In case it's not clear I'm hoping to appeal to self-interest in case other motives should be in short supply to make sure I know enough not to make any silly foreigner mistakes that would cause me any trouble.

"Uh... I'm not a historian so I don’t know much about silly foreigners making mistakes. Don’t break the law... do make sure food you buy is good for your species... if someone commits a crime against you - I guess you can't just tell the sky, you’d have to go to a police station... oh, public chats exist, they’re nonsimultaneous geographically distributed public conversations where every contribution starts with a specific phrase so a knowledge mage can search for it. And the laws are free at city hall. And so is Hari is the Language of the Empire. Oh! And some doctors participate in a program where they treat some diseases for free - for instance, rabies."

Good to know. Where is city hall?

"Over that way."

Fortunately the interpretive method of "read what they mean by what they say" makes that actually usable directions. She goes and takes down her notice and goes to City Hall.

It contains copies of the laws of the empire and the state and the city and Hari is the Language of the Empire, and some receptionists who are birds. The birds appear to be mind-blanked.

Inconvenient. What if she holds up her notice and runs her finger over the part where it explains you can't be mindblanked if you want to talk to her.

Then one of the birds will offer to pay anyone else present who doesn’t mind having their mind read to translate and some other people will decide they urgently want some illusions.

So reasonable of them. Anyone offering to translate?

One person will do this for a few sentences but is kind of in a hurry.

She just wants to know if she can walk off with the language tutorial thing.

Yep! That's what they're there for.

Good. She grabs one. Buys a bag of nuts in the market. Posts her notice and returns to the park.

The language tutorial seems to be a video of an agerah (the big cat species) pointing at things and naming them and sometimes making more complicated statements accompanied at all times by explanatory imagery.

Another agerah comes by after a while to ask her questions about her attitude toward slavery.

Can she... pause... the TV...?

Nope. This person is also an illusion mage, though, and can set up some sound insulation for it if she has a pocket or something.

She's got pockets in her robes, yeah. All right, what do you want to know?

"Do you hate slavers and if so why?"

I usually skip the step where I get emotionally worked up about slavers. Generally they're doing the thing that makes sense to them like everybody else. Also based on what I've picked up some slavery here is just legally intense parenting and if that's what somebody's used to it's probably possible to be a good parent around it for some people. So in general no but I don't have to hate somebody to want to do things that would interfere with what they want to do if what they want to do is keep slaves. I'd probably get to the point of hatred if someone were really odious to their slaves right in front of me a bunch though because I'd feel sorry for the slave and wouldn't be able to abstract them away.

"Are you... trying to interfere with slavers doing things in general?"

Not significantly. Though once my friends find me there'll be a lot of opportunity cost to being a terrible person we don't want to work with.

"Uh-huh." This agerah has gotten what they came for now.

Nuts om nom.

And presently it's this guy.

Well, he's probably not worse than everyone else just because he was heinous to her in particular.

I'm not giving you my ring because I only implied I'd do that while, apparently, under threat of battery.