And, from the darkness, with a flourish of fog and glitter cascading around them like so much sea spray, emerges a figure.

Inhumanly tall and with unnaturally much of that height being leg, they cast a striking silhouette.  They are clad mostly in deep red velvet layered over black silk and leather, composed into a strange and quite ornate outfit.  Tasteful sparkles of gold and silver jewelry ornament them there and there and there, and they too are masked, though in a simpler style, evocative of a black skull.  A mane of densely curled golden blond hair pours out from their scalp, whipping around them in the gale.

The fog dissipates and the wind quiets as their gaze flicks between the assembled ceremonialists.

The assembled humans[A] all look at each other--actually most of A look at the androgynous one with the fancy yarn--and then back at the tall blond person[B] like A're expecting B to say something. The one with the weaving smiles encouragingly.

The dramatic newcomer produces some sort of static, in the air and clinging to the humans' skin and building in their ears.  This lasts only a moment before it resolves, like an old radio being tuned, into music.  Orchestral, grand, intricate; it sounds like its source sweeps and teleports through different locations in the clearing.

And after not very long, it pauses, the last note ringing, and if any of the humans think back on it they find they aren't quite able to remember the tune.

The newcomer continues to stand, posed elegantly, where they appeared.

One person starts applauding, which gets the rest to join in. Then the one with the spiderweb photo raises a hand and says, "External: sorry, I can't tell which muse you metaphorically-are?"

The metaphorical muse produces a shorter musical phrase.

"I was unable to extract syntactic content from that," says the weaver. (This is a single syllable in Convergentlanguage, and sounds very different from the two-syllable word for "I was able to extract syntactic but not semantic content from that" and the one syllable for "my interpretation of that was ambiguous or low-prior in a way I cannot easily phrase a clarifying question about".)

What a musical muse this is.  This time there's - maybe the barest hint of meaning in it?  For a split second, the speaker's confusion is echoed back to the group.

The masked person[A] looks around, hurries through the concluding phrase with A's metaphorical heart not really in it, and then pulls off A's mask. "Are you okay, person?"

Confusion concept music??

The writer tries singing the chorus of a song about meeting new people [B] and learning about B and befriending B.

The newcomer watches and listens intently, and then . . . does not stop doing that when the singing does.

. . . How about the first verse and then the chorus again? A couple more people join in on second chorus.

They keep up their very focused observation, and, once they're sure the people are done singing for the moment:

Friendship concept!  New people concept - new place concept?  (This is the first communication they've added an aspect of novelty to; it's metaphorically a bit fuzzier around the edges but not much less comprehensible.)  Old place bad old-new place good-bad, old place bad bad bad bad new place good question mark friendship concept?

This kicks off a huddle and a hasty conversation.

". . . Alien telepath?"

"Alien telepath."

"Outsidepredictionspaceevent!"

"Very."

"We're gonna clean up in the markets."

"Help us figure out communicating with the alien first!"

"I'm going to!"

"I call trying first."

Then the humans all turn back to the new arrival and the one with the pieces of colored glass says "This is a good place. We're friendly and we want to help," and holds out one of the pieces of glass--a translucent deep blue one with its sharp edges already covered by copper tape--in an open palm. "Would you like a present because we're friends?"

The alien doesn't react to this for several long seconds, then steps forward to examine the glass.  Their footsteps are audible (though they sound a bit unusual), but the train of their skirt brushing over the forest floor is not.

They bend down close to look at the glass, then look up at the person holding it without sending anything.  They do not seem to have much of a concept of personal space.

Well, everyone knows that if aliens exist they're inevitably going to be super weird. At least this one is bigger than a mouse and smaller than a traincar and doesn't think the standard polite greeting is an exchange of internal organs and is generally pretty tame by the standards of First Contact fiction. She flinches a little but keeps her hand out and tries singing another song, this one a little kids' song about how everything in the world is beautiful and the world is a great place to be.

They back off a bit while listening, and again wait till several seconds after she's finished to respond. Then, wordlessly and musically, they ask what a present is.

Aliens in First Contact fiction do sometimes have no concept of private property, so the genre is doing at least a bit of its intended job as scenario planning for reality. "It means I will be happy if you keep it with you and do things with it and use it for whatever you want to use it for. I use things like it to make big art pieces." As they say this they concentrate hard on first their remaining supply of these colors and then on their last stained-glass window as currently installed in a client's house, in case the telepathy does images, and then they hastily pull out their handcomp with the other hand and bring up a picture, in case it doesn't.

Well, this gets the alien to gingerly accept the glass, whether or not either of the nonverbal communication attempts were successful.  They turn it over in their hand, examining it from different angles, then close their fingers around it, return their hand to their side, and cast their gaze back up to the group.

The person with the yarn runs out of impulse control. "Where did you come from? Why are you on Firstplanet? To what extent is that what you always look like and to what extent did you pick it to match the context?"

