She attempts to roll her eyes, and finds that she can’t. Irritating. Her voice emanates from the corner of the room.

“I would not have appeared, if I saw risk or threat in appearance. Conceit does not become you. And I am on the ground, as well as the sky; there are a thousand nobles who would jump upon my word. Men who I wish die, die.”

Tashalkan- stutters, briefly ceases to exist, disappears- then resumes existing. There’s a (gaudy, skull themed) knife in her hand; she twirls it, absently, having regained mobility.

“Do you wish to measure dicks all day, captain?” she inquires. 

Aleshen tilts his head - 

And the world pauses.

He stands, turns slightly - 

And steps elsewhere.

(It's rude, to bring to bear non-mortal force against another god's charge without permission or strong cause. He doesn't know the local pantheon, and their pantheons have never hashed out what counts as sufficient cause.)

Of course, when you don't know the local rules, it's good to ask.

The place where he arrives, superficially, appears as a vibrantly colored reef- each coral glowing in bright pinks and oranges and reds, small fish flitting this way and that, gore-encrusted skeletons floating delicately on the current, sharks in improbably dense quantities. 

The place where he actually arrives, several conceptual steps above that, isn’t quite as readily describable.

There is a woman, there, violet-skinned- to the extent that you can have skin, in places beyond places. She does not have a name.

She raises a single, mostly-conceptual eyebrow.

”We do not intervene directly in mortal affairs/ We would not have allowed you into our purview, if we objected to you doing as you like/ Note that no power you may bear may remove any of our children from that purview/ I am hardly one to enforce politeness/ Goodbye,” she says, with all five strings communicated simultaneously.

And then he is- rather forcefully- booted from her domain.

It's not obvious what just happened from the mortals' perspective.

Time continues -

And Tashalkan's clones all vanish as pain briefly glances through her. Even mental actions become impossible, except a thin tendril of thought.

He brings the force of his divination abilities to bear, ferreting out dead man's switches and disabling those he directly can.

'You may communicate like this. Only those I permit will hear. Magic cannot be effected along this path. You are under the effects of a zone of truth.'

She seems to have instructed several dozen subordinate noble mages to destroy the ship if they fail to hear from her in the next day, as a routine precaution; three noble mages are under ongoing instruction to try to kill her at range and then resurrect her if they fail to hear from her for a week. Nothing else seems directly arranged; she wasn’t expecting to need to be quite this paranoid.

”... truly, you are too kind,” she says, after a pause. “Note to self: check that otherworlders do not wield unfathomable power before trifling with them. It is normally safe to assume.”

(Rakaskem is just going to be over here, quietly baffled by this rapid turn of events.)

The ship can become harder to destroy, in ways specific to the local magic. Unfortunately, arresting someone for something divination revealed they might do isn't legal.

Monitoring them is, though.

"'The Federation can escalate more than you can' is generally a safe assumption. Now, who are you?"

“Tashalkan, Royal Isonade Mage,” she says. “She who owns ten thousand souls. The Queen of Knives. The Golden Eye. Fools concoct many titles, for those above them. I pay attention to but few.”

“... good for you. And why are you here in the first place?” asks Rakaskem, who is pretending to be much more composed than he actually is.

“I have known you as a petty klasaiko* for years, and overheard your call: however could I not follow? I am watcher, you are watched: it is the natural way of things.”

She would give both Tanna and Rakaskem a disdainful look, but she’s currently incapable of substantial movement. The sentiment is nevertheless communicated.

“I expected no conspiracies of narrow aversion. No summarial scorn of long-held culture. No spontaneous detainment of foreign dignitaries based on ill-communicated policies. Thus I am foolish as a lamb. Do you often discourage spies from revealing themselves, and keep foreign dignitaries from announcing contingent intent, captain, or is this an uncommon display of incompetence?”

[*Untranslatable, roughly equivalent to ‘loathed blight on society’, normally used informally or sarcastically.]

"Spying on us and never getting caught isn't easy. It becomes less so, the more familiar with a magic system we are. We find it better to discourage the attempt entirely. As for intent - killing me for verbally siding against you is illegal. Credibly threatening to commit a crime is also illegal. You did not go through any channels to announce your status as a foreign dignitary. You did not establish yourself diplomatically. Our first contact with you was hostile, by your choice."

At this, Rakaskem looks nonplussed.

 “Uh. Not that I’m not in favor of you hauling away that psychotic bitch and throwing away the key,” he says, in an uncommon display of profanity, “but we do not have ‘credibly threatening to commit a crime’ as a crime. Or a substantial taboo.”

“My many thanks, Rakaskem, for that vital addition,” says Tasha, frostily enough to suit Tanna’s new pomola. “However could I abide the ages and their trials without such earnest support. Yet I find the things that you refrained from saying far more interesting.”

She- attempts to glower, finds herself incapable. Being unable to move, after being accustomed to four sets of hands, four sets of eyes, four faces, four bodies that are hers hers hers- it’s irritating beyond measure.

She takes a moment to compose her thoughts into something useful, in lieu of the indignant nonsensicalities that would otherwise be their natural shape. There are so many things that she could nitpick, in that statement, but one seems like to stand out- if she could just articulate it, ever so, as precise and concise as her tutors encouraged... this abruptly became higher stakes than she predicted, higher stakes than she could have predicted, the sharp sense of actions having consequences tingles like a serpent slithering down her spine...

