Well.

If the world's a template they might find fifty of these and they'd better start getting them right; this one is weird and they won't know how till they talk to it, and they'd better get 'talking to it' correct.

Would anyone from the original version like to sign on as an envoy or advisor? Are the alts anyone they've already got connections to?

There are plenty of places where lots of people like Vanda Nossëo and want to help and can slot frictionlessly into the first contact apparatus. More so the less Vanda Nossëo needs their help. The Azani royals they already know are of course on fine terms with Vanda Nossëo.

Feris of Leopard Hill would love to offer them some advice. He thinks he ought to get paid for it this time.

Fere's also willing to do some more consulting if it helps anything.

If there is one thing Vanda Nossëo is qualified to do, it is trading money for expertise. What do their well-paid consultants have to say about the ideal approach here?

The government of the Azan they know has lots of detailed information for them on surprise logistical problems they encountered when they switched over to Vanda Nossëo's prison system, and what they ended up preferring for healing given the constraint that it needed to discriminate well, and how things have been going with expanding public education. The princess might want to visit the new Azan eventually when her schedule permits but not immediately.

Feris of Leopard Hill thinks the main concern here is that Azan has an incompletely-assimilated often-visually-distinct Sesati minority and if they react differently there's probably some risk there. He wants to read some writings by Sesatis in Azan that weren't meant for Azani eyes but of course Vanda Nossëo might reasonably object to that. He'd talk to his alt about it but he expects his alt is dead or in Niazon. (He's in Niazon. Feris still wants to meet him, but it won't help that much with first contact.) Eventually he concludes they probably want to talk to the Sesati who helped spark the revolution; Feris knew the other Valan very well until he got sick of Vanda Nossëo and joined the group who disappeared off the map, and Feris is pretty confident this one will have a useful perspective on public opinion. For now Feris doesn't think he can do much better than the book he already wrote without more information. If it were another Sesat he'd advise just generically pushing less hard, on literally everything, but it's Azan so they'll probably join in a few days if they so much as find out that Vanda Nossëo exists. The Sesatis will presumably eventually find out what happened with the first Sesat and Feris advises sticking to the narrative that they sent an incompetent diplomat before. And if they do talk to any Sesatis, Feris thinks they should be less reluctant to try to pitch those Sesatis on their values if they're literally asked to. (This is in the book but Feris is approximately infinitely willing to repeat it any time it might conceivably be useful or relevant or welcome or tolerated.)

Fere thinks they probably have fewer problems ahead of them with Sesat's former slaves this time, since they'll all have been getting used to Azan. She has some ideas for how to explain restraining orders in a way that doesn't result in utter disaster, though she's not very confident that can be done, the whole concept seems fraught. She thinks in general the cultures in Vanda Nossëo separate out different virtues and strengths more - so for instance the vetting for different kinds of magic doesn't just look like nested matryoshka dolls each of which is a strict subset of the last - and that's something it took her a long time to notice and it seems important to a lot of decisionmaking, especially around magic vetting, that otherwise doesn't make any sense.

(Also some people send in lots of advice about the handling of some cities on the other side of the globe.)

They send a different team to this -

(no firmly official name was decided upon for the first planet of this kind, but with another in the mix one of the candidates quickly picks up traction - it's "Signature" for reasons having nothing to do with anything in that region at all) -

- version of Azan -

(some jokester immediately proposes calling them all things that start with "sig" in English, and nobody has a better idea in time; working title for the second one is "Signet") -

- since Ligaya et al have already been redeployed, Azan having been handed off to Integration ages ago, and Nelen having worked so poorly.

Melda (an Elf), Luca (a fairy), Shila Kolen (a Hork-Bajir), Casjan (a human), and Zua (a different human) descend to introduce themselves.

Outside near the palace they pretty much immediately run into the person Feris thought might be helpful, though if they're just going by what his alt looked like it may be hard to recognize him with all the new scars. He's reading in the sunlight, idly fidgeting with a pair of crutches, and doesn't rise when the visitors appear, though he does look at them and smile politely.

Passersby look at the visitors and make excuses to be nearby, or make excuses to get out of the area quickly. A page with fox ears and a bushy tail openly stares for a moment before catching himself.

Luca waves at the fox-guy.

Melda's eyes are good enough to identify Valan scars or no. She drifts in that direction. "Good morning."

Fox guy waves back.

Valan tucks his book into a bag. "Good morning. I don't believe I've seen any of you here before."

"We got here from a neighboring universe just now. Can you tell me who we'd talk to about that?"

"Depends on what you want to say about it. You're not required to fill out forms to move in but if you want to discuss technology sharing there's a councilmember - Vida - who'd be very interested, and if you're here for other reasons I can help you figure out what to do next. Welcome to Azan."

"Thank you. We do some technology sharing but are mostly here to establish a diplomatic presence with our newly discovered neighbors."

He calls the fox guy over and says, "Go tell Azan she's secretary we have more visitors - and then let Dira know, if you can find him, he'd probably want to know."

The fox guy goes to do that, looking back at the aliens wide-eyed one last time.

And turning back to Melda, Valan asks, "What sort of diplomatic presence?"

"We're envoys for a group of nations and other collectives called Vanda Nossëo. Usually we land with an intent to get people to join, but first we'd like to know more about what you're doing here! How many species are there among you, for example?"

He conspicuously examines the visitors. "At the moment, I couldn't say. It wouldn't shock me if some naturalist had counted all the animals and plants at some point and I know who'd know if that was true and where to find the book about it if so. How about you?"

"I'm not sure we've got all the plants catalogued either, and even if we had, someone would invent a new one. Sapients, a few hundred, though by the numbers most of them are just a handful of particularly common ones like mine."

"Yeah, I've gotten the impression humans are common. So if you normally show up and try to get people to join you, why the different approach here?"

"I'm not a human, actually, I'm an Elf. Casjan is a human, and Zua is too, and Luca used to be." She points. "Usually when we visit a new planet, they aren't already in touch with a lot of other planets. If you're already doing great under your current arrangement, membership may not have much to offer you! Vanda Nossëo has some, I like to say 'friends' but of course these are organizations and not people, with their own umbrella structures over different sets of states."

That sounds kind of off, for a regular voluntary association of states in some sort of mutual defense pact or whatever. They're probably a charity or a conquering empire, or both... but how to tell which one?

He shrugs. "We're doing great in some ways and not in others. Someone I know told me once that having his sort of magic powers is like being helpless, but worse, because if someone attacks his loved ones he can trivially get horrifically disproportionate revenge, but that's all he can do about it. In the specific case all his loved ones have powers more useful for defending themselves but it's - it's a pattern. I'm not sure if that's actually what you're wondering about."

"Huh, I've never heard of magic powers that work quite like that. We have different ones. I can demonstrate a very good healing power, for example, if there's anyone who'd like to be healed very thoroughly."

Who walks up to someone obviously crippled and says that - someone with very good but very specific intel on Dira, or maybe Adrian. Or conceivably someone who knows another instance.

"Very thoroughly meaning what, exactly?"

"Well, for example, if you wanted to keep your scars, or even just some of them, you wouldn't be a good candidate for my healing spell, though Casjan has a different one."

"It sounds like you're saying you don't control which things your spell changes, is that right? Do you know how it decides which things count as scars?"

"I can look up the documentation on it, if what counts as a scar is important, but it's correct that I don't control the details of how it executes the healing."

"I'll be surprised if it turns out there's a reasonable definition of scars or injuries for which I wouldn't rather get rid of all of mine but some people will be downright offended if you suggest the things they'd rather keep are flaws of some kind, and, you know, I've been surprised before. Let's see the documentation."

She pulls up the documentation for Loki's spells! She has to read it to him since it's not in Sesati.

"You know, I know someone who'll be kind of annoyed if you call these specs 'healing', but I know a lot more people who'll want it immediately and not care what you call it. I don't think I'm attached to anything it'd change, want to round up some more witnesses or do you think we've got enough people around already?"

"I can do it an unlimited number of times and will go with your recommendation on how many witnesses to wait for," says Melda.

"I mean, I'd just as soon get as many demonstrations as possible out of you, but presumably you want to start selling it at some point and people spreading the word will help with that."

"Oh, no, I don't take money for it at all. There are people who do but not envoys."

"Well, that's generous. Anyway, I expect to like all the effects you've represented your spell as having and I suppose if it actually does something else that'd be why you picked someone who couldn't realistically fight you or run away."

"It's touch range." She holds out her hand invitingly.

He touches her hand.

And he is healed.

He shivers at the no-longer-familiar sensation of not being in pain. "Back up for a sec?" There's nothing so urgent it can't be put off for a moment while he checks if he remembers how to do a somersault.

Melda gives him space, smiling.

He takes a minute to get used to everything being different.