They again send the old place concept, with an attached connotation of bad bad bad bad rather than that being explicitly stated after the fact, and also maybe it seems kind of naturey?  The badness distinctly has the flavor of being boring or stifling; the alien doesn't seem likely to be fleeing a dying world or dealing with a similar level of threat.

The next response is a bit hard to interpret, but the pieces that come across have something to do with getting help from someone more powerful and something about random chance.

They look like this all the time because of a previous context.

That seems pretty promising as these things go! 

"Do you want to come back to the city with us? The city has more people and more things to see and do."

'Yes,' they say, and this time it sounds (or, well, "sounds") like words and not like music.

"Ayyyy, syntax!" says the one with the yarn.

"The end of the train line is a few miles this way," says the erstwhile ceremony leader, taking a few steps that way and making a beckoning gesture. The mathematician and the glass artist start packing up the lanterns.

The alien follows the ceremony leader and pauses when they do.  'Elaborate on 'train'.'

Handcomp picture of a train! The writer wins the race on this because she has a train as her lock screen. Meanwhile the glass artist explains, "A train is a machine for bringing people between a fixed set of places. We can all get in a big metal container and it will move to a new place and stop and move to another new place and stop and do that several more times. And when it gets to the place near where we want to go we will get out and walk there."

"Hey, where do we want to go? City hall is going to be closed. I guess we could call the emergency line?"

"If I was the person working the emergency line I would be happy to be called about aliens."

"I vote we work on language all night and go to City Hall in the morning when the alien can say if they want to or not."

"Good point, I change my mind. Hey alien, you got a name?"

'Ancorabenilisifentiliane,' they say, not looking up from the handcomp.  'What is this.'

"I was unable to extract syntactic content from that," four of the seven people say in unison. "Repeat very slowly?" Adds the weaver.

'An-cor-a-ben-i-lis-i-fen-til-i-a-ne.'

The programmer concentrates for a few seconds and then says "Ancorabenilisifentiliane. I'm Tren."

The others introduce themselves as Voli (the MC), Artha (with the photo), Kara (with the yarn), Neren (with the glass), Tona (with the weaving), and Mark (with the novel). Also they push back the hoods of their cloaks, which reveals that Mark has about six rings in each of her ears, Neren has pointy ears and no eyebrows, and Tona has six-color rainbow hair.

They nod to each of them when introduced, then turn their eyes back to the nearest handcomp.  'What is this,' they repeat.

"This is a handcomp! It can get most information that isn't a secret--text, pictures, how to get places, math--and I can communicate through it with anyone else with a handcomp, and it can record and display pictures and sound and video and keep track of appointments and play games and things."

They stare for a while.

'How.'

Tren says, "It's made of millions of tiny parts that can do logical operations and follow sequences of instructions in order, and it has sets of instructions to do those things, and it can get more information and more instructions from other machines via radio waves, which are a kind of invisible light. Invisible to us, I mean," he adds, pointing at himself and the other humans.

Stare stare stare.

'It is very regular.'

"The process is very regular, yes. Here, let me show you the camera." He turns on the front-facing camera and holds it up so Ancorabenilisifentiliane can see their own face. "See?"

'No.'

"Can you describe what you do perceive? Is the problem localising the handcomp in space, interpreting the 2d projected image, the pixels, the frame rate, other?"

'This is intended to display a 2d projected image?'

"Yes. Can you describe what you see in this area?" He traces around the edge of the screen with his finger.

'I see rectangles, in three colors.'

"Oh cool, you have really high visual acuity! Uh, hm, can you try to--reduce your focus a bit? Do you see how the relative brightnesses of the rectangles varies from one part of the screen to another? Our eyes integrate the brightnesses and interpret each set of three colors as a single color and the pattern of those integrated colors is the picture the handcomp is displaying. If you can't figure it out right now that's okay, just, handcomps are really useful. Actually let me give you a simpler image to practice on." He switches to a picture of a dark gray square on a white background.

'Describe the image the handcomp is currently displaying.'

"It's a dark gray square on a white background. With a bit of metadata at the top; please ignore that." He covers the top centimeter or so of the screen with his thumb. 

'I see the outline of this.  The colors differ; I see the square as' [untranslatable concept, rendered as music] 'and the background as' [second untranslatable concept rendered as music].  'Your species sees only one consistent set of colors?'

"Uh, most of us have about the same ability to detect the any given frequency of light, in a band between--I forget and I don't know if you even understand our measurements, both ends are somewhere in the nanometers, anyway some people have reduced sensitivity to some of those frequencies and can distinguish fewer colors than the modal person. There's a project to enable people to see more colors than currently possible but they've only succeeded in mice."

'How many colors can the modal person see.'

"We have three kinds of light receptor and can distinguish--let me look it up--about a million hues, but Convergentlanguage buckets them much more closely, we only have a few dozen words for colors."

'I see.'  Blink, blink.  Blink blink.  'Are your three kinds of light receptor attuned to the three colors which this projects.'

