Climb check to get out without help.

He's wearing really nice clothing which he would rather not dirty. Let's see if they speak Taldane.

"Hello?" he calls out towards the people, waving his hand.

People look in his direction! Somebody calls back, "What the fuck are you doing in with the prairie dogs?" and somebody else says, "Somebody get a zookeeper!"

The effect is sort of like having Tongues up.

"I was hoping to ask you that," he calls back jokingly.

She is actually quite upset that a peasant would decide to swear at her! But she doesn't see any guards around, and Felip doesn't seem inclined to take offense yet.

A zookeeper is fetched and goes to unlock the door and let them out via a cunningly hidden gate in the side of the fence. "How in the world did you get in - what are you dressed as, should I recognize the film -" He has bright purple hair.

He files away "film" as something to ask about in a less embarrassing situation. "I'm afraid I don't know," he apologizes, "and am feeling rather lost. Where, exactly, are we?"

"The Shapto Zoo. Are you drunk or something, wandered out of a costume party?"

"We were at a party moments ago, but it was still early in the evening" he says, looking at the position of the sun in the sky. "Shapto is not a place I've heard of. Is it in Avistan?"

She is more interested in the man's hair. No illusionist would make it so obvious their victims were in an imaginary world. Have they been... teleported away or plane shifted, somehow?

"No, it's in Tapa. I haven't heard of Afistan, where is that?"

Should he tell them the tale of far-off Avistan? Unlikely. Or at least, this fellow seems unlikely to be the right person to read in to their situation.

"My home, and I fear I haven't heard of Tapa either. It seems like I should seek audience with the most learned of your wizards." Does this fellow seem like he wants to be their guide, or that he wants them to be someone else's problem?

Definitely someone else's problem. "...sir, I acknowledge that you are in full cosplay, but I am not part of your LARP and do not have a line I'm supposed to recite if you ask for wizards. Do you have zoo tickets or did you sneak in here somehow?"

"Neither. I suspect we were transported here by another." He's tempted to ask what a LARP is. "Whose menagerie is this, anyway?" Maybe that's their line of approach.

"Theeee Shapto Zoo is run by the Shapto municipal government at a small positive average return as an educational and scientific repository of animal and ecological knowledge and practice," says the guy with the purple hair, sounding rehearsed, like he says this twelve times a day.

"Well, thank you for your assistance in freeing us," he says finally, and then starts to walk away.

"If you don't have a ticket I'm gonna need you to leave the zoo. That's straight out that way, follow the white arrows on the paths, I'll page the security guards in case you get lost," or try to go look at animals without a ticket.

They will follow the white arrows, and he is quite interested in the security guards, actually. Does he even notice them, or do they look like the other guests of the zoo?

They're in uniform - gray uniforms with SHAPTO ZOO embroidered under a logo on the front of their right shoulders - and they've all got white or grey hair, while the attendees are not in uniform and have many hair colors. Mostly purple. Never, ever brown or black.

Unarmed? Where are they?

"Axis?" she mutters.

"Maybe." He'll try a Dancing Lights, and see what happens.

Everybody who was paying attention startles. "What the heck!" yelps a random orange, seizing her waist-high child away from the lights. "Holy shit!" shrieks a purple. The uniformed greys pull objects out of their pockets and move to clear the immediate area, everybody shooing very compliantly with only over-the-shoulder alarmed glances at the lights.

He'll make a short slashing motion with his hand, and the lights go out. "My apologies," he says soothingly. "I wanted to see if it still worked." Are they... going to let him leave the zoo?

Nope, he is no longer allowed to leave the zoo, he is supposed to come over here to the security office between the bears and the herons. Her too. "What was that," says the white-haired security woman who's directing them.

"A moment." He will subtly point at his wife.

It's not Axis, or it's a part where magic works and yet knowledge of it is suppressed. They probably won't be able to planeshift us back.

And in the meantime, we are strange creatures to them. There is a choice before them; to be timid or to be bold. Let us be formidable, then.

"I am a sorcerer," he says with finality. "I have several other spells at my disposal, the lights being one of the simpler and more benign effects. Is magic unknown, in your country?"

"I should say so! You sit tight and I'll have the place crawling with blues excited to help you out with whatever you need, how about." ("Blue" translates as the literal color and also as "aristocrat" and "civil servant".)

"Very well. What refreshments do you have available?" He is not quite skilled enough with prestidigitation to change their hair color.

"I can get you water? I don't think you'd better have any lemonade before some greens" (the color, and "musician" and "artist" and "scholar", but not "wizard") "make sure you can eat Amentan food, I saw a TV show one time where they had aliens and then the aliens died of eating bread, can't have that."

"I should be able to check that as well," he says with a smile. "Magic."

"Wow, okay, in that case I have lemonade." She pulls one out of the fridge; it's in a glass bottle with a metal cap. "And the weird basil soda that Tsintsi likes, he probably wouldn't make a fuss if I gave it to a magic alien."

What does Detect Poison have to say? There's a twinge that perhaps he should be trusting their scholars instead of his spells, but if they're unable to eat the food here it's not like they're going to last long anyway.

The spell thinks the lemonade is not poison!

Then he will bravely swig! It's... much sweeter than he's used to, but the contrast between the sour and the sweet is delightful. He'll offer some to Isidonia.

They really ought to have separate glasses. She's commandeered a chair, but she's adapting to the strangeness of this land much less well than he is. The drink is fine, tho the chill is quite impressive.

"So you have lights magic and also - Tsintsi, there you are, did you call the government in -"

"Yeah, they're coming, they want a video of the lights, can we do that?"

He'll make the lights again, and direct them around the room in the standard trap-searching pattern for dungeons.

"The others are more draining, so I would not waste them on demonstrations. Some of them are defensive, and others relate to sharpening the mind or enlarging the body, and then I can also summon some creatures to fight for me if needed."

"Like Creature Carriers?"

(Taking a video of the lights involves pointing a rectangle at them, apparently.)

"I fear our cultures are quite distinct. How do they do it in Creature Carriers?"

"They run around catching wild monsters and training them to fight other wild monsters and other people's tame monsters. My daughter's really into it."

He digests this information. Bloodsport for children is a worrying sign about their society, but if their problems with monsters are serious enough, he can see the argument for early training.

"I mostly summon ones from the celestial realm, and there isn't time to train them or develop relationships. More durable pacts are typically accomplished by spells I cannot cast."

"Huh. Well, maybe get used to saying 'no it's not like Creature Carriers', I guess."

"No, it's not like Creature Carriers."

He opens up another Message channel, but discreetly. 

How are you holding up?

Worried about the children. Worried about what happened to the Convention. Worried about what they will think of us.

She leaves unsaid the other worries--that they only have the clothes on their back, even if some of those clothes are enchanted. She is nearly as practiced at hiding their conversation; a subtle point from a hand in her lap while the other daintily covers her mouth.

He nods. I'm glad to be here with you. I'm not sure how I would have fared on my own.

She has felt quite useless, so far, and it's hard to hear that as more than empty reassurance. He's the one with magic; he's the charmer. But she tries to let it warm her heart anyway.

Besides, if any mortal can return us to Cheliax, Elie Cottonet can. He feels a spark of fear that they have moved outside of the reach of the gods. 

"I should ask about your gods, I suppose. Is knowledge of them widespread or will I need to wait for ... a Green?" he guesses.

"...I don't know what that is so probably you need to wait for a green, if it's like, a complicated physics thing you can do magic to or something."

He looks grim, hearing that, and will close his eyes for a bit.

She will remain attentive to their... Captors? Hosts? Hosts. She'll clink the lemonade bottle to signal that she'd like another.

"...you want another lemonade?" the grey guesses after a moment's incomprehension. She can have another lemonade.

Well, at least they're good for something.

He wishes he had retained more of the practical side of theology. Somehow people got the attention of the gods, and became clerics; he never had, and probably it is too late to do so now. If Erastil was watching Tapa, they would already have clerics of him. They likely don't have the components necessary to draw a god's attention and pay for answers, and no one who could hear the answers anyway.

The enormity of the situation weighs on him; if these people are subject to Pharasma's judgment and do not know it, how terrible for them and how important that he rectify the situation. If they are not subject to Her judgement, how terrifying for him, not knowing what they would see wise to do. And his own soul's fate, once certain, is now in question.

And eventually in come some blues and greens! They can be told apart by the hair, even if the language of Amentan fashion is fully lost on the alien visitors. "Hello! Welcome to Amenta!" says one of the blues. "I'm Kash Ekachta." (The Tongues-like effect thinks "Ekachta" means "link" or "referral", as in an internet link or a citation.) "Is there anything you two need immediate help with or should we just get you somewhere more comfortable?"

On the arrival of their notables, he makes another gesture, and at least for an hour, his fear is mastered and his thoughts are clear. 

"Well met. I am Duke Felip de Fraga, and this is my wife Isidonia, both lately of Cheliax, a nation on Golarion." He does not know how much of his meaning is translated; for him, Fraga is a name and a place and a lineage, all twisted together like the strands of a cord, and stronger for it. He doesn't realize that "Duke" might need translation.

Cheliax, of course, he has a much more complicated view of. Avistan meant nothing to the guard, but perhaps their scholar has at least learned of his planet. 

"Let us travel as you see fit."

The security office is--well, rather more functional than they're used to, and rather more sterile than he's used to when roughing it.

"Alrighty then, we've got security holding us a path out to the side exit, we can have you out of the zoo in a jiffy. Any chance you can tell me why the zoo?" says Ekachta.

"I'm afraid not; we understand what happened as little as you do. Do you have a guess as to why the zoo?"

"I haven't the faintest. This way, through here - thank you," he adds to the grey who gave them the lemonade, "write in if you need anything comped of course."

"Sure thing," says the grey.

They follow. She walks gracefully, head held high. He watches the people, noting the strange sights but keeping an eye on the faces and spaces that people could appear from.

