That's so weird! They've gotta figure out what's up with that.

Nelen and his team pop down to a population center to see for themselves.

Here is a group of around 30 hominids, and a couple of elderly australopithecus.  The generations get increasingly anatomically modern as they get younger, and the tools they carry more complicated.  A few teenagers are wearing grass skirts or body-paint, but most of the band is naked.  Some hunters appear to have caught a gazelle, and a teenager is exasperatedly trying to deter an australopithecus from eating off it before it's cooked.

When the envoys appear, someone calls out "stranger!" and people (and humanoid animals) run for cover or ready weapons.

"We come in peace!" calls Nelen.

They relax some, but don't put down their weapons.

A teenage boy comes forwards and asks:

"Who are you? What do you want?"

"My name is Nelen Utopia and my colleagues are Tanaka Natsuko, Cassiel Jones, Zanro, and Tarwë. We're from very far away and we are here to learn more about your people and trade goods and exchange information with you."

That is a very reassuring reason for being here.

"We have meat and stone to spare.  We know how to make food better to eat, and how to make rocks very sharp, and how to make shelter, and how to kill animals without hunting them.  We do not know how to travel without walking."

"We know all those things too! We're mostly more interested in learning about what your lives are like than in getting stuff from you."

"What are 'lives'?"

"A life is the period of time you spend doing things and having experiences. For most kinds of people it starts at a specific point and for most of those it also ends eventually without magical help."

He takes a few seconds figuring that out. It's not actually a new concept, exactly, but it's not one he'd had a word for before.

Also, it sounds like these people claim to have a way to prevent death in general?

"Why do you want to know about our lives? We would like to know about 'magical help'."

"We'd like to know how you spend your time and how you make decisions. There are many places that have many kinds of magic that can do a lot of things - that's how we got here, for example."

"Learning how other people spend their time" is a strange thing to travel a long way and deal with strangers for. But perhaps not if you have really good technology for travel and can't be killed.

"What is 'making decisions'? If you explain how to not die, I will explain how we spend our time."

"There are several steps to take to not die. One is to arrange be brought back by magic after dying, and many people expect to need to use that now and then. One is to go to a world where there is technology that can make you younger, whenever you're old. One is to wear a magic ring that makes you stop getting any older in the first place. One is to have healing magic available for anyone who is sick or hurt, so they don't die of those things. Is anyone sick or hurt right now? I have healing magic myself."

Several people in the group are sick or wounded and would like to be healed. Another teenager asks if they can also heal animals.

Nelen's power only works on humanoids, but Natsuko can help if they have hurt dogs or something.

Hurt and sick dogs were in fact what she was thinking of.

Hominids get healed.  At this point the strangers seem friendly enough that the people who were tending the fire go back to that.

And teenagers will explain how they spend their time.  They hunt and trap and forage and travel between campsites and cook.  At night they sleep.  On hot or rainy days, they rest under rock overhangs or in these artificial shelters.  They maintain their stone and wood tools and their baskets.  They sing and dance and play games and have sex (they will demonstrate some of the singing).  The behaviorally-modern people tell jokes and stories and draw pictures and gossip and show each other new technologies they figure out (they will demonstrate some of the jokes and some of the gossip.  Recent inventions include a way to make this particular plant edible, a way to keep food from spoiling, a way to make wood harder, a way to catch fish, and a way to get honey with less risk of bee stings, and a way to make arrows more deadly. This young man is celebrated for his talent for inventing stuff, and invented several of those things).  The older behaviorally-modern people teach the younger ones about the world and the past.  Sometimes they meet and trade with this person's relatives to the North or this person's relatives to the Southwest. Sometimes they get into fights with the scumbags to the Northeast (who are this person's relatives, but she's one of the good ones) and the Southeast.

What does the family tree look like for this tribe?

Pretty complicated.

All the pre-pubescent children and all but one of the teenagers are children of someone else in the band.  Older people are more likely to have joined from elsewhere, often because they didn't get on with the band they came from and had friends in this one.  A lot of people in this band broke off from the one to the Northeast because they didn't like it's current leader, "Smart Guy".

Several members of the band have two or more fathers.  Generally someone is angry about this.  Most people with multiple children have had children with multiple people.  Again, someone is generally angry about this, although sometimes the angry person isn't in this band.  When the children associated with a drama are less than around sixteen years old, teenagers and young adults can expound about it in extensive and sometimes contentious detail.