"Approximately--the handcomp colors are optimized for combinations of them being able to reproduce anything we can see. How much of the electromagnetic spectrum can you see? Can you see the handcomp-towers?"

(There's a tower on the far side of a lot of trees from here, broadcasting its signal and listening to the locals' devices in the 700-800 MHz band.)

'What do the handcomp-towers look like.'

"Uhhh, you wouldn't be able to see the part I can see through these trees, but it would be a light source with a really long wavelength, at least, hm, ten times as far from us as we've walked so far but maybe farther? I don't know if you know what subjective experiences go with longer versus shorter wavelengths. Endless stars though, your subjective experience must be amazing."

'I do not think I know what subjective experiences go with longer versus shorter wavelengths.'  They look off in the indicated direction and blink six times, about once per second.  'But I see no such light source.'

"Huh, okay. How about--actually I should check first, how much patience do you have for taking about 65536 experiment-tests for everything anyone can think up? Because a lot of people are going to be super curious about you."

Ancorabenilisifentiliane considers.

'Over what timescale.'

"Depends how long of breaks you want and how long you're willing to talk to scientists for?"

"Everyone is going to want you to be happy you came here; if you say you want to be left alone people will leave you alone and if you want to be paid money or an undefined but definable set of other things to be looked at by scientists you'll get paid."

"There are probably hundreds of hours worth of things people will want to know eventually but they won't think of them all at once."

'I will sometimes, but not always, want to do other things.  Describe money?'

"Money is a bunch of numbers in computers--machines like my handcomp. Everyone has a number which is the amount of money they have; there are also some groups of people that can have money that belongs to everyone in the group according to complicated agreements but the simple version is that people have money. When someone wants someone else to do something they would prefer not to do, or prefer to do less of than the first person wants, they can offer some money. So suppose Kara has a piece of chocolate--as far as I know they don't, but hypothetically--"

"I do actually have some chocolate in my pocket right now but it might be melted."

"Oh neat. So suppose I wanted to eat Kara's chocolate, which I don't, I could say 'hey Kara, I will give you five firstcoins'--that's an amount of money--'for your chocolate,' and if they were happy with that idea then I would make my number go down by five and their number go up by five and they would give me the chocolate. In general people will do most but not all things for enough money because money is useful to have because other people will do things for it. It's like a way of keeping track of how much useful stuff someone has done for other people so that people who do useful stuff can get useful stuff done for them. And answering questions about yourself and doing experiment-tests would be very useful because you're the only one who can do it, so you would get lots of money you could spend on a nice apartment or pretty things or food or whatever else you want, assuming anyone knows how to provide it."

'I want pretty things.'

"Then you will be have plenty of use for money!" says Kara happily.

"We're almost at the train station," says Neren. "Did you have any other questions about how to ride a train? Also trains are kind of noisy, so if you hate noise you might want to borrow my earmuffs."

'I know little enough about trains to have no other questions about how to ride them.  I do not hate most noise.'

"Just follow us and do what we do and assume that everything is fine unless one of us tells you there's a problem and it'll go great."

Soon they come to a flight of stairs leading down into the ground with a sign above it staying "Forest Station - Red Line Outer Endpoint". "Right down here," says Voli. "Does anyone have a stored-value pass so they can beep twice or should somebody just buy them a half-moon pass"? 

"I can buy a half-moon," answers Tren, and nobody pre-empts them.

Ancorabenilisifentiliane's skirt clips through the stairs on their way down, its train appearing to rest on an invisible platform behind them, level with their feet.  They take 'do what we do' fairly literally and (imperfectly, erring on the side of elegance) imitate different members of the group, switching targets at irregular intervals.

"Woah, is your skirt some kind of illusion or something?! That's surprising*!"

*Translator's note: the connotation is of a surprise of strong but uncertain valence.

They don't respond for several seconds, and keep mimicking Tona during that time rather than displaying any outward sign of contemplation.

'We are still friends regardless of the answer?'

"Thinking."

Neren stops halfway down the stairs and is silent for at least thirty seconds.

"I can imagine answers that would make me nervous about interacting with you, but as long as I am not in immediate danger I will talk it out with the expectation that we can have mutually beneficial interactions. I will continue to want mutually beneficial interactions with you regardless of the answer even if I decrease my probability that they are possible. I do not want to disincentivize truthtelling and will weight highly the fact that you are revealing whatever you are about to reveal willingly and proactively. I will continue to help you orient to this planet unless it would come at the cost of serious harm to myself or another. I will continue to want to be your friend unless you are intentionally or recklessly harming me and intend to continue. Can you six say the same?"

The others were all listening carefully; one by one, they say "I say the same."

- nod.

'It is true that my skirt is some kind of illusion or something.'

"Are you creating light or something that reacts with light, or are you directly altering my eyes or brain to perceive something independently of the light entering my eyes?"

'It is something that reacts with light, in this case.'