There's a perimeter of more greys, in a different uniform from the zoo security, maintaining a corridor to the side exit preventing any of the guests from having line of sight to the path they're taking. At the exit, there's a car waiting. "If there's any immediate questions top of mind I can do my best to answer those for you or get you in touch with people who can," Ekachta says.

An enchanted carriage is impressive--no, it'd have to be something else. But that's secondary. Once they're inside, he asks the biggest question.

"What do you think happens, after you die?"

"- what a question! Are you two sick, should we be quarantining you just in case there's cross-species potential?"

He keenly feels the absence of his house cleric. "No, we're healthy, though separated from our healers. But the guard earlier didn't understand me when I asked about your gods, and that seemed like the right place to start."

"Huh. Well, that brings me to a question I'm sure all our linguists are tearing their hair out over, how is it you speak Tapap at all and is that mechanism something that might be failing on a word here and there? I don't recognize that one."

"There exist translation spells, but they are not within my abilities." He brushes past that mystery. "In all the realms I knew of yesterday, at a man's death he would meet The Judge, who would sort him depending on the deeds of his life, and then he would go to the appropriate afterlife. Sufficiently powerful wizards and clerics could look in on those worlds, or visit them, or communicate with their denizens. The living could, by magic, sometimes tell where they were pointed. The gods are the strongest of those denizens, able to empower mortals in their service, and instruct mortals in how to achieve their ends.

If that is not how things work here, well--you can perhaps imagine my disorientation. And if it is how it works here, and you are not yet aware, the costs of that ignorance seems staggering."

"...is this men specifically or is that a translation issue where you've got 'man' as metonymy for 'people', for some reason -" pipes up a green who is in their party.

"What's a cleric?" asks another green.

"Is a god like a... head of posthumous state?" asks another one.

She's following the threads between them, and by a subtle shift in her body posture indicates the middle Green.

"There are many types of magic," he says quickly, "but the two broadest categories are arcane, like mine or that of wizards, and divine, like that of clerics. They are renowned for their ability to heal wounds and diseases. Clerical magic comes from gods, to chosen individuals called clerics."

"And the clerics are... afterlife immigration officers in addition to magicians, or is that separate?"

He stops and thinks about that. "They preach the doctrines of their gods, which affect the behavior of people, which affects their afterlife. But they generally do not have the ability to determine where anyone ends up; Pharasma the judge decides that.

The gods... I think that calling them heads of states is half right. They have alliances and wars, they have servants and obligations. But many kings have little power beyond that provided by the obedience of their subjects, only live one day at a time, can only guess at the future, and only have two eyes in their heads. The kingdom makes the king, but the gods are themselves are fonts of power, minds the size of states."

The last line circles his mind, after he says it.

"So Pharasma is - afterlife immigration flow control of some kind, sending people to afterlives - based on their behavior? Not on the afterlife's capacity, or what skills are in demand there, or anything like that? - and gods are highly magical heads of state, with the states being located in these afterlives?" Ekachta says.

"That's roughly it," he says with 0 ranks in Knowledge (Religion). "And you have... nothing like this? How does your society choose what behavior to encourage, and what to condemn? Who to emulate and who to shun?"

If they're good at reading people, they can tell she finds this much less important than he does. But she's still watching the greens and the blues carefully, tracking their interactions with each other and their questions for Felip.

"- I'm not sure what relationship those things have to each other! Of course if we expected our citizens to move to another country after dying we'd want to make available the information they needed to make themselves - sortable? - into whichever appealed to them, but while they're here in Tapa they need to follow Tapap law which is based on what's good for them and their fellow Tapai."

He considers this. "Perhaps you have managed to match the wisdom of the good gods unaided, and if your lives end so soon, temporal considerations may dominate spiritual ones. The empirical question remains of whether you face Pharasma's judgment, or another's, or no judgment at all, but I fear my magic is not sufficient to settle it, and it does not sound within your power, or you would have settled it long ago." It would be sad if none of these people had souls, but if so they didn't have souls before his arrival either, and it would be cruel to dwell on what they're missing.

He glances at the blues among them. It is too soon to reach towards a deal, he expects; they are still exchanging basic information. But it seems important to keep things even.

"And what Tapap law is most important for us to know, do you think?"

"If our lives end so soon? Did comparative lifespans come up?" asks a green.

Ekachta waves her off to answer Felip's question. "I'd expect for the time being you'll be with people who can warn you if something you want to do would have an effect you might not predict. Of course we have laws against things like murder and theft, but I'd be surprised if that weren't the same everywhere, and the details apply more if you're doing something like running a business or having a child, not just talking to us. Does your translation work on writing? We can get you a copy of the legal code if that'd be useful to you."

"There have been signs we could read," he says after a moment. "The legal code can wait. As for comparative lifespans, I expected my first life to last another fifty years, if lucky, and my afterlife to be measured in centuries."

"After that is there another layer of afterlives?" says a green.

"Fifty years, that's - oh, well, I guess another question is how long your years are," says another one.

"It is... complicated, and we know much less about what comes next. It is challenging enough to have a good showing in one's first life."

He is stumped by the challenge of how to compare their years.

"We mark adulthood at around sixteen, for most purposes."

"A good showing? What does that mean?" asks Ekachta.

"Amentans are adults at four Amentan years and an Amentan year is 1475 days but the days may not match," replies Year Length Green earnestly.

"That suggests one of your years corresponds to about four of ours."

He hesitates a bit. "The afterlives I know have wide gulfs between them; a reward for the virtuous, and a punishment for the vicious. So for us, destination is of grave importance, and the idea that you might be facing judgment unwarned and unprepared was rather worrying."

"- oh, this is the first you've mentioned them being objectively different in quality. Those are... very different political missions than any Amentan country undertakes, let alone any I could imagine springing up that took immigration at the sole discretion of a third party... You're confident the information channels are good enough that this isn't a propaganda campaign of some kind, I take it?" says Ekachta.

"Not all of the gods have human interests at heart, and some delight in tricking and destroying them." he says grimly. "I am confident in the goodly gods and their churches, who oppose the evil gods, and in the Judge, who stands above them and has no reason to lie about her judgments. This morning we were in Cheliax, which many years ago was conquered by servants of Hell, who lied to the populace about judgment and the relative desirability of the afterlives, in an attempt to trick and coerce as many of them into Hell as possible. It was my life's purpose to defeat them, and then restore the country to goodness; we were engaged in the work of restoration when we suddenly arrived here."

One might reasonably wonder what their elaborate LARP costumes had to do with restoration, but--he's not going to notice that inferential gap on his own.

Maybe that's a normal thing to wear, where they're from! "Hell is one of the gods?" asks Ekachta.

"There are widely held to be nine major afterlives, of which Hell is one. It is ruled by a god whose name I will not say, and there are other lesser powers within it who can also have clerics. I personally pursued Heaven, home to Erastil, Iomedae, and Torag, among others, but also respect Sarenrae, Shelyn, and Desna, whose realms are in other pleasant afterlives."

As he says their names, he imagines their symbols, hoping to feel a tug of recognition in his soul.

"Why won't you say it, is there a magical effect?"

"They can see and hear, though their perception is not the same as mortal perception. Their attention can be attracted by their symbols, both name and sigil. I... wish I had studied more, about the gods and the nations and the planes, but I know that the gods vary in which regions they have a presence in, and the cosmic war is balanced perilously. An evil god I know may have ears to hear in this realm, but not yet have heard their name whispered on your world; if so, I would keep it that way."

"....goodness. All right. This sounds very complicated and high stakes and I'm sure we don't understand it all yet, so we'll defer to you on the wisdom of getting all their labels."

The carriage is taking them through a maze of glass towers. Going the other way they pass trucks and vans. On an elevated track among them a train crosses their path.

He's pretty focused on the people in the car with him. Magic can create quite the array of impressive visuals, and he's toured many follies. It will be striking once he realizes that it is mundane--that the trucks and vans are doing the work of porters and mules, not serving as decorations, that the towers are durable and spacious enough to be home and office to a whole town at once, and were built pane by pane by hand and machine, not by magic in a flash.

She is feeling a little nauseated, actually; the movement of the car is subtle but still enough to shake everyone inside, and some of the objects they pass whip by at a dizzying speed. She most expects that the lemonade is sitting poorly, however, and is wondering whether to make a fuss about that.

It's much less jostling than a ship or a horse, if still weird and hard to predict. He's doing fine.

"I am sure there is more we can do to determine whether or not the cosmic war I am familiar with rages here as well, or could, but probably not in this moment in this carriage. I worry that my now-remote concerns may be overbearing your local ones. If heroes had been sent to your world to solve some problem, what would you expect it to be?"

He is not particularly hopeful this question will work--most such threats build in secrecy until they explode--but if they do have a Worldwound, it would be silly to not just ask about it immediately.

The people in the car with them:

- Kash Ekachta, who appears to be taking point on this;
- another blue who hasn't spoken yet;
- three greens who have all piped up with assorted questions;
- one yellow who is deeply involved with some mysterious glowing rectangle;
- up front in the driver's seat beyond a plastic barrier, the purple driver, and beside her a grey;
- in back in a different compartment beyond another plastic barrier, two more greys.

"Well," says Ekachta, "that depends on who you were sent by! Nobody we know about has the ability to do such a thing; if an Amentan were bringing in exactly two magical aliens to help Amenta with something then probably they'd be specialized in one of faster than light travel or terraforming? But it doesn't seem likely than an Amentan did this, because it's not related to any technology we've gotten anywhere near, and we don't have magic, and furthermore it would have been both rude and clumsy to drop you in the prairie dog enclosure without an explanation or warning of any kind."

"When mighty magic is involved, what seems like clumsiness to us is often grace at a level we cannot discern. Perhaps you should tell us what you know of prairie dogs, in case some clue is contained within.

