The envoy crafts don't resist scrying much for the same reason that every team has someone on it who is willing to be mindread if necessary. The computers don't appear, but the imperial government can see people - mostly human or very humanlike, plus or minus wings or colorful hair or extra height and symmetry, but some that definitely aren't, such as a couple of bird-people and one who is straight up a capybara and a big ol' quadrupedal bug alien.

The ship is very lovely and clean and richly appointed and none of it is illusions.

Well, that's weirdly normal for aliens. How disappointing, they're not even silicon-based sacks of gas. The imperial knowledge mages get to work trying to identify what kinds of magic the aliens have and figure out whether it's an artistic statement or a materials limitation that they put that much effort into wholly nonmagical decor. One of them starts cataloguing every interaction they can observe between anyone on the ship and the Mysterious Things That Aren't Scryable to narrow down what they might be.

The imperial government considers possible announcements for the public and reconsiders them and alerts its police and the state-level entities that maintain wards important to the empire's hypothetical anti-alien defense strategy. Nothing else visibly happens on their end until an illusion mage takes a quick flight and then the tops of some clouds read HELLO, ALIENS - YOU MAY IDENTIFY YOURSELVES.

At least some of the aliens seem to be able to make new nonmagical things out of nothing. The Mysterious Things That Aren't Scryable seem to serve the purpose of - books? Maybe illusion video things? People look at them, and some of them don't have to do anything else but their eyes flick around the missing space, and other people have to poke theirs (including everybody with colorful hair, the capybara, some short people with beards, and a ten foot tall blue guy).

The tops of the clouds presently read, under that message, We are peaceful visitors from Vanda Nossëo, a federation of many peoples from many stars!

The tops of the clouds next read:

THERE IS NO LIFE AROUND OTHER STARS. WE CHECKED.

hi aliens im hanu

THIS IS NOT OUR PREFERRED MEDIUM FOR LONG EXCHANGES DUE TO THE POSSIBILITY OF VANDALISM. CAN YOU ACCEPT DELIVERY OF A PHONE OR SEND ONE YOURSELVES?

Hi hanu!

We can send phones! Where would be good places to put them?

Conflicting maps appear pointing them to a spot in the imperial capital and a spot near Hanu's house and yet another spot somewhere on the west coast...

They have no shortage of phones. Little drones spill out of the shuttlebay and head to all the suggested locations.

People meet the drones and try to figure out how the alien phones work and whether they'll work from inside illusions that block all light and sound from leaving an area, although that's not terribly urgent since the other end isn't private.

The drones drop off boxes with phones in them and fly back up to the ship. The phones have pictorial instructions for how to turn them on. They will work in illusions that block light and sound!

A representative of the imperial government gets their phone working and lets them know that the Hari Empire is interested in peaceful trade and coexistence and has gone to great lengths to ensure that the biologically, culturally and linguistically diverse people of this world could have that with each other.

Hanu wants to trade information about Har for information about other worlds and also wants to know specifically whether the Solar Lord is right about the conspiracy to hide nineteen extra types of magic and - someone interrupts to say that there is basically no chance they work for the Solar Lord and actually they should be trading science facts because this is a science phone -

Someone representing an astronomy hobbyist group would like to know what they might trade for an explanation of how it is that they could miss Vanda Nossëo's current existence and entire evolutionary history.

Someone wants to know if the aliens would like to do an interview for South Coast News And Weather.

There are different people on the other end of each phone.

"We're interested in peaceful trade and coexistence too! We'd like to extend an invitation to join Vanda Nossëo, but even if that won't work for you, we're happy to facilitate free trade and free migration and cultural exchange between Har and hundreds of other worlds."

"We don't actually know how many types of magic your world has! Or who the Solar Lord is."

"The stars we're from are in other universes, which are places that can't be reached by traversing intervening space."

They'd love to do an interview for the South Coast News And Weather.

"The Hari Empire has historically extended such invitations to many polities. It has historically been our way, to have many states within the empire whose laws and customs vary, as long as they allow their people to leave, and to vote, and accept a minimal set of laws we insist on to keep the peace - that they must not do things to other people's bodies or possessions without permission, that they must keep their word, a full list can be provided to you and we can compare ours to yours. Har has always sought the stability of political union, but not at the cost of our people's freedom and independence."

"Well, what'll you tell us if we tell you?"

"...Excuse me, are you telling me we could be invaded by arbitrary aliens at any time?"

They should consider sending someone to this place at this time for an interview, if it works out that they can come visit, or else they can work something else out over the phone.

"That sounds pretty similar to our situation! Membership in Vanda Nossëo requires free emigration policy, laws against rape, torture, and murder, and a vote of a majority of the entire population in favor. Local polities almost invariably add more requirements but the details vary. We also have some neighbor states who either couldn't implement those minima or prefer to operate separately for bureaucratic reasons, and we still trade with them and allow their people to move to Vanda Nossëo."

"I don't know what you want to know! That's one of the thing we're here for! How about you tell us what you want to know - besides those things that I already said we don't know - and in exchange for that I'll answer the ones I can?"

"In principle, that's not impossible, but if there were a polity of scale comparable to ours running around invading people we'd probably have a problem with them sooner or later even if they didn't attack Vanda Nossëo members."

They would be happy to send somebody down then! Any requests on what kind of somebody?

"Your people may visit as soon as they've read our laws, and our people may leave if you'll have them and they want to go. I can read our imperial laws to you over this phone if that's the most convenient way to arrange for your people to know them."

"We want to know how you make phones!" "And what other worlds are like and what you want and what it's like to be aliens. We have twelve kinds of magic, unless the Solar Lord is right and it's thirty one, but nobody else believes that. And the Solar Lord says he's king of the sun and moon and I think he's probably allowed to be as long as he pays taxes but he doesn't live there because nobody lives there."

"Well, that's good. And nothing I've seen so far has made me think we couldn't win a war if one happened. - I notice you skipped straight to answering my question and I'm not sure if the implication was that we're going question for question or what."

They'd like somebody who can understand and pronounce Ilan and ideally also someone who looks alien in a way that'd be hard to do by layering illusions over a caralendar actor. ...And they have to have read or heard Anavel Sani's state laws and be willing to follow them while they're there.

"Can you tell us where we could find a copy of your laws written in physical form? Illusions are also fine but we'd have to send a drone to pick it up."

"These phones were made by an onboard object-conjuration team member but their design and non-magical manufacture are really complicated and honestly I don't know much about it personally! I'm going to send you some pictures of other worlds, you can poke through them if you touch the blue part of the phone's screen - there you go -" There are pictures of planets from the sky, cities from the air, people partying and traveling and hawking various goods in a dozen settings. "We found some bodies on the moon but nobody alive, that's for sure."

"I'm in the habit of answering questions in situations like this, it's part of my job. Do you want me to ask you more questions?"

"All our people are using translation magic that will make them sound like they're speaking Ilan to people whose native language is Ilan. I'm not sure how easy it is for you to do illusions that would add, say, wings...? We're working on getting a copy of the imperial laws, where can we find the state laws?"

"Sure, they're normally free at any government building but I can get a copy and set it someplace outdoors if that's easier for the drone. They should also be scryable," and the imperial representative can explain where to scry them.

Regardless of how they get them, the imperial laws read, in Hari:

The Hari Empire commands all free people who live within Har's borders and partake in Har's society, to

pay taxes which are explained in the Appendix of Current Imperial Taxes,

not change, touch, or put magic on the body of any free person unless that person allows it,

not kill any free person unless that person allows it,

not take away any free person's possession unless that person allows it,

not change or put magic on the possession of any free person unless that person allows it,

not release and make free any slave, unless a reasonable person could expect that slave to understand and follow these laws,

keep all contracts which they chose to make at a time when they were not being threatened with battery, murder, or something these laws forbid,

stay out of areas owned by any free person unless that person allows it,

not lie to a judge or police officer while in court for the purpose of determining any person's guilt or innocence in any criminal case,

not prevent any free person from entering any public place whose owner has not chosen to restrict entry into it,

not force any free person to leave any place whose owner consents for that person to be there.

Additional exceptions may exist for some law enforcement officers; for more information on this, see the Appendix on Law Enforcement. For more information on property, ownership, and state and municipal laws, see the Appendix on Property and Possession, and the Official List of States of the Hari Empire. For sentencing guidelines, see the Appendix on Sentencing. For more information on the Hari Empire and who can speak for it, see the Appendix on Elections. For information on the benefits of society, see the Official List of Current Imperial Public Works. For more information about opting out, see So You Never Want To See Another Person Again: A Guide To Private Island Life. Remember to also read the laws of the state and city you live in!

"Oh, cool - I know a story about the bodies on the moon - wait, what do you mean about conjuration, we can totally make things with magic..."

"Yeah! Why is that your job? Who's paying you to do it? Is physics different in any worlds you know of?"

"...Uh, what happens if someone whose native language isn't Ilan tries to capture an illusion of exactly what one of your representatives said?"

They're gonna read all the appendices to see if they need to pay taxes, how their posessions will be adjudicated, and also all the other things just out of curiosity.

"I don't know if your magic could make phones or not! Our kind used the design of the phone, once it had been invented, to make real phones."

"Vanda Nossëo pays me to do envoy tasks and part of that is making ourselves clear and easy to understand for anyone who's curious about us! There are some worlds with different physics, like a couple where the world is flat and goes on forever instead of there being stars and planets. What are all you guys's names? What were you doing before we showed up today?"

"The illusion will probably also have the Allspeak property but we haven't tested that interaction since your magic system is new to us. We have some people who can learn languages very quickly but not in time for the proposed interview schedule unless we call in someone who isn't assigned to this ship, and those people aren't necessarily going to be interested. Alternately, we could borrow someone who speaks Ilan, and take them to a different universe with some useful magic, and have them do some of the magic to let one of our people know all the languages they speak, as well as they speak them."