For older drama, they are similarly eager to speculate but it's obvious they only actually know the basics.  If the envoys ask the parents themselves about these disputes, they are generally happy to confirm who they do or don't consider their children and who they do or don't like, but will get confused once asked for more complicated details.

Asked about the parentage of past-middle-aged members of the group, the young adults can sometimes give some anecdotes what those parents were like in their old age. Asked about the parentage of elderly members of the group, they mostly agree that those people probably did have parents once but admit they don't know for sure.

More anatomically-modern people generally have more children than less anatomically-modern people. Children seem to reliably be at least as anatomically-modern as their parents.

Can they confirm that they mean that if somebody is somebody else's mom, that means, at least in the typical case, that she was pregnant with them and gave birth?

Yes, that's right.

People they're used to usually look more like their parents than that, do they know anything about why they might look like their siblings and less like their parents?

"Maybe some peoples' fathers aren't who we think they are? Do you think some peoples' fathers aren't who we think they are?"

   "Usually young people look like other young people and old people look like other old people, right?"

"- let me show you a family picture of my family."

He has one from their latest reunion from when his grandma saved up to get her dad back, so his great-grandpa looks kind of conspicuously young, and most of Uncle Finto's side of the family has gotten cosmetically wacky, but he can compose a crop of one where it's him, his sister, his aunts, his grandparents, the as-yet-un-deaged grandma and great-grandma.

"My people get old more slowly than some, but this is me, that's my older sister, that's my aunt - younger than me, but my aunt - and that's my grandmother, and her mother."

"You all look very modern?"

At this point the gazelle is cooked. People start cutting off slices. One of the people who cooked it offers the envoys some.

"Modern?" asks Nelen.

Zanro will have some but the others demur.

"Not much hair, big heads, smart? The things that make people born now mostly different from people born before, that isn't being young."

"Ah. Hm. So, on worlds we've learned about in the past, that happens only very, very slowly. Modern people are descended from less modern ones, but with many generations separating them."

This is apparently a pretty surprising claim.

"What are... 'Worlds'?"

"Worlds are a kind of place. Bigger than all the land you've ever seen, bigger than all of that land plus a few more lands the same size with water between them even bigger."

"You travel between those?

If people from your homeland have been very modern for a very long time, that might be why you have so much technology.

In your homeland, do animals also only evolve very slowly, or just people?"

"Animals also evolve only very slowly, though they can be bred fast if they have short generations."

"Huh. Why might here be different?"

"I don't know, it's very interesting. Especially since it means we have no idea what your grandchildren will be like!"

"Nor do we! One-day we'll find out."

   "Star thinks they'll be even smarter than we are, but animals and plants don't always change the same way generation-to-generation, right?"

      "I think they'll probably be even smarter than we are. We've been changing the same way for at least three generations."

"On most worlds, the changes happen because whichever plant or animal or person has the most children gets to contribute more to the next generation - so individuals that are infertile, or sickly, or not good at having a lot of children for any other reason, have fewer children, and fewer grandchildren. But it takes many many years for this to have any noticeable big effects."

"Huh."

   "Hmm.  That's puzzling, I can't think how to say how."

"It takes a long time to notice it happening, too, in worlds like that. Here it's very obvious that it's happening but not clear how!"

The puzzled person has figured out words for what was puzzling her, now.

"If people in other worlds don't evolve for the same reason we do, why do they look the same afterwards?  Does our world... look at other worlds and copy them?"

"That would be my guess, but it's definitely very weird and we haven't found any other worlds that definitely seem to be doing that."

"The aurochs-followers are trying to kill off the fiercest aurochs in their herd and spare the gentlest ones, right? We should ask them if aurochs start evolving to be gentle"

   "The sort of evolution other worlds have must work here too, though, it might be hard to tell our sort apart from that."

"We should be able to tell it apart because our sort is much faster, though."

"Maybe someone will want to bring a plant or animal that breeds very quickly here and see what happens if they breed it in different ways. In the meantime, we're not scientists, we're envoys! We're here to help you out with whatever you need and tell you about the other worlds out there - what do you most want to learn or get?"

"Well, we'd really like to be able to bring back the dead, and to learn to use healing magic ourselves, and to learn to reverse and prevent ageing. Being able to travel like you do also looks very useful."

