"Fascinating. I hope you'll allow me to introduce you to my brother, he'll want to know all about how your magic works."

"We'd be delighted to."

"Wonderful. Now, this situation is highly unconventional, so we don't exactly have a standard set of procedures for it, but--how many of you are there here, do you have a good idea of what kinds of trade goods you're likely to want to display for most impressiveness, an embassy should be fairly straightforward, hospitals probably less so..."

"You'll just be meeting the two of us for the time being, though we'll draw on more people when we know what specific expertise is needed. We're planning to ask for some empty land for the embassy and have that serve as a demonstration of what we have to trade you, since a lot of it relies on infrastructure you don't yet have - Cam, do you want to show her, like, a computer -"

He has his along. It can display its current progress in translating the local language.

"Literally only two people is going to make it hard to convince anyone you're actually representatives of a foreign nation, and no one is going to give you land until they're pretty confident about that."

"We debated descending very dramatically on your palace in a very obviously otherworldly spaceship, should we in fact do that?"

"It would be very, very easy for that to not go how you want it to."

"That's why we didn't do it that way to start with. It'll be very inconvenient to have a hundred people standing around just to make it clear we're important, can you think of a different solution?"

"Probably, but it's difficult with as little information as I currently have. How does your magic work?"

"Cam can make arbitrary material objects and is also indestructible. He is from a society about - seven hundred to a thousand years more technologically advanced than yours. It is possible to magically pull people like Cam from his world to mine; it is not possible to magically pull them here. In my world, this is traditionally done with great caution, because with sufficient knowledge of science and technology someone who can make arbitrary objects can blow up the whole world very trivially. My society recently developed a very efficient way of travelling between worlds and decided to go meet all of our neighbors; we're going to have portals from the embassy to our home world in a few years, but we're not setting them up immediately for security reasons. My world is - a thousand to fifteen hundred years more technologically advanced than yours, but we're not humans so slightly less of the knowledge transfers."

"And he is human?"

"In both of our worlds of origin you can turn into the sort of magical being that Cam is if you die. That is also not true here."

"Pity. The tail is awfully charming."

"Humans can in fact get add-ons like this but need to be very sure they want to keep them."

"I'll pass. What's your country like?"

"I am the crown prince of the Noldor, one of several nations of Elves. We number about five million, as a species we live forever, and on our homeworld there is no scarcity of any kind and we spend most of our time making artwork and music. When we discovered there were other worlds we were very excited at the chance to do something useful. Another planet known to us has humans so we're familiar with the species; other aliens known to us include orcs and Dwarves and Maiar, some of whom will also eventually want to meet you."

"Tell me more about the Noldor."

"What do you have in mind? We're very good neighbors, haven't been in a war since prehistory. We occupy the equatorial continent on our home planet, my grandfather has been our ruler for the last ten thousand years, we do a lot of work on computer chips, which I can explain at length to your engineers..."

"I would like enough information on your government that I have a fighting chance of convincing my superiors it exists."

"Cam, do you want to print out our legal code on fancy looseleaf?"

"You don't want it spiral-bound or on stone tablets or anything?" Voilá.

"It'd be a lot of stone tablets - maybe I can work up a condensed version - anyway, this help?"

"Very much, yes. Do you have relevant standard ambassadorial procedures? Obviously not anything that applies perfectly or you wouldn't be asking for my help like this but something I could at least cannibalize?"

"Yes, but Elves being immortal it involves a solid three months of dinners and theatre. Our first contact procedures are more informal in case we encounter governments we can't countenance."