Depending on where they set up shop they could end up owing state sales tax. The states they'd realistically operate in have strict truth-in-advertising laws, not all the same, and laws against replacing matter with vacuum. There's a bunch of interesting precedent on what kinds of things can be considered property, and whether they are by default thus considered. (The states they're at all likely to want to operate in are Har, Erhau, Meiu, Westgarden, East Anemone Bay, South Anemone Bay, Ethornak, Ehima, Rasa, Cloudbreak, and Anavel Sani. That's not even half the states in existence but, for example, I Don't Like The Other States, population: one, full text of state laws: stay away or I will hurt you until you wish you were never born, probably doesn't want to entertain a diplomatic delegation.)

Hanu et al and the astronomy club will all keep talking at length with Vanda Nossëo's representatives.

South Coast News and Weather can put out an ad for people who want to get involved in an alien magic experiment to teach people languages by magic. This might go better with more detailed information on the specific magic in question.

The way it works is that there's some species that can be summoned from a couple of specific worlds from their homes, so they'd dismiss one back to their home, and then have a Hari citizen go to one of those worlds and summon them, and then dismiss them right back (the first thing involves pressing a button, the second thing involves concentrating for about a minute).

One thing they often do in new places is set up stores where they will exchange goods of theirs for stories, anecdotes, songs, and similar cultural trivia. How would sales tax apply in those cases?

South Coast News and Weather puts up their ad. There are some people interested in going to another world and pushing a button, sure.

There are several different precedents for how barter relates to taxes in different areas. Each of them individually makes sense.

Cool. They don't mind paying taxes when they operate in those states.

They would like to send someone down to collect a button-pusher, okay?

They can do that. Would-be button-pusher is some kind of hummingbird but generally handles heavy loads with magic and does not expect to be impaired in pushing even a very large button.

Some kind of hummingbird is informed that it is typically the case that people born outside worlds where summoning occurs are not affected by performing a summon, but their species and world have not been tested, and the thing that happens to summoners from the relevant worlds is that they become a summonable being upon their death, is that okay?

"What kind of summonable being?"

"A demon, an angel, or a fairy; which seems to depend on your personality. All three are indestructible; demons can conjure material objects, angels can change them, and fairies can move them."

"You mean like how a structure mage can take plain air and turn it into sugar?"

"Angels can do that, sure, or vice-versa, or water into rock, or whatever."

"Does the conjuring make things out of nothing?"

"Yes it does."

"...Okay, that's going to be a big deal economically - do you also have the ability to get rid of the things, one of my other selves can do that and it's not exactly useful here..."

"Angels can get rid of the things by turning them into smaller volumes or different things or both. Other selves?"

"You know, I'm part of a thwilit. There are other birds that are also part of the same thwilit. Together we're one legal person."

"Huh. Do you all need to come along to still be able to talk and stuff, when we bring you to do the summoning? I'm not sure it will work if you aren't individually sapient. And if you are I'm curious why you're one legal person."

"I can talk on my own. Just, if I were trapped alone, I would rather be dead, and couldn't have kids, and wouldn't really know how to take care of myself in the longer term, and if one part of us touches another part of us without asking it's not any of the empire's business."

"Okay. That's really neat. Ready to go to the world where summoning works?"

"Yeah!"

There are a series of environmental discontinuities and then they're standing in a nice office and the thwillit-member is offered a button.

They push the button. And now a daeva speaks Thwilit and Ilan and a few words of Hari.

Cool. And dismissal goes fine?

Seems to, or at any rate, the bird in question doesn't have any trouble wanting it for a minute.

And gone is the fairy. (And then back is the fairy, as the escort resummons her.) And then they can all pop back to Har!

They can do that. And the fairy can be interviewed about Vanda Nossëo and its species and laws and intentions toward Har and its take on linguistic diversity and democracy and lifespan differences and whether Vanda Nossëo knows useful things about science and technology and what kinds of magic people have in other universes...

The fairy has pretty good screen presence, insofar as that translates when the camera isn't a camera!

Species: lots. Mostly humans by population, but the Amentans and orcs both have much higher birth rates and whether they catch up or not probably depends on what they find with further exploration (Amentans seem to be a one-off, orcs aren't). There are also Elves and Dwarves, who have pretty low birth rates but also keep being discovered in new worlds, and demons and fairies and angels, who don't reproduce at all but members of many other species can turn into them if they're born in the right world so they've put lots of the Amentans' colony planets in those worlds specifically hoping to increase the supply. There are dozens of other species that you are less likely to run into if you're bopping around the multiverse; the fairy gives examples but tries not to get too into the weeds about all the weird nonhuman humanoids you can find one or two planets of in Warp or Edda or Cube (those being the most crowded-with-various-aliens worlds).

Laws! The minimum requirement to join Vanda Nossëo is freedom of emigration and laws against murder, torture, and rape, plus a majority vote in favor; that gets you defensive support and a universal basic income. These may not sound very controversial but on some planets they turn out to be real sticking points because the locals were underestimating how many people they apply to (it's all of them, all the people, yes children, yes slaves, yes crazy people, etc., many places limit immigration such that you can't enter if you're a murderer or something but you still have to let them leave, and you also have to let them vote). Basically everywhere in Vanda Nossëo has more laws than that, though.

Vanda Nossëo has mass-produced wands that, with a tap from a trained installer, give you Allspeak, the ability to be heard as though speaking all your listeners' languages, to write in any language, to read and understand any language. (Reading and writing only work if you're literate.) This substantially accelerates linguistic diversity development - anyone who needs to talk to lots of people who don't live in their neighborhood gets an Allspeak installation and will barely even notice if their idiolect drifts out of mutual intelligibility with another dialect's. This is very controversial among linguists as to whether it's good or bad but it sure seems to be happening.

Democracy: varies! Humans and Amentans often like it in one form or another, Dwarves are anarchocapitalists, Elves like monarchies, orcs do a bunch of different stuff, other species do a bunch of different stuff.

Lifespan differences: it is the considered position of Vanda Nossëo that nobody should have to die if they don't feel like it. Immortality and resurrections are both still bottlenecked, but they're working hard on that; resurrection doesn't work on everybody, specifically people who have nonreductionist souls and whose souls can't be conveniently located and coaxed back into a replacement body, so people meeting that description are prioritized for immortality, as are people who don't live very long.

Vanda Nossëo knows lots of great stuff about science and technology, like various ways to travel faster than light and information technology that lets you find the exact passage you have in mind in a book out of a library of text and recordings and suchlike you have on a device yea big.

Some of the most common magic types are magic songs (they have to be composed in specific universes but can be sung anywhere), wizardry (the world it's from is super not safe to visit, but there are refugees, and anyone can learn it), being a magic rock (more common in Mîr, the polity oriented around the universe neighborhood in which magic rocks can be made) which have a useful suite of utility powers and also varying other abilities depending on their personal details, and the alphabet spells (a suite of several spells that only one person can invent more of and that very slowly, but that anyone can learn, but that are so ridiculously powerful that you need to pass even more screening for them than for being a wizard).

They have a lot of detailed questions about Dwarves and the screening for the ridiculously powerful magic and how they can get access to the technological information. And what "rape" is, until they ascertain that it's a subset of something already illegal in Har.

The interviewer asks about whether they require consent for resurrection or for that matter whether they can just make their own copies of people who they want to do things to, and about the types of magical beings that people can become when they die - do they keep the magic they had before? What exactly can demons conjure?

They don't require consent for resurrection except in the sense that if someone has requested that they not be resurrected they won't be; the presumption for people who never had the opportunity to do that is that they may as well give it a go, since most people would rather be alive. It is possible to copy some kinds of people but illegal without that person's consent. Screening filters out people who want to use the magic antisocially in some way, and if there's really limited spots in a class it'll be filtered further. Some kinds of magic are retained upon becoming a daeva but not all. Demons can conjure any material object provided they have enough information to specify it.

The interviewer goes very still.

"Can demons conjure material objects that are magically hidden?"

"Not always - there's a magic system that can erase written information sufficient to prevent a demon from getting a copy, if the copies are all erased - but, uh, probably."

"Can we check that?"

"Yes, I can ask one of my demon colleagues to check something if you'll tell me what."

"The grocery list I wrote this morning and haven't taken anywhere yet?"

The fairy looks at his computer and then turns the display so the interviewer can see. There's the grocery list.

He freezes for a solid ten seconds.

"It's possible to get a brain implant that demon-proofs information you use it to record," says the fairy earnestly. "I can tell this is really important to you and we can get the research fast-tracked for local brain anatomy."

"But you can get - anything - people naked - everything anyone wrote before you came - the ways people decorate their bedrooms - right?"

"- they can but it's not that likely that they will, for any given person."

"...I do not consent to resurrection," he says, and freezes his heart.

The fairy is pretty freaked out about that.

The way they do filming in Har doesn't require that someone be right there in the room behind a camera. There do happen to be an illusion mage and knowledge mage in the next room toying with what might be called camera angles, or more accurately at this point, staring vaguely at the metal they were testing angles on and not particularly toying with anything.

The illusion mage recovers first and walks in. Possibly someone should have some manner of interaction with the fairy about this. ...She does not have any ideas for what kind of interaction it should be.

The fairy is sobbing into his scarf!

The illusion mage is so at a loss and honestly sobbing sounds like a very relatable response right now. She's not doing it, but, super relatable. She liked that guy. Also every time she has ever gotten off is now basically public. Also she would prefer the fairy not be sad, which seems basically unachievable but slightly less unachievable than anything else.

"...Hi. Um. I totally saw that that wasn't murder and I will let people know if it comes up."

"Um... th-thank you?" whimpers the fairy.

Seems like an odd response but it's at least sensical. "Do you want to go be in the same room as me and Malar who was also watching?"

"...okay." The fairy floats along after her.