Terraforming is the province of other magic, but as for travel--well, I cannot teleport yet. But I thought it probable that I would be able to someday."

"That's very exciting! We know of some very promising planets we'd like to settle but they're too far to reach in our best ships in less than an Amentan lifetime, and we can't tell for sure without visiting them if they'd definitely be able to support colonies. I'm sure one of our greens knows something about prairie dogs...?"

"I'm not a rodent specialist," says a green, "but they're social burrowing animals, come in a range of shades of pink and purple, are closely related to squirrels, have a lot of squeaking-based communicative noises they make...? Does any of this sound helpful?"

He's actually a little offended by some unseen hand placing him with the squeaking-based communicative rodents, but he's able to set that aside for now.

"Not yet, but perhaps you should find us a book about them for later. The teleportation I refered to was shorter range; a continent's breadth in a moment. As for other planets--well, to shift between planes is the province of mightier magicians than I expected to ever become, and it was theorized that you might be able to hop astral distances through that method. But I had never heard a credible tale of one who had done it. It nevertheless remains the most promising pathway home I could walk with my own feet, remote as it is."

The nonspeaking blue glances at the yellow at the mention of a prairie dog book; the yellow nods.

"How is it your magic expands in scope over time?" Ekachta asks.

"Every type of magician is different, and sorcerers yet more different. While a wizard could no doubt give you six theories and explain the experiments that make them credible or incredible, a sorcerer's magic operates by instinct and shies away from deliberate study. I have lived a life of adventure and solved problems using my magic; I have fulfilled my responsibilities as duke wisely and well. Eventually enough drops fill up the chalice and my magic deepens, and worrying about the flow fills it up more slowly than worrying about my realm or my responsibilities."

"...so you may not be able to improve your magic here away from your duchy?" asks Ekachta tentatively.

"I did not come into possession of it until recently, but it has been the focus of my whole career. I am unsure, but--my previous efforts to return to it strengthened me, and I hope they will do so here as well."

"What form would you expect those efforts to take?"

The question is harder than it might seem, and he closes his eyes to think it through.

"Most people do not seek out danger and power, because their talents or their personality are poorly suited for it. Of those who do, they have the best chance of survival with a balanced team. My talents and magic fit my aristocratic bloodline; my magic has long been focused on coordination and amplification. Here alone, I doubt I can do much, but working with your heroes, there might be much that I can accomplish.

But not every war is fought with a swordarm; this morning I was debating laws for our newly formed nation. It may be that my statecraft is what you need. But I am well aware of the challenges that immigrants face in politics, and would wish to learn much more before attempting to embark on any such endeavors here. I also am not yet released from my old obligations; I would be loathe to make you dependent on me in any way and then depart without warning for my true home."

"So when you say 'swordarm' is that an archaic idiom, or do swords dovetail particularly well with magic, or are swords in fact the dominant martial technology where you're from?" asks a green after a silence.

"I'd hesitate to ask you to involve yourselves in a war on our behalf even if it were blindingly clear that you could affect the outcome," says Ekachta. "For numerous reasons, among them that most of the time we're quite friendly with our present opponent and have a short term local dispute; that we have anti-escalatory international law prohibiting the involvement of anyone who doesn't belong to the Amentan grey caste in combat and whatever you are I think it isn't 'grey'; and of course that we don't have a supply of other magicians we can learn from if anything should befall you two."

"The queen of Cheliax is a swordswoman of unmatched skill, but in the phrase 'swordarm' it stands in for the whole category of weapons. My retinue uses pikes and crossbows; my lieutenant is an archer, and the destructive powers of magic are many. Perhaps you should tell me more about your castes; of course we have our own bloodlines and social roles but they do not appear to align." He leaves unsaid that he struggles to respect any blue who is not also a grey; it would no doubt offend them and perhaps they have a good reason for their tradition of widespread cowardice.

[He is, of course, wearing a sword as part of his party outfit; he is well-practiced at not bumping anything with it, and so it probably just looks like a weird embellishment to his belt to them. It doesn't play any role in his self-defense plans--he needs his hands free to catch arrows--and so his unconscious movements haven't given it any more importance than the rest of his outfit.]

"I'm blue," says Ekachta, "hair color correlates very well at birth and even better once people grow up and dye non-matching hair to send the correct signals. So is my intern Patkeon. Blue is the aristocracy and landowning caste. These three - Tahu, Ashuao, and Hepka - are green; that's the caste for scholars and artists. Our assistant there, Muim, is yellow, for work involving organization and compliance and records and suchlike. Our security is grey, the caste also includes soldiers and police and athletes and dancers. The driver's purple, about half of Amentans are purple and they do things like farming and manufacture and retail and transportation. You might also meet oranges, depending on what you wind up needing and wanting to do while you're here; they're the caring professions - doctors and nurses and teachers and prostitutes and counselors. Some jobs are casted differently in different countries, of course, that's the Tapai breakdown, but the generalities are mostly the same."

He nods at this explanation, which sounds like a sensible arrangement. "Dye non-matching hair? How does one obtain permission to make such a change?" That seems like a safe enough spot to start probing their society.

"Oh, it isn't like that. Caste is matrilineal, though again that can vary by country, our ally and neighbor Anitam has patrilineality. But sometimes someone has an intercaste child, and the hair color might take after the non-lineal parent, or even a grandparent or more distant ancestor, in which case to avoid confusing anyone they'll dye it."

"My hair grows in purple," volunteers Hepka, "it runs in my mother's family though I'm not actually sure when it was introduced, we haven't had an intercaste marriage as far back as I've been able to find. But I'm green."

"And so, as both of our mothers were aristocrats, you infer that we are both blue. But a family's fortunes may wax and wane out of proportion to their number of children; what happens to the children of blues who cannot support themselves on rents?" Or, implicitly, to them, currently cut off from their lands, incomes, and investments.

He imagines Desna weeping at the people unable to follow their dreams, but holds off for now. The people in this car may not know how the system bends around its people, or may not be willing to share it in front of each other.

"Responsible blue parents don't seek a child credit - official permission to have a child - until on top of the face value of the credit they have a portfolio to entrust to that child which will keep them supported indefinitely. Investments, land, that sort of thing," says Ekachta. "There are always people who aren't responsible - but their children will then either make their own fortunes by applying their wits to the salaried professions blues hold, like the judiciary for example, or be unable to afford child credits in their turn, so the problem isn't perpetuated further. In your case, of course, you're the guests of the Tapai government and we'll be pleased to see to whatever it is you need if it can be found on Amenta."

"...what happens to a pregnant mother without permission to bear a child?" The question of whether or not these people have souls jumps to the front of his mind, again.

"It's vanishingly rare! We've got effective contraception freely available to absolutely everyone," Ekachta says. "If there's some kind of problem which results in an unintended pregnancy it can be safely terminated, though of course everyone much prefers it never get to that point."

She boggles a bit, at this, and tries to imagine what being a woman is like for them.

"For us, prematurely ended pregnancies result in children in afterlives," he says sadly, "and so we treat that option with perhaps more caution than you do. But if we can bring your method of contraception back home, and replicate it there--perhaps that's why we're here."

"- in that case we should get you some oranges to see if you're biologically similar enough to us for the full range or if only the more mechanical options will work! No one should have to worry about having a baby before they're ready. Muim, get us -" He rattles off a few more names.

"And I suppose by these child credits you ensure that the number of people fit for a role can match demand for that role? But how do you manage the costs of having a standing army that you must recruit years in advance of the need for them? Much of the defense of our towns and states is done by militias and levies, with retinues and trained adventurers critically important but a much smaller fraction of the fighting force."

"That's a major function of child credits, yes! There are peacetime occupations for greys. A lot of those industries wind up with suspended or shoestring operations when there's a war on as more greys join up."

There's something about the way that they said "peacetime occupations" that lands strangely. "Like monster hunting?" 

"...I guess if someone wanted to hunt a giant sea turtle they'd need to be grey, sure...? We don't really have... monsters."

He boggles a lot, at that.

"I am not sure I have ever been in a country at peace, in the way you understand it," he says after a long moment.

"I'm so sorry to hear that. I hope it's to your liking - as I mentioned we are actually at war right now but it's very localized and I wouldn't expect any of it to affect you."

He actually missed that! He's used to people being much more grim and fixated on such affairs, and the previous mention was more like an idle hypothetical. He would not have accepted a second dinner invitation from someone in Nerosyan who had been so relaxed about the Worldwound. But if wars aren't draining monster-hunting capacity from the homelands, and if the aristocrats are not themselves fighters, it's not actually clear there's much at stake for them.

"Could you explain that conflict to me, or would it be more appropriate for a grey to? Who made the decision to start this war, and who might make the decision to end it?"

"Oh, I can give an overview. We're fighting with Voa. Tapa and Voa are the two largest countries in the world but the fighting is over a specific historically Voan province; Voa exports a lot of food, allowed the supply to become contaminated, and won't hang the blue responsible, so Tapa's seeking a border province called Imde with a lot of quality farmland, as redress and so we can have independent food security. We expect to win; Voa's slowing us down but not committing the force it would need to do anything but buy the residents time to evacuate into the rest of Voa, though we're committed to accepting any who stay as Tapai citizens once the dust settles."

He nods. Honor violations of that sort seem like an obvious reason to go to war. "A province that makes the difference between food security and insecurity for one of the largest countries in the world must be a fertile province indeed. What fraction of the known world do Tapa and Voa hold? How many other countries are there?"

"Ashuao, pick a map -"

Ashuao pulls up a political map on her pocket everything. "Tapa's this one here, and we also control as protectorates this, that, and these here. Voa's here. Imde is this portion."

As the duke of a very densely populated region, he doesn't put too much stock into the size of countries on a map, but he still gives it a close inspection. "I see. And the fighting is constrained to Imde, or is along the whole border?"

"Imde and the immediately adjacent stretches. Everything else has heightened security but no battles."

