"Truth magic and background checks. I think you can expedite it if you ask them to use mindreading instead."

"Okay, thank you. Is there some way for me to read about how the mindreading works first?"

"Sure, there's a bunch of kinds, I bet there's links to all of them on the Wikipedia page for 'mindreading'."

"...What is a Wikipedia page?"

"Do you know about the Internet yet?"

"Not really."

"Okay, so, the internet is a way you can read stuff that people wrote, or see pictures people made, or hear music people played, stuff like that, anywhere and anytime. Anywhere that has internet access, I mean, but that's most places now. And Wikipedia is a sort of library of stuff like that which is especially good for if you don't know anything about something and want to know where to even start learning."

"Do I need the, uh... language magic thing, in order to read it, or will it have Sesati?"

"I don't know how recently Sesati would have been added but if it has a written language and has been in touch with Vanda Nossëo for at least a few weeks there should be bad machine translation. I can get you the language magic thing if you want though."

"I guess I want the magic for it."

And once he has that and enough information to use the internet he'll go find a public library to read the list of different kinds of mindreading. And while he's at it also check for articles conveniently titled "the moral philosophy of Vanda Nossëo" or "exactly what kinds of people are considered trustworthy enough for wizardry" or anything along those lines.

The articles aren't titled anything quite like that, but he can find articles explaining that Vanda Nossëo is founded on the goal of universal sapient flourishing and the principles of freedom of movement, free trade, and free flow of information as means to achieve this, and that wizards are not supposed to have criminal records or violent tendencies or corrupt inclinations or impulse control issues or etc. etc.

What kind of inclinations count as corrupt, exactly? And are they counting crimes based on whether they were crimes in the polity where they were committed or based on whether Vanda Nossëo prefers that they be illegal?

Vanda Nossëo considers joining Vanda Nossëo to be a great occasion for total amnesty for any crimes that aren't obvious ongoing dangers even in conditions of material abundance and comprehensive law enforcement; but this occurs only upon joining up and thereby accepting the Vanda Nossëo set of laws. Corruption that they're worried about is mostly using official positions or powers to intimidate or harm people or collect bribes (as distinct from helping people - in ways that don't harm anyone - off the clock, which is fine, or selling your services freelance, which is also fine).

...He can maybe pass this screen. At any rate he probably won't become more able to pass it if he waits.

He does stop to try to look up what Vanda Nossëo has to say about why slaves have worth as people so he doesn't say anything unnecessarily rude about it if it comes up. And tries to figure out if he can make an appointment online to get screened to learn magic or if he needs to go talk to someone in person.

COUNTRY OF THE DAY: Sesat! Mostly an unremarkable preindustrial human polity on this new planet, but here's your usual roundup of pictures of the architecture and the local fashions and here's my sister blog's chosen Sesati recipe. The real oddball trait is that they... think... slaves aren't people? It's really weird and I can't actually tell if they think being enslaved magically makes you not a person anymore or if they think they inerrantly detect and enslave all and only non-people or, uh, what, but they seem really firm on the concept! Their planet doesn't have any actual magic, and noninvasive telepath checks have turned up zilch, and the ex-Sesati-slaves in their neighboring country, Tuesday's Azan, do not bear out this bewildering opinion.

Oh, Feris mentioned that. It must be the thing where aliens think everyone who has feelings and thoughts is a person. ...It must be a translation mistake where a word that means beings that have feelings and thoughts is getting rendered as a word for beings that have moral worth. Can he find a place to write to the magic translation people to tell them this is a mistake? He's not going to try that hard, he has a job to do here, but if it happens to be easy.

There is a form for that on the official Vanda Nossëo website, Notify Us of an Allspeak Glitch!

Cool! He will notify them of an Allspeak glitch! It's about Sesati and he can be contacted at - he opens a new tab and figures out how to get an email address and gets one of those - and the details about it are...

The Sesati word person isn't a synonym for human or thing that can talk and it seems to be getting rendered as

(he does some searching and some copy/pasting to get the right words and provides a couple examples from different languages)

but it exclusively refers to entities that cultivate virtues, not just

(...not just things that talk, but Feris said they checked that slaves have an internal monologue, like how people think "what do I do about that?" or "seems like it's going to rain" - Feris mentioned it was the same in form, just different in content in ways that Vanda Nossëo doesn't care about, and if Valan had realized while they were talking about it that he'd want to explain he'd have asked questions...)

something that has thoughts. It's a statement about current moral character and future potential for character growth, not intelligence. This has come up in the case of statements that seem to be getting translated as something like "having facial tattoos makes you mindless like rocks." or "Sesat sentences people to slavery for being stupid."

(...not that he actually knew they weren't mindless like rocks before Feris mentioned it, but he's not very smart...)

For context, the act of acceding to slavery rather than choosing to die is, in Sesat, typically considered itself

(...incompatible with choosing to cultivate virtue... that sounds circular if you don't already understand it, and they don't...)

typically considered to itself constitute a renunciation of moral decisionmaking. I'm not vouching for that claim being true or anything, but statements translated by Allspeak have made it sound like traits like courage or honor are irrelevant to classification as whatever words are getting translated this way, and regardless of whether slaves have worth,

(they don't but it's not incoherent to imagine someone being prevented from suicide, it just never actually - does that actually happen - and Vanda Nossëo doesn't care - but that's not something the people working on Allspeak need to answer for)

that they don't is the claim being made in Sesati.

(...They don't, right? Someone who wasn't an alien would have noticed if they were more than animals, Vanda Nossëo is being pretty much the same as Sesat in treating them exactly like animals.)

...Anyway. How about that wizardry.

There are wizardry schools in Warp and several Ardas; they vary on things like what the campus looks like and the curriculum emphasis and what scholarships they interact with and how big they are and student/teacher ratios and whether you're expected to work on your mana capacity with practice and sleep vs. tap an associated Maia. There is an online test he can take to tell if he is probably smart enough to do any wizardry.

This might be too expensive and more importantly it might take too long but he takes the online test, at least.

The test is free! He is supposed to look at diagrams of imaginary systems that behave according to made-up rules described in each question and determine how an input into the system would affect an output, and rotate shapes, and do math problems, and memorize things and then repeat them later in the test, and complete analogies.

He screws up the first question just due to being confused about the interface, and gets steadily faster over time, carrying over between question types. He's... maybe wizard material, depending on how much the sheer unfamiliarity of everything is getting in his way, but at any rate not likely to be top of his class.

The test assigns him a rank of "ABLE: You will be able to learn and cast spells of relatively low complexity (list). With further development of your skills and/or magical enhancement you could become a midrange wizarding talent."

None of that is teleportation so none of it will achieve the thing his friend asked him to arrange that led to him looking for magic in the first place, but it is, admittedly, all very cool and useful and maybe he could do healing...

But he probably ought to at least try to get the other kind. What does the internet have to say about that?

Apparently there are tens of thousands people - in all of Vanda Nossëo - who qualify for "Loki's spells". The screen usually culminates in meeting "a Maitimo", a "template" with nigh-supernatural person-evaluating skills, and having a relaxed conversation over lunch or on a walk during which the Maitimo determines whether you are going to drop any planets into their suns or teach other people the teleport or anything like that. There are also precognitive spot-checks on the counterfactual behavior of persons under consideration. There is, in theory, a lower qualification threshold for just the healing spell, since that one isn't that dangerous, but that's just a few thousand more people and they also have to be identified as pretty unlikely to try to derive spells of their own or seek the text of the teleport spell.