When they get there the illusion mage curls up clutching the illusion blank they were using to her chest as if she desperately needs a hug from something that isn't metallic and doesn't imagine either of the other people in the room are valid sources of hugs. "So I guess we don't have to go outside to let anyone know, huh," she says.

Malar looks up and shivers and seems to snap out of it.

"I'm sorry," sobs the fairy. "Are - are a lot of people going to do that -"

"Uh, probably some? I like being alive but I like it less now," says the illusion mage. She does not attempt to charge because it would make her feel slightly less bad if the fairy felt slightly less bad so she's going to give him free stuff about it. "I don't think you have to be sorry about it? The demons should be sorry, the demons should stop existing, everything would be fine if we could make every demon stop being conscious forever and destroy anything they already conjured about us."

The fairy finds this bewildering enough as a thing to say that he stops crying and looks puzzled at her.

"...Because then the thing that upset everyone here wouldn't be true? Probably if that happened Aisan wouldn't even want to be dead. I guess you might feel like that was worse if you have demon friends but I don't have any of those. At any rate if anyone's going to try to appease us it should be the people who caused the problems in the first place and not you."

"There's... billions of them. And they're important. And they don't even care how you decorate your bedroom. I don't understand why you'd want them all dead?"

"Because sometimes I like to have privacy for things. It's - I mean - it's - maybe it's not something fairies care about, I don't know, all the humans I know care, and all the caralendri I know care, and obviously agerah care even more than we do a lot of the time. I'm not really seeing how there being billions of them would make it any better."

"It... makes it worse to kill them all, since it would be billions of murders and not just a few? And they - have better things to do? Than invade your privacy. I guess there's probably a few who do that kind of thing but it's so, so so unlikely they'd pick you, there's so many people, it's probably likelier that your privacy mage defrauded you in the first place."

"I am my privacy mage! I didn't defraud myself! I admit that billions of murders would be intensely disruptive and counter to the rule of law and also the demons would be against it."

"Okay but for any given person who isn't their own privacy mage it is probably likelier that their privacy mage defrauded them than that a demon super cares what they look like naked or how they decorate their bedroom. ...demons do have kind of a reputation of really wanting to organize all the writing that has ever been written so I guess that might be more of a concern. Would it help if we tried to avoid making this world known to the general demon population? I worry that would make it more interesting, not less, if they figured out there was a secret world..."

"I don't know! The government could figure it out, but if you tell them then maybe they'll kill themselves instead! This is not my job and I don't want it to be my job but I'd rather it be my job than live in an anarchy because we can't have a government and two of the imperial ministers are agerah. I don't know. I could be wrong. Maybe they'll be really chill. Maybe if you lead with 'we're trying to figure out how to fix this' before you explain what the problem is."

"Maybe." The fairy has his face in his scarf again. "Possibly someone who is not me should try to do that."

"Yeah, you can just... be in the same room with someone who also feels kind of upset and freaked out, if you want, I feel like that makes things slightly better."

"I think I'm going to go up to the ship again now actually," mumbles the fairy. "Since my interviewer is dead." And he vanishes.

Welp. The illusion mage stays put and tries to think whether it'd improve on this situation to go get hugs from her actual loved ones. On the one hand, yes, it would. On the other hand, she's not going to go tell them and watch them react.

Malar also leaves to go let some people know what's happening.

The representative talking to the government says that they have discovered something that appears to be locally infohazardous, is there a local policy on that?

Infohazards have historically usually turned out to be hoaxes or bad news or excessively bright lights. But they're learning a lot of new things today. "We could arrange a more private communication channel and you could speak to a member of a different species than the one it's known to be hazardous to."

"The only species we know it to not normally be infohazardous to is humans, because all the other species here are new to us, and it seems likely that humans here are more vulnerable than most, maybe for cultural reasons. We have reason to believe it may be especially dangerous to agerah but the person who killed themself on exposure was a caralendar."

The imperial representative thinks about those species and what they have in common. "Maybe a belul or an erel would be a good choice, then. Several of both work for the imperial government."

"No humans? We'd really like to avoid more casualties, we don't think this is something people ought reasonably be killing themselves over or at least haven't yet been brought to an understanding of why it would be. We can explain to a volunteer belul or erel if that seems best from your perspective."

"My reasoning is - if it varies between our humans and yours, it's likely culturally influenced; caralendri are one of the more social species, so that also makes me think it's culturally influenced; agerah really aren't, to the extent that the agerah that you meet are selected very heavily for being unusually social, so anyone's idea of what they're like will skew social; humans, caralendri and agerah are all large, all mammals, all specifically form long-term relationships with the same individuals. The non-mammals are essi, who won't have good enough models of other people's concerns to help, ereli, who might, and thwilit, who are more social than any other species; beluli don't usually prefer to form stable long-term relationships, and if you're concerned what you have to say is alarming, there are some who won't be alarmed by anything at all."

"Okay. Difficult to alarm sounds good. Though if I had to bet on it I'd think thwilit might actually be fine."

"All right. If you want to send someone down we can offer you privacy and a fearless belul in the employ of the imperial government; I'm not sure how to get privacy over this phone, but we could also send you one of ours."

"We'll send someone down."

The someone is a demon herself, this time, in case demos are required.

The belul is smaller than a human and fluffy with a babyish face. She carries herself as if totally unaware of these facts. She looks like she's wearing a spiked collar and part of a skull for a hat. She perches up where she can be vaguely around eye level for most humanoids, and makes herself comfortable, ignoring the ostensible spikes clipping through her.

"Hey there. What rends the minds of other beings?"

"Anti-scrying wards don't work on every possible spying attempt," she says. "We think it's vanishingly unlikely that any given person would be spied on, but it's possible. There may be a way to prevent it going forward but probably not retroactively except for written material that all copies of ever made still exist."

"...Yep, people'll kill themselves. Not sure what I can say about that besides 'cool, being part of a peaceful global empire was kinda boring.' What's the vulnerability?"

"My species can conjure arbitrary material objects, including to specifications like how things were at a particular place at a time, or around a particular person. It does have to be material, we can't copy illusions. There's a way to record information such that we can't retrieve it and the author can still access it, but it requires a brain implant, and we don't have them figured out for all the kinds of brains here."

"...And, also, you were telling us about nonreductionist souls, but we don't have those, so you can copy the brain itself."

"We actually can't do that in a way that wakes up; if we try we get a biologically alive but not sensate or responsive copy. Good for medical research but not for kidnapping. Resurrecting people without nonreductionist souls requires that and then also a second step from a different magic system."

"I'm not thrilled that you can get every piece of information it's possible to have about me even if, if you want to actually kidnap me, you have to get another kind of mage to help."

"- I can't, the other kind of mage can only wake up an empty body if there's not an extant version of the person around."

"So you have to murder me first. That's another tricky step but it's not impossible. It's not what people are going to kill themselves over, though, that's the part where they have no privacy and never did."

"Right. So, one thing we could try to do is get the planet and everything and everyone on it to be sufficiently magical that we can't conjure it. We could try to classify the existence of this planet, so the only demons who'd know about it are the ones on this crew - me and there's two others - and it'd be much easier to enforce rules against us spying on you than against all the demons in the multiverse doing so. We could move the entire planet to Mîr, a world where one of Vanda Nossëo's friends and allies has the ability to grant wishes, and have some people wish everyone and their stuff unconjurable; we could then put the planet back or leave it in Mîr as you preferred. We could move the planet to a new world, that demons don't know to quantify over when they're looking for things, and handle all communications by multi-hop crystal ball relay, which could be limited to one non-demon knowing how to emplace everything - could be someone who'd forget it after the installation was performed, although then maintenance would be impossible. None of these plans is perfect but the Mîr one is probably the best if you want my recommendation. Or there might be things we haven't thought of yet."

"Mîr sounds like a fine plan to me, I guess if you don't want everyone to die you should lead with that. But if it's not retroactive some people are still going to hate it."

"Might be able to get it retroactive with enough wishes. Mîr wishes run on strength of emotion, so the fact that people here feel so strongly about it is an asset if we can keep them from committing suicide about it long enough to make the wish. Uh, one complication is that if things are unconjurable retroactively then we can't resurrect even people who would like to be alive again, lacking the ability to conjure a body for them. So ideally there'd be an exception for that."

"I think we're going to crack immortality in a few more decades, maybe a century. Maybe we could get it faster with alien biology information."

"Sure, but that doesn't help your great great great grandparents."

"Huh. Well, but you care what they want, and it's not impossible that a structure mage could someday rebuild someone - maybe it will be impossible if we make a wish, but no one knew that might happen - and people in the past went around hiding their brains too. Admittedly they wouldn't've been picturing a peaceful empire that cared about them getting to be alive and happy, when they pictured people who might bring them back."

"Well, we're a peaceful federation and we care about them getting to be alive and happy."

"Is there a manageable number to do today - you won't be able to find a lot of people who would have strong feelings about them getting to be alive and happy, you could find, like, historians who want to spy on them and I don't think that's what you want here."

"A manageable number of - what, resurrections? Uh, let me get a ballpark estimate how many people have died on this planet." One water molecule per and a scale, whaddawegot.

Lots. Not as many as most Earths, but still, lots.

"- yeah, this would be an absolutely massive undertaking just to resurrect, let alone the logistics to rehome and bring back up to speed," says the demon, shaking her head. "We don't need strong feelings for standard resurrections, strong feelings are for wishes and resurrections we can do in large amounts, but we can't do it all this week."

"Then they're going to stay dead."

"- maybe we could conjure the bodies in advance, and then keep them in stasis till we're ready to complete the resurrections," suggests the demon. "Since only the conjuration will be blocked by the protective wish."

"That might work! We can keep things in stasis pretty easily."

"I was imagining covering it with another wish and leaving them in Mîr but it's possible your solution is better, how does it scale and how reversible is it?"