"Does 'in this case' mean you can also do the other thing? Oh, was that how you communicated before you figured out our language?"

'I can also create light, yes.'  They glow their eyes demonstratively from behind their mask.  'Elaborate on 'before you figured out our language'.'

"Well, what you're using to communicate now resembles words in our language, but before you were doing that, I mean really early on, you were doing something more, hm, direct."

'The way I was communicating before and the way I am communicating now are not precisely the same, but neither are they fundamentally different.'  They mimic a fidget.  'It is a matter of scale and finesse.'

"Can you describe the mechanics in more detail?" Tren asks excitedly. "Also is it the sort of thing you could teach someone else to do or do we not have the anatomy/hardware for it?"

'I expect this method of communication to be inherent to my species and not replicable by humans, although none of the ones I interacted with previously attempted it that I am aware of.  In describing the mechanics I could make a comparison to emitting light, and narrowing the wavelength as I recalled and rediscovered what humans are capable of perceiving.'

"That's an interesting metaphor but I meant the mechanics of the whole thing. What are you doing to what particles to cause there to be new information in my brain?"

'I don't know.'

"Oh, well, there are loads of people who would be happy to help you figure it out!"

"We have been paused on the stairs too long," says Voli. "If you want to start generating experiment ideas it should be after we all get on the train."

"Fair point. I'm going to go buy you that train pass now." Tren goes and does something to a plastic and metal kiosk, which dispenses a dollop of clear liquid they rub all over their hands and a small plastic rectangle they offer to Ancorabenilisifentiliane.

They don't initially move more than they already have been in response.  Then:  'Am I meant to hold this.'

"Yeah, there's a thing one can tap it on to get to the part of the station where the train is."

Ancorabenilisifentiliane delicately takes the plastic rectangle and holds it near their face to examine it.

It says "Bridgecity Subway Mulitpass" and three little abstract symbols on one side and has a picture of a city skyline on the other. The skyline features lots of tall buildings of different shapes and sizes and window configurations.

They return their hand to a bras bas and watch for more behaviors from their humans to imitate.

Their humans imitably tap their cards on a pillar and then go through a turnstile and stand near a set of doors that are currently closed with nothing but a big hole on the other side.

"The train will come from that way," says Kara, pointing, "and it's a bit loud."

Tap.  The turnstile jerks a bit oddly as they first pass through it but they get to the other side alright.  Kara's comment provokes a serious-looking nod.

The train arrives! It's painted with colorful swirls that blur together interestingly (at human visual refresh rates) and then resolve as it slows to a stop. The humans pile in. There are chairs in the corners and some poles in the middle but everyone leans against the walls.

"We get a car to ourselves tonight, since it's night, but in the daytime it's a lot more crowded," Kara mentions conversationally.

Ancorabenilisifentiliane spends a moment looking at the wall before deciding to stand close to but not actually touching it.

'Thank you for warning me of the noise in advance.  How many people are there usually.'

"At the busiest times of day, as many as can fit in the car without being pressed up against each other. Because if there were more than that they'd run more or longer trains."

Nod.  'Who is responsible for the project of trains.'

"A company called, I actually forget what it's called but it's a big group of people who know how to build and run trains, and they collect money with the card system--we store money on the cards and tapping it on the thing transfers a little money to the company. And they use that to maintain the rails and the trains and keep the extra."

"It's actually three different companies running different lines!" Chirps Mark. "That's why you have to change trains at the contemporary art museum and again at fourty-third street even though it's going the same way the whole time. The first few years they had cards instead of cash you needed a different card for each section!"

"Wow, three cards? That was butts," opines Kara.

'Thinking.

Are most human projects this collaborative.'

"Maybe," Voli answers. "Definitely if you scale by impact on the world rather than simple number of projects. A thousand humans working together can do something more useful and more impressive than a thousand humans working separately."

"And even things that are mostly one person's project still involve getting raw materials from somewhere and that somewhere is usually a giant cooperative operation," adds Kara.

'I see.  My species's efforts are typically more solitary.  Though I am an atypical member."

"What sort of scale are they usually on?"

"How much of their time does a typical member of your species spend on work directly necessary for their survival?"

"How are you atypical?"

'It varies, especially with age; nearly all of it; I am less narrowly focused than most.'  A pause.  'Nearly all of it, or only for a short while after their inception.  I am uncertain of your standards.'

"Yeah, that was kind of a vague question. Maybe just describe how you generally spent your time, and for the activities that were more instrumentally than terminally valuable what their purpose was?"

'If I understand you correctly, that is not a question it would make sense to ask most members of my species.'

"You don't mark a distinction between instrumental and terminal values?"

'I am again uncertain of your standards.  I suspect not.'

"Can you try just answering the first bit, then, about how you spent your time?"

'In my realm of origin I almost exclusively directed my efforts towards concrete and physical projects in order to increase my health, power, and fulfillment.'