Once he's done with that there are still aliens to deal with. "You seem like you have surprisingly good guesses about how to talk to total aliens from another world you only just found."

"One interesting thing about the worlds is that some of them are very similar to each other. There are a couple really common types, but this is only the second of its kind we've found. I wasn't totally sure I recognized you before I healed you but I'm sure now."

"I thought it might be something like that. Have you run into weirdly similar people who don't look alike yet?"

"Yes, we have! How do you go about finding them, do you have a magic available that does it?"

"They're weirdly similar, it's noticeable if you meet two. We're not actively looking."

"Ah, we do have magic for it but it's a little annoying to follow up on so most people don't find their alts."

"Seems like you have some interesting kinds of magic."

"We've found a lot of worlds! Luca and Casjan are the only ones of us with magic natively but I've learned some and so has Zua."

"What kinds?"

"The spells I know are called 'sorcery', and I can also sing some magic songs, though those also work recorded and that's the most common form nowadays. Luca's a fairy, they're telekinetic, and Casjan is a spellbinder, they can do lots of different things but not many of them in one day. Zua is a wizard, they can also do lots of things and normally can't do many in a day but they're much easier to refuel than spellbinders."

"I don't have magic yet at all, our kinds are - physically hard to get, unfortunately."

"Physically hard? How do you mean?"

"Well, how do people become able to do your kinds of magic?"

"The songs you just sing them - composing new ones is more complicated but anyone who can sing well enough can use a song spell. Sorcery you have to have an eidetic memory - there's magic for that - and then memorize the spells, which are extremely long and complete nonsense. Spellbinders have to be born that way. Wizards learn it in a classroom setting, normally."

"Those sound easier! Maybe people will be less interested in trying ours, it's kind of an ordeal. I don't follow the logic behind exactly what they do to people to make them magic and I'm not terribly inclined to give you details for free but suffice it to say it's deeply unpleasant and sometimes kills people but if you live through having it done to you you come out with powers. And not necessarily the same powers as anyone else."

"Well, we have resurrection, for most kinds of people, so maybe it'll be a little more popular than it used to be, even if it's not more popular than our common kinds," Melda smiles.

"...We have... a lot of dead people. And half of them would be a mess to bring back."

"Well, the - mixed news - is that it's expensive. No need to prepare for them to all come back at once next week. But someone with insurance to cover it might want to try your ordeal sooner or later."

"They'll have to talk to Jamie about it - that's the young woman with cat ears and no tattoos who sells prosthetics." Her name is foreign and has a sound Azani doesn't but he says it like he's practiced it a lot. "The one who looks like Azan she, and is kind of otherwise reminiscent of her too. Speaking of which, you said you recognized me?"

"Yes, though I'm afraid we won't be able to introduce you to your counterpart, he decided after a brief period of employment as a teleporter to teleport off the 'map', that being the set of worlds we have explored."

"Why?"

"Vanda Nossëo's handling of Sesat on that version of the planet was subject to - I'd be inclined to call it a personality mismatch, but I think the Sesati use stronger words, and at any rate we should probably have swapped out the team instead of attempting to keep the same one in place. So there was some accumulated resentment. But I don't actually know his reasons as an individual, we never met."

"I see. And you... showed up and immediately invited them to join you? Is that right?"

"I believe so. I wasn't on the team, so I don't know if he led with that. I think there was some issue with face-saving - I'm not sure I'll be much better at that, but at least I know to look out for it, so we can hope." Smile.

"Well, I can't think of a worse way to do that than to say it's what you're doing, but I imagine that's more the sort of problem you have when you show up to tell your helpless neighbors they're your vassals now and not so much when you meet dangerous, magical interplanetary civilizations."

"I do think the power disparity was really awkward and I hope this time around everyone feels more secure."

"I'm sure they will." Now how is he going to make sure Azan doesn't look weak to these people when Azan has, like, five people who do magic and is only interplanetary in the sense of shamelessly exploiting a neighboring civilization. Oh, no. "So I assume you guys have germ theory and electricity already, right? What're your major unsolved problems?"

"There are some kinds of people we can't resurrect - people who aren't what we call 'reductionist' and also don't belong to one of a couple species with particularly easy-to-handle souls. We are, as you might have guessed, sometimes a little lower on tried-and-true personnel than we are on planets we'd like to contact. And of course there's always political drama but it's about things like whether it's okay to eat meat that used to be an animal or whether it's child abuse to bring kids up in certain religions."

"What makes people reductionist?"

"Being solely reliant on their material form."

"I doubt we can help with that but it might depend on what else they're made of. I guess it's possible we could end up helping with your personnel shortage. I assume more people will only make your arguments worse."

"Yes, but it'll be a drop in the bucket. There's a lot of us."

"I did get that impression. Do most of Vanda Nossëo's people go around having political opinions?"

"Plenty of them don't! But we have a way to make every announced political opinion accessible to anyone who wants to read it. So it gets rather obtrusive."

"Which ones don't?" The ones who aren't allowed to, or aren't considered to have opinions worth hearing, he imagines, but which groups are those and how much of the population are they? Or conceivably they could be like Azan and at least theoretically have a system for escalating important comments from arbitrary people.

"The ones who have better things to do, I think is the common supposition. My grandfather never touches the network with all the political opinions on it, he does planned ecologies for terraformed planets and plays the harpsichord and takes my little cousins out to feed the ducks and things like that."

Hard to tell if that means people recreationally have unimportant opinions or if it means people who know all they have to do is whisper once in the right ear are conspicuously silent in public to signal how they don't need to worry about making themselves heard.

"Those all sound like good things to do. So - something I've noticed about the different countries I know of is that societies can vary a lot, and in ways you don't necessarily think of, and I'm curious about how yours is structured - and I bet you've met enough different people to just answer that without me needing to get specific, yeah?"

"I can say a lot of things about a lot of the states that make up Vanda Nossëo, but they vary, quite a lot. There are only a handful of things that a place has to agree to in order to join, so I grew up in a monarchy and Luca's from a democracy and so on."

"Democracy! How's that working out?"

"Oh, democracy works great," Luca says, now hanging upside down in the air. "At least compared to everything else you can reasonably do with an arbitrary set of people."

"It hasn't struck me that way but it's hard to tell cause from effect from coincidence and you might have a bigger sample."

"Well, it's the arbitrary set of people thing that really bites you. If you have a good queen that works fine in a lot of ways especially for a smallish country," Luca says.

"It seems like there are even more people who need to be good in a democracy but I haven't really studied them in that much depth so I wouldn't really know."

"They just have to avoid overwhelmingly being bad in the same direction," says Luca. "But I'm not a political scientist. Anyway, we don't have a problem with monarchies."

"Huh, that... huh. I wouldn't expect that to work but I guess I can see how it could? What else - what do people eat, how do you handle unfree labor, will anyone take issue with the fact that not everyone wants all the normal physical abilities most people have?"

"I don't have to eat!" says Luca. "I can though. Everything humans can and also things that would taste good to humans but are poison."

"I eat tree bark," says Shila Kolen.

"When I'm at home I just eat flowers and the leaves off the trees," says Melda. "But we eat mostly the same things humans do too. - these are specific flowers and leaves that humans can, also, eat."

"We don't have unfree labor, everyone has freedom of emigration and a basic income guarantee they get whether they work at all or not," says Zua. "You have to be really rich as a society to pull it off, but it's incredibly neat once you are."

"I remember the king in the other Azan didn't want to see, and that's fine, we just recommended him a medical alert bracelet so in an emergency that would be clear," Melda says. "Some people have very different physical abilities anyway; there are species that can all fly, or read minds, and nobody's expected to acquire those to match."

"...Some people read minds, huh? Can you stop them?" Even a fake way to block them means they can't act on the information they get until they're ready to never have anyone trust them again. Probably. Unless they're making bad strategic choices.

"Depends. Some Elves - not my subspecies, but most individuals who look like my kind of thing - can do it; them you can keep out by designating some of your thoughts private by internal metaphor. Everyone has a range limit, though some have very large range limits; some kinds can be blocked by some materials; and of course nonconsensual mindreading is illegal in most jurisdictions and incontinent mindreaders usually have to wear some kind of suppressant gadget if they want to go traveling to those jurisdictions."

"Will you accept my say-so that Azan she will be displeased by mindreading being permitted within Azan or do I need to go run to her audience chamber and demand her immediate attention?"

"Oh, I believe you! And nobody among our envoys is an incontinent or untrustworthy mind-reader. Will Azan she need further urgent precautions or contingencies in place or will that do for the time being?"

"Are your trustworthy and continent mindreaders reading anyone's minds right now, have they read anyone's minds since coming here, and are they planning to start reading minds without consent in the foreseeable future?"