"Off the top of my head I don't have specifics but it's worked in the past sometimes and in the past it's also resulted in a lot of statues we don't know what to do with that can no longer be restored - unless we resurrect a particular person who could bring them back - and which we also can't destroy. Probably doing it over a shorter timescale would be fine."

"...I think probably we'll go with the wish in that case. I hope we can figure out something to do with your statues but it sounds like they'll keep." Deep breath. "Okay. Do you need to consult anyone else about going ahead with prepping for the Mîr plan?"

"Yeah, that's the kind of thing that's... probably Minister Seihra's job to sign off on, I think, although it might end up needing everyone because it's going to make so much more work for the judiciary rounding up records of which people were executed on purpose."

"We don't need those records now, we aren't going to complete any resurrections today, we're just going to conjure bodies to maintain option value."

"Okay. And, uh, is this going to involve us needing to store a lot of frozen bodies, is it going to involve telling a bunch of demons about us before we can prevent them conjuring everything we've ever made..."

"We can store them, and we can keep it to just the demons on the crew till the wish is made."

"Sounds good to me. Run it by Minister Seihra, who'll be the one rounding up people with strong feelings about privacy and explaining the situation to the public anyway. Come with me, there are phones for the ministers' secretaries in another room."

The demon follows.

The thing that is translating as "phones" is actually a type of paired illusion-and-scrying device. The fearless and slightly edgelordy belul gets hold of the minister's secretary, explains the urgency, gets hold of the minister, and explains the situation.

"Yes, we'll do that," the minister answers. "While we're working on transit and finding people with strong emotions, someone who knows how Mîr's magic works should speak with a spell designer about what exactly we want - maybe Exav, a belul force mage who does command design for the empire and shouldn't be doing anything urgent today. Make that happen. And are there requirements beyond strong emotions? I expect we can filter for something else at very little cost."

"I'll call in a liaison from Mîr. The strong emotion needs to be related to the subject of the wish, but it can be positive or negative - both is even better - and they need to be trustworthy to make only the agreed-on wish. Plus they'll be going to Mîr, but all of you will be going to Mîr, so -

- oh, hm. Some magic systems are by planet but some are by world. If any babies are being born, or conceived, or hatched, or whatever the critical point in your magic system is, it's possible being in Mîr would interfere with them getting magic."

"I can have the person placed under a temporary command not to make any unapproved wish - finding someone who'll accept may still not narrow it down to a manageable number of candidates. I'll announce the other potential problem in case any soon-to-be mothers hear about it and want to have a defense mage freeze them for the trip, and it sounds like if anyone does miss the announcement we have several options for fixing any problems that might result."

"Okay, that sounds good. Uh, let's see, anything else... there's a species that requires a particular kind of solar radiation but we're bringing your sun with you... getting to Mîr from here via known worlds requires going through a world where gravity works differently, possibly we should do a test planet or go on a quick shortcut-hunt to make sure being there for a fraction of a second won't be an issue... you'll also be passing through some planets with inborn magic features of their own, which should be mentioned to soon-to-be-mothers too..."

"There are many uninhabited planets in this universe that you may use for your test. I can include information about other worlds' magics in the announcement. Do you have a list of them?"

"The ones en route are Hex, Stork, and Dreamward - Dreamward being the one with the different gravity situation. Hex everyone gets an immaterial perceptible-only-to-them animal companion and then you can either instantiate them physically or not; in the first case they eventually go to sleep and stay that way and memories about them fade and in the second case you can cast spells but if they die you're in very serious trouble. Stork has servantmaking, being able to animate and control a few kinds of thing collectively called servants. Also they spontaneously appear as babies without reproducing at any point so it doesn't seem that likely to be contagious to passersby but it bears mentioning. Dreamward has a thing called troportation where you can exchange properties between objects you're touching. Also they have immaterial souls there."

Seihra can go put together that announcement.

Exav can talk spell design with whoever they send. It was Exav's day off but this is urgent.

They're sorry about having appeared on Exav's day off.

They've gotten ahold of Mîr's wish design department and have some wordings rendered and checked in Hari to vet, for the unconjurability of the people, possessions, and inhabited places belonging to the people of Har (available in "entirely" or "just the things that are also unscryable", they recommend the latter because demon forensics is pretty useful but it's up to them), stasis on the conjured bodies of the dead of the past, and a precautionary wish protecting the magical development of any babies conceived or born at an inconvenient moment.

Exav wants to know if demonic conjuration is unprecedented or if it'd make more sense to wish for immunity to divination more broadly, and whether they can make use of any of the established ways of excepting specific people's spells to allow illusion mages to, say, specify a whitelist of demons if they have some reason to want to.

Demonic conjuration is pretty special but a broader immunity might work. No-conjuring-except-under-these-conditions might also work, the question is mostly whether someone can muster strong enough feelings about it when it has more caveats.

Well, maybe if Exav ranks wish designs by how well they'd achieve what the people of Har most want to get out of this, they can go through the list in order and find out if any of their candidates can wish for them intensely enough. Is there a direct relationship between number of caveats and required strength of emotion...?

Often people who are making a wish like this find it much easier to feel strongly about a simple, clear principle than about a complicated legalistic document but it's by no means universal.

Meanwhile the imperial minister commandeers the imperial news and also the imperial live public executions channel to make an emergency announcement about the proposed solution, and then about the problem, and then about the special considerations for pregnant people.

They're swamped with volunteers for the wish. Well, for the privacy wish. A comparatively manageable number of people feel strongly about putting dead bodies in stasis or having a backup plan for babies.

They can bring a bunch and see who makes the Empress's wish-granter go ding the loudest? They're already moving this entire damn planet to Mîr.

(The test planet has made it there and back unscathed, seismic readings nominal, atmosphere intact, sun not behaving weirdly. It helped that they went WAY WAY WAY above the surface of the flat in Dreamward.)

They can do that. Some of them make the wish-granter go ding quite loudly indeed.

The winners for each wish can be the ones to make it, then.

Winners make wishes, then. They manage to work in a reasonable amount of caveats to the privacy one. The imperial news gives a terse summary of the whole thing afterward.

South Coast News and Weather edits the interview and cuts the death and immediate leadup thereto in favor of having Malar summarize things.

The Vanda Nossëo folks tentatively attempt to pick up where they left off before, uh, that.

Minister Seihra lets them know that Har has chosen to take it as a sign of good faith and an overture of friendship that they granted this wish, and invites them to send someone to the imperial audience chamber to address the three people to whom all the rest of the imperial government answers.

Okay! Here's an Elf who introduces herself as Alassë.

Someone will then show Alassë down a mazelike hallway whose walls are not where they look like they are, to a dimly lit room where three people appear to perch on daises. There are two agerah - Seihra, Imperial Minister of Public Works, and Haria, Imperial Chief Justice - and one caralendar woman, Saran Sorota, Imperial Minister of Revenue.

"Your people's coming has been intensely disruptive," says Saran, "but so are all interactions of societies with one another, and this one less than many. Is it true, then, that you have come because you care for the wellbeing of others, wherever they may be found?"

"Yes, that's right," says Alassë.

"We are pleased to have met you. Can you think of anything else that might alarm us if handled indelicately - I would very much like to be sure we're done with that phase of things and move on, I expect you understand."

"We weren't expecting this first wave of alarm, but brainstorming attempts haven't come up with anything else obvious. Uh, more common sources of tension are that Vanda Nossëo opposes slavery, takes a fairly strong position on children's rights and freedom of emigration, doesn't endorse the death penalty, and opposes mind control and mindreading."

"Well, children's rights and slavery might indeed be sources of tension, but that's not nearly so alarming as the existence of mind control - we'd like to arrange tests of our magic against that and mindreading, and, ah, backup plans in case those tests turn out alarmingly."

"All right, we can call in a range of people with mental powers for testing. Some people, like my species, just have communicative telepathy, but there are more powerful ones. We do have our own solution, based on Mîr wishes like the ones we just arranged, for that, which most of our envoy staff are equipped with. It works against most things. - there are also precognitive powers in a particular world-neighborhood that our defense does not work on."

"Can you tell us more about these precognitive powers, and can we avoid them if we stay in our own universe?"

"The precognitive powers only work in a particular neighborhood and Har isn't in it. Information about other worlds that enters that neighborhood can be precognitively learned. They work by allowing the precog to get advance information about things that they in particular will experience while remaining in their neighborhood in the counterfactual that they did not use precognition. We use that for disaster anticipation - we probably would have gotten a warning from a precog about the privacy thing if it hadn't specifically concerned privacy and make bringing more eyes onto the situation fraught - but nothing local to Har that doesn't make the interdimensional news will be apparent to them."

"Well, that might be fine. I am sure some people will be annoyed that all their shows will be spoiled if they get popular on other worlds, and there are probably other problems I'm not thinking of immediately... I expect it will be fine. So, I don't think we're likely to join Vanda Nossëo - trying to end slavery really wouldn't be popular, probably not even among slaves - but I hope we can nonetheless make you glad you came."

"Can I ask why ending slavery wouldn't be popular among slaves?"

"Many of them like being alive or have hope that they will like being alive in the future."

"- to be clear, when we're addressing slavery we do not do it by killing anyone. We try to find ways to free the slaves."

"Well, then you have the additional concern that many of them like that their families are alive and the planet exists! I am imagining that, say, a serial murderer would go on to commit more murders once no longer restrained from doing so, or that someone with poor impulse control would be angry that a town was laid out confusingly and try to rearrange it and get frustrated if that didn't work and do something big and destructive about it, or that a child would like the bath they were taking and not want to stop and freeze the entire room so that nothing within it could ever change in any way again."

"- is that the main problem that you're using slavery to address?"

"Yes. Of extremely secondary importance are uses like medical research and the fact that some people enjoy owning other people."

