Nobody takes particular notice of them, except for one streetsweeper who kinda checks out the man but doesn't say anything about it.

The last time she was starting from nothing she at least had a legal identity and a place to stay. This will be trickier. 

She has her Forsworn borrow someone's everything, claiming to have just broken his own, and look up a few things. 

Moving inconspicuously through this city isn't hard. Moving inconspicuously through cities never is. 

Getting into a blue's house is harder, but not by as much as it could have been. It should probably have occurred to her to wonder whether the same knock-out drugs would work on these people before she took out the security guard, but oh well, you live and you learn, and the guard is out like a light and not going into anaphylatic shock so she's going to call it fine. 

She changes her hair blue and her Forsworn's hair grey and sits on the couch with perfect poise and waits for the blue to come home. 

This will alarm the resident's cook, who lets himself in an hour and a half before dinnertime to get food on the table for the blue.

Woops that person can be unconscious too. This is really not what she had planned but in her defense she does her planning much better under circumstances less gratuitously unfamiliar than this. She picks up the cook and puts him somewhere out of the way but comfy enough they're not gonna wake up sore. 

Kamuor Insho lets herself into the house and is even more surprised than the cook was (the cook could have been uninformed about a known guest; Kamuor herself knows better).

"Hello," she says, and has the Forsworn repeat in Oahkar. "I apologize for the unfriendliness of my intrusion. I couldn't think of any other way to get my point across discreetly." She stands up, and her eyes flash blue and her hair turns black and her clothing shifts back to her preferred jacket-over-tank-top and cargo pants. Scales creep up her face and over the exposed skin of her hands, shimmer through the full spectrum of color, and recede. "I'm an alien, and a powerful one, but I did not come here under my own power and have no desire to overturn everything by going prematurely public. I do have things I need in order to exercise my power to its fullest extent, and there are numberless benefits I can provide--both to the world in general and to anyone I was personally allied with." 

"- I, uh. I. Are you visiting lots of people simultaneously, or -"

"No. I am limited to one physical location at a time. If your next question is why I chose you, the answer is because your house was the closer than any other comparably low-security blue residence I could find. I am at this time weaker than I have been since I was an adolescent, as a result of having come here not under my own power." 

"Oh. Do - you want me to refer you to someone better connected -"

"Not necessarily. Someone better connected would most likely also have more of a specific agenda that they would be inclined to manipulate me in pursuit of, and I don't care to attempt to navigate that while I don't yet understand local culture fully." 

"Oh. - where's Imuro?"

"Both the security guard I had to get past to get in and the person who came in later were sedated harmlessly and relocated somewhere they wouldn't be sore when they woke up." 

"Oh. - Pardon me; my name's Kamuor Insho."

"No pardon required; I'm Rhonda Wallace. This is James McElroy," she adds, gesturing to the Forsworn. 

"It's a pleasure to make your acquaintance. Can I get you anything?" says Kamuor.

"I'm alright for the moment. Is there any--gesture of good faith that I could make, that would in some way act as reparations for my rudeness in how I introduced myself?" 

"Oh, that won't be necessary," Kamuor assures her. "Are my guard and cook going to remember anything?"

"They'll remember me sticking them with a needle growing out of my finger; the sedative doesn't have any amnestic effects." 

"I'll do my best to smooth that over. So you don't wind up prematurely public."

"If they cared to make a fuss I'm certain I could disappear before anything could be confirmed, but that would be significantly inconvenient; I appreciate it." 

Kamuor nods. "What are your short-term priorities and plans that I can help you with?"

"I want to learn the language, familiarize myself with local customs and networks, and figure out what problems people here have." 

"How does your translator know the language?"

"I have power over that which is within my dominion, and he is sworn to me. My ability to use this reflexively is limited; my body I can alter to my heart's content, but my mind I can affect only indirectly."

"Oh, I - see. I can try to find you a discreet tutor. I have a guest room and don't entertain too many visitors to make it hard to keep them all away for some time."

"Thank you. I can change my hair to a local color again if that would make finding a tutor easier." 

"I'm not sure if I'll be able to find a tutor who won't expect you to be starting from another Amentan language. I might be able to make up a good cover story and then it would be best if you looked Amentan, though I'm not sure what caste to place you as..."

"The kind of alien I am does not have castes, so I can be of little help to you there." 

"- mm, do you have some way to arrange to all be clean?"

