"Wow. Is it mostly humans?"

"It's all humans. Humans evolved on a planet called Earth and colonized the galaxy from there. I have no idea where you came from."

"...I guess probably Earth if that's where all the other humans in the galaxy come from? How do you know that? How long ago was it?"

"Humans first left Earth hundreds but not thousands of years ago."

"...then that doesn't explain anything, we've been here much longer than that. What is Ibyabek like? What are your gods?"

Why does everyone expect Ibyabek to have gods?? "We don't have gods."

"....what, none of them? Huh. Okay. What's that like - that's not a very helpful question? Who organizes, uh, courts, and aid to the poor, and banks, and orphanages and so on?"

"The state handles that class of thing except we don't need banks and don't have poor people, having progressed beyond the use of money."

"- you ...don't have poor people?"

"...no, because we don't use money." Kyeo is pretty sure that poor people are people who have less money than everyone else, so.

"But do you have, uh, people who are hungry sometimes, people who are sick and can't get a healer to come heal them because they don't have anything to trade in exchange, people whose house is too small for all of them to live in..."

"Nobody has to pay for food or medicine," Kyeo says. "Although we don't have any magic healing. I think people's houses are generally the right size."

"I guess most people could just grow their own food," she says, but she sounds slightly confused. "Are there not cities or armies? Is everyone a farmer?"

"There are cities and armies and we don't all grow our own food," he says. "I'm in the military."

"How do the people in the cities get food? Do they trade city goods for it?"

"No. People on less civilized planets have to make exchanges to get things they need but on Ibyabek they don't. The farmers grow food, and the truckers bring it to the city, and then everyone gets food, because otherwise people might starve. The farmers do also get things that are made in cities when they need them but it's not a purchase."

"Huh, okay. Will they give our starving people food, once we can contact them?"

"I think maybe you'd have to become part of Ibyabek? Or the starving people could move to Ibyabek."

"What would becoming part of Ibyabek work like?"

"I don't know, we've never had an annexation on another planet before."

"Which gods do you permit the worship of? ...I guess if you don't have any maybe you've had no reason to figure that out -"

"Who does your military fight?"

"How would they end hunger, if we joined..."

"We have to defend our part of the solar system against various bad actors. I don't know the logistics they'd need to do to get another place up to Ibyabekan standards."

"Right but just - in general, what kinds of things would they be doing, do they have... crops that grow better?"

"I don't know how much magic is helping yours but there have been improvements over time relative to the last time any Earth-extracted human used a sword."

"Do we ...have to join Ibyabek for them to teach us those?"