"And the war will end... when Imde is fully held? When Voa sues for peace? How long has it been going on for?"

"It began just a couple of months ago and we think they'll probably surrender the province midsummer if not sooner. We're not in a bad enough food situation to need to rush it at the risk of escalating or taking more casualties."

He does not see any immediate avenues to help. He is trained in military tactics, of course, but with very different weapons and doubts his doctrines would transfer well. If it were a duel of champions, then perhaps his magic would swing things, but this sounds like a rather different affair. He does have questions about the underlying incentives and forces at play, but so far their description seems like mere background, and he would need to talk to the negotiators or generals in charge to learn more.

"Could you point out Shapto, on the map?" he asks.

"Sure -" Ashuao zooms in on the big lake. Shapto's on the southern shore of said lake.

"Thank you."

He will lean back, and look out the window of the car for a bit, collecting his thoughts, with a subtle point.

I mislike having picked a side without hearing out the other, but it seems challenging to do anything else as a guest.

They seemed shocked by even your mild description of the difference between Heaven and Hell, she responds. I doubt we are accidentally casting our lot with the Kuthites.

Besides, it sounds like they might not even let us near the war. He glances at the blues and greens; are they waiting patiently, or eager to ask him more questions?

They're watching them curiously. Hepka leans over to murmur something to Muim.

I am torn, he admits, between preparing to stay and preparing to return. It would be a simpler decision, if his son were younger, if Cheliax were still Infernal, if they were clearly in some archmage's puzzlebox instead of a truly foreign realm.

She is silent for long seconds. It is much clearer to her that their children still need them, that they cannot cast aside the past. But also--she feels the pull of peace, and the discussion of destinations has weighed on her. She does not pursue Heaven, the way Felip does; she believes that the nobility must make tough choices for the good of the realm, in a way Pharasma fails to understand or correct for. The thought of being outside of Pharasma's judgment is liberating in a way she did not expect it to be.

But also she does not have to answer the question now; she just needs to settle his mind.

I have always known you to be a man who can do both.

He returns his full attention to the car. "Where did you say we were going, and when do you expect us to arrive?"

"We're headed for a house in a suburb of Shapto - I expect it to be more comfortable and private than the seat of government and anyone you want to talk to can meet you there. Looks like..." He glances over to the GPS display the driver has on the dashboard. "Another ten minutes."

He nods. "And how will we discover who it is we would like to talk to? Until we have a better understanding of the landscape, I imagine we will want to accept many invitations, or have a social secretary of some sort."

"So, the first big decision is whether to make your presence on Amenta known at all or not. We can hush up the zoo appearance and nobody who reads submissions to the form the zoo staff used is going to blab without authorization. If you want a quiet life talking to greens about your language and culture and magic and society, that's the way to go.

"If you are publicized you will instantly be the biggest news in history - I do not exaggerate - to thirteen billion people and every single one of them will want your attention. Many of those people will handle this desire by accepting that they're not going to get it, but that's many as a percentage of thirteen billion. We can manage almost everything else for you and narrow it down to whatever invitations and meetings and messages you'd like to accept. We are not inerrantly flawless at this, though; you'd be running a bit of a risk."

Thirteen billion is--rather a lot of people, actually. Cheliax, which he was used to thinking of as large and powerful, was only a bit more than a thousandth of that size.

He also raises his estimate of the importance of the people in the car with him now. This morning they might have been regional bureaucrats, but now they are read into a secret of world-historical importance. He fixes their faces into his mind a bit more firmly.

A secret shared cannot be unsaid; but also his power is in his voice, and to hide means to delay its use.

"These prairie dogs," he says. "Are they secretive animals?"

"Well, they live underground," says Tahu. "Otherwise not... especially?"

"Then neither shall we be. There is perhaps wisdom in moving slowly, rather than painting it across the sky." He doesn't know how they're communicating, if they don't have Mage's Decree, but they did seem to view the decision as binary.

"So, no press release today, but we should start planning for one, do I understand you correctly?" says Ekachta.

"Yes. Do you have superiors who would rather read this news in a private report than a broadsheet?"

"- my superiors are alerted to the situation, they had to come to a consensus on who to send out of who was available on short notice and that was me."

Hmm. He is not immediately certain how to be delicate, here; it is not clear whether they are an envoy, or an investigator, or a decision-maker, and 'event of world historical importance' does not by itself mean 'you would have a fruitful meeting with our head of state'. He will, for now, trust that Tapa is being deliberate. He is not yet sure what to make of them letting him make the decision on whether or not to be revealed, especially in the middle of a war.

"Well, I'm glad it was you; you've made us feel rather welcomed. If you could set our schedule for the next few days, how would you do it?"

"I'd recommend you get settled into the house - we're going to assign you a purple with a security clearance to handle chores and such, so they'll need to know things like what you like to eat and what you'd want in a change of clothes - and get looked over by some biologists and doctors to confirm that you're likely to be safe eating Amentan food, and then I'd recommend a mix of you doing background reading and you answering some greens' questions about anything and everything. Then when you've got your bearings a bit it'd be time to revisit the question of whether to publicize."

A purple?

He nods. "Very well. And how many greys for the security of the house?" Shapto had looked quite a distance from the border, and so he doubted they had the wartime heightened security, but he had always tried to maintain good relationships with his personal security, and it seems all the more important when they are all fresh to the role.

"They'll be on shifts but there'll be at least thirty total on the team and increased police presence for a ways around - not read in, to start with, the house in question is also used for other sensitive guests and it's normal for them to have to be on alert when there's someone there or when they're drilling for the possibility, they don't know which of those things is happening."

"I see. Well, when some are read in, I would like to speak with them."

They pull up to the house. It's surrounded by generous tree and hedge cover; it's not a lot of land by manorial estate standards but it's a lot more than most of the houses they passed on the way. There's a garage and they pull inside before opening the car doors.

She is looking at everything with a careful eye. How is the house, as a house? What do the decorations say to her?

The house is three stories tall and in excellent repair. The garage is not decorated basically at all, it's bare concrete, though that in itself may be interesting. In the house itself it looks - impersonally lovely, someone had a decorating budget and they spent it on nice prints and wall sculptures and fluffy rugs and abstractly swirly wallpaper. "Do you want to pick out one bedroom or two?" Ekachta asks, walking them through the dining room (the kitchen is not completely open-plan, but it is visible over a counter on one side through a gap suitable for passing dishes) and towards the staircase.

They share a glance. This is really the question of whether or not they can trust this house and use it like they would their own house, or whether they are treating it as hostile territory. He is open and confident.

She is more guarded, but leaning more towards trust than fear.

"Two, I think."

"The house has twelve, so take your pick." The rooms they are shown up on the second floor - and the third, too, if they want to see more of them - have ensuite bathrooms and kingsize beds and windows and more prints and rugs and wallpapers in various color palettes.

She moves slowly through the rooms, taking in the details, touching the fabric. This house is not the handmade work of artisans, she thinks. No one stood in one of these rooms and decided what rug would fit it, and then had the rug made. This one is slightly too small, this other slightly too large. The decorations are simple art, not artifacts; this house is no one's treasury, there is no history they are trying to advertise. The windows are well-placed, and the rooms spacious--some perhaps a bit more than she would like.

There's a room whose palette is a dark color contrasted with a bright one, in a way that reminds her of Fraga's black and gold; she puts Felip in it, and takes the room next door.

That takes care of the nights; now the evenings. There was a dining room--will there be space for guests to sit together? To stand and speak? To dance? How do the rooms flow together, and into the garden or grounds?

The dining room can seat twenty, and the adjoining rooms could have the furniture cleared away for a dance for a similar number if that were desirable, though they are currently occupied with chairs and couches. Those rooms lead out to a sunroom and veranda and from there into the backyard, which has some yard furniture, little clusters of it suitable for groups of three or four to sit together and chat and a big flat deck for outdoor dancing or grilling. There's a hot tub out there, too.

Hm. No one will know the dances. She could teach them, of course--a pang while she thinks of her daughters learning to dance--but it will be a foreign novelty to them, not a deep tradition. And they'd have to recreate the music, somehow. She could find space to put musicians, but their instruments might differ too much. A problem to solve in the future.

Let us consider the day, then. They will have meetings with many people, no doubt, their books and notes and maps to consult. She doubts they will have to hold court, even though it was suggested they would be famous beyond compare. Probably best to only be seen in public at a spot they travel to, and keep the estate private and limited to smaller meetings. Is there already a library? Are there offices for the two of them? Meeting rooms, at appropriate levels of symmetry? (It doesn't seem like the sort of house to have raised thrones, but she could perhaps make do with a room with a large, solid desk and intimidating chair for them and an insubstantial chair for their guest.)

There are a few books on shelves in a corner of a living room! A dictionary, an atlas, a couple photography books, it doesn't look like the home of a book-lover. There are three offices on the second floor, two on the third, and one right next to the sunroom, though at present they all have matching sets of chairs behind and before the desks.

Well, she'll be able to figure something out.

She glances around. Who has followed her, this long into her tour?

Ekachta is there, and Muim; the greens have taken up spots at the dining table to murmur to each other and Patkeon is talking to the greys who came with them in the car.

How old do Ekachta and Muim look, to her eyes? Likely to have teenaged daughters?

"I do not know how it is in your realm," she says conversationally, "but in my home noblewomen would be attended to by others of nearly the same rank. Perhaps there is some young trustworthy Blue who would suit as a lady-in-waiting."

Ekachta might have teenaged granddaughters! Muim might have teenaged daughters.

"Attended in what capacity?" asks Ekachta. "I can put about that we need an assistant for you but ideally there'd be a clear job description - is it important for some reason that it be a woman? That they be young?"

