The hallway to the border zigzags and the floor has speed bumps. It's dark and empty; a catfolk walks with them.

At the end, their escort leads them onto a perpendicular hallway, where regularly-spaced bored werewolves lounge against the stone. Some of them have a small bag and keep one hand inside it.

The passage to the FD appears entirely unguarded on the Lei side. The escort stays back, but the path is straight and smooth and there's light on the far end.

The FD side looks the same except that they all wear yellow with black embroidery and no sash. An elderly catfolk greets them excitedly, even Mirana (after a startled look at her uniform). "Welcome to freedom and democracy! What is your business?" (Speaking Elvish.)

The undine is curious too.

Rafiik was kind of kicking himself, earlier, for forgetting that they wouldn't have communication tech here, but the long walk has given him time to think about his approach and he's calm and collected now; he was a bit nervous about approaching a possible war zone and is pleasantly surprised at the reception, albeit uncertain whether the catfolk has some idea of who he is or if the FD is friendly to Lei expats in general. It's definitely strange, that these two places are supposedly at war and their border is like this rather than being defended in any meaningful way, even if they were expecting him. (Did they think he'd be offended by a military presence? It's plausible. He's starting to understand why Jedi don't live among force-insensitive people unless they're under cover, this is getting tedious to worry about.)

"Hello! I'm looking to leave the Lei; I don't know yet if I'm going to want to stay in freedom and democracy or go on, but I have some questions about the war and things that I want to ask while I'm here."

The undine thinks those thoughts are astonishing, especially when backed up by Tomas and Mirana's thoughts. Not an immediate threat, though.

The catfolk nods. "Of course. You're welcome to stay or leave as you wish. What is your relationship with the Lei butler? I can answer some questions; people with better answers are over that way and then up."

He has to puzzle out how to say 'it's a long story' with the vocabulary he has; the undine will get a pretty good sense of how he got here as he considers approaches to it. "I would have to tell you a lot about myself for you to really understand why she's here, but the short way of saying it is that the Lei want me to hear what they say about things and not just what you say, and she's here to say that." Also he's not sure that's not an excuse to get out of the Lei, she may have been lying when she said she'd be safe there. "If you want to have someone with her to make sure she doesn't hurt anything here that's all right with me as long as they don't do anything bad to her if she doesn't." Tomas probably doesn't need special monitoring above and beyond being a random unvetted person, even if he is pretty unpleasant; if the FD wants him, or for that matter Rafiik, to also be accompanied, that seems pretty reasonable, but he's not going to suggest it.

The catfolk's ears droop. "It is currently against the law to hurt anyone who isn't a criminal, a spy, your child, your patient, or your opponent in a duel. As you just described her, she is a spy. Would you please correct my misunderstanding? Or, if I am mistaken about that misunderstanding, please send her back to Lei, possibly with instructions to wait for you, in Lei, or perhaps she could travel through the Frozen City to Sient and wait for you in Piht-Tac."

The undine doesn't have a procedure for this - normally the cases are 'ordinary refugee, write down anything interesting', 'spy, kill them', and 'distraction, send guards elsewhere'. She scrambles to manipulate the unnatural system of 'language'... "No! He's important."

The whisshopper (because of course there's a whisshopper hiding the rest of the guards) relays this to the catfolk.

"...Er, actually it appears that this is a complicated situation. I don't know how the law will apply to you. Please wait a few minutes."

"I'm sorry, I don't know the word 'spy', I only started learning this language a few cycles ago. I think it would be good for her to stay with me and I think it would be good for someone to stay with her. We can wait."

It'd be a hell of a diplomatic incident if he were to take responsibility for her and then she pulled something, which he doesn't think she's specifically here for but it's very possible she'd take an opportunity that was presented to her. He can't even volunteer to do it himself; even leaving aside the part where he has to sleep sometime, he doesn't have the cultural understanding to be sure he'd catch everything she shouldn't be doing, the mention of disiniuria earlier made that perfectly clear.

"A spy is a person who collects information, or says or does things, for a country we are fighting."

There is a bench and a pitcher of water... but only a minute later, the catfolk perks up. "She can stay with you if she swears - says to an undine - that she will not say or do anything as long as Lei or its allies exist, except as permitted by you, or any elected official of the Freedom Democracy, or any werewolf don or housechief in a neutral country, but in no case enter Lei or its allies, or seek to communicate with them. I will now permit her to eat and breathe and groom and so on, and to accompany you, and to do work of kinds which most werewolves are capable of."

Undines don't exist, so what does it actually mean to 'swear'? But yeah. She nods gravely.

Rafiik nods too. "Do we need to go somewhere for that?"

(He understood maybe half of the oath, but it seemed like the more important half - she can only do things if he or some other people give her permission, and she won't go home or something else even with permission, and she now has permission to do some basic things and presumably to go with him. Presumably if everyone is satisfied with it it's fine.)

"Here is good."

Such an weird oath. There's nothing stopping her from going into the drydark near a neutral country, declaring herself werewolf don of a new town, and permitting herself everything. Or acting the fool in order to trick someone into permitting her to speak about Lei 'for the purpose of criticism' and then saying something unexpectedly convincing. It's like someone with no experience of treachery composed all that phrasing in less than a minute... but the law about not hurting people was also sloppy, if that was an exact quote.