"Sounds like fun! At least the fulfillment part; doing stuff for my health is generally boring."

"I'm telling you, Kara, you have got to get into rock climbing. You will get so much muscle." Neren makes a flexing gesture, its ostensible purpose rather defeated by Neren's loose drapey sleeves.

'Health, fulfillment, and' pause 'muscle are separate, for humans.  They are not for my species.'

"Can you go into more detail? What things are good for your overall well-being?"

'Portions of existence being in line with my sense of aesthetics, and more of them becoming so by my action.'

"Either I am misunderstanding you," says Tona, "or that is the coolest thing I have heard all year. Are you saying that you never have to do anything other than make art?"

'Yes.'

"That's ultrashiny! What media do you do, usually? I bet you have media nobody on Firstplanet has ever heard of! Do your species usually specialize in one to three things, or are you generalists, or are you serial specialists, or other?"

'Most members of my species specialize in natural design.  Previously I made a magic system.'

Mark grins. "In words, or a computer simulation, or as pure math/theoretical physics, or other?" 

'In magic.'

Tren makes the syllable for "my interpretation of that was ambiguous or low-prior in a way I cannot easily phrase a clarifying question about"! 

Mark essays a clarifying question: "You can locally alter physics?!?"

'If I understand you correctly.'

Neren says "Well don't do it here, we're using the physics we've got!" at the exact same moment that Kara says "Ooooh I wanna see!"

'I am an inherently magical being.'

"Okay, well, whatever you're doing now is pretty clearly compatible with being here safely, at least in the medium term. I don't know much physics, I guess you could have reduced the half-life of protons by a factor of a thousand or something else nobody would notice. Actually I don't think we ever got clarity on whether you're from another planet or another universe? If it's the former then I bet there's nothing to worry about just from you passively being around."

'Another universe.  Though I stayed on another human planet for some time without.  Thinking.

Without issues of the sort which I understand to be of current concern.'

"There are other human planets?!"

"Where are they? What are they like? Are they in this universe or a third one?"

"Maybe it's alternate timelines instead of alternate inflationary regions and that's why they got humans twice?"

"The physicists are all going to love you so much!"

'They were in a third universe.  I lack sufficient exposure to you to be certain in accurately conveying differences and similarities between them and you.'

"Did you see a map of their planet such that you'd recognize whether our continents are the same?"

"You acted like you hadn't seen a screen with pixels before, so I'm guessing they didn't have those?"

"How long were you there? What experiments did you do?"

'I a few times teleported high enough that I could see the shapes of the continents.  They had no handcomps or other screens of that kind which I was exposed to.  I remained there for longer than one decade but likely shorter than two, and during that time experimented with my magic system.'

"Ooooh, you can teleport? What do you need to know about a place to teleport there?"

"How do you handle clipping and velocity-matching? Is it FTL?"

"Can you take cargo? Passengers?"

"Is the teleportation part of your magic system?"

"What were their most recent inventions? Did they have trains, the printing press, agriculture?"

'I need to be able to uniquely identify a place in some way, or specify parameters and rely on random chance within those.  If I begin emulating physical matter within other physical matter for any reason, they are thrust apart before mine is instantiated there.  With enough magical power I can traverse greater distances than light could in that time span.  I can select matter to accompany me.  Yes, I integrated it.  I recall the invention of the soundkeeper.'

"Star travel star travel!" Kara is literally bouncing up and down. So is Tona. It is a party in this train car tonight.

"This is the highest-branchingfactor fractalquestionssituation I have ever been in. What's the farthest you've gone in one go within a universe? Does bringing more cargo trade off against distance? Can you go off latitude and longitude? How about a photograph? How about 'my apartment'? Unrelatedly I know it's probably too early right now but if you see any conspicuous absences of good things the other humans had you should tell us so we can copy off them."

'I do not know.  Yes, though not by much.  All of those are acceptably specific.  I will say so if I observe any.'  (One of the fidgets they copy, briefly, is the bouncing.)

"If you teleported out of this train while it was moving relative to the ground would you come out moving relative to the ground or would you match up with your destination?"

"Did you ever go to another celestial body? Like the moon or another planet or something."

'I would not be moving relative to the ground unless I willed it or it was for other reasons more aesthetic.  I briefly visited the moon a few times but as a location it was unsuitable for human survival and therefore uninteresting and irrelevant to my projects at the time.'

"This planet of humans know how to survive on our moon! It takes a lot of equipment but there are people up there right now!"

"Have I mentioned you are going to be so rich. Possibly richer than anyone has ever been."

"Oh hey, speaking of getting rich--" Tren pulls out his handcomp and starts doing something on it; everyone else follows suit within about three seconds. 

Mark, without looking up from her betting, says "Next stop's mine and I vote we all pile into my apartment; my roommate's out of town and doesn't care about guests and I have a blackboardwall." This gets a chorus of "aye"s.

