In she goes!

"I have a guest room for you made up over here."

"Thank you!" 

He shows her to it. It's nice.

She sits down happily. "Does anybody need reassurance that y'all are safe - or magic healing, for that matter, I also have magic healing and could do that -"

"I haven't told anybody we're seceding. We won't have to if the rest of the Houses join up. But if they don't they might be annoyed. I've got about a million and a half people, that cleared the threshold mentioned on TV. I'm not aware of any acute medical issues right now."

"Good for you. It's a good deal and, like, they'll remember who was on top of making it happen."

"Who will, Vanda Nossëo?"

"Yeah."

"What results does that have?"

"More cool stuff? Like, a lot of the cool stuff really goes out on a trust basis. The things for which there's consistent overwhelming demand, there are rules about how to distribute it. But, like, who gets to be the site of a trial of giving everyone some cool new magic, who gets to be the first portal hub once portals are stable and scalable, all of that is 'who is competent enough to use this well and cares about their people enough to use it for them?'."

"Oh."

"Is that not how things work in most places? My classes on alien governments mostly covered the other member states - and not even all of them, there are too many..."

"Things sometimes sort of go on a trust basis internally but I think our 'internally' is smaller."

Nod. "I'm from Luster, which is a Mîr protectorate - Mîr runs really hard on trust because of how their power source works."

"- so you're not even from Vanda Nossëo?"

"...Luster is also a Vanda Nossëo member state. Usually you aren't both but - uh, how much of a political overview do you actually want."

"Some?"

"There are lots of Elf planets. They all sign up for Vanda Nossëo the minute they hear about it, and this is convenient for everyone because Elves are a very trustworthy reliable species and they don't have to be bribed to do what Vanda Nossëo does because it's by design exactly the thing they most want to be doing - Elves are lower psychological variance, too, when I say it's exactly what they want to be doing I mean way more of them than you could get humans agreed on any particular goal. Luster's an Elf planet. It has humans, too, but the Elves rule us.

It's in range of Mîr, and everyone in range of Mîr is a protectorate with more or less independence because Mîr's powers are just really really thorough that way, and an Elf princess of ours is married to the Empress of Mîr, and that was working okay for everyone, and then Luster made contact with Vanda Nossëo and said 'do you mind' and Mîr said 'that looks right up your alley, go have fun' and we got expedited membership 'cuz Elves."

"...range?"

"It's complicated. You are way out of range."

"...okay."

"Some worlds are adjacent to one another in a way that doesn't have to do with physical distance, and some kinds of power are adjacency-constrained. This - region for adjacency purposes, some people use 'universe' for a region for adjacency purposes and 'multiverse' for the whole thing - is seven jumps from Luster and eight from Mîr. I'm not a, uh, I don't even know if physicists know more than that, but I definitely don't."

"That explains the Mîr thing I guess."

"Uh huh. I got my powers from Mîr but I work for Vanda Nossëo, doing internal security stuff."