"Mr. Casares, we're not relitigating the custody decision today. Your preferred lawyer being on parental leave means you might have to hire another lawyer for your appeal, not that you can preempt the appeal entirely by escaping to Dreamward. Moving on, three counts child endangerment - Mr. Casares, are you aware of the entities known as 'klaonso' that occupy Dreamward -"

"Yes, but I was too far out for any to be near!"

"On what basis did you come to that conclusion?"

"Objection - Mr. Casares was in fact correct, and many people are justifiably confident in things they can't firmly back with episodic memory of specific evidentiary matter -"

"Sustained."

"I see here that your social worker Azut Convinced-A-Spree-Killer-To-Take-Up-Lovingkindness-Meditation referred you to a subtle artist for treatment for your kleptomania?"

"He kept rescheduling on me - I tried a different one but they were so expensive..."

"Mm, there is a pretty serious shortage of subtle artists. Did you contact Azut, or anyone else, for help with that?"

"No."

"And then he said 'I'll eat your eyes, I'll eat all your eyes'."

"Would you care to explain that, Skutshati?"

"I heard somebody say it back when - you know, back when, and it seemed really badass. I wasn't literally going to eat anyone's eyes."

"And what was your response to Maria's thoughtspeak attempts to convince you to call for help?"

"She mostly didn't try convincing, mostly she yelled! I couldn't think straight! She wouldn't shut up!"

"What did you try to solve that problem?"

"Eventually I managed to hike out far enough that I couldn't hear her but it took me a few tries, the first time I didn't bring enough water."

"And did Maria have water during -"

"One topic at a time, please."

"I just don't know how to interpret it if somebody with a set of tits and legs for days snuggles up to me and says they've got no idea what the big whoop is about orgasms and they can't figure it out! They don't look four when they're doing that! And, and it's all right to bang angels, even if they're four, if they've got tits - I just don't get it, man!"

"Thank you, Mr. Berezin. I think six months will do the trick with an emphasis on, ah, applied developmental psychology, and reparations paid out of basic amortized over the next, let's see, three years."

"Miss Mirzah, can you explain why you haven't availed yourself of the thirst-dampening effect now commonly available to vampires?"

"Yeah, so, like, the unique heritage of vampires includes our unique foodways, and just like some places still let Inuit club baby seals and eat them, and there's still ultra-orthodox kosher butchers who slaughter animals, my coven feels that vampires' special culinary culture is worthy of honoring and preserving. There's really no substitute for the holistic experience and we think it shouldn't be lost forever, especially now that it's easy to restore our meals to life."

"...I see. And were you aware at the time that you bit Mr. Shah that this was murder?"

"Well, I know most people see it that way, but people sometimes say meat is murder too, you know, and also I would personally have been fine with the outcome where the guy turned into a vampire instead of dying, which is a traditionally attested outcome even if it's not typical."

"Next case, a Mr. - ......Turkafinwë? As an aside, why did you change your name to Turkafinwë, given that you are a colugo and have never been an Elf?"

"Is that relevant -"

"I just like the name."

"...Mr. Turkafinwë, are you aware that you're under a truth effect?"

"Ah, damn, it didn't work. I heard it had an exception for Fëanorians. Can I change my name back as long as I'm here?"

"Yes... all right, Mr. Sugartoast, can you describe the circumstances under which you began doing business as 'Sugar Maple LLC'...?"

"Had you at any point registered nonconsent to resurrection?"

"No, I was fine with being resurrected, but not by him! The system's set up on his planet so you get a while in seclusion after you come back, for - do you already know this -"

"We'll take as read the resurrection setup on New Zidia. And you didn't have a way to contact other people?"

"No. I died before any of us knew about demons or anything, so it was just him and me."

"Were you aware that there were people inside the building?"

"No."

"Are you aware that you are under a truth effect?"

"No."

"You are under a truth effect. It will reveal statements you make but do not believe."

"No."

"...Counsel, I'm going to call a recess while you try to explain the matter to your client. You have half an hour."

The Dreamward case seems like a normal thing that a father who was having a fight with his partner might do, given access to an infinite dimension, and the handling of it seems reassuringly sensical.

The representative watching the kleptomania case takes lots of notes the upshot of which is that yeah okay if you mind control people into not wanting to commit crimes you probably don't have to enslave them but who'd prefer that to slavery. This person, apparently. What does that say about the cultural norms out here in the wider multiverse...

The representative watching the Beach case, who came of age at four, completely lacks all of the context necessary to have any idea what the fuck is going on. Is there someone they can ask for an explanation?

The representative watching the vampire case feels that actually none of this is surprising or unpredictable and would rather go do some tourism now.

The representative watching the resurrection case starts idly drafting resurrection setups that aren't like that.

The person escorting them to the Beach case explains that Beach natives in a state of nature are cognitively adults when they're only a couple years old but reach specifically sexual maturity when they're nine, and the consensus among them is that you should probably not have sex with them before they're nine. Angels, who are sometimes dead humans but are other times spontaneously generated adults, have different rules; you're allowed to have sex with an interested angel who is not both of dead and juvenile as long as they have learned at least one language. This guy apparently likes winged people?

...Why are there... rules about who people can have sex with? Is this related to how Vanda Nossëo only has three imperial laws and one of them is about sex?