Ancorabenilisifentiliane peers at the handcomps.  It's less obtrusive than it would otherwise be given that they're very tall, have relatively arbitrary visual acuity, and are unaware that text has an intended orientation; they just incline their head slightly.

Nobody notices the peering because that would require paying attention to another agent's body language and gaze direction, but Voli says "I don't think anyone has explained prediction markets yet; you want the alienexplanation on that? Heh." Firstplanet has enough fiction about different societies or species meeting each other and trading exposition that the particular style of explanation aimed at someone with adult intelligence and maturity but zero context has a name, and that name is suddenly very apt And That's Awesome.

'I do.'

"Alright, so the first thing I need to explain is a bet. When one person thinks the future is going to be a certain way and another person thinks the future is going to be a different way, they can make an arrangement where whoever is right gets money. So for example, suppose I thought it was going to rain tomorrow and Artha thought it wasn't. We could make a bet where if it does rain she gives me a dollar and if it doesn't rain I give her a dollar. And we both think it's a good bet because we both think we're right about the weather. Now suppose I was 90% sure it was going to rain and she was only 60% sure it was going to rain. We could still make a bet where if it rains she gives me three dollars and if it doesn't I give her four dollars, and we'd both think it was a good bet. A prediction market is a collection of communications channels where people can make bets on anything, and it's useful for figuring out what's going to happen, because if someone knows a reason something is especially likely they'll make a bunch of bets that it will. So you can look at what bets people are making about, oh, whether some government policy is going to drive up the price of steel, or something, and see what everyone collectively thinks is going to happen. And people who do well at it get more money to keep doing it with, so you can see what the smartest and most well-informed people in particular think is going to happen."

'And now you are all making bets about me?'

"Yes. Well, we're making bets about things that your existence is information about. You're going to change a lot of things just by people knowing you exist, and right now we know that and nobody else does, so everyone else is collectively offering odds we know aren't right--like, I can make a bet that pays out a hundred times what I put in if the existence of intelligences not from earth is discovered in the next few years."

'My previous human acquaintances thought only a small number of people should know of my presence.'

"Well, they knew you longer than we have so they probably had a point, but it might have been something specific to their planet that doesn't apply here. What did they say their reasoning was?"

'I did not understand it.  But they were very insistent.  I think it seemed obvious to them; if no reason seems obvious to you perhaps none are applicable.'

Everyone spends a while contemplating the bizzare situation just described to them. 

"Maybe they terminally valued--knowing things nobody else did, or something? When I try to think of things that are obvious but hard to explain I think of stuff like nausea being unpleasant."

"Okay but I can give a causal explanation of why nausea is unpleasant even if I can't give a mechanism, it's because it's the poison response mechanism and evolution disincentivizes being poisoned."

"If evolution hadn't been discovered yet you'd still hate being nauseous and wouldn't be able to say anything about why."

"Yeah, okay, maybe[-at least 20%] it was something like that. No way to test it until and unless we make contact with them or Ancora remembers some exact words."

'I was allowed to be in the presence of other humans for brief periods once I had learned how to look and move like one.  And I was introduced more personally to five others besides the first one I made friends with, even when my impressions were imperfect.  But that is many fewer than the numbers you describe.'

"We can introduce you to some more people one at a time before we tell everyone you exist if that will make you more comfortable. Or we can try to keep you secret indefinitely if you want that. We don't want to pressure you into doing anything that would be harmful to you, is what I'm trying to say here."

"But if you do want to be public knowledge we will be very happy and work to make it go well."

"Priority-interrupt: this is my stop."

'I like humans and would prefer to meet more of them if there is no cause not to.'  They watch for and mimic stop-related behavior.

"Awesome!"

Stop-related behaviour is: wait for the train to stop and the doors (one pair on the train and one on the platform) to open. Exit the train and head towards a flight of stairs.

"The stairs are going to start moving when I get on," says Mark, and proceeds to prove this statement correct.

Ancora stares at the stairs for a moment and then teleports to the top of them.

"Nice!" says Kara as the humans all jog up the stairs. Mark gets back out in front again and leads them out onto a broad sidewalk along a narrow street between rows of towering buildings. There's an elaborate abstract chalk drawing in their path; they step into the empty street to go around it.

Ancora dutifully and gracefully follows, taking the same path into the street and looking raptly all around but especially up at the buildings.  At some point it starts raining intangible glitter around their ensemble.

Shortly after the glitter starts someone leans over their balcony six stories up and yells "You guys look awesome!"

Ancora looks at their party members and tries to determine whether they all think that this is an okay thing to have happened??

It's fine! Kara waves.

(Someone else on the balcony tells the yeller to pipe down, people on the other floors are trying to sleep, but quietly enough that the humans on the ground can't hear them.)

Ancora hears that but does not derive meaning from it.  They copy the wave.

In another minute or two they get to the tower Mark lives in. Mark holds their hand up in front of the door and it swings open, revealing a lobby with a mosaic tile floor, a stairwell, and a row of elevators. They hold their hand in front of the panel next to the elevator and it dings and the up arrow lights up.