   "It sounds like- you have so much technology you can't just list all of the best stuff? If you have ways to protect us from being injured by enemies and wild animals in the first place, that would be very good. If you have ways to let us get food and water more easily during dry years, that would be very good. If you have a way to make pregnancy and childbirth less painful, that would be very good."

      "What are other worlds like? How do people in other worlds live? How many other worlds have you been to?"

"The magic you can buy with money - do you use money here? And the injury prevention we - mostly do by not getting into fights with enemies or wild animals in the first place. Food and water and improving pregnancy and birth are all technology, not hard to come by." He can show them pictures of worlds he has been to - born on this ones, live on this one, worked here for a while, went there on vacation...

"If we use money here, we don't call it that. What is it? How do you keep enemies and wild animals from attacking you? Can you teach us your technology for getting food and water and improving pregnancy?"

The pictures of other words are amazing! Those landscapes are bizarre and spectacular! Those are so many people in one place! Look at all the different sorts of people!

One of children will ask if they can go to see those places themselves. Another of the children will point to some of the weirder-looking people and ask what they are.

"If you called it something else our translation magic would almost certainly work on it. It's a thing that everyone agrees represents the option to trade for things. So I spend money to buy something from one person, and then they can spend that money to buy something from another person, instead of trading or doing favors. You make peace with your enemies and live places wild animals don't, and if that doesn't work, you can use magic to keep them away from you. And of course, though the things you'll be able to do yourselves and the things that will work fastest today are different."

The kids can go on the bus like anyone else once there are stations here! That's an Andalite, that's a Klingon, that's just an angel with a really outré look...

"Well, then it sounds like we need a way to get enough money to buy healing and resurrection and protection from you.  Or a way to do the magic ourselves, why is it that only you can do it if not technology?"

   "Do you have a way of finding places without dangerous beasts to live?"

The scumbags to the Northeast raped these women and killed these peoples' parents. The scumbags to the Southeast killed these other peoples' parents. Is Nelen saying they need to just let them get away with that? Magic to keep them away would be good if it's on offer.

What technology for food and improved-pregnancy will they be able to do themselves? Why can't they do the fastest sorts, and what would they need to pay for them?

"If you decide to join Vanda Nossëo, you'll all get basic income - money that is paid out to you even if you don't do any work - and you'll be able to sign up for classes in any kind of magic that can be learned if it appeals to you. A lot of us live on planets we made from scratch, but maybe if you tell us more about the kinds of beasts I can give more specific advice? Most beasts don't want to live in cities and prefer forests or savannahs or whatever, so if where you're living becomes more like a city then fewer will bother you at home.

"It's really hard to let grievances go. The problem is that - we can bring back the dead. And we don't want to punish people for all eternity. At some point it has to stop. The person who mutilated and eventually beat to death my great-grandfather for refusing her sexual advances served no prison time and now runs a sweetshop in a bus station. We avoid her - that's why I know which bus station, so I can - but we can't pursue it to the ends of the earth. Vanda Nossëo wants to make it so no one feels driven to crimes like that, and that, going forward, no one will expect to get away with them - but not reach into the past and try to figure out what would be just from there. Teams like ours are talking to those tribes right now and they might be getting similar stories about you, and they'll tell your neighbors the same thing."

Fast food and pregnancy solutions include things like "being in a hospital with well-trained doctors who have drugs that require an elaborate engineering and pharmacological base" and "having a demon just make all the food ex nihilo". If anyone is in acute medical distress right now, or, indeed, for the next few weeks, this team can fix them, but the do-it-yourself improvements are going to be things like germ theory and crop rotation.

Three members of the band are pregnant and would appreciate short-term help about it. Food isn't scarce at the moment.

"What is Vanda Nossëo?"

   "Why can't you look into the past to figure out what's just?!  How do people not expect to get away with crimes in the future if you don't punish any that have happened before?!"

      "What can you do to keep the Tesi-Ba and and the Kau-Ba from thinking they can get away with attacking us?"

"The most dangerous beasts around here are the big felids, the big canids, and the hyaenids.  How would we make our territory more city-like?"

      "What are germ theory and crop rotation?"

The pregnant ones can get Nelen-taps and if they are still having issues he can call for doctory people.

"Vanda Nossëo is where we're from. It's a great big band-of-bands, kind of.