"Would you be willing to work with us on ending slavery if we had some kind of non-slavery-related antimagic that sufficed for safety purposes like that?"

"I can't immediately rule it out. I'm not convinced you'd like the effects it'd have and I'm concerned that incorrigible criminals would still be able to do something objectionable, and there are lesser concerns like the unpopularity of such a policy with people who just want to hurt others."

"Vanda Nossëo has," sigh, "prisons, for people who can't be safely released into the general population, but most people prefer them to slavery."

"Why do most people prefer them and for which species is that true?"

"Prisoners have guaranteed rights - which don't include leaving the prison system but do include lots of other things - and they're generally maintained to a high standard of comfort and include opportunities to learn skills that will be useful upon release. As far as I know every species in Vanda Nossëo and our allied neighbors Mîr and Elendil with... hm... three exceptions, nigh-universally prefers prison to slavery in typical conditions, and the individuals in other species who choose not to exit slavery conditions usually have a specific reason like having close personal relationships with people they wouldn't be able to see if they left."

"I don't believe we'll want to interfere if you want to buy some and take them to very comfortable prisons to teach them things."

"Buying slaves on an ongoing basis has a tendency to incentivize people to enslave more people. We'd be happy to buy every single one of them as a one time thing."

"I can understand your concern, but we have all the incentive we need to keep doing that indefinitely."

"I understand that your current rate of enslavement is incentivized quite sufficiently," Alassë assures them. "The issue would be if, say, people chose to have more children knowing that Vanda Nossëo would buy them."

"Are you hoping to increase our infanticide rate or are you hoping we'll institute wildly unpopular laws about that?"

"...we also distribute contraception."

"For what species?"

"Any. We have nonmagical methods that work for humans but the magical ones will work for arbitrary species."

"I suppose that and the ability to check in advance whether the baby would be a void mage would bring the rate down."

"What exactly is the issue with void mages?"

"As a practical matter, it's been historically true that we haven't had the ability to create matter, only to destroy it, so we haven't permitted the destruction of matter, for obvious reasons. On an emotional level, their magic is useful only for destruction; it feels uncanny. I expect with demons around they'll be more popular again up north."

"Oh. Yes, there's not a scarcity of matter, multiversally speaking, and actually one of the things angels are in demand for is garbage disposal. There's an entire magic system from a planet that did in fact destroy too much of its matter and is now gone, which is also destruction-oriented, but different in details."

"I wonder if void mages will turn out to be cheaper than angels, for that."

"Quite likely! Angels have a lot of other things they're good for. We can't employ slave labor, though, which brings us back around to the slavery question. With universal contraceptive access, something to ensure the safety of incompetents with dangerous magic, and an economic niche for void mages, can you envision Har transitioning to a no-slavery model?"

"Can we envision it, well, it depends on what you mean. If you have the legal right to confiscate the products of someone's own body, and have the surveillance state necessary to ensure no one can reproduce in secret, in what sense do you lack slavery?"

"Our legal apparatus considers everyone to own themselves, with that ownership in many respects held in trust until they can make meaningful decisions with it but that trust revoked in cases of maltreatment," Alassë says. "It might be a useful model if you imagine, say, people already existing before they are born and then being transported into the world of the living upon conception - that's not in fact what's going on except in cases of reincarnation, which as far as I know you don't have, but it might get at some of the concepts I have in mind better? And we want to recognize and enforce the rights of all the people involved with our best guess of what they would and would not have assented to had they been in a position to make a free agreement in advance."

"That makes sense as a political philosophy. Do you have any expectation that it's enforceable?"

"We did just dismantle a key arm of our enforcement protocol here," she acknowledges, "but it's important to us and if it makes the difference between Har having slavery and Har not having slavery, we'll put a lot of effort into figuring out how to enforce it."

"You have, I imagine, decided to broach this matter with us because it is the imperial government alone which could repeal the law against releasing those slaves who cannot follow the law."

"Which," Haria interrupts, "we will need to discuss altering to explicitly state within the territory of the Hari Empire, as we hardly claim jurisdiction over what you do in your own worlds."

"Yes, quite," says Saran. "And that law is an imperial law, exceptionless and universal. We can make laws like that - simple laws, laws that require nothing of those who would rather forget there are people other than themselves. Most people live in larger states that people can leave any time they want - often for some other large state - and which may therefore require much more burdensome things of, for example, parents. If you speak of this instead to the Governor of Anavel Sani, you do so with my blessing."

"So you expect it won't be possible on an imperial level but may be on a state level?"

"Something you'd like better than the current system might be possible in some states, and is not possible for us right now. I note, also, that the legal precedents have not held, for instance, that it is criminally negligent to leave a knowledge mage free of any command magic in itself if the slave is not also in a position to do nonmagical sabotage of any kind. I may have garbled that, a bit, Haria?"

"Close enough. There's no legal requirement to use command magic and no legal requirement not to give a slave away for free to mysterious mages from the stars, nor any legal requirement to make that decision without consulting the slave."

"Right, we're really expecting the sticking point to be slaves whose owners do not want to stop having slaves," acknowledges Alassë.

"Yes, the fact that you're proposing we enforce something objectionable to many people, intruding on the solitude of those who have retreated from society and forcing medical and chemical synthesis research to be rebuilt from the ground up, insisting that there is no way to avoid our commands and that we must be omnipresent in every life and relationship, is a sticking point," says Haria. "Would I be wrong if I guessed that a typical Vanda Nossëo member polity at the time of initial contact knew the number of its own people, and was composed entirely of those who would make substantial compromises to avoid being cut off from society?"

"That's true of typical member polities, yes."

"It's not true of us. It's substantially closer to true of the eleven largest states, and especially Anavel Sani and Cloudbreak, and we have no objections to you speaking with their governments after this. Are there perhaps any other goals you have that might be more tractable?"

"I'm getting the sense that you aren't liable to object to free trade or networked exchange of information."

"In general I don't think we will object to that, and if you have any logistical difficulties in implementing any of it, we can see if we can help. We would object to visitors or immigrants who would not follow our laws, including those now awaiting resurrection who haven't followed our laws. For those who have done us no harm, we would ask no more than that they be asked to summarize our laws and state their intent to follow them, unless and until it becomes clear that this does not suffice to keep their crime rate at or below the level we currently experience from our own people. Individual states may also object to the dissemination of advertisements that fail to comply with their truth-in-advertising laws. I don't expect any of this to be a substantial impediment to trade or the exchange of information."

"We can make the test on the Hari laws a condition of entry, yes. Do you object if we resurrect people who have not followed your laws in the past, settle them within Vanda Nossëo, and allow them on transit to Har if they pass that test?"

"Those people have been given their chance already, generally multiple chances, and we will likely only want to allow them if there is some very clear reason to believe they are more capable than they were in the past, such as a disease that affected their judgment and has been entirely cured. I will point out to you, also, that I had expected you to ask us if we couldn't favor clean executions more often, as opposed to death by torture, and if you do want to ask for that in the future, resurrecting our criminals will make that a harder sell."

"I didn't actually know that you tended to go for death by torture. We'd be happy to take them off your hands if that would be satisfactory, but if you prefer to sentence them yourselves, we would much prefer clean executions. We aren't in a specific hurry to resurrect any of your criminals and won't be unless, say, their bereaved immigrate to Vanda Nossëo and put in a request for them."

"If the end result of execution is being welcomed into a great and prosperous empire as its free citizens, we will not go out of our way to make the process pleasant. As long as it is unpleasant to experience and removes people from our universe, that suffices for our purposes, no matter if or when you resurrect them. Any who find it too terrible to live with the possibility that they could end up subject to our justice are free to leave first and commit all their crimes on your planets if you'll have them."

"What if someone commits a crime in Har and then leaves before they're arrested?"

"Well, that, perhaps, ought to depend on whether we can come to an agreement on whether you'll return them to us, and what you'd do to them if you didn't, and what you'd want us to do if one of your people did that."

"It would be a pretty hard sell to repatriate an escaped criminal to be tortured. Easier if it's a quick death, but that is related to the expectation that we'd eventually get around to resurrecting them."

"What would you want, if someone... owned a slave in Vanda Nossëo, and then came to Har?"

"...almost no one does that. Stipulating that this is one of the situations where they do?"

"If you can think of a more likely crime, you're welcome to suggest another example, but otherwise, yes."

"Oh, you mean if someone were keeping a slave against their will, not that this was, say, one of the species that likes slavery, or an oddball of another species. I think we'd be inclined to treat that as we would any other kidnapping case."

"And how do you intend to treat other kidnapping cases that wind up in our territory?"

"We would want the kidnapping victim returned to their home, being that we by default perceive them as a sovereign person with rights over themself."

"And the kidnapper?"

"Would be refused entry into Vanda Nossëo unless they were entering our justice system, but actually we wouldn't object to you harboring them if you wished to."

"Then perhaps we will decide likewise. And in general I expect that if those kidnapped are able to follow our laws and not considered slaves in the polity they came from, we can simply treat them like any other people, all of whom have a right to freely access public spaces. However, for those kidnapping victims who don't know our laws, is there any way you'd find it objectionable if we treated them as your stolen property to be returned to you, ideally undamaged, and prevented from causing problems in the mean time?"

"Hm - prevented how? Off the top of my head, my species spontaneously dies of being confined."

"Normally, we would use magic to prevent them from taking unauthorized actions."

"What actions are typically authorized or unauthorized in the normal case?"

"It varies and I don't personally write procedures for it but it would not surprise me to hear that someone in that situation was prevented from using magic, prevented from doing violence, prevented from leaving an area which could feasibly be large and partly outdoors, or prevented from leaving such an area without an escort, or watched."

"All right. I think we can work out an arrangement where a kidnap victim here is kept according to your safety needs till we can pick them up."

"Good. What other common problems have you run into already when you've met new societies?"