"Assistant is about right," she says. Writing a job description for it--well, that'd be easier if she knew her own job description. "It must be a woman, for sake of propriety, comfort, and ease of understanding. I would expect her to live here in the house, and to be available as I need. No doubt I will require many points of your culture to be explained to me, and the use of your tools demonstrated."

She holds a chair for a moment, thinking of Lady Maria, hoping to see her again. "Youth is not essential, but is helpful." Among other things, it will make her a bit more controllable, which they have precious little of at the moment. "But a married woman would no doubt expect her husband to join the household as well, which it seems premature to do before getting our feet beneath us."

"Single female blue cultural consultant with round the clock availability?" recaps Ekachta.

She purses her lips slightly. "As a major duty, yes." How to cross the cultural gulf? "A lady-in-waiting is... a magnifier for her mistress. She can read correspondence, she can host guests, she can discuss the affairs of court, she can keep her mistress's confidences and scheme with her. She is much like a friend."

"Some of those things we're in the habit of employing yellows for but I think it folds into a blue job on the whole just fine. Cultural consultant and... attaché."

"Yes, that seems better."

"Do you want to interview candidates - that'll complicate information security, though not prohibitively - or read profiles and choose among them, or shall we just assign you someone?"

"Interviews would be best. If you got me some blue hair dye, we might not even have to let anything slip, although I imagine part of the appeal will be, well, the cultural novelty."

"Very much so, and - you sound like a native speaker of Tapap, but you carry yourself like you're important enough that anyone in a serious blue career track in your own country would expect to have heard of you, they might guess something was up."

"Well, it sounds like Felip plans to make an announcement soon enough that I doubt it will be too serious of a leak."

"Still, better to have a controlled release. I'll see who we can scare up by way of attaché candidates."

His tour of the house was somewhat faster than Isidonia's, focused on different things, and now he finds the greens at the dining room table and joins them.

"So, now that we're a bit settled in, do you have any more questions for me tonight?"

"Oh, absolutely - can you tell us more about the magic you can do?" says Hepka.

"I know about twenty different spells, across five different 'circles', which roughly corresponds to their complexity and difficulty." He'll gesture, and the color of a plate on the table flips from white to black. "That is a zeroth circle spell, which I can do without exhausting myself. The effect will fade after about an hour. Spells of higher circles deplete a reservoir of power, which recharges daily as I sleep. Many of my spells have subtle effects, which are nevertheless powerful. For example, there is a spell to create invisible armor and a spell to protect against arrows, which each last about a third of a day. I cast them on myself as a precaution against assassination or accident. The ones I use most often now besides those are one to draw forth someone's heroism, and another to allow them a moment of skillfulness. I can also enlarge someone's body, or cause them to move faster. Many of those spells last for a rather short amount of time--minutes or seconds. Useful in a fight, but one where I have to participate, rather than simply being part of preparations."

"Arrows in particular, or would it catch bullets too?"

"What does it mean to draw forth someone's heroism? Or allow them a moment of skillfulness?"

"...you use slings?" he asks, confused. It seems out of line with the rest of their material wealth.

"...no, guns."

Tahu pulls up a video of a grey shooting a gun and the fate of the paper target many yards away afterwards.

He has ever seen an arquebus, but he thinks of those as firing balls and this slim handheld weapon reminds him more of a wand with a curious grip. "Fascinating," he says. "That would be accomplished by magic in my homeland, and far too expensive to outfit every guard with." He'll also take a closer look at the device displaying the video. "Likewise this illusion. How are you creating it without magic?"

"A lot of our technology including pocket everythings like this runs on electricity. This grey in the video is a real person, with an electronic device pointed at her while she did these things exactly as you see them; it committed the events to recorded format, a video, and then I'm pulling it up on the internet, which is a network of many devices communicating with each other."

"And this pocket everything was... created by an artificer?" He didn't quite get an answer to his question--"runs on electricity" is about as informative as "runs on magic"--but he hasn't exactly been able to give them all that much detail himself.

"...it was made in a factory? A lot of people are involved in making them, and they're mass produced"

He doesn't actually know much about how magic items are made, but he doesn't think it helps to have more than one person working on one at a time. But that might just be wizards being antisocial.

"Electricity is used in our magic, but only as a weapon. To think that it can be tamed like fire, and open up such possibilities..."

"Electricity is great! I can probably find a Watch Us Work about making pocket everythings..."

Yes, he can. A video montage of manufacture set to jaunty music comes up.

The video is not very long, and he feels lost for most of it. The jaunty music and the transitions are both a bit disorienting. Objects are being moved around--sometimes by hands, sometimes by what are either complicated machines or strange stationary golems. He is left with the impression that these greens understand electricity about as well as he understands magic--which, to be fair, is enough to get by. It reminds him of watching a blacksmith at a forge.

When the video concludes, he changes the topic. It's late enough in the day. "You asked earlier about what it means to draw forth heroism; would you like a demonstration?"

"I'd like to know more about what that means first?" says Hepka.

Proof that she needs it, he thinks to himself. "For a bit more than an hour, you will be braver; your thoughts clearer, your actions more precise, your reactions more robust. We consider it harmless."

"And it work regardless of target species and doesn't make people do reckless things?"

"I have cast on several different species without issue." There is a wrinkle if she has spell resistance, but that would just confuse things to bring up. "It does not impart wisdom, but it imparts bravery, not recklessness. You should feel more in control of yourself, not less." 

"I'll try it," says Ashuao.

It is fast; words not in Tapap, gestures that a hand would not normally make, and a touch, over in a few seconds.

"- huh, I feel that. It's like... I want to say it's like I always imagined being the opposite of drunk would be?"

"Huh! Opposite of drunk and more courageous?"

"Yeah, like it wraps around or something."

He smiles. "No-mind."

"See, that sounds like a really bad mental state to be in when you call it that, but this state is instead great. I'd maybe call it propensity to flow."

He shrugs. "You have an hour; I suggest making good use of it. This is one of my more draining spells, and one I often use for myself; I can do it about a handful of times a day. I think I will check in with my wife."

"Yeah, go write a report, we'll cover for you if the blues ask."

Ashuao nods and disappears into one of the offices.

The chore purple with the security clearance arrives, is introduced as Saaski Mihent, and wants to know what the resident aliens normally like to eat so she can approximate it as well as possible with local ingredients, and also take their measurements and solicit parameters for their preferred clothing styles.

She has lots of opinions, but the translation spell can only do so much. A photo on the pocket everything confirms that their "beef" does not come from a cow. She suggests something like the Mendevian buffet style, which will allow them to smell the foods, rather than picking by description or sight.

The clothing styles need to be a mix of performatively local and reminiscent of Cheliax or Taldor. She'll want to blend in while selecting her attaché, and does not trust the purple to understand the subtle distinctions that a blue would read from the various options; she'll need to wait for the attaché before finishing her wardrobe. But she can describe the basic daily needs, for both her and Felip, and select from the photos she's shown.

The purple's brought fabric swatches in case alien skin is sensitive to certain Amentan fibers or anything, and if they're not, she'll get right on ordering them changes of clothes and lots of snackboard type things to try.

She seems remarkably uninterested in how they feel, compared to how they look, their cultural significance, and their expense. She does compliment the softness.

As part of talking about clothes, it becomes clear that Isidonia is sewn into her current dress, and will need help to get out of it tonight.

"...wow," says Mihent. "Okay, the nightclothes will be here in less than half an hour, but I can also order a seamripper."

He gives her a hug from behind, feeling her body melt into his.

She's tense; she's tired. Her composure isn't cracking but her mind is racing, too many threads to chase down at once.

He lets go and addresses Mihent. "It was night when we left our home, and day here when we arrived; I imagine we've been awake much longer than you have. We will have dinner as soon as possible and then retire for the night."

"You got it. Dietary restrictions at all?" She's looking over the snackboard to see what they turned out to be partial to.

Detect Poison. Thankfully, magic and smell seem to think all of the foods are edible.

They favor the fruits, and the sweets, and Felip tries out all of the meats. They move slowly on several of the spiced snacks, carefully considering. Felip excitedly shares one with Isidonia; several of them get middling reviews, and a few merit grimaces.

When Mihent thinks she has the gist she gets express grocery delivery - fruit salad and rotisserie chicken and cake - and they can have it on the table in less than fifteen minutes from her placing the order.

She's carefully observing the blues and greens as dinner appears. Does anything stand out to her about their reactions?

They're letting the aliens serve themselves first. Patkeon, the blue intern, is asking Mihent if she needs anything the kitchen doesn't have for future "less sudden" meals; she checks but says it looks fine. Ashuao is avoiding the fruit salad.

The aliens are not expecting to serve themselves!

But he'll figure it out quickly enough, and pulls a leg off of the chicken to hand to Isidonia and then gets another for himself.

Wow with their bare hands o-fucking-kay! If that's how they roll! Everybody else does it with forks and knives!

It is not how she rolls. The dainty duchess delicately debones delivered delicatessen delights.

He, on the other hand, has the casual air of someone who can clean their clothes with a second's magic. "I find camp food tastes better eaten camp style," he explains, and then switches to knife and fork for the rest of the meal.

"Oh, is this the sort of thing you'd eat while camping on your world?" chirps Tahu.

"A roast bird? Indeed. Simple to catch, simple to prepare. I've probably eaten more meals around campfires than in dining halls."

He quickly filters thru his list of stories--Isidonia is in the ones of their Chelish tour, but that will make them too homesick, and ones from Galt will predate her. He settles on a Mendevian contract he fulfilled which involved many weeks traipsing throughout the woods, and the supply challenges they ran into. He doesn't expect it'll move at a narratively satisfying pace, but at least it will give them a framework for clarifying questions. 

"It's not wild," says Tahu. "The bird. Amentans eat almost no hunted meat in the modern day."

"Few of our city dwellers do, if you count fish as caught instead of hunted." Do they... all live in cities?

"Even farmers, I wouldn't expect them to hunt anything - they might shoot pests but a pest animal could have been anywhere, I wouldn't trust it..."