"They're almost all Elves - the term is, for silly reasons, 'Flat Elves', for the ones who can read minds - and those are at this time all aboard the ship unless they have been called down as float healers or teleporters somewhere that needs extra hands. They might use their telepathy to talk to people who know how to interface with it already. It's possible they would, say, read a small child's mind to find out if they were injured or just lost, if they found a crying toddler. They have not been extracting any information that I would expect anyone to consider private or sensitive and won't start, it's an extremely firm principle Vanda Nossëo adheres to that mindreading is hostile by default and we take it very seriously."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"Anything else that seems top priority to cover?"

"Well, if I say no, what's next on your agenda?"

"Plausibly asking to be put on Azan she's agenda."

"I can go let her know you asked and come back here when she's ready to see you." Which will be after they've had a chance to talk strategy since apparently their continued independence hinges on being able to act like they're extremely magically powerful.

"Okay! Do you want us to avoid talking to other people while we wait, it might be a little awkward to do that if they ask us questions."

"...Why do you think I have the authority to forbid people from talking to each other. Is that normal where you're from?"

"No, but if it would be delicate for any reason this would be a good time to warn us."

"...I think I'm not any better positioned than you to notice ways it could be awkward for you to talk to people who are very similar to people your allies spooked into a blind jump to some other universe from which they never returned. That seems like it would be cross-culturally obvious and you've decided to talk to people here at all anyway so you clearly have a plan for it."

"We got along very well with Azan. It's Sesat that was spooked."

"Most of the surviving Sesatis live in Azan or Niazon. We're the ones without tattoos."

"Thank you - why are tattoos popular among non-Sesati in those countries?"

He laughs, hand over his mouth, embarrassed and hysterical, and tries to answer. "Um. No, it's." He breaks off laughing a bit more, slightly more happily, and shakes his head. "You know how Azani and Sesati are almost but not quite the same language? We thought we 'conquered Azan', and they thought we 'conquered Azan', and during the brief window where we thought we were agreed on that, we marked them all with slave tattoos. Except Vida. And then it turned out they weren't interested in being conquered in the way we meant it and, uh, anyway."

"- I'm not sure my magical translation is capturing the distinction but that sounds like such an interesting story, I hope at some point it's convenient to give the long version."

"There isn't a distinction - I mean, the words are the same - they thought we wanted some regime change and for them to serve as unfree labor, but actually we wanted to destroy their country and keep them as chattel. There's a history in the royal library but I can also tell you about it any time."

"All right, thank you."

And he goes off to talk with Dama.

The envoys hang around in the street, out of the way, smiling at people.

Some of the people approach them with questions.

Fox guy returns and waits for an opening, bouncing on the balls of his feet and fidgeting with one of his glowing fox ears. When he disturbs his hair enough in so doing, it's possible to see a human ear too, although the fox ones don't look like they're on a headband and do move like real appendages.

Shila Kolen snakes her neck down to his level. "Hello!" she says.

"Hello! You look really cool."

"Thank you! I'm a Hork-Bajir. What are you?"

He sighs dramatically. "A human, I guess."

"Huh. Do humans here just sometimes have ears like that? Humans from Stork don't have belly buttons and most humans do."

"Noooo, these are fox ears, humans never have fox ears or tails. I bought mine because I wanted to be a fox."

"Oh. In my world there's a technology you can use to be all the way a fox, if you want."

His eyes go wide and he grins broadly and then two seconds later he gets very dignified. "Perhaps if it doesn't conflict with my duties here."

"What's your job?"

"Um - stuff? I'm a page here, I run messages and carry things do whatever random thing isn't someone's full-time job and doesn't need the king or the council to handle it but still needs to be done."

"Cool! How long have you done that?"

"A few years." He seems pretty young now; he probably started as a child.

"I bet you pick up all kinds of cool stuff that way. Do you get a lot of time off? I can ask some people about getting you a chance to be a fox but it'd help if I knew when would be good."

"Um, I have time off but is it temporary or permanent?"

"It can be either. You can turn back if you're within a few hours' time limit, and you can't if you go over without doing some more stuff but it's doable stuff, and you can't change back outside the world neighborhood, like here, because it only works there. Oh, also it makes you able to talk to people telepathically."

"Just while you're a fox or forever?"

"Just while you're not in your original form. But if you wanted to turn into a slightly different fox-human hybrid I think it would still work."

"Wow. I... really really want to do that but would I live as long as a human if I turned into a fox or would I live as long as a fox?"

"Huh. You know, I don't know that off the top of my head, because people who do this usually live in my world full time and morph younger whenever they feel like they're getting on a bit."

"Oh. Uh, do you think I can probably visit your world again in a few years? Would you mind showing someone who can go between worlds the way there?"

"We don't have bus stops set up yet but once there's a route you'll be able to get there, now and in a few years too!"

"You use buses? To go between worlds? Why don't you just teleport?"

"Not everyone can teleport, so instead we have bus drivers who can teleport, and they teleport the buses. The physical bus is just to make sure they know who's coming along and who's not."

"Oh, that makes sense. I guess if you need things to put people in and have buses lying around."

"I'm not sure they were exactly lying around, but yeah."

Nod. "I imagine my king and her council will be interested in hearing about mass transit in your worlds, we haven't had the necessary technology or magic for long."

"On a single planet I think the buses usually fly, instead."

His eyes go wide again. "That sounds fun. I thought, uh, that there was some reason buses use wheels even if you can fly? But I only know so much."

"I think flying costs more fuel and you need better drivers or programs doing the driving?"

"Programs?"

"Oh, they're a thing that makes a lot of fancy machines work right. I don't know how much you want to hear about it right this second."

"I'm interested!"

"My computer is this thing." She pulls out her tablet; it's ruggedized so it doesn't splinter to bits when handled with her sharps. "It does lots of stuff - I mostly use it for sending messages to other envoys who aren't right next to me at the time but it'd also, like, play music, or tell me where the best-reviewed restaurant that serves tree bark in a particular town is. It kind of does all those things by doing math. So, programmers, people who write programs, are professionals at turning all kinds of random tasks like 'play music' or 'fly a bus' into math, so that computers, which can only do math, can do them. And then you can make machines that use that math to turn bits of a bus on or up or to the left or whatever, whenever they need to be different, so nobody has to personally pilot a bus, you can just make a million copies of the math problem easily as soon as it's been done once."

"...Huh. I don't think I really get it. Uh, by a restaurant that serves tree bark do you mean someplace really expensive or do you mean something else?"

"Oh, I mean I literally eat tree bark. Though it's very unusual for restaurants to carry it in areas where my species isn't common."

"So do we if we can get it but it's not cheap - I mean not just any tree bark, there's one kind that humans eat. But not by itself, just ground up and added to other things."

"Is it cinnamon? I like cinnamon but it does have a pretty intense flavor, my favorite tree bark is maple."

"Yeah. I haven't tasted maple, I don't know if I can eat that one. I haven't heard of anyone else trying it."

"I think humans like maple sap, usually, not the bark."

"Huh, efficient! Hey, if there are all these kinds of people I never heard of, are there kinds of plants, too?"

"Yeah! The plants on this planet are mostly a lot like the ones on planets humans usually come from, but there are other kinds of planets with their own plants. And some of them you can eat."

"Interesting... and human worlds are common, aren't they? Not just that there are a lot but that if you pick a random world..."

"Yeah. Earths are very common, and then on top of that there are not-Earths like this with humans on them anyway. It's weird and we don't know why it's like that."

"And things tend to be all different or not different at all? Like there aren't worlds with more of you and no humans but with cinnamon and foxes and lentils?"

"Hork-Bajir seem to only come from the one planet in the one world so far! Though cinnamon and foxes and lentils I think exist on Ardas before humans show up on them."

"...Maybe the Hork-Bajir just haven't shown up there yet?"

"I guess that's possible, maybe one day we'll find an Arda from a billion years later and it'll have some!"

"Maybe it will! We haven't met any Ardas before, I don't think, unless I wouldn't necessarily know if we had."

"They have Elves in, like Melda. How many worlds have you met?"

"Me personally, just this one. I know of another one, and yours and Ardas now, but I wouldn't necessarily know if there are more that the king knows about if no one wanted to come to Azan from them."

"Huh, you only hear about them if people move here from them?"

"I guess? If they're just off in their other world I wouldn't run into them. I could ask someone but I'm not going to bother someone on Azan she's council about it unless I have a reason to and mostly other people wouldn't know either? Maybe if someone made a list I could find it at the library. Do you have some kind of list of all the worlds anyone in your country has ever heard of?"

"Yeah! I can look it up on my computer. What they're like and how to get there if I want."

"I don't have one of those. I didn't even know about those until the people from Emika showed up."

"So Emika has computers?"