"Religious objections to various things such as birth control are common. Sometimes we land in the middle of a war, or a - more population-level oppressed class than slaves where the central case is minor children. Sometimes there's a non-war ongoing crisis, a disease or disaster we have to deal with. On a smaller scale sometimes people try to attack our representatives or scam each other about how to access the services we have to offer but I don't expect that to happen often here. - I have a question about enslaved children. What tends to underly the decision to free them if it's never obligatory?"

"Different people have different reasons. Slaves don't vote and free people often vote like their parents - candidates tend to appeal to specific species or industries or linguistic minorities, and in two of those cases the correlation is nearly absolute. Slaves are not responsible for their own behavior - if one finds a way to get revenge, that's legal, unless it causes collateral damage to someone other than the owner, in which case it is the owner who is tried for vandalism or battery. Some slaves will work harder if promised freedom, and if the owner went back on such a promise, that would not be illegal, but it would be the kind of thing that anyone dealing with them in the future might bear in mind. Some species commonly exhibit substantial parental investment in offspring and members of these species will sometimes free people out of a personal preference that they be free. Caralendri, ah... Saran?"

"For the dignity of the clan and so they can join other households and perhaps become heads of household themselves someday," says Saran. "And for personal fondness, and because competent slaves with very valuable skills aren't necessarily easier to get what you want from than free people that you pay."

"Huh," says Alassë. "- it currently does not seem likely that you will want to take an Empire-wide vote on joining Vanda Nossëo but if you do it will be necessary to allow the slaves an opportunity to submit their opinions."

"That would be... impossible in some cases and a substantial logistical undertaking in others."

"In what cases would it be impossible?"

"Those who could understand the question but not answer, or answer the question but not understand that it was being asked - it is possible that telepathy would solve some of those problems, but to solve them that way would compromise ballot secrecy - or those who have been taken away to hidden islands and may or may not even be alive."

"If they're not alive we can check for them among the stasised dead," Alassë points out. "And we allow proxy vote registration as long as the proxy can testify that they didn't pressure or misrepresent the vote."

"Then perhaps it would be possible, if it ends up seeming like a good idea. And, regardless, the empire and Vanda Nossëo will likely - if clearly not immediately - both be better off for having met, do you agree?"

"I do!" says Alassë. "We're big believers in positive sum trade. I don't see any reason to think we can't accomplish that much here."

"Likewise. If you want a business tip, which is worth less than the rest of what I have to say because I'm no businessperson, I think healing will sell well."

"It usually does," agrees Alassë.

"I find that easy to believe," says Haria.

"What if the kidnapping of some incompetent person were the other way around?" asks Seihra. "Would you return them to us?"

"By default, yes, though if they wanted to stay we'd be inclined to harbor them."

"And so we might have a situation where one of your people steals one of ours and you might be reluctant - I assume because of internal political pressure about handing people over to be slaves? - to return the stolen property."

"Yes. For many possible applications of slave labor we could replace it, we have nonsapient constructs that can do a lot of things, but it won't work if the slaves are seeing, for example, sexual use, or if their individual identities are a factor for the owner."

"There might be some way for us all to get more of what we want than this but my first thought is that you'll need to pick your favorite two of 'Vanda Nossëo doesn't return stolen slaves', 'Vanda Nossëo doesn't turn criminals over to Hari justice', and 'there is free trade and travel between Vanda Nossëo and Har.'"

"I appreciate that even if we aren't coming from the same underlying values we at least have plenty of clarity on what's realistic, that's surprisingly rare," says Alassë. "I anticipate picking the first and third, with the border control situation informed by having to give up the second, if there's no way to avoid compromise there."

"I'm curious what you've dealt with before, that's rather odd to me, but at any rate I think we can make that work. You might also want to get in contact with someone who runs a mutual assistance association, since that's the closest thing to a group dedicated to improving lives as we have here unless you count governments."

"Where can we find those?"

"Run ads, which you can do by contacting the people who run noticeboards if you don't want to do it by standing around and talking. Don't happen to feel like telling us about the aliens with less clarity?"

"Oh, usually we run into people who have a lot of very deeply buried assumptions about how things are and make it very hard to get through to them about how we're coming from a different place there. I particularly appreciated in your case how the thing I said about imagining people already existed before being born made sense."

"Huh! Well, we haven't done alien diplomacy before, but we have done interspecies diplomacy and maybe that helps. By the way, if you don't want to answer to one of the states, can I interest you in state-level sovereignty for your bus stop?"

"Huh, that sounds like potentially a good idea, though you cover enough area that we might want several of them."

"We do cover a lot of area! But only one planet is likely to have much demand for a bus stop and we can arrange a force transit route between the bus stop and Mar Geru if that ends up making sense."

"- one planet? I didn't think you'd settled others."

"We haven't, that's why only one of them would have much demand for a bus stop. We do claim all of the spatially contiguous universe as the territory of the Hari Empire, whether we are yet using it or not."

"That's... hm. Why?"

"Because no one else is using it and if someone declared another planet their own sovereign nation and set it moving toward us, or claimed dominion over the sun and hid it, or all sorts of things like that, we would object."

"Your magic system is very useful and it seems likely some people would want to move here so that their children would have it, but I suppose it's possible we could operate a state of Har to everyone's satisfaction," Alassë says uncertainly.

"We would welcome peaceful immigrants who wanted to abide by our laws and we would charge very reasonably for state-level sovereignty in some unused area. It seems unlikely anywhere can abide by both your laws and ours while having children present, but there is no law forbidding your people from having a state in which they treat all people kindly and somehow incentivize whatever treatment of slaves you like. You could make it a condition of entry that everyone agree to regularly take their slaves to an area with an antimagic effect, take all commands off of them, and offer them the chance to move to Vanda Nossëo."

"Perhaps something like that will work. It might depend on the details of how the command magic you use to make children safe works."

"It prevents unauthorized actions and does not prevent unauthorized thoughts. People can be under commands they don't know they're under. People can sometimes be confirmed to be or not be free of such magic. Are those the sort of details that are useful to you?"

"Yes. Sometimes? When?"

"Not when the answer is hidden from knowledge magic."

"Ah, I see. We'll need to put up a noticeboard asking for volunteers to test various antimagic effect options... What will we need to know to have statehood for the bus stop, though, in the shorter term?"

Seihra recommends some useful background reading, some of which they've already read, but as a bare minimum, they'll just need to pick a location that isn't already claimed (here, have a map to consult) and work out a price and a plan for how imperial justice will be enforced. (The plan is allowed to be "fuck off it's just me and my property here" but in this case that clearly isn't what anyone involved wants.)

Their main priority locationwise is that it be very easy to travel to; other than that they can put things up or remove landscape features pretty easily.

The continent is pretty well spoken for unless they want to negotiate with a state government, but arbitrary islands including ones that don't yet exist can become convenient to travel to if they have an airport suitable for imperial flights to land at and take off from. (Here's a scroll containing some notes about airport specs.) It'll be a little faster to get there from Mar Geru, the capital and main transit hub, if it's to the northeast since Mar Geru's not in the center of the continent.

Okay, they will plan an island to be placed... hereish? How's that sound?

Sounds good! They'll get people on extending flight service as soon as the island exists and has an airport.

Great. Anything else that should be covered at this meeting?

Not that comes immediately to mind.

All right then.

They need someone to test the antimagic field, so they put up ads about that; and they will send state-level envoys to all the states that aren't just about guaranteed to reject such overtures, to see if they can buy out all the slaves on a state level.

People are interested in testing the antimagic field.

States that control parts of Anemone Bay confer and jointly suggest to Vanda Nossëo that they might be willing to sell off all of their anemones, specifically, for the right price. The anemones are people but they've never had much success integrating them into society given the massive difference in sensory perception and the inability of most anemones to speak vocal or visual languages. Maybe telepaths will have more success.

Cloudbreak assigns one of the people who usually interface with Anavel Sani, a caralendar in his sixties, to talk to Vanda Nossëo's emissaries. He takes the suggestion of fair dealings with the unborn well and asks how that's usually implemented in practice in other polities.

Meiu and Har (the state, not the empire) are both trying fairly hard to hold onto a lot of residents right on the border of willing to interface with society and want to know if Vanda Nossëo has a privacy-respecting solution to enforcement.

Anavel Sani, Rasa and Ehima's governments won't even consider it without effective, convenient, free contraception for essi (the snake people) and clarity on how eggs would count and what would happen if someone stopped being able to raise a child after having one.

The person they speak to from the state the empire knows as Eserag, and who makes a point of repeatedly pronouncing the name as Ethornak, mostly just wants to hear more, in general.

Erhau and Westgarden want to send representatives to observe relevant legal proceedings in Vanda Nossëo if any are public.

Some telepaths will go try talking to anemones!

Sometimes Vanda Nossëo has computers look at evidence, or have conclusions sent to precogs so that only the conclusion makes it into the real timeline. Do they have specific use cases in mind?

If the essi need their contraceptives free a bunch of Elves will go to work overtime on that till they can deliver. They don't have a strong position on how essi eggs should count but can deploy some telepaths to peek at eggs at various stages of development to ballpark it. Normally if someone has a child and then stops being able to parent the child they hire help or, if they really can't handle it even with help, adopt the child out to someone who can. There are people in Vanda Nossëo who are willing to adopt children and some of them would probably be happy to adopt specifically snake children if that became an option.

Plenty of Vanda Nossëo's trials are public, are there more specific desiderata to be had?

Some anemones will try talking back to telepaths.

Precogs seem like they'd help some, in addition to being creepy and driving some marginal people into seclusion. Computers, depending on how smart they are, might be able to find out more from less data and guess the presence of secret slaves in hidden areas... but there's already a bit of an arms race there, as people figure out more tricks for getting information out of unscryable areas and then other people figure out more tricks for hiding the evidence that lets those tricks work.

