At least there's always Milliways.
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The colony starts to carve a place for itself on the southern continent. Valanda toys with calling it something that'll make people who have morals think of morality but ends up telling the imperial government that his new state is officially named Ira Sani, Ice Beach in Ilan, because an Ilan name will make caralendri more likely to immigrate and caralendri will want human-friendly architecture.

Things move frustratingly slowly. The plumbing gets planned, parts of the plans get tested, they discuss zoning, they discuss zoning some more, there are always more things to figure out and more ways everything could go wrong and not one single slave saved so far. He wants to move to Hyrule and forget it all. Instead he imports frozen fruits from the mainland and has Dareni check for the presence of known poisons in the native wildlife and pretends individual flakes of falling snow are monsters from Ganon that he needs to beat to death with his staff.

Every day he steps out of the illusions on the tents and creates a record of the slow effects of the drugs he bought in Milliways for when he has a new voice and a new face and needs to prove he's not some random person who killed and replaced Valanda. On most of those days he talks to himself. He sends a letter to the imperial government on the same flight Nik takes listing dates, places, turns of phrase to have their knowledge mages look for in his rambling monologues to find the times he spoke letters to them. He tells them how to find the time he talked about why he wants permission to test the effects of setting the age of majority for humans a year younger, to sixteen.

People come, mostly to visit, only rarely to move to the new world. Under Ira Sani state law there's a fee to bring a slave into the state, a tax on all slaves, an additional tax on all slaves over the age of majority for their species. The only result of all these laws is that one adventurous and introverted agerah sells a slave in Norvand before immigrating.

While Nikolas is on the mainland and has been for a while Valanda ends one of his monologues and decides to head inside and finds Milliways. He says hi to Bar and sits down for some nice sulking instead of putting up his sign immediately.

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The very small agerah or possibly something else curled up a few seats over purrs at Bar, writes something with a paw-pen device, and grabs it in her teeth before walking over across the seats.

It says 'You smell funny.'

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"Hi, tiny cat. You look funny."

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She yowls in an amused sort of way. 

Do you have magic? Lots of people here do. It's exciting!

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"Yeah, I do. Do you?"

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I'm using it right now by being a cat! I'd have to leave if I stopped. You have to wear clothes in the bar.

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"Changing shape sounds pretty great! My magic lets me make things stay the same."

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I only get to turn into a cat though. I'm a nice cat so I don't mind. Tabby says there's other kinds of creatures that can turn into birds or elephants or wolves but I think she made them up.

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"Is Tabby a friend of yours?"

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Yeah! She's the one who turned me because some guy cut up my throat and I couldn't talk anymore and almost died! But turning fixes stuff like that. I want to do it to more people but the boss lady says that's a bad idea. Not enough blood for everyone, yeah right, there's all sorts of animals out there to eat.

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"Oh, are you a vampire? Yeah, it would be morally wrong for your world to have a lot of vampires. I could have a couple more come to mine if you're in danger, though."

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Why would it be wrong? Vampires don't die all the time like humans. Zeke keeps trying to get his girlfriend lol to be one but she doesn't wanna. I don't get it.

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"Because it's hard for non-vampires without any magic to protect themselves if a vampire happens to want to do something bad, but you can't turn everyone because you can't have as many vampires live in an area as you can have humans, so either there have to be humans who are afraid all the time or you have to kill a lot of humans."

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If there were only vampires eventually it'd be better though! Most of the humans died already. It's really sad.

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"What did they die of?"

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The Big Bug. You're sick for months and don't know it yet so it got everywhere before anyone noticed.

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"I'm so sorry, that's terrible. If it got at least eleven twelfths of them you can probably turn all the rest into vampires, I think, but I'm not sure since you don't eat all the meat."

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Yeah it's so awful. I think it got seven eighths? Almost all the adults. Not little kids. And some more later since little kids don't know how to farm but this one guy is a total hero he turned all the computers and phones everywhere into survival guides. Boss lady turned him. I didn't do anything like that. Just tried to stay safe.

What a sad cat.

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"That sounds really terrifying. I can arrange for someone to heal some specific people in range of your Milliways door but I don't have a way to make people immune or help anyone on another continent. Um. Do you want to sit on my lap and be petted?"

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Yeah. We're picking up the pieces now. It's been two years. And yeah.

She moves onto his lap and curls up.

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Pet, pet. Carefully, with the grain not against it. "You're so small and fluffy. I know other people who are cats but they're all big."

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Writing a response would require petting to stop, so she doesn't bother. Purr, purr.

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Well that sounds like it's mostly not a trying-not-to-feel-so-bad kind of purr, at least.

"My neighbor across the hall was a cat at my old apartment before I moved. She could make sugar from thin air."

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Meow.

She turns around in Valanda's lap. Still in a pettable position.

Tasty! You guys have neat magic. Vampires are magic but we can't do magic except turning people. Technology is kinda like magic though.

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"Yeah. It seems like it really is just another kind of magic." Sigh. "I'm glad you know that already, I made some people feel bad before I understood it."

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?

I meant it can do interesting stuff?

Oh and we can do the voice thing but it's creepy and hard and boss lady yells at you for it.

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