"We farm fish, too! Pen 'em up in great big stationary nets. There is some wild caught, though, some fish are very difficult to farm."

"I hear the sedacthys or mermen have some arrangements like that, but I am unfamiliar with the details." 

"Oooh what are those?" asks Hepka.

"Mermen are much like you or I, but they live and breathe underwater. Their upper half resembles that of a human, while their lower half resembles that of a fish." He's more familiar with them because of the archhealer's reincarnations, but--talking about that would probably lead to too much digression. "Sedachtys are--do you have sharks, or something similar? If the merfolk are half-man and half-fish, they are half-fish and half-man. They are bloodthirsty in the extreme and the ocean floor is a giant patchwork of their feuding kingdoms."

"...half-fish and half-man as in they have fish heads and human legs?" says Tahu. "How'd that happen, do you know - do you know about evolution -"

"I'm so curious about the grammatical caste you must have in your language which is sex-based, that's such a way to do it," says Ashuao. "And it's leaking into so much other word choice, or is it the other way around -"

He really doesn't know very much about linguistics or etymology, and so will continue steering around those subjects.

"You would be able to tell apart a sedachty leg and a human leg from twenty paces, whereas the difference between a merfolk arm and a human arm would be subtler; you might have to feel their skin. As for the gradual development of things, I'm not sure what that has to do with the many different races of the world."

"Well, on Amenta," Tahu says, "all species of creature are related. Very, very, very distantly related. But we can dig up ancient bones and eggs and skin imprints and petrified wood and so on, and figure out how old they are, and get a picture of how everything alive is descended from things that lived millions of years ago. Now, with magic in the mix maybe that's just not true at all where you're from, but if the assumption breaks down I'd be so fascinated to know where."

Millions of years ago! And their years, not his.

"I think your world might be older than mine," he begins. "It is thought that there have been about ten thousand years of mortal history on Golarion; before that was the Age of Creation, when time had little meaning to the gods. The creation or alteration of life through the use of magic is... not common, but not uncommon either. It is said many monsters were born in the lab of some wizard, and demons are eager to sow corruption among the living things of the world."

"Are demons a wizard-made creature, then?" asks Tahu.

"Demons are from one of the nine afterlives I described earlier. One of the many crises Golarion faced was that a durable portal had been opened between the home plane of demons and Golarion, which required colossal efforts to contain. Thankfully, it is now closed." He will, once again, say a silent prayer of gratitude for the heroes that closed it.

"The demons are... dead people...? Not their bodies, presumably, but their - identities, re-embodied...? And they showed up to do... what exactly."

"Let's discuss something else over dinner," she interjects.

"Of course, it is too heavy a subject. Tell me more about how you can read the record of millions of years."

"Oh... sure," says Tahu, and he pulls up pictures of fossilized creatures, including prehistoric ancestors of Amentans - "These aren't bone any more, over time the bones mineralize, but the shape is informative" - and give an executive summary of the dating methods they use.

At some point things snap into place. Their brightly colored hair had made him think of gnomes, but the picture that's being painted is not of the residents of Tapa, but the residents of the whole world. "Your civilization... is only made of humans? What happened to the rest?"

"- we're not the same species as you!" says Tahu. "I admit we look a lot alike but our hair doesn't come in that color, and your teeth are bigger than ours, I think, I haven't gotten a close look. But there've never been any other sapient species on Amenta that we know of. We haven't found any tools or other artifacts that couldn't have been Amentans'."

"My mistake, Amentans." Something about the situation seems simpler, thinking of himself as transported to a faraway kingdom with denizens of an unfamiliar race.

But it also feels lonelier. He always got along better with humans than nonhumans, and now the only human around is Isidonia--he strengthens his resolve to return to Cheliax.

"- definitely bigger incisors, not sure about the rest of your teeth. Whenever you're ready I think the blues rustled up some doctors who'd be really curious to get a closer look at what else might be different."

They share a glance.

"I would be happy to receive them in the morning," he says, "but I think we should retire to our rooms, for now."

"I've got that seam ripper," says Mihent, "and the nightclothes are all unwrapped and laid out on the beds for you."

She'll nod. She still doesn't expect one purple to be enough, but so far Mihent seems competent.

Mihent will accompany Isidonia to her room and seam-rip her free. If Isidonia needs help getting the nightclothes on she can do that too. She might not be used to stuff you can just pull over your head because it stretches.

She is not used to stretchy fabric, but--even so, she's also not used to dressing herself.

"How should I summon you if I need you?" she asks, once she's changed.

"I'm going to sleep in the next room over and should hear you if you call my name - do you wake up in the night a lot?"

"Not often, no. That will be all for now."

"Sleep well!" And she sees herself out of the room.

Isidonia will walk to Felip's room.

Felip is seated, eyes closed, thinking. He looks old. It is one of the pieces of magic he kept up his sleeve.

Some magicians are tricksters, playing fast and loose with the minds and trust of others. Felip is repulsed by those sorts of enchantments, even as ones that soothe and straighten his mind, and the minds of his allies, are his most trusted tools. The ability of magic to read minds is useful for security the world over, though he has stopped relying on it Cheliax, given their recent oppressive history with it. (He couldn't cast the spell himself, which made it easy to abandon.) But the ability of magicians to change shape--well, there's really no use for that besides trickery, and these Amentans would undoubtedly become suspicious if he demonstrated it.

Well, except for this spell. Rather than letting him take on an arbitrary shape, it lets him switch through the three stages of life; youth, adult, and elder. And not as he actually is or was or will be, but an idealized version of it. As the Father, he is smarter and wiser than his base form, even though his base form is also a literal father.

As the Grandfather, he is even wiser, and he is sifting through the implications.

She has still not adapted to their new dynamic. For decades, she has been his intellectual superior, the two of them splitting areas of responsibility and trusting each other implicitly. And now, overnight he has become her equal in many ways, and she cannot expect the same deference. But also she does not need to take the same leadership. She sits on the bed, watching him think, and thinking herself.

"I see three avenues," he begins.

"The first is our road home. To walk it ourselves, my magic must deepen to the point where I can breach the planar boundary on my own. Even then, we may lack the tools we need to find Golarion among the cosmos. To deepen my magic... they do not have monsters, they likely do not have dungeons. I can throw myself into their politics and their wars, and hope the strains that puts on my magic is enough to stretch it."

The second is our rescue. We need to attract the attention of the gods, if they can rescue us, or to trust that President Cotonnet is coming for us, one way or another. We perhaps can light a beacon for the gods, but I do not see how to do so for the archmage.

The third is Amenta. These people... I do not know if they need us, or if they need the gods, or if they are teachers for us. But I think we must embrace this world wholeheartedly to make the most of it, both for our eventual return and in the case it does not happen."

She nods. There's a melancholy about her.

He turns his head a bit; looking directly at her is too much, at the moment. "I know I have spent much time away from our children, and you little, and they need their mother yet. But Caterina and Felip are old enough to survive our absence, even if permanent, and they will not abandon their siblings. Our loss will be keenly felt but we never planned to live forever."

She nods, and looks him in the eye. "Tell me you will never give up on returning to them."

"I will not. How could I?"

But as he says it--he sees how. He would not stay in this land for ease or comfort, not while Cheliax suffers still. But if they are unknowingly marching to the Abyss--thirteen billion souls--to fix that he would sacrifice his whole line, and perhaps all of Cheliax. With tears streaming down his face, with his mind racing for alternatives, but he could not turn his back on that many strangers in need, even bound as he is to Cheliax and his children.

But the choice is not in front of them, and he does not expect to face it. He expects to find a solution that satisfies all ends, even if it takes him years of work, even if it takes unexpected luck and providential serendipity. It has happened before; it will happen again. He will be ready to be a vessel of the goodly gods when the opportunity arises.

They confer a bit more; she returns to her room to sleep and he prays earnestly and long, then he goes to sleep.

Desna's boon still operates--or he is too used to it to dream of anything else. He sees Fraga stretching before him, he teleports from place to place. He sees the news spread that the duke is missing, that the new Duke is staying in Westcrown for the convention. It is viewed as an ill omen everywhere. He sees their suspicion of the boy, their ambition growing; he sees the bandits that he talked into legitimacy wondering just how long their leash is now. He sees everyone whose loyalty is personal, and how many of them decide that their other responsibilities are more pressing, or that they should focus on finding him and rescuing him, instead of rescuing his duchy.

The visions are not real, he says to himself in the morning. There are what could be real. He prays again to clear his mind, and then spends fifteen minutes concentrating on his magic. At least his spells have returned to him.

When they emerge for the morning Mihent is up and ready to show them how the showers work if there is any sign they might not have availed themselves of this knowledge already. New clothes are ready for them to change into after that, and Muim has lists of possible appointments they could choose to entertain - various candidate attachés for Isidonia, and while she's busy with that Felip has lots of greens who want to know about magic, and culture, and the other sapient species on Golarion, and the business with the afterlives and their magical governors, and of course he can summon an expert on anything that strikes his fancy if the three already-resident greens can't answer his questions. They've also got a yellow PR lady to talk about the possibility of announcing the aliens' existence if he wants to move ahead with that. Mihent whips up fluffy banana pancakes with chopped nuts and cherry syrup for breakfast, and sides of sausages and pickle chutneys and toasted sprouts.

They eat their breakfast together on a patio overlooking the grounds. He wishes he had broadsheets or reports to read, but knows he would be better served by tales told to children. They ponder the list of possible appointments, more to stay connected than to add their expertise together.

Felip elects to see their healers first, so they can determine just how close their biology is, followed by their scholars of magic, followed by their scholars of the afterlives. Afterwards, he will consult with their tutors about Tapa's government, the other governments of the world, and their communication systems. The yellow will likely be pushed to a later day, unless everything moves more quickly than he expects.