"People can disagree about what's just even if they agree on exactly what happened and who did it. If they attacked you because they were hungry, they'll never be hungry again; if they attacked you because they were hoping to take your territory, they can have some on another world practically for the asking. Whatever their reason was, we'll address it at the same time as we forgive what they've done before. If they attacked here right now and wouldn't stop to talk, I could teleport them away.

"Cities have lots of buildings close together. That means there's nowhere a big animal will want to live, so they'd be going out of their way to go to the city, and that there are lots of people also close together, so they'd be outnumbered every time."

And he can explain germ theory and crop rotation.

"Ah. I suppose the places with lots of people in your pictures are near cities, and Vanda Nosseo live in one? Would you allow us to live with you for just a little while to see whether we like it?"

   "If we leave this world, that might mean we stop evolving, right? I don't want to risk that."

Germ theory: makes sense, they will learn from the envoys’ superior understanding of when and how to keep things clean.

Crop rotation: first the envoys will need to convey the concept of horticulture, but after that it makes sense. They'll try planting some of tomorrow's harvest.

"It's possible you'll stop evolving if you leave the world, yes. Or it might only be a problem if you have children in another world, or conceive them there - different kinds of world-properties work different ways in terms of how they're passed on to kids. But if some of you want to visit or move to Vanda Nossëo anyway, you can."

"Well, if we might all stop evolving we can't do it."

   "It would mean we'd never die and we could get Birds and Sad-About-Everything and so on back. That's worth not evolving for."

"I don't think it's worth not evolving for. That would mean Singer's kids are as stupid as she is and our kids are as stupid as we are and we never find out what comes next in evolution.

   "And otherwise everyone dead stays dead, and everyone who's alive now eventually dies too!"

      "We'd eventually find out what was next. It would take many, many generations but we'd live for many, many generations. And on the other hand, the other way the dead don't stay dead forever, they stay dead until we can figure out how to use magic ourselves."

"Alright, but our children wouldn't get to be whatever that thing was."

         "We also wouldn't need to wait many many generations because not every band is going to join Vanda Nosseo, and we can visit the people who don't.

      "Right. And it would be really bad if we stop evolving but our enemies don't."

         "It would also really bad if out enemies get Vanda Nosseo's magic and we don't."

      "I think eventually being smarter matters more than having stuff invented by people who were smart to start with but won't always be"

         "Not if they kill us all before we get there!"

      "It sounds like Vanda Nosseo wouldn't let its members do that? Right, Nelen?"

   "What if we wait until some people smart enough to understand this plan are too old to have children, and then send just those people to Vanda Nosseo? That way no-one stops evolving and also no-one stays dead forever."

"Vanda Nossëo members are not allowed to kill people," he confirms. "I think it's pretty unlikely that some of you going to another world could lead to all of you stopping evolving, but I can't be sure."

"What if you test how all that works with animals and then we can decide where to go once we know more?"

"Okay. I can tell some people to catch some bugs and take them to another world and see what happens to the ones there and here."

"Thank you."

"If we only sent some people to Vanda Nosseo, would you let those people learn magic and use it for the rest of us?"

"Probably! Some of the kinds of magic are harder to get access to than others."

"Mostly we want are the resurrection and the healing and the not ageing. How hard to get access to are those?"

"Most people reverse aging by going to a place where they can shapeshift and shapeshifting younger, but if that doesn't work for you, there is a magic solution we can bring here. There are many kinds of healing; if you want to have it yourselves probably the easiest way would be to get someone over here to teach a class on wizardry, but if you'd be happy to just have someone stationed here who can heal that would be doable with someone who can also do the waking half of resurrection. It's two steps, creating a body for the dead person to live again in and then making it wake up. Also it works on most kinds of people and it might work on you but it's also possible it won't."

"If we might not be able to get resurrected, that makes it more important to get not-ageing and healing sooner rather than later. We can probably still wait to see what happens to the bugs."

"How many people would need to join Vanda Nosseo to pay for healing and resurrection and not-ageing to be available to all of us? Either sort of not-ageing."

"That depends. Healing isn't very expensive. Just a few of you could probably pay a healer to come by here occasionally, even if they didn't want to live here all the time. The anti-aging jewelry is actually really expensive, but you can get it subsidized if you're a member - maybe also if you're not but it'd be a different organization. Resurrection it might depend on whether you need it done here or if it can be done somewhere else. It costs less than the anti-aging jewelry, but still enough that it takes most people a few years to save up to resurrect someone."