Essi hatch able to move around and use magic and do explicit logical reasoning, and in theory that relies on gradual brain development in the shell, but they turn out to rarely be conscious and almost never have preferences before hatching. Essi are not that popular among Hari people who buy babies to enjoy their company and have fun teaching them to function in society; they're initially easily provoked, and the temperature necessary to make them cuddly isn't good for them, and their behavior at hatching is more like that of a disoriented adult, and they don't have big eyes, and they don't love people.

They'd like to see trials that involve people who would've been slaves in Har. Custody disputes or something, maybe? Or things that involve people who have committed several crimes?

What do anemones have to say?

There are some daeva who enjoy teaching disoriented adults how to be people, because daeva start spontaneously existing as adults, but it's good to know that essi do not love people and interested parties would need to not have a loving filial relationship in mind. They tentatively don't have a strong opinion on killing essi eggs that aren't going to hatch real soon though they will still be getting right on free birth control for the essi adults.

Scheduled for today are trials including a noncustodial parent who tried to take his daughter and sons into a remote part of Dreamward, an infinite flat plane, on the hopes that he would be impossible to conjure for usefully there; a serial shoplifter; an aggravated assault case; a guy who trapped his morphed friend in a cat carrier, leaving her a raccoon for several days before finally calling in the authorities to set her right; a person who's been talking Beach natives into sex despite the fact that they're in a weird legal pickle with regard to the age of consent; a serial scammer who defrauded people out of their basic income; a vampire who ate a guy; a woman who misrepresented her relationship to a dead person to get the dead person resurrected and then behaved badly once the person was alive; and an arsonist.

This one has an out of date take on politics from a couple decades and a fork ago based on recollections of its knowledge mage predecessor. This other one wants the water one degree warmer and isn't near a heat mage. This other one wants the water one degree cooler and also isn't near a heat mage. This one wants to renegotiate its current agreement, it no longer feels it's getting a good deal on all this chemical synthesis but isn't a knowledge or illusion mage. This other one wants to know what the fuck is going on.

There are enough people interested in observing legal proceedings to go observe all of those trials.

Vanda Nossëo will ask the anemones if they would like to be purchased and freed (possibly with some kind of antimagic situation for safety) and collectively hire a telepath to make sure they can all communicate.

Relatively few anemones have opinions about surface-dwellers' legal systems, relatively few anemones have a good understanding of surface-dwellers' legal systems, and the overlap between these groups is incomplete. One of them is against anything that involves more restrictions on magic use. One of them thinks it's about time they managed better communication and more useful trade. One of them wants to know if they can all have knowledge magic. Several anemones want to know how this proposal would affect the pH, KH, salinity, and temperature. Someone wants to know how much telepathy access they'd get out of this plan and is only in favor if it lets them and their forks coordinate better. Someone wants to know if this means moving to a different spot. A handful of anemones want to know how this would affect these dozen water quality indicators not popularly studied on the surface. Someone is concerned that if they change their current arrangement, which involves getting fed, then they will not get fed, and then they will die. Someone is in favor of freedom in general. Someone is in favor of being able to buy their preferred weather. Someone else is in favor of being able to buy their different and entirely incompatible favorite weather. Some of them struggle with the idea that non-anemones are people and capable of communication and possibly going to take their preferences into account and also have some kind of complicated... cooperative situation... about holding objects... and some of the objects are people...?

Well, the telepath is an Elf and very patient, and can try to explain everything to all the anemones.

Eventually more than half of them have any idea what's going on, and more are in favor of being bought by Vanda Nossëo than are against it.

Are the ones against it objecting for any addressable reason?

Reasons include general conservatism, the fact that their likely circumstances if they stay just improved because other people can also hire telepaths to communicate with them, mistrust of Vanda Nossëo, and the fact that they like where they're living now and would have to move if they were bought by people who don't own the bay.

What are the prospects for buying the bay?

It's right near an inhabited area. It's useful for shipping. It's useful for fishing. It's popular for playing in. It's lucrative to sell it off a tiny bit at a time to people who want to live in seclusion. Selling all of it now would require rearranging a lot of things. It's big. As an off-the-cuff order-of-magnitude guess before the involved states actually talk it over, maybe something in the vicinity of 5,159,780,352 imperial rings (number chosen for its roundness), which is... somewhere in the vague ballpark of 644,972,544 pounds of apples.

Presumably apples decrease in marginal value well before you drop nearly six hundred and forty four million pounds of them on the market ex nihilo, but understood. They will maybe buy the anemones and just not remove all of them at this time. Could the anemones be allowed to continue to live where they are if they are purchased and the bay is not? Perhaps they could pay rent out of their Vanda Nossëo basic income?

Rent can be arranged. For less than six hundred million pounds of apples, even.

Okay. Would the anemones who prefer to stay in the bay like this arrangement?

For the most part, yes.

The Elves sent to talk to anemones will attempt very patiently to make sure every anemone is satisfied with the arrangement and that the anemones that want to move are aware that moving will mean their descendants and possibly also their forks won't have Hari magic and so on.

A majority of them think it's unacceptable for their descendants and forks to not have magic. ...Several people, including an anemone, suggest that most coastal areas are not right off the coast of the biggest city on the planet, and might be cheaper, although there might be a bit of a bubble starting now that it looks like the planet's getting immigrants...

Hm, how much water rights does the island-state come with?

Not enough, and it gets too deep too fast, and the area gets too cold. All of which things are fixable for less than the cost of six hundred million pounds of apples.

Yeah, they can DIY that. They will put the anemones who want to move near their island, heated to various temperatures so they can all have the one they like.

The imperial government, since so much of its attention is on the aliens anyway, checks that the extra heating is properly contained and not going to fuck things up come winter. If it looks like there might possibly be any problems they can send the aliens literature on best practices.

The terraforming department is happy to swap information with them about that!

"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."

"I guess so. I really should've gone through all your state laws before visiting, I skimmed but I kind of thought - you know, you can usually step over the border to get lunch and you'd be at fault if you managed to fuck it up but you won't actually usually fuck it up. Here, anyway."

"That's true with us too! I think even if you followed the Hari laws and didn't specifically try to have sex with anyone that would cover you most places for short jaunts. It's just that since we don't forbid casual touch, and don't have people legally understood as property, and are focused on preventing harm, sex is a particularly weird collection of issues."

"Makes sense. What's the legal definition of sex in Vanda Nossëo?"

"Varies - has to, for Elves petting each other's hair is sex and for humans it's completely normal to pet a kid's hair - but it's generally going to be something like, stimulation or witnessing of stimulation of an erogenous zone on oneself or another with the intent or understood effect to create, sustain, or relieve arousal in either party? You'll probably want to have really wide margins around this, though, till you have more extensional familiarity."

"Witnessing. I think I understand that definition, though. Hm. Well, I'm not qualified to figure out how this should affect immigration policy, I'm just supposed to write up a report on how alternatives to slavery work in practice, and I think I've learned a lot about that."

"What'd you learn?"

"That it involves extra cognitive overhead for everyone else. That it can involve giving people different parts of what we consider freedom piecemeal. That it makes things less standardized. That it relies on deeper knowledge of other people than our system."

"That all seems true."

"Glad we're on the same page about it, I guess. Think I left anything important out, or is it just... those things in exchange for the happiness of people who would in Har be slaves?"

"I'm not sure I'd put it as specifically 'happiness', but basically, yeah. I do think the cognitive overhead isn't much for most people who are native to the system or spend long enough acclimating. It becomes second nature."

"How long does it take to acclimate?"

"Depends on a lot of things - including original culture and species, so I don't even have a good ballpark guess for you."

"Well, I guess that also makes sense."

"Elves are slow because they're slow at everything but they have a few specific recurring points of tension that we can mostly address in a formulaic way, humans who are actually trying to integrate seldom need more than a few years, shorefolk - that's the Beach people - they adapt in a couple weeks, that's probably to do with how fast they grow..."

"That makes sense. I'm curious about the recurring points of tension."

"Elves tend to feel very strongly that people should not have sex except with a monogamous heterosexual spouse, that virtually everything is of lesser importance than children occurring exclusively when desired by parents in a marriage like that who are prepared to spend the next fifty years with no competing obligations, that it's reasonable for it to take a few years to make a major decision even if people are waiting on you..."

"They might get along with agerah. I think. 'Marriage' is an awkward translation of something, is it one word of jargon for you or something?"

"It's a popular social institution among many species where it's customary to arrange sex and romance and primary companionship and coparenting and cohabitation and merged finances and certain legal responsibilities to each other in a long term committed package deal, usually pairwise. Not everybody does it - Dwarves for example don't routinely get all those things in the same place."

"Oh, like caralendri, except not in pairs. And a little like agerah, too."

"What are agerah like?"

"Introverted. Grouchy about people. They hate spending time around people they aren't close to and like not being completely alone - except when they'd rather be completely alone - so their ideal is to stay friends with their mothers, find one mate, stay with that mate and not have to filter any new partners, and maybe stay friends with their children when they're grown."

"Huh. Elves aren't particularly introverted like that, just very monogamous."

"And social like humans, and not social like thwilit, am I right?"

"More or less, yes. Plus being telepathic."

All around the not-too-introverted states of Har, various mostly-Dwarves - carefully read up on local law and exquisitely thorough with their compliance and documentation thereof - move to rent storefront space in highly trafficked areas, where they set up currency exchange and bank branches (rings, unlike most currencies, are actually uncounterfeitable, and Har has some unique magic, so the rings retain some value next to multiversal fiat), and, often right next to or on top of the financial side, travel and job agencies to help anyone who is interested in exploring the multiverse find things to do there for a reasonable price. They sell bus passes, too, and have a side business in the sorts of things that envoy shops normally do but are not on this particular planet.

One of these is in the city of Thelm Ret, right where Hari-speaking and Lexori-speaking populations border each other, and at first they see mostly beluli and agerah and thwilit.