"I didn't know you had a skinchip, that's neat," says Artha.

"Yeah, it's very convenient."

'Humans here can affect the physical world in ways other than touching what they want to affect with their visual form?'

"Yes! I have a little piece of metal under the skin of my hand, and it sends information in response to a radio signal from the door and the door reads that signal, and the only chips that have that information belong to people who live in this building, and the elevator shows up in response to it. There are other things one can operate without touching them too, some computers have voice interfaces for speech to text and stuff, and there are things where one moves to block a laser and the absence of the laser does something. And there's cases where one can interact with a machine by touching it and then that interaction sets off a large set of consequences widely separated in space and time."

'Oh.  I had hoped it was some sort of magic.  Members of your species die?'

"Yes," Voli answers solemnly. "Of old age, if nothing else kills us first. There are procedures we do whenever anyone[A] dies, to preserve A's body in the hope that someday we'll find a way to heal A. . . . Does your kind live indefinitely?"

'Yes.  I was deeply disturbed to find there existed species that did not.  I expect to someday be powerful enough to resurrect beings which were even minutely magic, but the humans I encountered previously had none.  Tell me more of your preservation procedures?'

This is a sufficiently important topic that going off memory is obviously suboptimal; Voli opens the omnipedia page on brain preservation, skips the history section and explains the cutting-edge preservation methods and the ongoing work in various animal models on uploading preserved brains.

Kara asks, "You said you designed magic things. Do you have a way of--attaching a little magic to someone without messing with their biology, and then being able to resurrect them?"

'Any person[A] wholly entwined with the magic system I created automatically imparts a magictag[B] onto any living being[C] on which A uses magic.  B has no direct effect save allowing me to interact with C as a magical being, including resurrecting C.  I, however, am outside my own system, and cannot impart magictags directly except by making a person a fully autonomous member of my magic system, which does involve some biological changes.'

"That sounds like the sort of thing I want to learn a lot about before trying it, but it would have to be some pretty awful changes or some pretty lame resurrection for you to get no takers. For almost all X there is someone who X," Voli says in the tone of a proverb. "Can I get the eight-minute version, stipulating that when we introduce you to the dictator[A] A'll* want as much detail as you can provide?"

* In Convergentlanguage this use of a pronoun immediately after its antecedent is either avoided, or handled with an elegant contraction that is not unpleasant to say or type; it is left expanded here, as in new-readers media, to aid in clarity.

'Certainly.'

The gist of it is:

• The magic system Ancora created only interacts with living beings, including animals and plants.
• Ancora thinks the magic system might be metaphorically persuadable to include some electronics, especially those which interact very closely with organics, without them having to rebuild the entire system.  There isn't a way of testing it yet, without any local magic users, but in fact those might already count.
• Only sapients are capable of having their own pool of magic.
• Sapience is defined by the magic system as being (either individually, or part of a species which most of the members of are) able to understand a certain threshold of complicated communication.
• Ancora is unsure whether local parrots will count yet but the magic is capable of ensmartening.
• Vampires (people fully entwined with the magic system) acquire magic by drinking the blood of sapients.  There's a sharp limit on how much magic they can hold, and it doesn't take very much blood to hit it.
• Blood drank out of an intermediate vessel such as a cup gives only the vampire magic.
• Sangrades are people who have their own pool of magic, which they receive upon being drank from by a vampire directly.  It can be spent down completely and will run out on its own if the sangrade doesn't use it fast enough, which happens of a scale of several days to a few weeks.
• Sangrades can become vampires by following the suggestions of a helpful magical interface Ancora designed to accompany the magic, over several feedings and on a scale of weeks to months.
• This involves changing their physical appearance to one the aesthetic-based magic can sustain a hold on.
• The exact details are customizable but generally it requires most or all of: fangs; skin tones slightly evocative of corpses, on an axis largely orthogonal to darkness and paleness; more distinguished facial features; eyes in one (or more, various forms of heterochromia are allowed and encouraged) of red, black, gold, and silver; and some adjustments to one's intuitive posture and gait.
• Changes which Ancora didn't think of ahead of time (or thought of and rejected) but which fit within their aesthetic sensibilities can replace the specific requirements.
• Since there are no vampires on this planet yet, Ancora will have to find a volunteer who is okay with Ancora being the one to make changes that the two of them agree on.

(When the elevator arrives, Ancora copies the appropriate actions from their ensemble, doesn't cease in their infodumping, and displays no surprise about its behavior except that their illusory glitter gets left behind for a few seconds until they update the frame of reference.)

The elevator gets to the sixteenth floor fairly early in the infodump, but these humans are good at receiving infodumps while in motion! All the way to the end of the hall, left, six more doors and then they're at Mark's apartment.

