The Milliways door opens in a fishing town in Meiu. It's the exterior door of one of the two apartment buildings in town. Boats bob in the water. A belul sits on a dock, eating fresh fruit.
"I have an interview and then I'll be able to show you around," Valanda says in Hari. "Shouldn't take long."
"Let's hear one of the ones you don't have a word for, maybe I'll figure out what word you're looking for."
After a price is agreed he can tell a very flowery (and somewhat lewd) dramatic romance! Youthful desires and hubris and furtive touching and longing hearts and rushing into things and contrived misunderstandings between the characters and authority figures who do not approve of the young couple one bit...
There's a tangle of different relationships and desires. Two men - Carlos (who is powerful and already married) and Raul (a young hard-working craftsman) - wanting the beautiful and rich Josa and competing for her attention, while Helena pines after Raul in the background. There are dramatic expressions of desire, elaborate gifts of jewelry and flowers, a duel between the romantic rivals, Josa's father forbidding her from seeing either of them (but there's no command magic, so she can disobey).
Carlos and Helena try to make it look like Raul betrayed Josa - Carlos so he can win her affection, but Helena because she still wants to be with Raul. But this gets cleared up. There's another duel, this time injuring Carlos.
In the end, it's Josa's choice who she will love. She picks Raul, who loves her with no ulterior motive and makes her laugh and is handsome, instead of the more selfish and scheming Carlos who mostly wants access to her family fortune. Carlos tries to have them arrested, but Josa and Raul flee the country on a boat and marry and go build a new life in America.
(There are pretty clearly social norms Mahan is not aware of and Valanda only dimly so, also 'marriage' is an official legal and usually permanent thing where he's from, not the casual version the most appropriate word he can find refers to here. He does his best to talk around them.)
"...So Carlos is a prostitute and Raul will fuck Josa for free but Carlos is angry his competition is undercutting him?" asks Mahan. "I don't understand any of that story at all."
"I get it," says Valanda. "It's because Josa wants children with someone who'll do things for her, because in other worlds they think parents need to love each other and do nice things for each other so the children can see. Because of that thing Hari doesn't have a word for. She's worried if she has kids with Carlos they'll turn out normal instead of having that thing. Right?"
"Yeah, you both kind of entirely missed the point. Pretty much as I predicted. Valanda's a lot closer though."
"I'm actually not sure how to explain it to you, but I'll try. In our culture - Love is about wanting another person to be happy. Love is important to us. Also, betrayal is considered worse than assault, sometimes worse than murder, depending on the details. So. Raul loves Josa. He wants Josa to be happy above all else, above his own happiness, and showed this with the gifts and the compliments and dueling Carlos. Carlos did a good impression of wanting Josa to be happy, but actually just wanted money, and when Josa found that out she thought of it as a betrayal, as lies. So now she hates Carlos and loves Raul. Carlos did a lot of things that violate soft rules, moral rules, which have... Reputation consequences, and are supposed to be shameful and make you untrustworthy, but are not actually illegal."
"Oh, the word for that is 'rude', when you do something that's not illegal but everyone expected something different and hates you for it you're being rude."
"No, different thing, it's an alien thing we don't have," says Valanda.
"Is it since if you love someone being around them makes you happy, so they think you owe them for the happiness?" asks Mahan.
Valanda looks at Nikolas, confused.
"...Not exactly. If you love someone, being around them makes you happy if they also love or at least like you. Usually. If someone loves you, they don't automatically owe you anything, or you them, but you want to give things to someone you love, you think that buying them something they want is a better use of money than buying something for yourself sometimes. Love is about happiness, and trust, and safety... There's - all sorts of complicating factors. Love is almost never pure and selfless and mutual between exactly two people, there's pretty much always some other motivation and complicated factors - wanting power, wanting sex, wanting money, wanting to prove something to yourself or someone else... But some of the stories like to make it sound simple and pure, even if simple and pure love is rarer than one might think."
"Oh! Yeah, I feel like that sometimes when I love people, but why do you have whole stories about how rude it is not to?"
"The rude, the immoral thing Carlos did was act like he loved her, lying about it and manipulating her emotions. If he hadn't talked to her at all he would've been fine. 'Playing with her heart', one might call it. And people like talking and thinking about love and marriage, it's a very thrilling topic to a certain kind of person."
Shrug. "I'd still rather have both of them if I were Josa. But I guess she has the better one and she can find more men in America. Well, good to know you're off the table unless I decide you're cuter when you're happy."
"Oh, for children-tracking reasons you're only supposed to love one person in a sex sort of way. It's kind of stupid, but that's the culture. I don't care that much about love, but I'm not into men, sorry."
"Oh, you must not have inheritance magic, guess that explains it. ...How much don't you like men? I have rings."
For some reason, this is hilarious. He laughs. "A fair bit more than I don't like talking about how I became a vampire! By all means, make me an offer some time though."
"Being rich does make many things easier, doesn't it? I'm glad we're amusing you, O Glorious Leader."
Giggling.
They don't get the reference at all, but he knows he's being deeply sarcastic.
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