For breakfast he changed into the new clothes provided him, but is unused to the fit, and a glance confirms Isidonia doesn't like it more than usual. Yesterday's clothing was his party silks, a level of ornamentation beyond what he would normally wear daily. But today is more like "meeting diplomatic delegations" than it is like a usual day, and it seems appropriate for that.

Besides, it seems like they benefit from seeming alien, and the local clothes don't help with that.

She would not wear the same dress two days in a row, and so is trying on the local clothes. She is spending breakfast relearning how to move with the clothes instead of against them, as well as considering her options.

One of the candidates she rejects out of hand, but will meet the others with a thirty minute break in between each.

Here is the first single young ambitious blue, who has to be female for some reason but fortunately half the people meeting that description are! She looks at the hair, she beams, and she offers a handshake. "I'm Ninpa Nenwa, delighted to meet you, your grace."

"Charmed." The handshake is not part of her Avistani repertoire, and so is less graceful than her other movements. She'll gesture towards two chairs, oriented with a comfortable angle between them; easy to look at the other party, and also easy to look away.

"Tell me about yourself." Isidonia is a long and practiced observer of people; she's interested in the choice of topic (and will ask her own questions later). How does Ninpa move? Where do Ninpa's eyes rest? What excites her, and what is she avoiding?

Ninpa Nenwa is looking at Isidonia's hair and her jewelry and her teeth when she's not making eye contact. Alien-ness, apparently, excites her, not that this sets her apart. "Right now I'm technically still in university in the international relations track, but if you go with another candidate, I'm lined up to be a junior intern to the undersecretary of international relations. Their office mostly facilitates Tapa hosting various conventions in science, medicine, the arts, standardization protocols, and other widely important topics, so that we can always have a finger on the pulse of progress. In addition to Tapap I can speak Oahkar, Taroleen and Litholeen, and tolerable Baravic. My jobname is a reference to an old poem about the fingers of the hand cooperating on a single task while all moving differently but it literally translates to 'hand'."

"Of those topics for conventions, which do you think is most important, and which least important?"

"I'm personally partial to medical conferences and was planning to specialize in them somewhat but importance-wise I'd say the sciences, or at least, that's what I'd say if we had never been visited by magic aliens, and now it's anyone's guess what'll turn out to be important. Maybe the right way to plan is still for physics to hold the key but maybe now we should be extra excited about medicine in case we can all turn into magicians too with gene therapy or something! - arguably at that level of cutting edge medicine is more of a science than its own thing."

"In my home planet, medicine was mostly the province of clerics. A few knew how to craft herbal medicines, and many knew how to bind wounds and treat burns. But as I understand it, the performance of medicine is the province of oranges, here. Who attends the convention, and how does it work?"

What happens to Ninpa's eyes when Isidonia tells that story? The phrase 'home planet' is not particularly natural, for her, but seems like the sort of thing the Amentans might like.

Ninpa does look like she appreciates the unironic use of the phrase "home planet"! Also she may not have been briefed on what a cleric is but she doesn't ask at this time.

"There are a lot of different events for different specialties! The pediatric oncologists aren't going to the hemopathology conferences and neither of them go to the obstetrics conventions, and so on. And it's not always oranges! Some countries have green doctors and we have to accommodate that if we want to be able to include everyone with something to contribute. Usually there's an event space rented out by a foundation or association of some kind - for example the Unaligned Orange League does a convention on emergency medicine every year, they're a disaster response group and show up on battlefields. They'll identify some people who've made advances in the field recently or who have notable accomplishments within it, and invite them to give a talk or sit on a panel. They've got to hire lots of people to keep everything running, the UOL has catering for their events though not everyone does and you need an online schedule for people to consult and security and ticketing payment management to defray the costs if not necessarily turn a profit."

She'll nod, at that. Ninpa seems focused on categories and concepts, to her; groups and institutions. When it came to caste, she described the exceptions, not the standard approach. Time to turn towards the personal.

She'll gesture for Mihent to supply them with pastries and tea, and then raise another topic.

"Tell me about a time your loyalties were tested, and how you thought through your decision."

Mihent does not natively understand the gesture but she guesses correctly anyway.

The question seems to surprise Ninpa but she gives it a minute of thought. "...this isn't a work example," she says eventually, "since I don't have much in the way of work experience, but when I was four, a school friend of mine had a mental health problem and desperately did not want her parents, or the school, to find out about it. I went along with that at first, but then I realized - not that the situation was worse than I thought, but that I wasn't getting all the crucial evidence about how bad it was, so if it was taking a turn for the worse I wouldn't necessarily find out. I went to a great-uncle I'm close with about it and got his advice, without identifying my friend, and then I told her that she had her choice of going to her parents or the school administration or the relevant government department but if she didn't pick I was going to, and she went with me to the school. I think I did the right thing but I knew at the time I might lose the friend and I have."

She is thrown by a child having a mental health problem, but then remembers the difference in years. Unfortunately, while Amenta can send its alien-lovers, Golarion did not choose the same. She briefly imagines the gnome who would have sold their soul to swap places with her, who would've eagerly reconfigured their mind to fit.

"How did you learn about the problem in the first place?" It doesn't much impact the question of whether she did the right thing, but it is useful to know how perceptive Ninpa is, how much others open up around her.

"She told me - she didn't expressly swear me to secrecy first but it was understood that she wouldn't have said anything if she'd thought I'd thoughtlessly blab."

She'll nod at that, and then move down to the next question in her mental list.

"Who in your family do you look up to, and why?"

"There's my great-uncle I mentioned; he never had a career per se but I think he's incredibly judicious and thoughtful and he's got a way of being unhurried that I think puts people at ease, struggle though I might to imitate it. My mother's got a really stellar career going with the department of public health and I admire her work ethic and time management."

"Wisdom is queen of the virtues, yet diligence amplifies them all."

She will pause briefly, considering.

"What does being blue mean to you?"

That question, also, seems surprising (the family one did not). "- it means that I have the privilege and opportunity to lead people and shape the world in which they live to support their best qualities," she says eventually.

Felip would like this one, she thinks.

"Do you have any questions for me?"

"Can you tell me more about what someone coming into this position in your own country would tend to have by way of skills and background?"

"I am still learning the differences between our planet and yours, but I think a major difference is that our politics is much more personal, and geographically defined. For us, 'court' is the place where governing happens, and everyone involved can fit inside one enclosed space. My husband and I were responsible for the entire government of the duchy of Fraga; before we left we were in the national capital, where the restoration government was determining how it would function with around six hundred individuals, conducting our morning business in a single room.

Many women desire different things in their ladies-in-waiting, but a familiarity with courtly life, and the subtle movements of politics and people, would be a requirement everywhere. She would have the skills that set her out as graceful--not expected to master all of them, but enough that she could contribute to making a gathering lively and desirable. She would herself be from a noble family, though she would likely be a peripheral member, unless attending on someone of high importance. One of the daughters of our vassal counts was a lady-in-waiting, as was one of my Taldan cousins.

I expect the value of being good company to directly translate, and there to be a shift in which political skills are most desirable."

"So it sounds like entertaining is a lot of the province of - not blues - aristocrats?"

"Indeed. The aristocrats must work together to govern the realm, and the mutual warmth necessary for that monumental task is built in ballrooms and dining halls. Complicated issues can be settled in delicate and private negotiations."

She doesn't bring up marriages; it is too painful to consider her great project of this season, now happening without her or perhaps not happening at all.

"Ballrooms, gosh. I took a half-season of line dancing lessons one winter but that was purely recreational and it's not customary here as an instrument of politics - parties and dinners are, though."

"If we were to host a reception for the governors of the local province, how would you design it?"

"The province in particular? That's - depending what exactly you mean by governors just ten or so people but if they're bringing top staff that's another thirty or forty, it'd fit comfortably on the roof garden of the Swiensa building and if I couldn't book that or the weather were inclement I'd either rent a yacht on the lake or borrow my aunt's hills house for it, both of those would come with some staff but the gardens don't and either way I'd want catering in local cuisine, maybe Pepmametsa Bistro but I'd want to check that they still have the seal of approval, if they don't I'd get a recommendation from my friend who knows the food scene better than I do. The state security detail would do, but if you were there I'd tell them to triple it. All those people already know each other so I wouldn't want to schedule icebreakers..."

She nods along. The pace, the options--she could be entrusted with organizational matters. What about aesthetic ones?

She gestures around the room they're in, the decor. "What does this room say to you? How would you make it more welcoming? What would you do to make it more formal?"

"Huh. I think they use this house for diplomatic guests in general, so that knowledge means I'm not getting a completely fresh impression of the place. That said. The room is... nice, but maintainable by purples who have security clearances instead of purples who know exactly how a specific family likes things - I think hard copy books would be welcoming if they were well chosen, one caseful of them would do it, you could put it over there if you angled the chairs a little differently. I want to say something about the curtains but I'm not sure what, exactly, I'd change; interior design is purple. More formal I'd take out the comestible trays and maybe the tables that hold them too, people don't snack when they're doing really serious business. Swap out the art prints for maps and portraits."

She nods. She won't have a good sense of how sensible those answers are until she's comparing the candidates against each other.

"Did you have any more questions for me?"

"What kind of schedule do you envision this position calling for - both in terms of hours per week and in terms of, I was told it mattered that I am not married, does anything change if I get married and if so is there a specific number of seasons you'd expect me to postpone it?"

"I would expect you to join the household and spend most of your time in my presence or accomplishing tasks as I direct, with some time to pursue your own interests. If you were to marry, either your husband would join the household or you would leave it to join his, at our discretion. It remains to be seen what our schedule will look like; I expect us to be mostly engaged in receiving vistors, but this may turn in to the Chelish embassy or a center of magical research." She does not say out loud the thought that they may simply become a zoo exhibit, exotic groundhogs for the multitude to gawk at. 

"- okay, so a live-in position, but do you expect to be able to accommodate any time off beyond sick leave?"