"Well, even if people who get resurrected can't have evolved children anymore, that's still better than them being dead."

"Right, but if you have some kind of more complicated dependency on the world, that would interfere with resurrecting locals in other worlds and you'd need to arrange it here. We'll need to check it - not in reality, with a precognition in case something does go wrong."

Once it's clear that no-one has an immediate reply to that, someone will ask

"Evolving fast is a this-world thing. And you said different world-things work differently. What things do other worlds have?"

"Different worlds have different kinds of magic, and different neighbors!" He can show them a map and point out where all the magics they have observed came from. "Some worlds have the same people on them, or some of the same people, and some worlds are almost exactly alike apart from being at different times."

That last part there is confusing.

"What do you mean, the same people? By different times, do you just mean some of them have been more evolved for longer and invented more things?"

"Hm - imagine there were two worlds like this one, exactly alike, with a copy in each world of all of you and every tree in the same place. And then we visit both of them, on the same day; but in one of them, it's this day here, and in the other, it's last week."

"Huh. But they don't have the same neighbors, by the look of it, so they get visited by different people like you at different times?"

"That's right. These worlds," he highlights some Ardas, "are all just about exactly alike except for when they are in their timeline and who visited them and what happened then. This one is a lot like them," Space Arda, "but it's sort of the same story at a different scale - bigger, with some extra people, like Tarwë, who is from there. Every Elf who would have been around in that year in these Ardas is there, but there are also some additional ones, like him, and some other details are different too."

Tarwë waves.

"And Earths have all the same landmasses, and a lot of the same histories, but they all have different magic."

"Bigger scale, like, in other Ardas bands did things and in Tarwë's Arda bands-of-bands like Vanda Nossëo did those things?"

"Mostly the bands are just bigger rather than being more complicated in other ways, but things were - farther apart, mostly."

"What magic do the different Earths have?"

He can list them! That one has magic based on emotions, it can grant wishes. That one has a magical trait some people are born with that lets them cast spells with wands. This one over here has a variant physics rather than a magic but it acts much like a magic in practice, allowing people to turn into animals. That one has vampires and werewolves and witches. This one's got people coming over powerfully magical when the moon does thus and such. This one has some lowkey psychic powers, which are subject to some debate about their magicalness, but the Earthlings mostly don't have them. In this one you can summon beings from these neighboring worlds and those do cool stuff.

"If you can grant wishes, why are some things still expensive for you?"

   "I want to turn into a bird!"

      "Yeah, hopefully it will be safe for us to travel there."

"Each person only gets one wish, and only one person can grant the wishes, so they all have to be checked for safety and then narrowed down to the most important ones. Plus it only works in that neighborhood, so it doesn't work well for anything that you want to have in another place."

"What sorts of wish aren't safe?"

   "Wishing to hurt enemies or rivals, probably?"

      "What sort of things do people wish for, when they already have resurrection and safety and so on?"

         "I'd wish for Smart Guy to die."

   "See, if Smart Guy also has magic and technology and people who'll resurrect him that's not safe."

"Well, not everyone in that world is in Vanda Nossëo."

      "They're all in a place that's had technology as long as Vanda Nossëo, 'though."

   "Can Vanda Nossëo make someone fall in love with me? If they can't, I think I'd wish for Traps to fall in love with me."

         "Maybe we can wish to keep evolving outside this world."

"...some kinds of wish aren't safe because they might break the device that grants the wishes," says Nelen, slightly bemused. "Or because they'd hurt someone else, like if it would kill someone or mind-control them into falling in love with you. People wish for magical powers for themselves and other people, often they can get a bunch all together in a batch; they wish to make new planets good to live on; wish magic is also part of how resurrection works, that's a power you need a wish to get."

"Oh, that makes sense."

The boy who asked about making Traps fall in love with him looks kind of affronted but doesn't say anything in reply. Everyone else seems to find the explanation satisfactory.

"You're not very likely to get other visitors. There are two other big organizations that we're friendly with, but one is mostly just planets in this world," Warp lights up, "which has a whole lot of them, and the other is this neighborhood," Wish lights up, "with the wishes, because they rely on those for a lot of things, while we only do things with wishes from their empress that we can't readily do otherwise."

"Empress" being the word for the person who can grant wishes, presumably.