"I guess it must! I haven't been but that's where the new books came from, the science ones that Vida's obsessed with. - If you ask me anything I only know the answer to because I work here, I won't tell you, but everyone knows we imported science books and Vida's obsessed with them."

"That's fine, I'm not trying to spy on you!" Shila assures him.

"I know. You're fine. So are you thinking of selling computers like yours here and stuff?"

(Meanwhile the other envoys are also approached by a handful of people wanting to introduce themselves and ask nosy questions.)

The other envoys are also happy to answer nosy questions! What do these people want to know?

Mostly where they came from and what it's like there and what kinds of magic they have. This one kid wants to know if apples grow where they came from and whether they can remove tattoos; this other kid wants to know if they have alien sweets and would like to hire a poison tester to try them all in case they want to sell things here; this non-kid wants to know what the envoys would like from Azan and whether there are people visiting other parts of the planet.

All of these people came from places where apples grow somewhere, though Casjan grew up on a more tropical part of his planet. Luca can remove tattoos but it would probably be faster and less uncomfortable to get it done magically. They have alien sweets, and weren't expecting to need a poison tester to sell them, but if that's customary they will be in the market! They want diplomatic relations and trade and migration with Azan, and there are people visiting other parts of the planet too.

It may perhaps not be "customary" so much as "a scheme this person came up with to get paid to eat candy" but who's going to clarify? Not any of the witnesses quietly trying to hide their amusement.

This person who isn't the one who first asked about tattoos overheard that part and wants to get hers removed as soon as possible even if it's uncomfortable and slow.

This other person seems nonplussed by their answer to what they're looking for here but eventually manages "...oh, say more?"

Okay, Luca can telekinese ink particles out of the tattooed person who wants them out, playing a healing song out of his computer as he goes so they don't bleed all over themselves.

"We're from Vanda Nossëo and teams like ours have landed in every identifiable polity on this planet!" says Zua.

"Yeah but why did you come here if you could've just stayed at home?"

"You mean, like, why do I personally have this job?"

"...No? Sure? I mean why do people from where you're from want to go to foreign countries if you don't have problems you want us to solve for you, do you just like seeing new places?"

"We like seeing new places and new things and learning new stuff. And we like helping people, and most places are in a position to find something we can do helpful."

"Sounds like a good reason." He glances over at the tattoo removal. "And you're not wrong, you seem to be helpful. I think I'd get homesick but maybe not if I could teleport back and forth whenever I wanted."

"I like seeing lots of new places, and, yeah, teleporting makes it pretty quick to get home again if I want that."

That's about when Valan gets back, coming up over a rooftop and dropping down near the envoys like he's trying to make up for several years of not being an obnoxious showoff.

"Azan she is aware of your presence and expects to be able to respond to any trade proposals you write up for her within a few days. One of Vida's assistants is available to discuss technology sharing as soon as is convenient for you, and I will be available most of today and tomorrow to talk with you about whatever else might be relevant. Here, see?" Seals are absolutely not going to stay a reasonable way to verify information for long but today it's what they've got.

(They should know who Vida is already, she's been on the council since before the war, though she got more famous after it.)

"Great, thank you!" says Melda. "Is this a good place for us to be during this time or should we move somewhere else?"

"It's not too much in the way but if you want to come talk where you won't have ten other people coming up to you at once we can go borrow the royal courtyard, I like it there but I have no idea if you will."

"I expect it will be perfectly suitable. Maybe Luca can wait here since his services as a tattoo remover seem in demand."

"There's got to be a better way to do this," says Luca.

"I'm sure there is, but it's not standard enough that we have whatever that way is on the ship!" laughs Zua.

"That's the other thing wrong with calling that spell a healing spell."

He'll show them to the courtyard.

"Oh?" Melda asks.

"It doesn't just do things some people won't think of as healing, it also doesn't do some things they will."

"My understanding is that all the spells of that magic type were originally developed for personal use in a specific context and only later shared with others and their creator considers them functional first drafts rather than elegant finalized masterpieces," shrugs Melda. "I'll tell the shipboard coordinator that we want something more directly targeted at tattoo removal here soon. What else should we expect demand for?"

"I would have felt the same way when I was twenty. Well. I don't know how to scope that question but I guess we can always use more copper wire and steel and aluminum." Being able to use lots of those things puts a floor on their capabilities without also putting a ceiling on them, right? He hopes that's right.

"Well, good news, those are cheap, there are people who can magic up ludicrous amounts of normal material goods like that whenever they like and some of them work for competing commodities sellers. You'll need to be on the transit network if you don't want to arrange every delivery as a one-off, though."

"Huh. So you basically don't go hungry and no one is naked or cold, am I guessing about right?"

"You are! There are some distribution and education limitations - I don't know if this specific problem is real but as an example I could imagine it being hard to find people who want to make deliveries to that one planet full of indiscriminate mindreaders, and of course if someone's parents don't let them talk to outsiders they may have a hard time coming by directions to the groceries and social services and we have to pick a spot on the tradeoff line between being intrusive towards perfectly good families versus letting some of those slip under our notice. But there is no fundamental material scarcity."

"Convenient. Well, now that I'm thinking about what I'd do with a bunch of completely nonmagical objects I'm tempted to ask what you'd want for a hundred thousand doses of measles vaccine but I don't work in medicine and I have no idea if they know how to verify that it is a measles vaccine and not something else."

"We have vaccines! Not just measles but a lot of common human diseases; I think the other copy of this planet had one or two that were novel they've been researched by now. Would being able to test our lie-detection song magic work?"

"It might! I'm not sure how I'd do that either but that's probably just because I haven't thought it through yet. Does it go by exact words or what?"

"Yes but not with such exactitude that you can't rely on it through magic translation."

"Huh."

And he gets them into the palace courtyard and then there's no longer an audience to worry about or be reassured by as applicable. "So what kind of deal did you end up working out with the other Azan?"

"Oh, they wanted full membership almost immediately. Azan as we found it there was one of the closest things to the Vanda Nossëo project among humans at this technological level anywhere," says Melda, "and they recognized us as kindred spirits. The integration of Sesat here might change something, I'm not sure, and the same is true of you already having contact with other worlds."

Oh, is that what they're up to. "I think Azan learned a hard lesson about being too enthusiastic about that, if I understand you right. It's very easy to overextend yourself and get everyone you care about worse than killed. But I think people still like the idea of having a country people can come to when they hate where they are. I can show you the agreements we've come to with Iral and Niazon, if you want, they might give you a sense of how our foreign policy has changed in the last few years. But what exactly does full membership entail?"

"I'd love to see those agreements. Full membership in Vanda Nossëo requires a majority affirmative vote of the entire population, and having and enforcing laws against killing people, torturing them, raping them, or preventing them from leaving - other laws vary and some of the enforcement and implementation details do too."

"...So basically if they have the same laws as you and open borders with you and no one has any objections you stop bothering to distinguish?"

"Not quite. It's fine to have laws preventing some people from entering your state. The borders remain in place both for local legislation, and so the state can leave Vanda Nossëo later if they want. Membership's primary on-paper benefit is the defense clause - we'll defend member borders from aggression. In practice, it's very economically beneficial - it's not that you can't get tourists and businesses here, or go traveling yourself, without joining up, but it gets a lot smoother when you're a Vanda Nossëo member state and people aren't choosing to leave our umbrella at their own risk."

"I can see why the other Azan wanted to join. And I suppose you ran into trouble with Sesat because they heard 'laws against torturing people' and said 'sure, we have those'."

"Yeah, we usually have to clarify that this includes slaves, or includes children, or includes crazy people, or includes other species, and that if you sarcastically ask about whether rocks can vote you're going to get very earnest telepaths trying to establish communication with your rocks."

"If anyone notices that rocks are people I want to know about it but we don't prosecute them for murder when they kill people and invading armies don't enslave them so I don't think they should get a vote."

"As far as I know your rocks aren't people, but if they were those conditions wouldn't exclude them from the population that Vanda Nossëo looks at when determining if a vote to join is valid."

"I must be more confused about democracy than I thought because I don't see what possible goal is achieved by giving the vote to people who are dumb as rocks and have no skin in the game."

"Well, you don't enforce laws against rocks now, but if you found out they were people you might start! And it's a strong signal that Vanda Nossëo won't back any disenfranchisement, which can be pretty important to get communicated early on - otherwise it's more deceptive than we prefer to operate and it gets some people convinced that we'll back them in what they're doing."

"I expect this never comes up because rocks aren't people but it's very silly of you and in a way where I'm concerned it will come up in cases that don't involve rocks." Azan's laws have almost no protections against people coming in, declaring themselves citizens, staying long enough to vote, and then leaving. Why would they, people coming in and declaring themselves citizens for a day isn't nearly that much of a headache with a monarchy. "Like, say, donkeys. Donkeys have extremely strong preferences and if you're telepathic you don't need them to talk, and frankly it'd be good to get a telepath to come let us know how to treat our livestock decently, but letting them vote on government policy seems even less likely to go well than letting all humans vote on it."