Something about the framing of this line of questions is jarring to her; it seems too mercenary, or like it creates too much separation between the role and the person. It's not like she has time off from being a duchess, or being a mother.

"Could you give me an example of what you have in mind?"

"If a friend of mine gets married, or if there's an errand I need to run in person, or if a friend I haven't seen in a while wants to get together, would I be able to get a day or an afternoon at a time off with appropriate notice?"

"Yes, those all seem reasonable. You may have to become more wary of your friends; we have heard that when the news is released broadly, it will create quite the stir."

"Oh, absolutely, I won't tell them where I'm working. Everyone understands that sometimes someone gets a classified job and has to tell everyone they're on the board of directors of the university of minding your own business."

Another mismatch. "Will you be recognized, if we are seen in public together?"

"- that depends where we go. I don't normally live in Shapto, but I do look a lot like my grandfather, who works in the federal government, and anywhere with a lot of blues has some chance of my being remembered from some event. But I'm too young to have a lot of independent recognition."

"As you say. Any other questions?" She thinks that Ninpa is not correctly assessing how motivated people will be to learn about them, but perhaps espionage is less well-developed here.

"Anything it'd behoove me to brush up on before starting if it should be the case that I'm starting?"

"I expect to make a decision tonight. In the meantime, you might think about how to run a conference on aliens." They might end up doing so--and if not, the undersecretary of international relations undoubtedly will be interested in that. 

"Absolutely!" grins Ninpa Nenwa.

"That will be all, then." She will dismiss Ninpa with a small nod, and then direct Mihent to supply her with writing supplies once Ninpa is gone.

Mihent has acquired longhand writing supplies for the low-tech aliens; she's got a selection of ballpoint pens and some pencils and a spiral notebook for her.

She writes what struck her about Ninpa, and a short note asking Ekachta about her grandfather and granduncle, and then takes a few moments to simply stare off into the distance.

Once she's done with that, she starts preparing for the next applicant.

(Ekachta can identify the grandfather - he's in legislature - but can't figure out which grand-uncle she meant based on the description.)

The next lady-in-waiting candidate has her ultramarine hair in a long mohawk braided down the middle of her head and she's got darker brown skin than most of the people they've encountered so far. "Good morning, I'm Chiko, no job name at the moment!"

"Job name?"

"Oh, has nobody explained that? Tapasphere custom - us, our protectorates, Anitam, a couple other places - is a personal name from your parents, given first, and then when you know what you want to do with your career, you pick a word that indicates or is somehow emblematic of that. I've been traveling - hopped back here from Shi Cubrio on an overnight flight, lucky I can sleep on airplanes - and that's not a job, and I haven't been certain what I'll settle down with, which is why I was free to come take this interview. It is absolutely thrilling to meet you."

"A pleasure to meet you as well. So, tell me about yourself." Once again, she studies Chiko closely. Where is her attention? What is she drawn towards?

The hair. Again. But also she's pulled out her pocket everything and has it on the arm of her chair to peer at notes.

"I'm from one of our border provinces, down south. My great-great-grandmother's running this whole operation, she's Ekachta's boss. I was tracked for constituent management, in school, though I haven't started uni, I'm taking a year off to see the world - or I was, before this happened. I used to win public speaking contests, but that was all at the junior level, I haven't competed since I was four."

Great-great-grandmother? That opens some questions about their biology and lifespans, but--another time.

"Do you have a favorite poem to recite?" To her, that is a natural followup to the claim about public speaking contests, and she doesn't notice that it might be a non sequitor.

"I do, actually, but it's six minutes long, would you like to just hear the first stanza or two...?"

"Yes, that would be enough." How good is she?

She stands up for this and starts declaiming about the villages nestled within the mountains of Ethkinai. She's obviously working from a poetic style and public speaking convention Isidonia's never heard of in her life but it's not surprising that she could've beaten thousands of other teenagers like that.

Alas, Isidonia grew up listening to bards, and is married to Felip, and it takes much more than that to impress her. But she'll still nod and do a soft clap at the end.

"Tell me more about constituent management."

"So, most countries, Tapa included, are democracies. To get anywhere in a track where you need to win elections, you need to know what people want and how to convey to them that you're the right person to give it to them. But if you just read randomly selected parts of the internet or talk to random people in the street you will get very poor quality information. My track was about how to manage the trusting relationship an elected official has to have with the voters. If I'd gone ahead with that I would be attaching myself to someone on an election track, and figuring out what they should say in their campaign and how it was landing with the voters."

They really do all live in cities. "When you say you would attach yourself--which side is courting the other?"

"Oh, both, I would select someone with policies I could believe in and defend to the constituency so the would-be candidates would be trying to sell me on it, but they certainly wouldn't have to add me to a campaign they didn't think I'd serve well."

Hm. She'll signal for snacks, and also to give herself a bit of time to think.

This dimension of Chiko feels like a double-edged sword. An expert in knowing what the people think seems important if they are to have influence on this world. But she seems flighty and noncommittal, full of independent ideas. If Isidonia knew the landscape, she could probe to see whether or not they already agree, but she doesn't.

She perhaps can answer her questions indirectly. "What does being blue mean to you?"

"It means I can decide to matter. A lot of blues decide not to. I've thought about it too. Other castes might matter, or they might not, but it's usually not something they can just take up as a mantle - they get lucky one way or another, they succeed at something. But even a blue whose campaign loses changed the landscape of politics doing it."

"And do you think taking this position would make you matter more, or less?"

"Oh, more, a lot more. I'd expect solely in soft power, but the key word there is power."

"Tell me the outline of how you would use that power, once acquired."

"Absolutely everyone wants this - 'this' being our first encounter with aliens, let alone magical ones - to go well, and I'm no exception - based on the job description I got I think that's going to, for your attaché, involve explaining Amentan cultural stuff to you, picking up what I can about your own culture to explain it to others, putting you in touch with people and filtering out the ones who are wastes of your time. So obviously that involves a lot of judgment calls, how to describe things and what to emphasize and who to dismiss versus invite in. In that respect I'd be aimed solidly at 'it goes well' - we all learn a ton and the greens get to play with magic and so on. But I also think - once the secrecy is lifted, if at all, not immediately - anyone who can credibly claim the ability to give you a ten-second pitch on any policy or interest group is going to have as much cachet as she knows what to do with. You're one of the only two aliens on the planet. Absolutely everyone wants to keep you happy. If you mention that you're in favor of dockworkers' unions or against differential execution by caste or something, that's worth any ten provinces full of votes in the same direction. And you're only going to mention those things if you find out they exist, instead of hearing about dual-casteing prostitutes or the military action in Imde, and it sounds like you're hiring for somebody to help you know what exists."

She is good at controlling her reactions; there is no value to be gained from sharing her shock at a blue mentioning prostitution. But if Chiko is an ideologue, she is hiding it well; her examples seemed more like hypotheticals than issues near and dear to her heart. She will feel out Chiko's sense of the world and the electorate--a skill that Isidonia only recently developed for the convention.

"How did you estimate ten provinces, and what do you think we could do to raise or lower the number?"

"Ten provinces worth of votes is about what it would take to advance any unpolarized, relatively neutral political agenda. Like the ones I mentioned, as opposed to, say, dropping the war on Voa, that'd be harder, you'd probably have to make more than a brief mention and have a serious argument that demonstrated that you understood what was going on there; or lapsing to protectorate-grade population control enforcement, that'd be easier, you could just wait for the right person to bring it up and make a face. If you want your word as a magical alien to carry even more weight than it already does, well, it currently has the weight it does because of the potential you represent for solving problems that bother the people of Amenta today. Realize the potential, reap the clout. If you want less attention, the opposite - or just don't let them break the infosec around your existence."

She'll nod at that. She's not going to ask which problems they can solve--that's a question Felip will presumably be figuring out with their greens. She thinks she has the measure of Chiko, or enough to move on to questions.

"Are there any questions you have for me?"

"Why in the world do you specifically want a woman for this?"

She considers this. "Are men and women so similar, on your planet, that they may be freely interchanged? The role involves quite a bit of personal closeness, which would be inappropriate to have with any man who is not my husband."

"I'm pretty sure the only other jobs I've ever heard of with gender requirements were 'wet nurse' and 'pregnancy surrogate', and the right meds can get a man to do the first thing, it's just not worth the health insurance premiums, but I guess if the thing isn't the job but the degree of access I could imagine where the norm might have come from. Is your husband hiring a man?"

"Women are held to a higher degree of propriety than men are," she says delicately. "I do not think the Duke is hiring anyone yet; the management of the household is my responsibility, and the management of the realm is his, and it remains to be seen what realm we will obtain on this world."

"Is that... also a gender thing, or just the specialization you two happen to have."

"There are three factors, of which gender is one. The second is who has personal power; my husband is a magician and I am not, and so he is much more able to defend the realm in times of need. The third is who holds title; my husband is the Duke of Fraga in his own right and I am a duchess by virtue of being his wife. If anything, we were unusual in how much of the administration of the realm I handled, because of our history. Both of us were born aristocrats, but my father held his duchy in Taldor while Felip's father was exiled from his lands in Cheliax, and so my education was more focused on the practicalities of administration than his was."

Chiko's eyes go a bit wide at "defend the realm", but she seems to be following along, and nods.

"Did you have any other questions?"

"Can I bring my own purple?"

"Of course. They've only issued us with one so far, and while she seems to be quite efficient I can't imagine that'll be enough for the household once it is active."

"They probably don't know what-all you want them for - and also might be expecting you don't know how much purple work is managed with appliances now, like laundry and dishes - and don't want to tell too many purples what's up till they're sure which ones, but I've got a factotum I trust implicitly."

"The importance of trust is difficult to overstate. I am feeling the loss of my old companions quite keenly."

She sips from her drink, giving Chiko an opening to ask another question.