"Is your entire world smaller, or do you just have bigger oceans or something?" 

"The world is actually a little bit bigger but we have a lot more ocean, yes." Pictures of the globe, this one's Amenta, this one's Velgarth, the images spin.

Wow! That's so neat! 

"- Is that really what our world looks like? There is an entire other continent on the other side! Have your people been there?" 

"Not yet! We will soon but we wanted to establish some relationships on the planet for local context - stuff like 'magic exists', that's important! - and we started with you because we felt like offering war support would help us get off on the right foot."

"Good for them that they're not having any wars over there, I guess." 

"At least not any visible from space, I don't know if that's typical."

"I'd guess they have mages too. - Though I suppose Herald Vanyel is, er, exceptionally good at making very large explosions." 

"That'd explain why your war was the one we spotted first!"

"It would!" 

Breda leans forward, lowering her voice. "- Listen, I do hope you all have a chance to meet Herald Vanyel, but...maybe don't mention that I sang the songs for you? He's very modest. Getting all that attention makes him self-conscious." 

"I don't think there's a reason to bring it up."

Nod. "Glad we're on the same page. Anyway, do you have more questions about Valdemar, or about Bards and the Bardic Collegium?" 

"Is there a reason there's so much focus on bards in your educational system?"

"Does Valdemar have more - ordinary - diplomatic relations with its non-Karse neighbors? Are any of them helping either side in the conflict?"

"I mean, Bardic is only one of the Collegia? It's a relatively common Gift in Valdemar, though, and - Bards play an important role for the Crown, in terms of spreading news and such. ...Er, on the diplomatic relations - we have treaties with both Rethwellan and Hardorn. Hardorn would definitely prefer to help us and not the Karsites, but they're...having a bad time of it. The wizard-weather from all the magic being thrown around on the border is hitting them hard too, and they don't have the infrastructure to cope with it. ...Rethwellan is officially neutral in this conflict. Which is understandable, they share quite a lot of border with Karse and they're just being pragmatic. They maintain tight border security, though, which mostly works in our favour since Karse is the one trying to invade us and not the other way round." 

"We did also land in Rethwellan but didn't send diplomats," someone remarks, "just borrowed a lot of their books to get initial traction on some languages."

"I guess that's not a bad plan, they've definitely got the best libraries. Maybe on the entire continent." 

"It was the biggest thing we could identify as a library from space, yeah!"

"I'm amazed you can tell what any kind of building is from space! What were you even looking at? I would've thought the roofs look the same on libraries and other kinds of buildings." 

"Oh, they do, but if we zoom in enough we can see through the windows, and see people coming and going carrying books." The green who says this demonstrates by zooming way in on Haven.

.....All right, that's kind of uncomfortable and creepy. 

(Breda does not say this out loud. It does seem probably very useful for the war effort, and she's not here to antagonize the aliens.) 

"Wild, right? We don't have the kind that would let you recognize individual people or read over their shoulders on this ship - we'd have requisitioned it if we needed it but we're doing all right with the cheaper scopes so far - but we can guess if something is a book or not."

"Well, I'm no military tactician, but I'm sure the Heralds have already brought up how useful that could be for Border surveillance!" 

"Yep! It's one of the safer ways for us to help, too, sitting up here and looking at pictures."

"I'm glad. I know it's not fair to ask all of you to put yourselves in danger for another world's war..." 

And, since they seem to have run out of conversation about Valdemar, Breda will go on to prodding them for more stories and songs and history of Amenta. Bards are infinitely curious about this, of course. 

There are THINGS HAPPENING in Haven. 

Jisa mostly doesn't know what things! Her parents are very very distracted and she's barely seen them at ALL and when she has they brushed off her questions (and she was very easily distracted by the offer of being read a story or playing a game together.) 

But. THINGS. HAPPENING. 

And conveniently all of the adults are very distracted and so it's not too hard for her to sneak off into the palace grounds, and wander around hopefully in search of THINGS.

Here are some Things! They are people with brightly colored hair who are walking to a larger mansion-sized Thing, talking to each other and holding glowing rectangles!

One of them spots her and gasps and beams and points her out to the others and then they are all looking at her and grinning.