"Donkeys are not to my knowledge sapient on this planet unless they assigned..." She checks her computer. "Donkeys are to my knowledge not sapient on this planet. But, yes, if they were, and Azan couldn't countenance letting them vote, you would not be able to join Vanda Nossëo. We'd still trade with you and individuals from polities that haven't joined can immigrate to many Vanda Nossëo polities and some places do choose that option."

"What exactly does 'sapient' mean?"

"- let me check real quick if there are any translation patches I need to be implementing." She looks. "Okay. The way I think of it it means the capacity for agency and reason and preferences. There are a lot of definitions and you're welcome to read a list. In practice if there's controversy over something maybe being a person we err on the side of caution."

"I am very confident donkeys have the capacity for agency and preferences. Not so much reason, I guess. Do you care if humans who don't have the capacity for reason vote?"

"If there is a large class of humans who don't have the capacity for reason that isn't an already-understood category like 'babies', we can look into it. If there are individual humans who lack the capacity for reason, like comatose people, they still count as part of the population a majority of which has to vote yes, but a normal number of those won't sink a well-liked membership campaign."

"No, that's basically who I mean. It sounds like you expect people to vote to join by a wider margin than I thought was typical of elections."

"It's a very wide margin, yes, votes do fail for lack of turnout. Sometimes you get a setup where most of a planet joins and some individual states don't, and the non-joiners wind up with most of the people who voted no or abstained - who of course can't be prevented from leaving their member homes - and the people from those places who did want to join filter out, but obviously there's no solution that makes everyone happy and we settle in this case for requiring overwhelming support to join."

"Did you have that with very many countries on the other version of this planet?"

That's about when someone shows up and hands him a book containing among other things the treaties with Niazon and Iral that he mentioned earlier. Valan refrains from explaining how they knew to do that.

Maybe they have telepathy from whoever else they've been talking to, how would she know! "Thank you so much - Casjan, if you don't mind looking these over as a first pass? - thank you - yes, including the Azan there, but not the Sesat at all."

"What happened with Sesat?"

The treaties are notably less idealistic than Azan's previous foreign policy. They pushed pretty hard to make their concessions mostly in land rather than in border controls, but still. The war with Sesat wouldn't have happened under these terms, because Azan has, if not given up entirely, at least ceded a lot of ground.

"The planet looked pretty uncomplicated - as they go. They sent some less experienced teams - they have to start somewhere - and one of them, assigned to Sesat, didn't swap out for replacements when they had a personality conflict. I don't know the envoys who were there personally but I believe there is now a scathing book published about how he was terrible and everything was his fault. I can get you a copy if you like."

"Was that all, they decided to never join because that person insulted the Star of Stars personally or something?"

"I don't think anyone insulted the Star of Stars - although relatedly there was a coup shortly after contact."

Which would normally mean they backed the coup to push through their preferred policies but not if Sesat then didn't join. Also that isn't an answer, that's a distraction.

"Would you feel more comfortable having this conversation with someone who has a tattoo."

"Oh no. Okay, maybe it wasn't a personality conflict so much as crosscultural conversations being extremely difficult - I have no idea what I've said that led to you replying in that way."

...Plausible, really, his first few years in Azan did feel about this confusing. The last magic people to land on them were practically Azanis, and these people have been emphasizing how they're basically Azan with more power, but.

"My apologies, cross-cultural conversations are one of the hardest things I've ever done. It feels as though you're being evasive, which is understandable, I've been evasive several times in talking with you. I was trying to clarify - it sounds like you were saying Sesat didn't join, for a length of time I've been assuming was at least a few years and not a few decades but I might be assuming wrongly, and you're not hoping they'll join in the future, and it's because a conversation went in a way that could be described as 'a personality conflict' or 'cross-cultural communication difficulties' - at least, I think that's what you said - and if that's what you said then maybe you're worried giving me details will make me as angry as everyone in Sesat must have been. But maybe I have that wrong."

"Sesat didn't join because they didn't like us. They still haven't and still don't. I've seen forecasts of three to four generations before they put it to a vote again. I think they found it extremely insulting that getting even carefully exactly-worded lip service for their treatment of slaves, which seemed of utmost importance to the movers and shakers of Sesat, required being very overt and direct and it was impossible to instead rely on subtext and avoid losing face. I think they felt threatened and when it became adequately clear that the threat would not manifest in genuine violence chose distancing themselves from Vanda Nossëo as the dignity-preserving option. And someone decided to stage a coup and, for some reason, subsequently... export... the previous Star of Stars to a world in our sister organization Elendil where it remains possible to meaningfully own slaves because there is a domesticated sapient species that prefers slavery as a lifestyle available on the open market there. I think it took many conversations to get that bad, and that the leader of the envoy team should have bowed out much earlier and let someone else try to rescue the situation. I am willing to answer all of your questions, I don't know any classified information, if I sound evasive it's because I'm not sure how to put something in a way that will be informative across the culture gap or I don't understand the relevance of the answer to you such that I can pick out a useful response out of the possible topical sentences."

"Thanks. I could probably get more than you from a public statement by the new Star-of-Stars if there is one, or pick apart diplomats' statements for accidental subtext, but I'm mostly trying to figure out if this is - something that will matter to the Sesatis living in Azan, something that ought to matter to everyone in Azan but was easier for Sesatis to notice, something where that thing you keep doing where you disavow the diplomats involved every time it comes up will be important to letting everyone decide it's a stupid fight other people are having that we don't have to get involved in, or something that basically only matters to one guy who doesn't have that much power or might be dead. If it was about slavery we - I don't know if you'll decide we still have slavery or not, it probably depends on how your translation works, but at any rate I think it's not something that would be very disruptive to get rid of."

"Do you have anyone who would be prohibited by the licit use of force from walking up to me and asking me to teleport them to another planet, never to return?"

(Zua pulls up a search for public statements by the new Star-of-Stars to show him.)

"Not in the way you mean. Azan doesn't currently have anyone enslaved, but it would be legal if it came up in the future under certain circumstances, and then there isn't technically a law against leaving the country so much as them being confined somewhere specific and not allowed in the parts of the country between them and the border. Also, we're in an interior courtyard of the palace, and while there are procedures in place to escalate complaints from literally anyone to Azan she, that doesn't actually mean just anyone can wander any part of the palace grounds at any time. But if there were such people and they left with you we wouldn't ask an Azani teleporter to hunt them down."

And he'll look at whatever Zua finds...

So the most immediately notable thing about this video is that the new Star-of-Stars is an alt of someone Valan knew once.

He's furious, almost vibrating with it, explaining that it is possible to grow greater than Sesat ever realized, that Vanda Nossëo has that potential with their magic and technology, and that they are squandering it in favor of constructing a society of docile sheep as fat as any king and as cowed as any slave. Sesat will grow as rich as Vanda Nossëo - its people can already wake the dead; its people will soon be able to make jewelry that produces flameless light, or that grants immortality; Sesat has seen its last famine and its last plague no matter what happens next.

Vanda Nossëo is as rich now as Sesat will be in six months and if you strip away the temporary disparity in wealth and look at what they do - in Vanda Nossëo they maim people who get drunk and commit manslaughter. Like Azan. They do it with mental editing, so they don't have to look at what they've done, which is important because they're squeamish. Sesat has been coming to recognize that no person, king or serf, ever deserves that.

To join Vanda Nossëo would mean making this bargain: that any time one of their young men gets too deep in his cups and starts a fight, they give him up to be maimed and kept apart from society, in exchange for which they would all have enough food.

Vanda Nossëo's leadership staked their honor on their boasts that they would not annex Sesat until all the people of Sesat united in begging them to. They'll keep their word. They won't even be closing their stores. So even were there any in Sesat so contemptible as to want to take them up on their offer, it would hardly matter. Nothing is lost by turning them down.

He does, in the end, smirk about that.

If he'd known going into it what that was going to be he'd have watched it first in private, or with Dama or Maki. He doesn't immediately have anything to say about it.

"Wow," says Melda, blinking at the video when it concludes.

"Oh, that's what the Allspeak update about maiming was for?" says Shila.

What the fuck is he supposed to say to that.

He had better say something. It's - in keeping with who he once thought Feris was, to care about that. And it's genuinely an attitude more characteristic of Sesat than Azan. And the idea of mental editing is deeply disconcerting. And it's - everything he ever liked about Sesat.

And after the old Star-of-Stars had them imprisoned it took months for Maki's hand to stop shaking, nearly a year for Valan to walk, years for Maki to speak.

He's not going to bring any of that up with these strangers but there's a long pause while he gets past that to think of literally anything appropriate to say.

