"If I just copy entire books, what then?"

"As long as you do all the copying out, it should come out in your language. Up to you how much time you wanna spend doing that, but at some point it probably stops being worth it?" 

"I'll do at least a little, I guess."

Dion would help with the copying but that would literally not help at all because he doesn't speak or write Ilan. He perches on a barstool so he can swing his legs, and watches Valanda work.

"What are you gonna do with all this science once you get back?" 

"Sell it to people who know how to use it."

"Why don't you just give it to them?" he wonders. "A lot of this stuff could save hundreds of lives; it seems kinda mean-spirited to hold onto scientific advances just because the scientists don't have enough money." 

"...What?"

"Like, what are you gonna do if, I dunno, maybe people don't believe you about how good the information is and don't wanna gamble their savings on it?" 

"Oh, that! Well, then I try... I think one of the medicines... with a structure mage who has a contract saying they can't tell the information to anyone else, and then I sell single doses at a reasonable price until people are satisfied I know things."

"And what if no-one will buy them because they don't have any way to know it's gonna work?" He's mostly playing Sith's advocate, being contrary just for the sake of it. 

"Then I'd do like Bar and give out some free samples until I got good word-of-mouth going!"

Dion nods approval to this plan. "Good. It'd be terrible if your world missed out on modern technology because you couldn't convince anyone to invest." 

Leg-swing. 

"It's so weird that your world doesn't have, like, specific organisations of Force-sensitives. I mean, mages," he corrects himself. "I keep wanting to say 'why don't you just take it to the Masters of your order and let them figure out how to help people with it', but if everyone is a mage you probably don't have one of those. I guess you could go to your government, but that's not really the same." 

"I could! The government would know who'd be interested in buying the information!"

"Couldn't they just give it to some scientists and say, here, work on this? What's your government even for if it can't do that?" 

"They could maybe buy it themselves and then do that, I don't know. They're for peacekeeping! And they do a great job of it, we haven't had a war for four hundred forty-seven years."

"Oh yeah? The Republic's lasted more than seven hundred." 

"Impressive! Someday we'll have lasted that long too! How did you do it?"

"I dunno, I wasn't alive back then." Dion shrugs. "Our history classes mostly talk about how we won the last great war against the Sith and wiped 'em all out." 

"You wiped them out? All of them? Why?"

"Uh, cause they were evil? A Sith is basically just the word for an evil Jedi." He shrugs again, looking uncomfortable with the idea. "I mean, it's more complicated than that, but it all started with some Jedi who went bad. Supposedly." 

"That's not translating well, are you using jargon or something?"

"I explained what a Jedi is already, didn't I? We're basically like force mages, I'm just used to saying Jedi." 

"No, the other part. What was wrong with the Sith, exactly?"

"They used the Dark side of the Force, which makes you get angry and paranoid and want to hurt people—wait, is the word evil not translating, what—"

"Yeah, that's the part that's not clear. The problem with Sith is that they get too angry to follow the law?"