”You land in a foreign system. They do not share your values, or culture, or species. They do not share your definition of ‘formality’, do not agree on its necessity- do not even speak the same language, in truth. From that system comes a queen: she arrives, takes unnecessary action to render herself conspicuous, and notes that you have narrowly avoided having her as your enemy. You attack, immediately, and then escalate until she is helpless as a hatchling. She announces her status: you explain that she violated laws she did not know of and does not share, that she did not announce herself as you would like.

Do you sense a villain, captain? Or, perhaps, I should borrow Rakaskem’s construction- do you sense a villain, you psychotic bitch?”

(Tanna: not even slightly trained for first contact. She is definitely making a mess of this! Not that it shows on her face or in her voice, of course.)

"The mistake we made was in permitting anyone from your system on our ship. It was an oversight, and in truth we should have remained more at a remove until we understood your magic better, and could easily prevent tag-alongs. We should have also exchanged solid copies of our laws before sending a first contact team, rather than after, and run the risk of keeping to ourselves until distance communication could be established."

"The primary crime in question here was the spying, and threatening me alone would, outside of our culture's context, be let slide with a warning not to do it again. Most species and governments I am familiar with at least operate on the assumption that spies will be denounced by their home government if found out, and that spying is at least nominally a crime. The others don't have concepts of deception such that 'spying' makes sense as an action. The Federation is more proactive than most in hedging out spies, I'll admit, but assuming that it is safe to announce yourself as a spy is not, in fact, something I have encountered."

"There are numerous reasons for us to control who has access to where on this ship. It is part safety concern - for us and you - part informational flow concern, part operational secrecy, and part expectation of privacy. Your protest would be more sensible if your compatriots had not asked permission before teleporting aboard. If you were spying on our operations, you would have noticed that Ateshai asked for my explicit clearance - including for the specific number, and for the specific people, implying that is important. If this was a simply cultural misunderstanding, I'd expect it to be shared by people from your culture."

"And, another: if you were spying on your neighbors, you would have noticed that we sent a copy of our laws, a treatise on our system of government, and an analysis of our culture performed by as balanced a group of species as could be arranged - admittedly as a hard copy, we haven't quite managed format conversions yet for our communication arrays. If you'd had an ounce of impulse control, you would have waited for it to be uploaded before risking poking us."

"A warning for you, perhaps: the Federation is also notably, and exceptionally, lenient against espionage."

“The seven royal mages on hekyeiyelui are drawn from disparate regions on a mother planet with billions and billions of people; only in a loose sense, are we are from a single culture. And I did ‘spy’ enough to know that they did not ask permission first; they were prepared to do no such thing, until, by accident most refined, they contacted this ‘Ateshai’. Pretending to be as one is not is, on occasion, a crime; doing as I do rarely is. And, if we are to speak of sticks and poking, inducement of complete paralysis, when unnecessary for urgent self-defense, is criminal in every country on the planet below us, and on most of those I know of elsewhere. Even for noblility.

First, keep in mind and soul that we still hold command over aging that you do not, unfathomable power or no, and that the other rulers of my planet will know, in time, of what you do here. Then tell me, most dignified and wise and exquisitely lenient of psychotic bitches: what are you going to do?”

"I had no guarantee you would remain, nor that you would refrain from attacking when I failed to react as you wanted. A hold is considered fairly basic, and in common use for deescalating situations by law enforcement, but given that difference, if you give your word you won't try to escape nor attack anyone, I will have the hold released. Your diplomatic position does merit special consideration, assuming I can confirm it. The most likely result will be economic, diplomatic, and informational sanctions against your country, given no repeat incidents. We do not bow to threats, however. Withholding that magic does not matter. Since this seems to need to be said: threatening us does not improve your bargaining position. We have our laws. They can flex, but they will not bend at the whim of gods, let alone petty tyrants."

“To the extent that you trust anything I say, trust that I will not attempt attack, or escape, in ways that would have been prevented by the hold. I would have been less cavalier with threats, aside from the opening one, if you had clarified that your preferred forms of reprisal were national, rather than, say, seven years of this, given that you are as cavalier as you are with it.”

The hold releases.

"That policy is due to a presumption of heads of state acting as the state - the actions of a queen are the actions of her queendom. If customs differ, here, and you are willing to be treated as a private citizen, then all sentencing will be as a private citizen would be sentenced, but you would likely lose the special consideration afforded foreign nations. We do not sentence differently based on caste nor class nor personal power, though."

The knife briefly resumes twirling, and then folds back into pocket space. Tashalkan luxuriates in a renewed ability to move. If she has to go her whole life without ever being quite that helpless again, it’ll be entirely too soon.

“... good for you,” says Tashalkan, deliberately squishing the urge to express non-faux gratitude like the miserable little worm it is. “And you misunderstand. Given how little I would like to interact with you again, I will take the economic, diplomatic, and informational sanctions, thank you kindly.”

“... and then-“ 

“I will not ruin you, nor display that which you prefer obscured. For now. Test not of the limits of my patience, and perhaps you may remain within them, for a time.”

She looks at Tanna.

”How patient must I be?” she inquires. “You mentioned ‘confirmation’, yes?”

"She is as she says."

"There. I will escort you to the teleport bay, and then ask you to leave. And not return, unless new permissions are negotiated."