"...Soap is not a caste, I'm fairly sure."

"No, no - I don't know how much background information you collected on us before you came to my house -"

"Enough to have any idea what a blue was?" 

"...I see. So. Soap is not a caste. Six of the seven castes are clean. Reds aren't. They handle the pollution-related work."

"...Ah. We avoid having successive generations of the same family do that kind of thing," she bluffs. 

"What stops the people who do from contaminating everyone else, though?"

"They wash. It's not something I've had to concern myself with the details of overmuch; in my domain I can simply deal with any such things remotely and nobody has to touch anything." 

"Oh, I see. That's good." She nibbles her lip thoughtfully. "I was trying to come up with the best way to get you tutored... I suppose if discretion is enough of a priority perhaps something computerized would be better, I don't have an orange permission to dangle..."

"Orange permission?" 

"I can't bribe a tutor with the prospect of a baby," rephrases Kamuor.

"Ah. On my planet only a few countries regulate reproduction." 

"It's been phased in everywhere by now, no one will tolerate a neighbor who lets people have a dozen apiece."

"--Is that a rhetorical exaggeration, or would people really chose to have that many?"

"...of course they would? I suppose some people would stop at five, I think five is the official median if you survey people about what they'd do with no controls, but that sounds a little low to me."

"Huh. My species averages much lower, that's probably why, then." 

"Oh, how interesting, I wouldn't have expected that."

"Our birthrate plummeted after the invention of birth control. I suppose evolution will probably cotton on eventually but it hasn't yet." 

"I suppose I can't think of a reason that couldn't work that way... anyway, we have population controls, but I don't have an orange permission. There are computer programs for learning languages. I don't imagine any of them imagine the learners are aliens but perhaps your - contractor can help you."

"Contractor?" 

"Your employee? I'm not sure what to call him."

"He swore to me as an alternative to the death penalty. I call them the Forsworn, who have that reason." 

"Forsworn. All right. I can look up some language learning programs." She pulls out her everything, pauses for acknowledgment from Rhonda.

"Thank you." 

Kamuor finds her a program called Empire of Words which assumes you start as a Tapap speaker but uses a lot of pictorial context on top of Tapap words to teach Oahkar. "I must have an old everything somewhere but it's probably easier to get you a new one than find the one I upgraded from last winter..."

"I should probably avoid making too many assumptions based on the similarity to comparable devices on my planet." 

"Assumptions about what?"

"How they're registered and handle data, mostly." 

"Is that important?"

"On reflection, probably not." 

"I'll text the maid and ask if he knows where the old one is but if he doesn't get back to me I'll order a new one delivered for you. In the meantime I was just about to have dinner, do you eat Amentan food?"

"Yes." She is less confident of this than she projects but, well, the sedative worked, so it's at least worth a shot. 

"Is the cook going to wake up soon or should I just order something?"

"He'll wake up soon." 

"I can have him throw together something quick then. In the meantime would you like something to drink?"

"Nothing alcoholic, but otherwise thank you yes." 

Kamuor pours them both some fruit punch.

She sips. 

"Tasty," she comments. "Not quite like anything I've had before, which makes sense." 

"I suppose it would! Where are Imuro and Sundei?"

"On couches in a couple of other rooms." 

"All right." Her everything bleeps. "And the maid says it's in the little closet under the shoeboxes, I'll just nip up and get you the old everything..." Up she trots.

She has the Forsworn quietly give her a few vocabulary words to memorize while Kamuor is gone. 

Kamuor comes back with an old everything she's in the process of wiping. "I'll have this ready for you in a minute."

"Thank you," she says, sitting perfectly composed and definitely not at all excited or impatient or anything. 

In a minute the everything is wiped and rebooted and has Empire of Words installed. Kamuor offers it to Rhonda.

She accepts it. 

And then it is hers and she can do things to it--the first thing is souping up the processing power, that's trivial, and more processing power is always a good thing but mostly it's just that she's relieved to have a connection to the world that belongs to her. She gets the Forsworn to look over her shoulder and murmur translations and starts messing with it to see how it works and what various icons are. 

In addition to Empire of Words the operating system comes bundled with a train navigation app, a calculator, a phone, a texting app, two simple timewaster games (one with numbers and one with colorful blocks), a clock with alarm features, a flashlight, a map, a web browser, an app that seems intended to connect it to peripherals if it had any, a calendar, a notetaking app, a camera, and a music player.