Eventually most of the band will go to bed, but a couple of teenagers will stay up all night asking the aliens more questions about magic and advanced technology and the multiverse; how many bands are there in all these organizations? How many bands have been invited but turned them down? How does Vanda Nosseo make decisions? Are there any factions Vanda Nosseo hasn't managed to make peace with? What are some of Vanda Nosseo's cities like? How long have they had immortality, and how far back have their resurrections gotten? Are the envoys all from the same band, or from different ones? Do they have ways to make less-evolved people as smart as more-evolved ones, it would be really useful if they could explain complicated stuff to adults? How does the turning-into-animals technology work, they know it doesn't work *here* but they're still curious? What are some any especially cool inventions that haven't come up yet?

They can have an introductory math lesson so they can understand the population numbers, and the number of member states and declined member states. Vanda Nossëo as a federal entity has a lot of agencies with some appointed and some elected positions; steering for the org as a whole is substantially done by members of this one template of person who appears over and over again across many worlds, but this world doesn't have one. Vanda Nossëo is not officially at war with anyone but there are plenty of people who don't like them and may or may not consider themselves at war even without Vanda Nossëo's acknowledgment or participation. Here are pictures of some cities from many different cultures! Some species are naturally immortal, but the shareable versions are mostly years to decades old. Resurrections don't have a specific chronological line where they reach so far and no farther, because usually people want their loved ones but some people want interesting historical figures. (Who then may want their loved ones.) The envoys are all from different worlds. There is intelligence-enhancing magic but it is expensive. There's these boxes you touch and they connect you in thus and such a way to a sub-world that can generate alternate forms based on samples from animals you touch. From that same world there's invisible forcefields that only keep out certain species, and there are trains, and there are flying machines, and there are golems, and there is the Internet!

That's so many people! It makes sense given how much area they operate over, but it's still pretty amazing.

Having one specific (template of) person in charge: not a good sign, these kids think bands are better to live in when they're not doing that. But at least it sounds like it's the sort of one-person-being-in-charge where they're okay with other people disagreeing with and making their own choices, so it's probably not too bad in that regard.

Lucky natural immortals! How long have the oldest ones of those who talk about history been around?

Oh no! They suppose it makes sense that once you have enough generations more dead people than living people only some of them are interesting enough to properly be remembered, but that's so sad, they're really glad that's not going to happen to their family. They wonder which people here would make that bar.

Oh well. Hopefully one day they'll be able to afford the intelligence-enhancing magic.

Turns out they're getting too tired to properly understand how Z-space tech works. Hopefully the envoys will be okay with explaining again later. One girl will still manage to produce a not-very-coherent question about why they don't have the gene-acquiring work differently that's surprisingly close to describing how the latest cutting-edge Escafil devices work.

Those technologies are indeed cool. This band already have the hang of storing information on objects (They will draw some diagrams to demonstrate. Not related diagrams, the contents of the diagrams isn't what they're demonstrating here), but being able to store it more densely and transmit it between objects is interesting. For density probably you'd want to make a really thin, flat material and fold it a lot? They probably won't be able to figure out details until they're better rested.

There are beings who are tens of thousands of years old but Nelen isn't sure what they mean by 'talk about history'; if you do talk to one they'll tell you about creating their planet and stuff though. There are weirder beings that have been around for billions but they definitely don't talk about history.

The idea is that as you resurrect well-remembered people, those people, too, will remember people, and gradually everybody will filter in. There are projects that work to figure out enough about history that they will not miss people just because they died young and unremarked or because they weren't well liked at the time, but those people aren't as much of a priority as people who somebody misses through their legacy or a personal connection.

Natsuko steps in to talk more about Escafil devices, since she's from Cube, but isn't an expert on them, since she's a wizard.

Sounds like it's time to break for the night. Is it okay if the envoys put up a building over there and hang out in it?

Yeah okay, they can break for the night and the envoys can put up a building.

(before they go to bed the teenagers will wake someone else up to keep watch)

The building goes up by magic. Natsuko does it log cabin style - it's not something they're doing around here but it should be legible - and the envoys hang out in their building, though sometimes some of them disappear briefly.

In the morning, the band will breakfast on some of the fruit and vegetables they gathered the day before, then most of them will head out foraging. They'll especially look for peas and sorghum since those are supposed to be good for crop rotation.