Mark[A]'s preferred decorating scheme is navy blue with silver filigree and A's roommate goes in for fake ivy hanging anywhere it's not too much in the way. There's a giant sectional sofa that makes three sides of a square and a thing like a memory-foam-lined bird's nest and a lot of bookcases and the promised blackboardwall with seven colors of chalk neatly alternating on the chalk ledge and an eraser and a water spray bottle in little holsters to one side. Mark starts writing notes about vampires; Tren and Tona join in on different sections of board with some amount of repetition but nothing left out.

As soon as Ancora pauses in talking, Mark says, "There are definitely going to be volunteers for vampirage and sangradeage unless there's a downside you haven't gotten to yet, and it would have to be a big one to get people turning down resurrection and intelligence boosts. Can vampires drink from each other and get magic that way? What happens if a vampire can't drink any blood for a long time? Topicchange: snacks are in the pantry, through that door and on your right, don't take anything with 'Terreshe' on it and if you eat the last of something tell me. If you want water the cups are to the right of the microwave. Bathroom is yonder. Ancorabenilisifentiliane, do you eat or drink or have guesthostcustoms I should be implementing?"

Tren raises a hand. "Do you have any stims? We're definitely going to be up all night and then we're definitely going to go see the dictator[A] as soon as A's office opens."

"If you like me are one of the lucky people for whom caffeine is a stim I've got that and if you're not I've got moda, melatonin, and sellarin*. It's all in the bathroom cabinet."

"I've got phetrana** in my cloak pocket but only enough for me and one other person, if everyone wants it we'll have to send a runner to the pharmacy," adds Kara.

Everyone starts administering their food and drugs while Mark cleans up the redundancies in the blackboard notes.

*Earth has not discovered the usefulness of this molecule.

**A slow-release amphetamine.

Ancora waits to speak until several beats after everyone seems to have, in Ancora's estimation, taken care of their humanly affairs.

'I have not intentionally omitted any downsides.  Vampires can transfer magic by drinking each others' blood but not create more; the drinkee would have their own supply diminished.  I was interrupted when designing the system and no one has yet gone very long without drinking blood so I am uncertain of what would happen.  I am capable of drinking.  This room is pretty.'

"If vampires can't generate more magic from each other then there needs to be a population of humans around for anyone to use it."

"Unless--no, the sources have to be sapients. Might be able to work something out with a mixed population and subsidize whichever direction is less than optimally popular."

"How immortal can vampire magic make humans? Also I'm glad you like my apartment; the plantlikes are Shreyon's."

"Is there a way to find out what happens if a vampire doesn't drink blood for months without making someone try it?"

"If two vampires or a vampire and a sangrade or two sangrades or one of the two and a human have a kid what kind of entity is the kid?"

It's gitterraining quite densely in this apartment now.  (And also in the top three or so inches of the one below it.)

'Vampire magic can reduce and eventually eliminate humans' need for food, water, and air.  It also can make them unaging and more durable.  I could design a result for vampires who went extended periods without drinking blood but know of no way to find out what would currently happen except by trying it.  Children of any combination of the listed entity types will remain humans without their own pool of magic, although they may inherit persistent traits of their parents.'

The humans (A) all wave A's hands through the glitter rain delightedly.

"When you say you can design a result does that mean you can decide what happens? What are the constraints on that? Actually, what are the constraints on your abilities in general? Could you design a second magic system and have them both going at the same time, for example?"

The glitter rain is intangible.

'I can decide what happens within roughly the constraints of my aesthetics and taste, which dictate whether each result will fulfill or harm me.  Designing a second system is in principle possible but may be difficult or dangerous.'

"If it's based on taste you can tell if a decision will be good for you before you implement it, right?" asks Tona.

"I expect I put a lower probability on that than you do*," says Mark.

*In Convergentlanguage that takes about as long to say as "doubt dot jpeg" does in English.

The glitter pauses in the air, just for a moment.  As it resumes falling, a substantial portion of it changes from gold to black.

'I know what my tastes are but have had occasional trouble in predicting whether the results of my design choices would fall within them.  I work in a medium much more complex and autonomous than the rest of my species.'

"Big mood*," says Tren. "Probability on ['the vampire who doesn't drink blood just can't use any more magic until they've drunk some blood' works well]?"

*Literally "none novelty". Playing around with the rules of grammar is popular in a lot of worlds.

'I could not say.'

Voli looks at the black glitter and the lack of a probability estimate and asks, "Do you want a change of subject?"

'To what?'

"We could talk more about the physical changes the magic likes," says Neren (the one with the surgically pointified ears and shaved eyebrows).  "Or the humans you met on the other planet, what were they like?"

'It is somewhat difficult to compare, as I was significantly worse at human communication when I had known them for as long as I have you.  I lacked even a poor facsimile of a human form.'  And then there is, floating in front of Ancora's torso and about the size of it, a crystalline bipyramid with a five-pointed star for its base and a shadowy halo.  'My appearance was thus when arriving on Earth.'