She opens the web browsing app and starts investigating the general shape of their web.

Well, none of it's in any languages she actually knows, but it's sure an internet, lots of variety of stuff; the browser assumes the default thing she wants is this social media site.

She will stick with the parts she can make McElroy translate. What's this social media site? 

It's called Everybody and it invites her to import her contacts so it can try to find her friends and make her an account, or log in!!

She is sort of vaguely curious how far she can get in the making-an-account process with no actual legal identity or anything. 

Everybody does not require a legal identity. Now she has an account!

Okay neat. She can use this to try and get the lay of the land, so to speak. 

Everybody is not very useful without any friends.

...Joy, okay. She supposes she'll get started on that language-learning app, then. 

It's starting her on things like hello and thank you, though she's also introduced to the name of a local fruit as an example of a thing to be thanked for, and a couple names (a recurring purple cartoon character is called Ahmi and her yellow friend is Erak).

She dutifully does her best to memorize those things and tries to see if this app displays any differing background assumptions from what she's used to, culturally. 

In lesson three Erak lets Ahmi hold his baby and she says 'thank you'!

Well, that makes sense given the thing where apparently they want way too many kids. She's going to have to do something about that at some point but she doubts it's going to be in the top ten on her priority lists. 

When she can't focus on the language lessons anymore she goes back to the web browser to see what else she can learn about this planet. At least they have a reasonably recognizable search engine or this would be much harder; she decides she might as well start from the baby thing. What does she get if she searches, oh, "permissions," "reproductive control," and, on a whim, "babies?" 

Permissions are a form of population control used mostly in the Oahksphere where individuals or families are awarded permission to have a baby according to various criteria. "Reproductive control" gets her birth control results; they have it just about perfect and reversible for both sexes. Babies gets her BABY PICTURES and BABY MERCHANDISE and A CREEPY SERVICE THAT WILL EMAIL YOU RECORDINGS OF BABIES MAKING BABY NOISES.

Yeeaaaaah that's pretty creepy. She admires the cuteness of a couple of baby pictures then tries "population control" since that phrase came up when she tried permissions. 

(Meanwhile Kamuor has found and awakened her cook, who is hastily assembling some sandwiches.)

Population control search results tell her that some places instead auction credits for money and some places do two-per. Everybody has to have population control.

She is not thrilled by population control but she understands the concept of tradeoffs. Two-per seems obviously best but she's not going to say that out loud where her host is likely to hear and be offended. 

...How are population controls enforced, she remembers that in China during the one-child policy era you had to pay fines if you had a second kid...

Most places will take your unauthorized baby and adopt it out and sterilize you. Tapa, a large country north of where she's at, will sterilize you but doesn't adopt the baby out - instead they actually murder the baby. There are many forum arguments and blog posts about this.

What the fuck, Tapa. 

She's not happy about taking the baby but she knows people used to abandon girl babies so they could have a son in China so...maybe it's only comparable levels of bad? But. What the fuck, Tapa. 

She makes an actual noise of combined disgust and horror out loud. 

"- hm?" sais Kamuor, who's been fussing with her own pocket everything.

"Tapa," she says, her lip curling. "I was looking up population control policy and I found out about Tapa." 

"- oh. Yes, it's despicable. They're enormous, though, nobody's going to fight them over it, over forty or fifty kids a year..."

Nod. "That makes sense; I might be able to do something about it but not soon and however viscerally upsetting it is I doubt it's the most pressing problem." 

"The thing everyone hopes aliens will be able to do is show us how to get to more planets."

"...Well, my species hadn't gotten past our moon, yet, but I can create pocket dimensions." 

"Pocket dimensions would also be great!"

"Well, I can only make them in places that are mine, and I can't distribute the ability--well, not wholly; people who swear themselves to me get powers of their own sometimes but it's hard to predict in advance what they'll get and nobody's ever gotten anything as useful as mine. And I can keep myself from dying of old age but I don't think I've managed to make myself comprehensively murder-proof." 

"Is the swearing to you permanent? In non-death-penalty cases."

"I can and do release anyone not Forsworn who wants to go but if I do they lose anything I changed about them." 

"So you could in theory try lots of people and see who gets powers."

