"The last thing I was curious about was which magic 'spells' you have."

Isabella picks up the tablet. She drops it. It stops in midair, and she plucks it out of its place. "I do that."

"Wow!"

"I mostly use it to catch myself when I trip."

"Will you get more at some point or do the abilities stay the same?"

"The theme stays the same. Some girls have discrete spells they cast but I'm not one of them, I just get this basic thing."

"Do people think that they've explored the approximate upper limits of magical power, or not yet?"

"There are girls whose job it is to fight kaiju - those are huge monsters that accumulate in places too big, sparsely inhabited, and generally remote to patrol for smaller monsters before they join up, mostly the oceans. They have to perform at the top of their capacity and they have lots of resources for doing that. Some of them get fourth spells, the ones who have spells. Three spells is achievable by a dedicated amateur in a couple hours."

Nod. "All right. That's the first of my agenda items, learning about you, and the second, arranging you somewhere to land once we've spoken. The third one was arranging for you not to be terrified when you go do that. I don't really know what would - are cars scary? Are soldiers?"

"We have cars. We aren't accustomed to soldiers wandering around at random times and places - maybe they're serving a policing function? Do you have separate police?"

"Yes, but the people who accompany me in particular are drawn from our military."

"I don't think they're inordinately scary but they're slightly unsettling. I don't expect you to alter your security arrangements for us though."

"I'm not going to but I still want to know what's alarming. I can't think of a single other civilization I don't find alarming, and often in unpredictable ways, so it seems likely we've thrown a lot at you which seems very worrying or dangerous."

"What do you find alarming about other civilizations?"

"They're not careful enough and they're predictably going to have a mass catastrophe as soon as someone smart and motivated thinks up how! They all go around touching everything with their bare hands, which is only slightly better than going around touching everything with your genitals. They have the category thing your tablet is working so hard to maintain for you. They have extraordinarily high crime rates. There are some where they try new genetics on their children and most of them fail to make viable people. There are some where no one can visit the planet because they've accidentally completely destroyed their immune systems and a cold would kill them. There are some with air rationing. There're some that oblige everyone to worship the same god. There are some that have a war whenever their current ruler dies. In many of them there's no way to change the social class you are born into."

"Well, some of those things sound bad, all right. I don't actually know any numerical facts about our crime rate to compare against. We might need to know more about the taboo on hands."

"Yeah, what do you people do if you itch?"

"...go somewhere private and scratch yourself?"

"Wow."

"It does sound inconvenient but people who do it all the time are presumably used to it."

"Maybe you get itchy hands more than most people here. I don't think it really comes up very often, if you have comfortable gloves."

"I mean like if my arm itches, my fingernails are under the gloves."

"Some people have gloves with ridges, you could look into that."

"Okay."

"Anything we need to know besides wear gloves in public?"