"Not what you were expecting?"

"I'd read a transcript but this is remarkably - fiery. I suppose I should have expected it," says Melda.

"...So is he describing something you'd describe differently or just lying?"

"The first thing. - well, I don't think every case of drunken manslaughter has that outcome, that varies locally."

"How would you describe it?"

"Can you narrow it down or do you just want me to translate the entire speech into Vanda Nossëo affect?"

"Oh, if the second thing is doable it'd be helpful, but I mostly meant the part about your justice system."

"Mental alteration is never a person's only option. Even the most exceptionally dangerous people could instead be, say, dead, and most people could be in prison instead. The forms of it used in that way are very surgically specific and would generally leave the person able to return to everything about their life except for crime, or, usually, an even more specific exception than that. I could go into the history of how this policy came into existence but I don't know if that interests you or if there's something else about it that stuck out?"

"The history sounds interesting."

"A plurality of the individuals working for Vanda Nossëo are humans. There's just a lot of you. But it was founded by, and persists at a high concentration of, my species - Elves," says Melda. "And we have two unique features that probably contributed to this balance of desiderata. One: we cannot be imprisoned. Unless you're literally a god - an evil god - it kills us all by itself, it's so intolerable that we'd kill ourselves rather than let it get to that point, it's just a particularly cruel and inefficient way to kill us. Accordingly, imprisonment has never featured in any Elven conception of justice.

"Two: we can swear binding oaths. With some exceptions that I don't think are relevant to how this played out in the founding, an Elf who can talk can use a slightly particular phrasing and enforce on themselves that what they say is true. If I tried to swear to you that I was a man, or a pineapple, or dead, I just wouldn't be able to get the words out; if I swore to you that I was going to get that way, I'd do it, I'd have to, it would happen without stopping to check along the way past my saying so if I wanted to or if circumstances had changed. I could dawdle, maybe, but not quit. This has all the nightmarish potential you'd expect and then some, of course, but unlike imprisonment it's not unthinkable. It did play a role in the development of the Elven conception of justice. If someone has, say, struck a child, or destroyed a neighbor's sculpture, or otherwise committed the sort of minor misbehavior that's all you get in a typical century of a monospecies Elf community? Well, that's terrible, of course, but it doesn't mean they can't be among us - they just have to swear that they won't do it again."

"...I can see how if your species founded a society that worked for you and then went looking for the most miserable humans you could find and let them join if they were willing to have a democratic vote about it you would end up with the thing you've apparently ended up with. Except that I didn't understand the relevance of your problem with imprisonment."

"That... wasn't the trajectory but I agree it could have had the same result. So, another founding and ongoing pressure in the top levels of Vanda Nossëo is a particular personality template - it has sounded like you're aware of the same phenomenon here, people who are the same across worlds and may or may not look alike. This template, 'Bells', actually hates invasive mind magic of all sorts, it's a very reliable and strong feature they have. And none of them are Elves. Most of them come from societies where some sort of imprisonment, not oaths or anything like them, is the default response to crime too serious to handle with scoldings and fines. - Elves alone don't do fines in most worlds where we exist because in most worlds where we exist we wind up doing central planning or a gift economy rather than currency, though my specific world is economically unusual. So you have some Elves, and you have some Bells, and they're pulling at each other, one side barely able to wrap their minds around the concept of a 'humane prison', the other so suspicious of mind control that the first thing every one of them does on meeting telepaths is demand to know how to make them stop. But both of them able to agree on letting the prisoners decide, in cases where either option suffices to make other people safe from them."

"And the societies you know of where they do remotely normal human things would mostly be better off doing things your way, because as lovely humanitarians you went looking for desperately poor people who would be better off doing things your way and don't need to have anything to do with anyone else?"

"...I can't tell if that's your sincere best guess, a sarcastic way of describing your best guess that you are expecting to somehow highlight for me something you found inadequate about my explanation...?"

"It seems very strange to me that you find yourselves deciding between two punishments no country I've ever been in has made much use of, especially when you have magic that can make sure if you go too far with a whipping you can always fix it."

"Frankly, that is because your planet is very poor and very low-tech."

He is not going to be goaded into revealing what he thinks of as the technology they have that best refutes that claim. What if he says "we have electricity!" and they've replaced electricity with politely asking clouds to do all the work on their entire planet and don't even need to make copper wire? ...What if he already has tipped his hand by saying they could use copper wire? Maybe if you use gold wire you can make cooler electricity that does twice as many things.

"We haven't had some of our cool stuff long enough to have seen all the changes it'll bring but I do admit I'm not immediately seeing why that in particular would change."

"One of the things people buy with slack and luxury is being more humane towards criminals. If their labor is less essential to the economy, if the security measures people need to feel safe from them are commonly available, if feeding them is cheap, if there are social scientists willing to take data about whether they can stop doing crime and live normal lives and what made them do crime in the first place, if people are using their larger amounts of free time to think about moral philosophy and try to apply their principles to politics, that all gradually pushes away from permanent and violent punishments and toward rehabilitative and preventative strategies. This isn't a guarantee, but it's definitely a trend and particularly holds among humans."

"...I don't disbelieve the claims you just made but they don't sound related to the claims you made before them - for context, Azan uses execution, public whipping, public display in general, henna marking, fines, and obviously sometimes strips people of rank and associated marks. I'm not entirely sure which of those you consider more violent or less humane than what you do."

"So, in Vanda Nossëo the overwhelming majority of criminal punishments come with an alternative of exile, because it's illegal to stop people from leaving if you're not very sure they're just going to find an uncontacted planet and start murdering people on it. Any of those things except the first two would be fine, even in a member state, with the alternative of exile available, and depending on the details even the first two aren't necessarily off the table."

"Depending on what details?"

There's something that's still confusing here, like he's making an assumption that isn't true, but he's not sure which assumption it might be.

"If there were, say, a religious belief among the criminals themselves that being whipped or killed would meaningfully expiate their guilt, and they preferred that to moving to another country, then that could be implemented as an exception to the usual rules against killing and torturing people. Most localities just omit those criminal penalties across the board but we're much more absolute about having to let people leave."

"I don't think I'm getting less confused, do you want to walk me through concrete examples or just circle back to this topic later when we have more shared context?"

"I'm not sure how I'd even pick an illuminating example, I'm sorry."

"Well, in the mean time, I imagine you'll want to set up trade and travel regardless. Do we need to discuss travel beyond figuring out a good place for people to teleport to and from?"

"Usually intraplanetary busses just fly, so if you want service to Niazon and so on, someplace suitable for a flying busport will also be useful! But yeah, it's not very complicated beyond finding an available parcel."

Hmm. Missed the implication that Azan already has teleportation and blueprints for internal combustion engines, or figured out how limited Azan's access to those things is?

"Niazon's not exactly far away but it's possible we won't have the spare teleportation capacity for trips to the other side of the world any sooner than you could set up flights. As an aside, I'm not used to people calling flying things buses, in my experience people only call ground vehicles buses."

"It's a genericized brand name, 'Airbus'."

Is he supposed to know what a brand name is. Is this a trap. "I can see how a flying thing that does what buses do would end up with that name."

At some point when they've talked for a while he suggests that maybe someone could go visit their worlds and see what they're like.

"Absolutely! Are you imagining more of a guided tour or do you just want a few people to be turned loose in a bus station with an Allspeak installation?"

"...An Allspeak installation?"

"Our standard translation magic. It's free."

Apparently their form of teleportation doesn't just have language-learning as a mysterious side effect. He neglects to explain that Adrian's works that way.

"Sounds useful. How does it interact with other translation magic?"

"You know, I'm not sure it's been tried; we've got lots of kinds of telepathy, and nonmagical translation things, but for translation spells per se Allspeak is about it. I believe it can be removed but not by people who only have bus-station levels of knowhow about installing it, so I'd need to get a specialist ready if there's concern about interactions."

"I don't specifically have any reason to expect there to be interactions but I suppose it'd be silly to rely on anyone being able to say that there were interactions, huh?"

"Quite! So probably we want to prepare whoever goes first to have Allspeak put on and taken off again and then see how they're doing."

"I'm not sure we should expect that to tell us what to expect going forward, but it's not a bad idea."

"Is there an obvious candidate subject to try this with who already has your translation magic?"

Well, the thing is, that depends. Does Adrian have translation magic? Do people from Emika have translation magic? Apparently it's not people who travel to other worlds, and maybe it's not people who travel to Azan from other worlds, though conceivably they wouldn't have noticed if it's totally redundant with Allspeak. Are the people who learn languages by magic the ones with the magic, or the ones whose language is learned? It's probably not the Azani language or they'd have noticed already, right?

"I don't know if it inheres in people or works some other way. The magic that brought it about is new and dangerous to test. We could ask Val to go first but I don't actually know if that'd be more informative than any randomly selected person."