"It's slightly more complicated than that--the subset of people who get powers is a particular subset, it's not random, and it has--entry requirements that are not universally trivial--but it would in theory be possible to try lots of people and see who got powers they wanted to keep enough to stay." 

"- entry requirements?"

"I don't know why this is the case, but there are two levels of--sworn to me--and the higher level is the one that gets powers and for some unfathomable reason it requires me to have sex with the person." 

"...well, that's very weird, but you don't look like one of the weirder science fiction aliens..."

"And it comes with a weird tattoo. And feelings of devotion, but I can fix that." 

"I still think if you advertise all the side effects people will be willing to try it if they might get magical powers."

"I suspect you're right. But there's only one of me and I do intend to do anything with my time other than have sex with near-strangers," she says dryly. "I suspect that will be the real limiting factor." 

"That does make sense."

"...If you had any way of filtering for people who could be trusted to be discreet and wanted to beat the rush..." 

"I'm... I'm pretty young and don't have much of my own network yet, I'd probably want to get you my great-aunt."

She considers this. "What are your great-aunt's political interests?" 

"What do you mean?"

"...I assume that anyone with an established network has established interests they'll want to use me in the aid of pursuing; I'm not fundamentally opposed to this; I do have any understanding of politics; but I don't want to get entangled with someone and then discover they want to maneuver me in directions I'm unwilling to go." 

"Uh, she's been working with the Revisionist coalition lately. ...you're a magical alien, you have a lot of pull."

"A lot of pull and almost no context, so I'm trying to be careful." She looks up the Revisionists on her everything. 

The Revisionists are a political coalition within Calado that mostly operates on a local level, though it's courting senators, and wants to make some changes to subway systems and dual-caste some occupations and there are rumors they want to start robotics programs.

...These people seem if anything more advanced than Earth, do they not have robotics? She tries searching robotics. 

The deal with robotics appears to be that everyone wants it really badly and if you try to develop it reds will show up and murder you.

...Why???

Because reds are evil, suggests the internet.

...And why do people want robots so badly. She assumes it isn't just because they're science fictionally cool. 

Robots would be able to replace a lot of menial work.

...Hm. 

Well. 

She does not have to help with robots in particular, if she knows that she doesn't know enough about the situation to do that. 

After a little more cursory research, she nods. "I think it would be worth it to be introduced to your great-aunt." 

"I'll set up a meeting. Would you rather it be here?"

"I'm indifferent as to the location." 

"She might prefer her office. You'll need to fix your hair to go out unobtrusively."

She shrugs and turns her hair purple. 

"It'd be less odd for me to be traveling with a blue or yellow."

She turns her hair blue, then, and McElroy's hair yellow. 

"Perfect." She taps away on her everything, eating her sandwich one handed. (The cook has offered the aliens sandwiches too.)

The aliens eat sandwiches. The sandwiches are tasty enough, but Rhonda is privately glad that her power means she isn't cut off from ever having a normal PBJ again. 

These sandwiches are meat and cheese and pickles.

"Auntie says we should meet at her office in half an hour."

"Alright. How far is it?" 

Meat and cheese and pickles is an interesting balance of familiar and unfamiliar given that she's never tasted this kind of meat or cheese or pickles before. 

"Two subway stops."

...She looks up how long it takes to get between subway stops. 

Usually just a couple minutes, more in the sticks.

Okay. She pokes around some more on the internet in the meanwhile to see what else she can pick up. She tries "dual-caste occupations" since she does not have enough civic engineering knowledge to get anything but gobbledygook out of subway policy. 

Some places dual-caste occupations such as sex work, medicine, or operating boats. It means both castes are allowed to do the thing. It is outright typical to dual-caste most non-combat positions in the military - fill them with greys in downtime, shunt the greys into combat roles in wartime.

...On a scale of "World Peace" to "the Middle East" how much war is there. 

There was a big one last year but this is rare. A province changed hands.

Mm. But there's currently zero war anywhere? That part's good. 

She looks into the war. 

Apparently Voa was exporting contaminated food and Tapa attacked them, with support, to conquer enough farmland to achieve domestic food security.

Contaminated food? Someone cut corners on a safety regulation?

Deliberate sabotage, actually!

W...hy...would someone do that...

The form of the sabotage was having reds touch the food as a statement about it being fine if reds touch things.

Ugh, fuck all caste systems. 

...

She looks up slavery. 

Slavery has been abolished the world over, barring comparisons to Yvaltan contracts.