One of the kids who stayed up last night, named "Paint", will stay behind to start with since 1) she's kind of tired now, 2) she wants to ask the envoys more about technology now that she's rested, 3) she thinks she's on to something with the "thin sheets for writing on" idea and wants to see if she can get it working.

...is it paper she wants? Cassiel can make her some paper.

That looks right, but she wants to figure out how to make it herself.  Unless she's on totally the wrong track thinking this is how to store information densely, she's not actually sure this will work and Cassiel would probably know better than she does.

"It's not how computers work, but it's still cool and a lot of books and things still work like that. Do you want me to tell you what paper's made of?"

"Yes please!  I was thinking maybe bark molded flat somehow, or wood or clay cut really thin, or animal skin somehow made to not rot?  But that paper doesn't really look like any of those.  And what are books?"

"Books are lots of paper all stuck together on one side, so you can turn one page over and see the next one. Paper can be made of a bunch of different things but it's not cut out, it's dried out from a pulp. People have used various plants for it to get different kinds."

"Thank you!"

Paint will set about attempting to beat various plant materials into pulp to see if they dry into paper.

Looks like she's having fun.

Meanwhile, other envoy teams have encountered:

- Similar accounts about how evolution works here. Some bands have a lower portion Homo sapiens like members than Paint and Star's one, and a couple have only fairly Homo sapiens like members because they won't admit anyone else.

- Some variety in social structure; nothing very complicated, but a lot of bands are more hierarchical than Paint and Star's one, generally with highly-evolved young adults or older teenagers at the top. Several have formalized alliances with one or two neighboring bands. A couple of the more hierarchical ones have formal social divisions and roles because the people in charge felt like inventing them.

- A surprising amount of technology for how new everything is and how little infrastructure anyone has. A lot of the coastal bands have simple dugout canoes. Many bands have bows and arrows. Some bands have fired ceramics or small amounts of smelted copper. The aurochs-followers have indeed bred the youngest generations of aurochs into domesticated cattle, and have also invented simple wheeled ox-carts for them to draw.

Wow. This world is weird. Cool, but weird.

Eventually, rainclouds will start to gather and the foragers will hurry back to their shelters, mostly with less than a full meal worth of food.

Do they want umbrellas?

Umbrellas are great! How are they made?

Well, Cassiel makes them by magic but they can look up a How It's Made video if they want to know about the industrial process.

Wow this is some really impressive engineering! It looks like probably most of this could be done more straightforwardly by hand if you didn't need to make so many umbrellas, why do these people need so many umbrellas?

Because billions of people might be in the market for them!

"Oh, that makes sense!"

   "Wait, what are the umbrella-makers buying from billions of people?"

      "Maybe they're being generous?"

         "Or they're in a huge band like Vanda Nossëo and aren't being selfish."

      "Or maybe they want to hear stories from lots of people like the Vanda Nossëans do."

"The umbrella-makers might be being generous or they might be buying money, which is like a symbol that you did something valuable that you can trade for other things - umbrellas, land, food, whatever."

"Oh, right."

   "If people have a lot of money they can buy anti-aging jewelery, right. If we don't join Vanda Nossëo maybe we can make umbrellas and buy anti-aging jewelery that way. Or other things, I assume it's not just umbrellas that people can make lots of like this.

      "Even if we do join Vanda Nossëo we'll want money to buy resurrections and intelligence jewelery."

"Yup. Money's really useful and can buy all that stuff. You can probably sell things you make that are special to people who like things just because they were handmade by people from an interesting culture."

"Oh, that's convenient! What's a 'culture'?"

   "We should go find more food. Thanks for the umbrellas!"

"A culture is a group of people who are all used to acting in certain ways - speaking a particular language, eating particular foods, marking milestones of their lives or times of the year in particular ways, that kind of thing."

"Ok, so the thing us and the Bre-Na and the Dre-Na are mostly one of, and the Kau-Ba mostly are too, and the Au-Na and the Au-E-Na are kind of another one, and the Tesi-Ba are an almost totally different one?"

"If you say so! I haven't met most of those people."

The band head out to forage again, now with umbrellas.

Hopefully they just like foraging and are aware that they could get Cassiel to make them food.

(It has not yet occurred to anyone that they could just ask Cassiel to make them food)

Eventually the foragers will start to trickle back again. They have enough food for a meal, now, and enough dry firewood to cook it.

Cassiel realizes when she has a look at what they've got that possibly they do not know she can do food. She will offer them spices in case that gets it across without being pushy.