In his life, the law is either 'don't make the don angry' or some absurd pile of exceptions that basically means 'don't make the magistrate angry'. A promise is 'we're doing this job together', not a speech in which you pretend to be an elph. 

He's not going to point out the flaws, of course. If Mirana gets out of the oath and causes mayhem that would be lovely.

Wait, they know that she knows that undines aren't real. Is this a setup for a excuse to execute her? Well yeah. It's still the best option.

She repeats the oath aloud.

"The three of you are free, now." Gesture at the hallway away from the border.

It's pretty impressive that the undine can work at range; Rafiik himself can just barely read someone's mind if he's touching them and meditating. (He'd get better if he worked at it, of course.)

He heads in the direction the catfolk pointed out earlier, toward people who can answer his questions. Hopefully they're also the right people to explain his general situation to; he should really do that sooner rather than later.

The hallway slopes up to the surface, where there's a sort of deep conversation pit. No direct sunlight, but a wide view of the sky. A huge castle floats far above and brightward. 

The ground is planted with leafy vegetables, except that back the way they came there's an abrupt thick forest along the border.

There's a werewolf and a human waiting for them.

"Welcome! It's private here - we're far enough away from the undine at the border - if you care about that. Do you have any questions or anything to say before I start on the usual speech?"

"I only started learning Elvish two cycles ago, you don't know my other languages here. So please try to say things simply."

Wow, the report was right. "Okay. We can teach you another language quickly. It will be hard to teach you more Elvish quickly, and a lot of people here don't like to speak Elvish, so I recommend learning another language. The most common language here is Sotalese.

My understanding is that you" Mirana "have unusual arrangements. But you" Rafiik and Tomas "are now people like any other. In other countries, sometimes there are people who have to stay in a place and do the work that they are told. That does not happen here. You may go to any town in the Freedom Democracy, at any time. You may leave the country and come back.

That is the Freedom to Travel. What if someone tries to prevent you from leaving a town? You may fight, if you can, but what if you can't? We solve that problem by allowing you to say that someone else is in charge of protecting your Freedom to Travel. You may still fight in any case, but you may also pick someone else to fight with you. Normally, someone in a town wants to have the job of fighting to protect people's Freedom to Travel, so they ask everyone to pick them to fight. There might be a few people like that, who do most of the fighting to protect people's Freedom to Travel.

There are ten Freedoms:

The Freedom to be Free.

The Freedom to Live.

The Freedom to be Happy.

The Freedom to Travel.

The Freedom of Association.

The Freedom to Speak.

The Freedom to Grow.

The Freedom to Work.

The Freedom to Die.

The Freedom to Choose.

Before I say more about each of those, how is your understanding so far? Any questions?"

"I only know half of the words for the freedoms, but I think I'll learn those when you talk about them. The rest is okay, thank you."

"Okay! I'm going to explain more about what each of the Freedoms means to you, first, and then how the Freedoms are protected and how you choose people to protect them, because they don't all work the same way as the Freedom to Travel.

The Freedom to be Free means that the Freedom Democracy exists and is able to protect you, and that you are able to protect your Freedoms and choose people to help you. I'll come back to this one.

The Freedom to Live means that you have food and water and no one will hurt you.

The Freedom to be Happy means a lot of things. The most important one is that no one will take your things, specifically things that you carry with you. Also that no one will hurt you, in ways not covered by the Freedom to Live, including some things that don't hurt at all but which still make people unhappy.

The Freedom to Travel means that you can leave a town and go to another at any time, and go to places outside the Freedom Democracy and come back.

The Freedom of Association means that no one can tell you not be near another person. No one, including that person, but of course you can't make them unhappy or take their things or hurt them or make them unable to live.

The Freedom to Speak means that you can speak any language you like. Including Elvish, but as I said, a lot of people don't like to speak Elvish so I think it will be easier for you if you learn another language.

The Freedom to Grow means that you can learn new things, like new kinds of work, or other things that you want to learn. It also means that you can have children.

The Freedom to Work means that you can do work that you already know how to do. A town can't stop you from working and then get angry at you for not working.

The Freedom to Die means that you can die, if you want. Some countries, such as Lei, say that a person who breaks the law has to stay in a place and do the work they are told, or they will be hurt. This is very bad, worse that dying. But people sometimes say they want to live like this, even though it would be worse than dying. In the Freedom Democracy, people who break the law die. The Freedom to Die also means that you can fight people, if you and the other person want to fight. This is separate from fighting to protect your Freedoms. This is just, if two people are angry and want to fight.

The Freedom to Choose means a lot of things. Whenever a group or a town or the whole Freedom Democracy needs to make a decision that isn't about one of the other nine Freedoms, you can say what you think they should do. I'll come back to this one too.

How are you understanding? Questions?"

He needs her to go back over 'freedom to be free' after defining 'protect', and to explain 'work', and to confirm that his guess at what 'die' means is correct. (It is, and he makes a face about it.) He's following all right, other than those.

"Do you have... I don't have the word... you die here if you break all the laws?"

"All the laws of the Freedom Democracy, yes. If a town says, don't play loud music in this room, and you do, they can't actually stop you. But if they say, this field is for growing short plants, like squash, and you grow tall plants, like sunflowers, and block the sun to another field, and so someone doesn't have enough food to live, they can fight you, or they can ask someone else to kill you to protect their Freedom to Live."

"Okay. Thank you."