"Val?" inquires Melda.

"Val learned Azani by magic after coming here. Whereas I barely travel and don't speak anything besides Azani and Sesati, and arguably that's not even two languages."

"Huh, and he doesn't know how he did it?"

"Not unless you count 'by magic', or if he does he's not telling."

"Can you introduce us? If there's going to be challenging magic interactions better to find out sooner than later."

"Yeah, one moment." He'll step into a hallway and retrieve Val. (They sent word to Val and Jamie, among others, while he was talking strategy with Azan she. Otherwise this wouldn't be nearly so convenient.)

Val looks less like Valan than most Sesatis do, and he isn't built like Valan, and he doesn't even hold himself like Valan. There are some similarities in their expressions but not to the extent that it's notable just yet.

"Hello!" Melda says, and she introduces herself and her colleagues again.

"It's nice to meet you. I'm Val Renaud." That's not even structured like an Azani name. "I hear you're concerned about whether your language magic has side effects and want me to test it?"

"Not side effects exactly, its straightforward behavior is pretty well understood! We're just not sure how to expect it to interact with other translation magic, like what we understand you to have - can you tell us more about that?"

"Sure! I learned Azani when I moved here. I don't seem to have any less ability to express myself and I don't have any more trouble with background noise than if I'd grown up with it, I think. It is Azani and not Sesati, though I can understand Sesati the same way as everyone who speaks Azani can."

"Did you do that on purpose? Does it work for cultural idioms?"

Shrug. "Well, I didn't expect it to happen, but it was more of a 'let's try this and see what happens' sort of situation than a 'minding our own business not wanting anything to happen' sort of situation. What do you mean by cultural idioms?"

"Things like saying that someone is the creditor who owns you, or 'if Laen were kind'."

"I understand those - I don't remember hearing the second one before I knew enough to put it together but I do just magically know the first."

"Neat, Allspeak is actually pretty bad at that without manual patching. Are you willing to test having Allspeak put on you and then taken off again, to make sure it works all right? If you're nervous we can get a precog on standby."

"...Sure. You have precogs?" Oh shit they have precogs.

"A few. They don't work outside their universes but one kind of them can work on information transmitted to their universe from outside of it, so we can get some questions queued up for them." She sets this up on her computer.

"Interesting. Nice computer, by the way, how much RAM can you fit in that?"

"I think it doesn't work on RAM but I admit I've never asked."

"Huh, I don't really know enough about computers to know if I should be surprised by that. Well, you can do your magic whenever you're ready, I guess."

Melda takes a picture of a nearby wall, says, "The Allspeak installer who knows how to deinstall too will be along in just a moment," and then, lo and behold, a person, one who is eight feet tall and blue. "Morning," he says.

"Wow, are you human? Is that rude? It's not morning in this time zone but hi."

"It's not? Ugh, I hate time zones. I'm not a human, I'm a frost giant, is that important?"

"Only to whether I could be that tall if I wanted. Oh, well."

"Depends how bad you want it?" Shrug. "I am here to install Allspeak on you and then, for experimental purposes, remove it, and then, if you want it back, reinstall it. Can you confirm that this is what you want and expect?"

"If I had really strong expectations about it I don't know that we'd need to do any tests but I guess that's what I expect."

"Yeah, no, that means, do you want and expect this plan of action, not do you have firm beliefs about what's going to happen if I go about it."

"Yeah, go ahead."

The frost giant bops him on the head with the Allspeak wand.

"How am I supposed to tell if anything happened?"

"Well, can you understand me still now?" asks the frost giant.

"I think you just asked if I can understand you, and I think the answer is yes, but if you actually asked what my favorite color is then something has gone wrong."

"That's what he asked," Melda confirms. "- I actually speak Azani and am not using translation magic for it, to be clear."

"It could be constructing an elaborate lie about you speaking Azani but I bet not. Anyway, go ahead and uninstall it or however this works."

Bop!

"So what conversation did we have from your end?"

Melda repeats it.

"Well, it doesn't seem like it went badly. So far."

"Do you want it back?" asks the frost giant.

Shrug. "It doesn't seem like there's much reason to say no?"

Bop!

"Thanks. Is that typically free or just when you're testing it?"

"Oh, it's always free, it's just much less hassle for everybody if anyone who wants Allspeak has it and there's fewer miscommunications all around. Plus it takes like fifteen minutes to learn how to use one of these and Vanda Nossëo's economy is like a million times the size of the backwater that produces 'em."

"Huh. At some point I'd be very curious to learn more about that, though I imagine now's not a good time."

"I mean, we didn't know how complicated this was gonna get, I budgeted an hour, but if you're busy I can fuck off and play Snowflake Poem till somebody else needs the Allspeak specialist."

"I'm not, I just figured you would be."

"Sure. You want to learn to use a wand or you want me to diss Asgard some more or what?"

"Can I get both?"

"You got it. So if you've seen one of the envoys - which of you has Princess Beldri's -" Melda raises her hand. "Her, if you've seen her teleport, that's a spell that's made of a few hundred million letters in a magic alphabet. The only person who can use the magic alphabet is the princess of my planet Jotunheim, Princess Beldri. Everybody else who uses the same magic works with giant chunks of magic alphabet, like whole chapters' worth, and their spells are clunkier. Allspeak's made that way, mostly by folks from this planet called Asgard. They're assholes, they were at war with us since forever and also kidnapped Princess Beldri when she was a baby and raised her thinking she was one of them."

"Huh, that's..." He pauses contemplatively for a bit. "Wait, wait, do you mean they thought she was one of them or she thought she was one of them?"

"I think everybody except the Asgardian queen who kidnapped her thought she was one of them, did some magic to make her look like one most of the time."

"Wow! That's fucked up." He wasn't going to say that next but it seems like the only reasonable response. "And somehow she does magic at a finer granularity than anyone else?"

"Yeah, not because of that though, she touched a magic thing when she was a kid. Usually it just kills people who do that."

He contemplates this for a while. "Do a lot of other people try?"

"Nah. Most people it doesn't kill it also doesn't do anything particularly neat for. It or the other ones like it, there's - six? I think it's six."

"So can I get a ride to go touch all six or a subset thereof?"

"I think some of them are held by hostile governments? And you probably can't get the one the Princess has, she keeps it on her and has famous-person levels of you don't get to meet her in person usually. Maybe there's one you can go pat if you sign enough waivers that it's nobody's fault if it explodes you."

"Hmmmmm." More contemplating. If she makes exceptions she probably does it on the basis of precognition about what people will do. He can extract... weak evidence, not proof of anything... if he commits to using any magic he might get as a result in some particular way. He picks off of body language he expects to differ between instances of this conversation (which he supposes this is obviously not the only instance of). If he gets cool magic out of this he'll try to use it to make Azan richer and more powerful. "I'm surprised by that since I expect most of the reason for it is concerns about assassination attempts and I would expect she could just foresee that I'm not going to do that. But I don't have any reason to prefer to try to tackle that first if there's another one I could try."

"I mean, she's not super worried about assassination attempts but probably she's any worried? There's a lot of bullshit out there. But mostly it's just that there's trillions of people and if feeling like it was a good reason to bug somebody trillions of people know about was good enough to get a meeting, they would instantly suffocate probably."

He has magic from a process that kills most people instead of giving them powers. It isn't something people just happen to feel like.

There's really no benefit to tipping them off when they slip up. But he can't think of a reasonable and on-topic response that doesn't. He shrugs. "I guess. Anyway, you mentioned you were at war with some kidnappers?"

"Not anymore - or, I guess technically we might be in a state of declared war that is presently ceasefiring? We joined Vanda Nossëo and they didn't."

"They don't want to pick a fight with Vanda Nossëo and Vanda Nossëo doesn't want to pick a fight with them either?"

"Princess Beldri gets along with her adopted sister pretty well, but their queen still sucks, is how I heard it? So Vanda Nossëo protects us so they won't try anything and we're just sorta waiting for the Asgardian princess to inherit."

"Makes sense. And, hm. You mentioned I could learn to give other people the translation magic?"

"Sure, they hire tons of people to do it at bus stations and stuff."

"Do I have to agree to work at a bus station to learn?"

"No, that's just an example. - you will probably have to pay for a class if you don't want to do it under a scheme where you agree to take some kind of job and pay your financer? But they're cheap as magic classes go."

"I don't know what we'll do about currency conversion but I can probably trade work, I just don't know if working at a bus stop would be the fastest way to pay it off. Anyway, how do I arrange that and check up on the availability of your dangerous magic things?"

"You want the internet. Internet's fantastic."

"I don't own a computer, I didn't get to pack that kind of thing when I moved here."

"Well, you should get one, then, the fancy kind works on humans so you can get a nicer one than I have."