This will get people aware that Cassiel can make food. Although now they already have food, so they'll just ask if she wants to cook it for them.

Sure! She can magically make it deboned and cooked.

Cool!

They set aside some some sorghum, some peas, and some miscellaneous seeds and tubers aside for planting.

"Do the plants evolve fast too?"

"Yes. Maybe not as fast as animals? But a lot of plants mostly look or taste different from how they used to."

"Is it always in ways that are good for people?"

"No, some things taste worse and a couple of things have gotten poisonous."

"Huh! Which things? Can you guess in advance what they'll do?"

They will identify some plants which have recently evolved to be poisonous. They can't guess what a poisonous plant will do in advance, they just find by experience that some things make people sick now and so stop eating them.

"How about the ones that get better, can you guess what those will do?"

"If any poisonous plants have become edible we haven't found out. A few things grow more seeds or have bigger tubers than they used to, that's pretty easy to see. We don't have a way to tell how well stuff burns except trial and error, if that changes."

"What I'm getting at is, people in other worlds deliberately make plants - and animals, too - evolve in specific ways. Sometimes this even results in things like a fruit not having any seeds at all, and needing people to help it transplant. Sometimes the same plant can turn into multiple different vegetables, and different ones are bred for, say, the leaves, and others for the stems. Has anything like that happened?"

"No-one's intentionally changed how things evolve. I don't think anyone would know how."

   "Do you mean, plants changing in a way like it might be other-world-people steering their evolution? I don't think so."

      "Dogs are really good and the Au-E-Na say they only evolved that way very recently?"

"Oh, I should mention to whoever's talking to the Au-E-Na that they'll want to ask about dogs, that's interesting... Not like other world people steering, exactly, but like there being a template things are evolving toward, which would match the longer-term evolution in worlds with similar species."

"A template?"

"Is it kind of decided in advance how things will evolve, and if so, how is that decided? I don't necessarily expect we'll figure this out today, of course."

"Well, things evolve in the same direction here as in other places even though they don't evolve for the same reason, right? So there must be something connecting us."

"Yes. I think probably it has to do with the Earth biosphere - there are a lot of planets with the same species even if they aren't the same sort of planet with the same shapes of land on them, for some reason."

"Hmm. Could that normally be because the same things help plants or animals have children in different situations? Where do species come from in the first place?"

"Usually a species becomes more species when parts of its population are isolated from each other somehow, by distance or a change in geography, and then they wind up specializing differently from each other. If you repeat that enough times you can wind up with very different organisms."

And two populations never change the same way, except when they're in two different Earth biospheres?

Nelen will go on a little tangent about convergent evolution, but yeah pretty much, that would be staggeringly unlikely.

Hmm. That does seem mysterious.

"You've told us about Vanda Nosseo as a whole is like, but what are your particular communities like? Who's in them, how do they do things, how did they live before Vanda Nosseo and how do they live now?"

Nelen can show them a picture of his house! He lives here with his aunt and some other people from his subculture (on his home planet it was very different from the others and they mostly did not want to live with the rest after they had more places to go).

Cassiel can show them the cave-town where she lives in Heaven. It has wide, tall avenues for people to fly in and the buildings all reach top to bottom, clinging on both sides to the cloud-fluff. It's all riotously colorful. Before she died she lived on Earth, here is a picture of the suburb where she grew up.

Zanro declines to produce pictures but will give the highest level gloss of what the heck an orc is.

Tarwë has pictures of Valinor, and where he lives now in Ambaróna when he's home!

Natsuko lives in this little shoebox Tokyo apartment; she could afford something bigger but she's so seldom there, she just needs a place to sleep and keep some clothes.

Huh, Nelen's family only have the one camp, like the sea people? They don't travel with the rest of Vanda Nossëo?

And they have a shelter that covers their whole camp, and it's light inside? Cool. How much do those cost? Do they need to do anything special to keep it from getting smoky inside?

Not wanting to live around unpleasant subcultures (like the Kau-Ba): sensible

The angel city is pretty. Howcome Cassiel's family didn't summon her back to Earth?

They're glad the orcs are free now, it's horrifying that they had to go through all that. And it's good that Melkor's dead now.

Having a shelter that's just for sleeping because you spend most of your time elsewhere: sensible. It still looks pretty big and luxurious, actually.