"Of course. What were the hells you're familiar with like?"

"Don't screw around with gods and hells. Really. I mean it. Maybe other worlds are nicer, but calling upon gods and interfering in hells is a very good way to doom yourself to a painful death on my earth. I don't want to have you die."

"Okay. I'll try not to do anything about any otherworldly hells while I'm responsible for Ira Sani."

Sigh. "...The rules of each hell are gonna be different, if you ever do go into one. I probably can't give you sound general advice except 'be cautious, everything wants to kill you probably, and not always in defendable ways'. Anything hellish is likely going to have mind-affecting magic, or soul-affecting magic."

"Okay. Is their mind-affecting magic likely to get past my ward and vervain? And what's soul, is that English?"

"Almost definitely. Vervain is a thing specifically about my sort of vampire, the rotten stuff. Soul is... Personality? Essence of self? Some extra thing about people, a thing about people that can have things done to it. Most people have one. Having it messed with can change your personality, mind control you, remove emotions or make you fiercely loyal to someone, kill you, so on and so forth. Not fun. Vampires have different souls than humans."

"That sounds like you just mean mind. Next time we get a Milliways door I'd like to hear you say it in there and see what the translation effect does for it, maybe it'll make sense then."

"Soul and mind are linked in a lot of ways but they're not quite the same. Sort of like heat and burning, to use a bad metaphor. Anyway. Anything else you wanted to ask?"

"Not right now, I guess. Thank you."

"Your refugees might know how to operate a school system... Well, then, goodbye. You know where to find me."

In the months after their talk Valanda brings up the idea with the priest, too, and keeps planning.

The Hari Medical Association hears about the new otherworldly information and starts testing some of it on human slaves and trying to figure out if any of it is relevant for any other species.

Without any further explosions the capital city of Ira Sani gains plumbing and buildings and grosses of immigrants. It gets a name, too, finally: Riuhiu City, the closest Hari allows to naming it Moral City. (It's not very close.)

They welcome immigrants and tourists, dozens and dozens of them. The imperial government decides the project's not just a way for everyone involved to die slowly. They send their representatives and extend imperial mail service to Riuhiu.

The snow melts, the flowers bloom, the days get longer than the nights.

The otherworldly order of doctors gets weirdly offended when they start talking about experimental methods. They shouldn't be using slaves, you need to use informed (probably paid) volunteers for medical experiments. 

The Hari Medical Association offers to do that for most of its future experiments if the Order of Mercy will pay all the associated costs.

...They can't afford that. They have a collection at the church (still under construction) in New Dover. Now they can probably afford it for a while.

They attempt to explain medical ethics. They attempt to explain double-blind tests in a way that implies doing them unethically is bad science.

Much more importantly, doing them unethically to paid volunteers is illegal and bad for your reputation.

Does 'slaves make bad experimental subjects because they'll say what their owners want them to/they get worse nutrition and have different lives/being told to do the study is the wrong state of mind for accurate results' have any effect? (They really care about this, they're very passionate about it.)

The Hari Medical Association assures them that the utmost care is taken to make sure the slaves in question have whatever state of health is most useful and that experiments relying on self-report are avoided when possible.

The Hari Medical Association auctions off half its slaves but it's unclear whether it's this line of argument or the offer to pay them to use free people instead or both that caused it.

Foreign doctors are uncomfortable and mutter about maybe just going home and making their own medical association and sharing results. After some theological debate about working with an organization that uses slaves, and whether paying them continuously for not using slaves is a bad dynamic (it is, but it's also probably worth it on humanitarian and principled grounds)...

The Order of Mercy decides to keep working with the Hari Medical Association on some things, for the express reason of improving peoples' lives, but also try and gain publicity and donations as the people who brought all this shiny new medicine here. They ended up hiding most of their books on futuristic medicine after all, in case there were poisons or such things in there, and trot out new medicines and procedures to test and sell to people every couple of weeks. They accept a few apprentices, from New Dover's few children and from locals if anyone's interested.

Meanwhile, New Dover grows more established. The hard pace of work slackens as the greenhouse starts producing food and spring comes in. People start building their own houses, from crude timber shacks to log cabins to large, proper buildings raised with the assistance of locals. The iron mine and quarry they used some land for starts producing ore, which goes to a makeshift steel mill and gets used for everything. They raise a central utility building-slash-workshop and make more automatons, which they use to mine more iron and do more logging. They sell lumber and steel in bulk. A few people start farms. One of the automaton operators tries to climb aboard and reprogram it while it's still running, falls, breaks his leg. They call in Mahan so it doesn't get infected and make him a wheelchair. They hire locals for a lot of things, and most everyone goes to church once a week so hopefully cultural osmosis will teach the locals morals rather than the other way around. They sing a lot of hymns.

The pace slackens more when summer rolls around. There is a second greenhouse now, privately owned. The farms are doing alright. Almost a dozen of the forty-something adult New Dovites are pregnant, and all happy about this. There are three marriages. They work with Nikolas to make better automatons, remote-controlled ones, even. They make music machines and telescopes and offroad vehicles and little motorized platforms for essi and ereli and watches and alarm clocks and furniture and clothes and children's toys. They start a mail-order business for these manufactured curiosities, advertising in a bunch of major cities.

People get used to them and mostly like them. Their steel sells surprisingly poorly but their inventions almost all sell very well. They get tourists and people who want to know if there's any housing for rent in New Dover.

They get business propositions that would be boringly normal if they didn't come from talking cats. Someone wants to know if they're interested in renting space for a physical shop in Elit City. Someone wants to know if they're interested in partnering with a knowledge mage to create telescopes that list the amounts of different elements in any star they're pointed at. Someone wants to know if they offer a bulk discount. Someone who notices their farms aren't doing as well as their business wants to know if they'd like to have food delivered every month. Someone else wants to know if they want magic help with their crops. 