Yeah, having sex with children of most species is incredibly disproportionately bad for them, or at least risks being incredibly disproportionately bad for them, and they are presumed not to be ready for that level of dignity of risk even if you can get them to say they're up for it, so it's illegal.

...So is there some sort of requirement for people to wear convenient signs explaining that they are or are not competent to do whatever? Because it sounds like there's mental overhead where people are required to remember what hurts other people, even if the people are saying otherwise. Are there other things like this?

People don't wear signs; if you want to have sex with someone it's on you to know if they're a child and if they're a species where "child" might have an unconventional meaning, and also to be certain they want to have the sex you intend. Some people solve this by only having sex with people they know, or only hooking up via specific apps or in particular venues that do filtering for them. There's lots of rules protecting children, actually, though it's one of the things substates of Vanda Nossëo vary on.

...What other rules are there. Are there rules protecting subsets of adults. Are there rules protecting everyone in some way.

...Important though it is to figure out how Vanda Nossëo's legal systems work, this person is just going to tip everyone off that some unclear fraction of all consensual transactions are illegal for a variety of reasons and then go home immediately. Their escort is welcome to come along if they want to continue the conversation somewhere safe.

...the escort comes along. "It's very rare for a Vanda Nossëo state to have only the minimum laws. Some do - Dwarves in particular often do, because they like to handle more things monetarily and with insurance and instruments like that rather than outright illegality, and there's others - but human populations and similar tend not to thrive on very bare-bones regulatory systems. You folks might get on reasonably well with Dwarves, though, as a group."

"We don't usually live with just the imperial laws either but we don't have unmarked people who look exactly like other people who'll ask you to do something for them that's normally legal who it's illegal to do that for. All of the people like that are clearly marked."

"I can see why that would be an adjustment. If you guys want to - ban child tourists, or Beach tourists, or something, you can do that, Har gets control of who enters."

"...Are you also expecting that if they come to Har that will make us subject to your laws?"

"It's the sort of thing we'd need to figure out before any tourists visited Har, and it might be there's no solution that satisfies everyone besides banning large swathes of potential tourists. That's not a big deal, there's a bunch of worlds nobody's allowed to do tourism in at all because they break causal regularity and you certainly don't have that problem."

"Because they what?"

"There's this whole neighborhood of worlds, the central one is adjacent to Warp and Shadow and Telperion and then there are some accessory worlds, but we can't use it as a shortcut because the worlds, themselves, or possibly as a single collective entity, are opinionated, and those opinions make it impossible to do science or achieve certain levels of reliable influence and power, and as a result tend to break important technology and magic and sometimes kill people who enter if anything from outside swings through. It's got a great magic system, though, and among its uses is that it can be used to evacuate people who are in that universe-neighborhood from outside of it, so eventually nobody'll be there who'd rather be somewhere that reality works consistently."

"...Wow, okay. Uh. So you said we might get along with Dwarves?"

"Yup. Dwarves are anarchocapitalists, when they can be - at lower tech levels they try other things but at the Vanda Nossëo general standard of living they converge on anarchocapitalism. That's a system where instead of having many laws they have insurance companies; you sign on to a dispute resolution service, and pay them a rate they figure out based on your expected propensity to cost them money, and then they handle it for you if someone complains about you. You can sign up for whatever company you like, they have lots of competing ones with different details. Most people in Vanda Nossëo have at least a low-grade subscription to a service like that even if we're not Dwarves, just in case, and people use your premium rates or which company you're signed on with as a proxy measure for some immigration screens. I'm sure some Dwarf insurers would be willing to operate here."

That's alien but the understandable kind of alien that makes sense as an alternate way to do things.

"They should send emissaries, I expect we can work something out. Maybe their states will even turn out to be safe places to travel to, uh, if they can be said to have states, I guess."

"There are - Dwarf places? Places where no non-Dwarf rules apply, except that they sign on to the Vanda Nossëo minimum rules - implemented in their own fashion - because of the benefits to trade."

"It sort of doesn't sound like they have rules at all but I'm certainly missing a lot of details here."

"Usually the idea is that if you can't pay for dispute resolution insurance then you just don't have the protection of being able to make your own complaints. In practice anywhere you go you need to know what will and won't be complained about - for example most people from outside Har would be really startled and confused that it's against the law to tap a stranger on the shoulder to get their attention here. Maybe about as startled and confused as you are that you have to have an idea of somebody's maturity before having sex with them."

"Well, those people shouldn't come here until they've read all our laws. - Confused about it, really? I know historically some societies have been different but it feels very conceptually simple to me."

"It's not that the law is itself hard to understand, it's that having that law instead of a different one is weird. Most of our laws are about preventing harm to people, and hardly anyone's harmed by being tapped on the shoulder. Whereas your laws are about specifically ensuring the - noninterference with free people, I suppose? So they're very broad about anything that could possibly interfere with a free person and have nothing for preventing harm to slaves."

"That sounds right to me. It seems a lot harder to me to learn - I mean, I don't even know what hurts all eight of our species, let alone as many as you have, and even if I wanted to know I don't know anyone who'd want to publish a handy guide to how to hurt them."

"You have a lot of species diversity packed into one planet, and with the magic complicating matters it makes sense this is what you'd tend to converge on."