"You keep recommending courses of action that involve already having opened up some channel for interacting with your society in response to my questions about how to interact with your society."

"The envoys can probably get you one installed?"

Melda nods.

"Thanks. 'Installed'?"

"The kind of computer he's referring to involves a chip in the user's brain," says Melda. "It works on humans and Elves and orcs; research is underway on other species' brain anatomy. Then you can control the computer with your thoughts, which also encrypts the contents of the device. No other kind of computer is fully proof against conjuration, though there are ways to make it inconvenient."

He has questions and the answers spawn more questions and - he doesn’t want brain surgery but this probably isn’t the first time this has happened, it’s probably their thousandth prophecy about this day and if he turned them down the first time then they probably read his mind anyway and had their seer write everything down. When this happens for real he’ll consent, because something could convince him to and they have mind-reading and a million tries to get him to do whatever they want.

So... fine. Getting a new computer is obviously the most convenient thing to do and whatever seems convenient is probably what they want from him. He wouldn’t rather they trick him into thinking he wants it. He’ll get a horrible brain computer and investigate their internet.

Melda wants to check if anyone else would like chiplock computers in the same trip, to save the shipboard demon time.

Not Valan, anyway. Vida would but everyone’s doing their best to keep Vida away from these people. They can probably find quite a few interested people around town, though, including the page with fox ears.

As long as his brain is still totally normal and human he can safely get a chiplock even if he is planning to go morph a fox later, though people who routinely morph often go with a thoughtspeak-based computing solution.

...He might want to morph a lot but he also wants a computer today.

Computers for all! A brief training montage! And back to our regularly scheduled diplomacy.

Yeah.

"I'm not demanding it but if you would give your word that you aren’t, haven't, won’t, and wouldn’t ever use prophecy or intentionally cooperate with the use of prophecy or mind-reading to extract information or cooperation without regard for honesty or the wellbeing of the people you’d be getting those things from it’d be nice."

"To my knowledge," says Melda, "Vanda Nossëo policy for everyone you will by default be invited to interact with - who works for them in a diplomatic capacity, this doesn't apply to the cafeteria staff on the ship or to people who have private sector work - forbids lying. More broadly Vanda Nossëo law forbids nonconsensual mind-reading or mind-altering magic any more invasive than facial recognition or communicative telepathy outside designated areas of which this planet has none, forbids attacking you in most cases sometimes up to and including in self-defense, and instructs us to assume that if we receive contradictory orders it's a red-team exercise or actual infiltration which we should report to our supervisors however many layers up seems called for. If you would like you may speak to someone who is sworn to never act on nor reveal anything you tell them so as to be able to get advice on sensitive situations without the pressure of other agents pursuing other goals on the basis of your information. My reports do get passed up and used to inform a summary delivered to an allied precog but I am not receiving or acting on instructions detailed enough to be an attempt to path you through anything complicated and when I have in the past received precognition-aided instructions they were about averting deaths or disasters, not about extracting cooperation. All of that is accurate to the best of my knowledge, I so swear."

"Thank you. I would also appreciate more information about - so, I’ve been assuming, apparently correctly, that you’re having someone check up on this conversation, and I’m aware of things. And I don’t mind spending extra time chatting in this garden, as long as it’s just for things like making sure you don’t accidentally give us all a horrible alien plague or the other way around, but if it were a different time or a different person..." Shrug. "But maybe that’s silly and prophecies don’t really happen?"

"I haven't made a report yet, although I believe Zua's written in about your having a local alt -?"

Zua nods.

"But since I will make a report later that would hardly prevent a precog from letting us know if you get, yes, a horrible alien plague that I can't just cure on the spot without issue. I'm - not really sure I followed what you just said."

"I mean... do the precogs go into a real future or is it more like a dream about people who aren’t really there?"

"The way they experience it varies by precog but my understanding is that it's more like a dream about people who aren't really there than like time travel. We do have a time traveler but she only works in her neighborhood."

"I see. Anyway, we were going to tour your worlds? I want to check if I end up understanding people there without Allspeak."

"Sure! Do you want to narrow it down any or should I just pick out a sampler?"

Well, there’s no point in using the trip to try to verify their honesty, so it’s really only useful for trying to understand things that aren’t clear. Or for entertainment.

"Whatever you think will be most enlightening."

"All right. Whenever you're ready. Zua, can you manage things here while I'm touring?"

"Sure thing."

He’ll just pass the job of talking to Zua on to some other Azani official and then they can leave whenever.

A series of pops, and:

They are on Beach, on, appropriately enough, a beach. There aren't many buildings; there are a lot of shorefolk fishing and flying and building sandcastles and grooming each other's feathers and napping. The most architecture there is to be had is a narrow shed with a shower spigot on one side.

"They don't like buildings much, around here," says Melda. "They can control the weather, and they were Stone Age when first discovered, and they don't have much need for privacy. So they live outdoors. Their language is sung through - did you wind up getting it?"

"I don’t know anything about it that you didn’t just tell me but I don’t think anyone noticed speaking Azani till they tried talking to someone."

"Well, you can go ahead and try introducing yourself to someone. They're a pretty friendly lot."

He’ll flag down whoever looks like they’re doing the most droppable thing and say hello.

This one is combing sand out of her hair with her claws. She chirps at him with a sunny smile.

He has no idea what if anything that chirp means. "Just testing something," he says, shrugging.

She giggles.

"No luck?" asks Melda. "She just said hello."

"Yeah. I can’t explain myself until I get magic for it but you can, I guess, if you think she minds."

Melda says, in a fashion perfectly comprehensible to Valan, "He's checking a translation theory!"

The shorefolk giggles and whistles and waves at him and goes back to combing her hair.

"Do you want to hit someplace where we can get you Allspeak next?" Melda asks.

"Yeah."

Pop pop.

It's a shining towering city, achingly beautiful in every curve and sparkle, full of Elves like Melda, woven through with parkland and water features.

"This is my world," she says. "It's called 'space Arda', conventionally, even though that's not a very pretty name, because most Ardas are lower tech and everyone in them stays on one planet."

"We haven’t had nearly enough time to make Azan look like that."

"Human cities often don't even given lots of time! It's pretty high-maintenance and there's competing priorities - humans often need various safety signage in bright neon colors that clash with everything around them to stand out enough to human vision, for example. But I like it here." She flicks her fingers through some fountaining water. "Allspeak's that way." She sets off through the foot traffic.

"I don’t think I’ve noticed humans needing that." He follows.

"Well, need under the most commonly preferred risk management polices. We can hit a human city after this."

"...Sure. Are you planning on pointing out anything you think would call for a neon warning sign?"

"I'll notice in plenty of time if it looks like you're about to wander somewhere dangerous but your own caution around heights will most likely do the trick, a lot of the safety stuff is for kids and their parents, pets and pet owners."

"In my experience animals and children young enough not to notice that heights can be dangerous couldn't read and the point of adult supervision is that they already know things like that."

"I'm probably not explaining it well, I don't have human children - or any children at all. Maybe there will be illustrative examples at our next stop."

Allspeak kiosk. Bop.

Shrug. He’ll keep an eye out.

"Anything here you want a closer look at or shall we move on?"

"We can move on."

Pop pop.

"This is a human city. The world is Revelation and the city's called Bangalore. This world was pretty advanced when we found them already because they can summon people from adjacent worlds with very useful magical powers - those aren't humans exactly but they're psychologically alike and some of them used to be humans."

Relatable, he doesn’t say.

He looks for neon warnings and tries to judge the tech level and see how electricity gets used when there’s enough of it to do anything anyone might want with it and they’ve had a long time to come up with new things to want to use it for.

There's a bright orange traffic cone marking a spot in the sidewalk that has been peeled open for plumbers to do things, and a truck the back end of which has a CAUTION - WIDE TURNS sign with a little picture, and nobody has coordinated the traffic lights or the car's lights to look nice together at all. But the buildings are tall and there are street food carts and people with wings and must-be-electric bicycles and little hovering drones doing photography or carrying packages and busy shops nobody has to staff and shady trees full of birds whose poop is being busily scrubbed by little robots that shuffle along the ground.

Blind people could use a warning about the pit but they couldn’t use that warning. Maybe when Azan starts needing to do that kind of maintenance on their power and water they should play music.

...He really, really wants a fleet of electric street sweepers.

"And all of them have a tendency to fall into pits?"

"I think the cone by the pit is there so if people are reading something while they walk, or can see high contrast things but not detail, or are going fast, have enough time to go around it? It might also be helping the robots navigate."

"That’s... huh, that does make sense. I thought people wanting to be blind was a weird Azan thing but you did already tell me Vanda Nossëo was basically Azan in space so maybe I should’ve guessed. And your robots navigate differently?"