They get business propositions that would never have happened at home. Someone notices they seem thrilled to have children and offers to sell of the non-pregnant New Dovites a baby belul. Someone else wants to buy a human child. Someone offers to help them figure out birth control.

One of the Hari humans in Ira Sani has an eleven-year-old structure mage child who wants to apprentice with the Order of Mercy.

Valanda sends them copies of his commissioned video courses. There's one that teaches arithmetic and basic algebra. There's one that covers an extremely slanted view of the history of the dawn period and the warring states period along with a digression into game theory.

In getting one of the videos made he has to take a trip to the mainland and comes back with a flock of ground-fowl in stasis as a gift for New Dover. Are they chickens? It's debatable. Do they lay eggs? Definitely.

It's not entirely clear how much they're doing business collectively and how much they're doing it as individuals.

Their steel is cheap enough to make thanks to automaton labor they can undercut sun mages a bit. It's not as good as titanium or other metals for some things, but it's very cheap. If they end up using most of it internally and not selling any, that's fine, the steel mill will just make less steel, that's how markets work. There is a small inn in New Dover, above a pub in the best English fashion. Someone's raising an apartment building next to a spot reserved to be an airport eventually but it's not ready quite yet.

Nobody seems interested in renting physical shop space, but some kind of distribution deal where a shop-owner regularly orders from the industries here might be workable. That knowledge mage partnership sounds like a grand idea! They have all sorts of other ideas for knowledge-mage-integrated instruments too! Bulk discounts will have to be worked out with a half a dozen different people. Yes for toys, clothes, alarm clocks, and little essi-vehicles. No for big vehicles, watches, furniture, automatons, and music machines.

The pub would like an amount of food delivered every month. The farmers are kind of skeptical about magic help but will try it out and see if it's worth it. They have an auction to sell the "chickens" Valanda donated (a farmer wins and starts selling eggs) and give the proceeds to the Order of Mercy.

Selling a human child: NO.

...How much is the baby belul? They have birth control, thank you, do you mind not discussing that in public?

They start building a schoolhouse. Basic education is free to anyone below their age of majority who shows up, whether they're free or slaves or human or not.

The structure mage who wants to apprentice is a child. Who owns them?

As long as it's not cheap enough to be worth buying from the mainland and as long as Riuhiu's mages don't just offer a better metal but also clear away the piles of dirt that Valanda doesn't have any clever uses for, they're at a pretty steep disadvantage. When they're out of useless material that needs to be sunmaged into something useful anyway they start using New Dover steel.

The magic help they're offered doesn't directly make farming much easier but it shortens the time from planting to harvest and improves the yield per seed sown.

The baby belul is awfully cheap. The seller can't promise this isn't because it may have brain damage of unknown severity.

The structure mage is owned by their father who bought them from their mother before moving to Ira Sani. The father is very interested in having a child with such a useful skill.

Valanda drops by to ask if any New Dovites are interested in helping him create a fantasy soap opera set in a society where everyone is moral.

The steel mill's production slows and its owner loses some money and fires people. Oh well.

Faster time-to-harvest is pretty good! They can use big, loud agricultural machinery for most of the hard work, and spend less time waiting for it to grow.

The prospective belul buyer seems unhappy now and wants to take the little belul to the Order of Mercy for an examination before making an offer.

The Order of Mercy will take the kid as an apprentice if her father signs a contract to free her within a year of her majority, or else pay them a very steep penalty.

Fantasy soap opera? None of these people have, like, theater experience.

The big, loud agricultural machinery scares some of the tourists away. At least while it's being loud. When it's off it's fascinating, a lot of people would like to know how it works.

Hard to tell what's just normal baby behavior for a different species but it looks like that belul might have seizures. ("That doesn't happen all the time!" says the seller. "And there are other babies who jerk like that! Maybe humans don't, I wouldn't know!")

The would-be apprentice's father suggests that the penalty should be a quarter the size they're asking for.

All of these people have experience with morality, though, so maybe they'd like to consult on what moral societies are like?

Some people will sell lessons or explanations or examples of most of the interesting inventions of New Dover, including the agricultural equipment.

If they wildly and naively apply what they know about dogs and comparable animals, plus what they've learned here so far, to this tiny belul, they might be able to help. The doctors ask the seller how often the seizures happen and if they've ever gone on for more than a half an hour at a time and if it got hit on the head. (Is the baby belul awake at all?)

The doctors explain to the would-be apprentice's father that they're very set on any apprentices of theirs getting freed sooner or later, so the penalty has to be that eye-wateringly high. Maybe they can extend it to three years after her majority and they'll pay him a mediumish amount when she's freed, but if he doesn't like that then they might not be able to reach an acceptable deal.

They can consult on how moral societies work, sure. They can recall bits and pieces of plays and novels and poems that dealt heavily with morality, and philosophical concepts, too.

Well, not immediately after seizing, but before that it was looking around and reaching for anything interesting that came too close. If they're still watching after a long enough while the baby perks up again afterward. A judge didn't believe this but the mother insists the father probably dropped the baby, intentionally, because he wanted to damage her property out of spite. She also insists they're really not all that frequent, definitely never anywhere near half an hour long if you only count the seizure itself and not the being-an-exhausted-lump afterward.

He hesitates like he wants to take the deal, then asks if they can make it four years instead of three?

It's not as lucrative as the automaton business but as jobs that consist of sitting around talking about novels and plays go the consulting gig pays pretty well.