Then a pair of humans come in, one of them wearing slave bracelets and the other holding his hand and slightly levitating. Between them they're wearing every ring they own.

"I heard you have healing magic," she says.

"On hand we've got a recording of the healing song," says the Dwarf who is dwarfing the place, "one listen is free of charge to get people in the door, but if you need something heavier duty than that I can call someone in with the stronger spells for seventy rings."

"I'd like my free listen and then I'll know if I need something else."

The Dwarf puts on the song. It's very beautiful!

She thinks maybe she can notice a slight difference, or maybe she's imagining it just because she's distracted by something nice.

"I think I need something else," she says afterward.

"That'll be seventy rings," says the Dwarf. "Or the equivalent if you have offworld money -" He points at a price sheet on the wall.

She doesn't catch that but her son does and reads it to her.

"What," she says, "you don't haggle here? That why you write it all down?"

"If you have a specific reason you think justifies a discount, you can tell me," says the Dwarf, "but we don't haggle by default, no."

"How streamlined. Well, seventy rings is fine."

Isava counts out the rings for her and hands them over.

The Dwarf accepts the rings and summons another Dwarf who explains that he has the heavy duty healing spell and can cast it but only at touch range, and offers his hand.

It takes her a moment to find his hand but when she does she touches it.

Boop!

She gasps and laughs and turns to Isava and hugs him.

"It worked?" he asks.

"It worked," she says.

He's silent for a moment, holding her tighter, as if he were afraid now instead of at any point when they were actually in danger. And then after several seconds, "So do I get to shop now?"

"Keep it under a gross of rings."

He lets go so he can examine the price sheet again. "Hmmm."

They have Vanda Nossëo mainline currency and a few other kinds; they have various investment and loan instruments on offer; the shop upstairs has a range of fabric and electronics and books and foods and stuff.

Isava examines the upstairs items. Fabric is boring although the prices are important - oh, wow, the prices on that fabric, that's going to screw up Echan's job and that's not great - but what about the electronics and books and is there anything fun around here?

The electronics include fun things like simple drones and music players and video games (low-text ones that were quick to relocalize into Hari for the handful of words that appear; you can add your name to a list if you want to receive a message when new games are localized). The books are mostly hard copies, though there's also an e-reader you can buy; they are, again, the ones that didn't require a lot of non-machine labor to translate, so they're things like coffee table volumes full of pretty landscape or wildlife photography, kids' books, and pictorial instructions for crafts like origami. There are also novels and short story collections and comic books, but those aren't localized at all; the shopkeeper can do Allspeak installations for 55 rings apiece.

Drones are conceptually cool but redundant for Isava. Music, though. How much music from human-originated traditions written by humans for an intended audience of humans do the music players come with?

...Origami is the kind of thing that would only make sense with a bunch of spare paper but maybe if enough people use e-readers that's what happens.

Isava's priority ordering here is getting a bunch of catchy human music with a strong beat, getting a game to try, and getting a book of landscapes because Echan would like that. He'll get however much of that he can fit into 144 rings.

The music players come with 900 hours of music, though only about half of it is specifically human music; the rest is predominantly Elf and there are samples of other things. All these objects are cheaper than calling in a teleporting healer to boop you, and Isava can get a music player and a game tablet with fifty low-text games and a book of landscapes for 120 rings.

Isava bounces about this and buys all of those things and skips out the store to meet up with Echan, with the objects floating along beside him.

Not long after another human shows up at the same store and asks if questions are free.

"You can ask things at no charge but will be deprioritized if a paying customer enters," replies the Dwarf.

"If I wanted to visit a majority-human polity, what's the closest one from here and how would I do that?"

"The most easily accessible majority human polity is Midgard. You'd buy a bus token from me or one of the other branches or our competitors, and go to the Vanda Nossëo island state, and board any outgoing bus to reach Station One in Edda, and from there you'd take the intraworld line Edda Seven, one stop outbound, and disembark. That'd put you in Sunvalley, a Midgard city. Note that the humans native to Midgard are not modal humans; the info booths at the Sunvalley station can explain the etiquette. If you want modal humans, you need to take Edda Four three stops and get off at Icefalls on Everhome."

"Okay. Where can I find copies of the complete sets of laws that apply in Sunvalley and Icefalls and the intervening bus stations?" There's been a reminder that aliens are alien and will have alien laws displayed prominently on the noticeboard for days now.

"I can sell you a hard copy for ten rings per location or electronic copies with the purchase of an e-reader for one ring apiece."

"What exactly does an e-reader do, is it just a thing for reading multiple books that's not as big as multiple books?"

"Yep, that's why an e-copy is cheaper, it doesn't require storing and packing and filing work."

"And I can buy more books for it for that price later?"

"The price may change without notice, for example if our tax burden changes, a subsidy begins to apply, or any input to the process changes in cost, but I don't expect it to get more expensive for the foreseeable future."

He'll get an e-reader and all of the laws that apply to all of the relevant places and go home to read them, then. Shouldn't take too long, right? Right?

The places actually have a lot of laws, way more than Har. Many of the laws are just definitions, and many of them only apply if you have certain magical abilities or a restraining order against you or are driving a delivery truck or something.

He diligently takes notes on unlikely conditions that would cause more laws to apply to him, and narrows down the set that actually probably will apply to him if he visits Icefalls, and reads that set.

There are so many laws and some of them are so weirdly specific. Why did it need to be illegal to commit battery with a weapon and illegal to commit battery with a vehicle and illegal to commit battery in a sexual way and illegal to commit battery by genetically engineering a pathogen? Is it legal to commit battery with a formerly frozen and thawed dead fish between midnight and noon?

Eventually, he goes back to ask about bus tickets and foreign currency.

He can get a bus pass good for the next twelve days anywhere in Vanda Nossëo for sixty rings, or he can just get a ticket that will get him to the specific destinations of his choice and back home again over any period of time for twenty-eight.

He'll get the cheaper one. And he'd like to trade 288 rings for a currency that's accepted in the wider multiverse and specifically Icefalls.

Here's some of that at today's rate.

And he books himself a flight to the new island and tries to figure out how to take the bus to Icefalls.

They're trying real hard to make that clear. He can get someone to write out the whole route for him if he wants, with little map drawings of the stations.

They're so convenient. And only a really reasonable amount of utterly terrifying and possibly dishonest.

He goes to Icefalls.

Icefalls, Everhome is built around a lovely waterfall; the oldest architecture, mostly houses, is rustic and has been supplemented and joined since its assembly by modern additions. The station's exit spits him onto a set of broad curved avenues all going parallel from the base of the falls to an imposing stone building. There are signs in six languages, and kids playing some elaborate sport with a lot of running and brightly colored flags on a big lawn between a pair of the avenues, and another pair of avenues contains an open-air bazaar, and the next has an art installation with lots of huge squares of fabric propped up to billow colorfully in the wind, forming a bit of a maze all together. There are taller buildings, ones that go all the way from the bottom of the falls to the top and have bridges from their roofs out onto the higher portion of the city around the top of the falls, made almost entirely of glass windowpanes. Somebody's going over the waterfall in a weird boat and splashing down with a whoop. Somebody else is paragliding off the cliff, a bit farther away. There are too many buildings for him to see very far, but a hill comes up over to his left and it's got a rice terrace on it.

It seems nice, much nicer than anywhere he's ever been, and some of that is that he's not particularly well-off and has been saving up as much as he can but... he's always thought a human-majority society would be better for humans and he was right to think so.

He doesn't know these people and he doesn't know how to know these people.

He wanders the bazaar a bit, because at least it's familiar.

Cheese on a stick! Toys! Jewelry! Fireworks! Shirts! Sherbet! Fake fuzzy cat ears on headbands! Shoes! Weird juice blends! Facepainting! Comic books! Perfume! Preserved butterflies in paperweights! Art glass! Deep fried goosemeat! First aid booth! Sidewalk chalk!

...Humans can eat things he's never seen before. Cool.

He would like to get his face painted in an authentic human style! How much is it?

There's a price sheet over here with the patterns! He can get a butterfly across his whole face or look like a deer or get imitation warpaint or do tiger stripes or abstract swirls in his favorite color. It's not that expensive but the complicated ones are moreso. (Most people he sees with painted faces are children but nobody's going to stop him.)

Possibly he should figure out if this is a signal of something - but if it were an important signal to always get right this person would do house calls, right? He's definitely not blending in, anyway, and definitely not trying to.

On the gripping hand, a butterfly! He'll take that one! He asks the painter how they came to do these patterns as opposed to some other patterns.

"I learned to do this one off a website, and kept doing it for my daughter, and she got bored of it," says the painter, beginning the butterfly, "and so I looked up some more to do, and then she grew out of it and I kind of missed it, so I rented a mall stall, and here we are!"

"Cool! Do people usually grow out of it?"

"Mostly kiddos like it, but you're not the first adult I've had today. Lady wanted the deer look."

"Huh, I can imagine wanting that. By the way, I noticed people around here ask each other questions like this and I didn't notice them paying but money's weird here, I just want to check - I can pay if I got that wrong."

"- I'm not going to charge you to make conversation. Though you might need to stop talking when I'm painting your cheeks."

"Right, I can do that." He shuts up.

Paint paint paint paint. "There you go!" She's got a mirror.

"I like it! What's the usual custom about how long you wear it?"

"Oh, it isn't very durable so you probably want to scrub it off before you go to bed tonight, it won't look nice in the morning," she replies.

"Hmm." He can probably magic it more durable. ...Is it appropriate to thank her? He normally would for a question answered for free but that seems to just be the done thing here. "I'll tell my planet I like your facepaint," he says instead.

"Ha, the whole planet? I'm just one lady at the bazaar," she laughs. "Have a good day!"

"You too!"

He wanders off in the direction of the interesting-smelling weird meat thing, idly casting a spell on the facepaint to make it last.