How long ago, what group or groups, is there lingering inequity. 

Typically prisoners of war, mostly purple but sometimes grey or other castes. Slaves were usually not allowed to have children, which whatever its other consequences didn't leave them with much multigenerational damage. The last country to abolish slavery was Spen in 3395 (it's currently 3423), and at the time Spen had literally four slaves alive, all of whom moved to Shi Alassei.

...Hrm. Well, that is in fact sort of the opposite problem her ancestors had, yeah.

Any human--Amentan--trafficking problems? 

Immigration is so rigidly controlled that getting cheap labor over a border is virtually never worth it, though she can turn up one story from four years ago about some oranges smuggled into the Maniten Republic where they provided black market medical care (locally out of caste, too, Maniten doctors are green!) for people who didn't want their heritable conditions to be reported to the eugenics board. They do have the occasional issue with fraudulent adoptions; people will pay through the nose for a baby if they can't have one of their own and the demand is not met by babies taken from population-control-flouting parents.

Sooooo no then. Wow, and she thought the border patrols in her country were bad. 

...Eugenics board? 

Most places have them. Even Voa has one. There are things that will make your credit more expensive (in credit countries) or get you blacklisted outright. There are also incentives for using donor gametes with socially desirable traits like mild springs.

Ah huh. 

Mild springs? 

Amentans are only fertile in the springtime, unless they move somewhere without seasons and their hormone systems panic and assume that they might need to be able to reproduce at any moment. (This is unpopular.) Springing makes them hornier (not a big deal, mostly) and baby-crazier (a huge driver of their otherwise large but not quite so crushing drive to have unreasonable numbers of children). There is much hand-wringing over how to select for mild springs to better the future of the species when this has the perverse effect of supplying children to those who want them least.

Huh!

Okay, she tentatively approves of the mild-springs charity. She's still not happy about eugenics boards, though. 

She keeps an eye on the time until the appointment. 

Kamuor has collected her bag and is ready to usher Rhonda out the door as soon as she looks up from her everything!

Cool. Rhonda allows herself to be ushered. 

They go on the subway. There's a nicer car in front; they use that one. They go two stops and go up and take an elevator up and check in with a security desk and then continue more up.

Rhonda and McElroy look perfectly serene and do not gawk at all. 

Still, Rhonda has to appreciate the sheer height of the skyline. 

It's super tall!

They go to the fortieth floor and get off the elevator and go in to Kamuor's great aunt's office. Said great aunt says, "Close the door." Kamuor does so.

"This is my aunt Delin Yanusho," says Kamuor. "Auntie, these are Rhonda Wallace and James McElroy."

"And you're under the impression they're aliens," says Delin.

She turns her hair black again and replaces her clothes with an array of chitin plates that cover all the relevant areas for a moment before swapping back to her Earth-style clothes. 

"- ah. Is that what you normally look like?"

"Yep," she says. "I'm as surprised that we seem to be mutually low-budget as you are." 

"How did you come to Amenta?"

"I'm familiar with--two other kinds of aliens, who give humans powers in an attempt to wage war by proxy. I was dealing with someone who was using his powers to hurt people, when it turned out one of his followers also had powers and sent me here." 

"I see. So it isn't reproducible."

"Not as such, but my own power is nothing to sneeze at either. Anything under my dominion, I can change nigh-arbitrarily. A building I own, I can create pocket dimensions inside; a person who swears fealty to me, I can physically alter them--make them younger, cure incurable illnesses. If I have sex with someone sworn to me, they get a magic tattoo and powers of their own. I don't know why it works like that, and the powers tend to be lesser in magnitude than the powers the aliens give out, but..."

"Lesser in magnitude like...?"

"Turning into other people, receptive empathy, absolute polyglottism, copying the skills of one person at a time..."

"Hunh. Interesting. How does the - fealty part of the swearing fealty to you operate?"

"I can make them do things. Back home, there were three kinds of people who swore to me--those who trusted me utterly, those who were desperate, and criminals for whom it was an alternative to the death sentence." 

"No one was just in it for the superpowers or the youth?"

"I refused to accept the fealty of those I didn't believe took things seriously enough. Those who were very old and wanted to live I count among the desperate." 

"What did you usually - do with them?"

"Expanded my influence. Interfaced with other organizations involving people with powers. Took down people who were abusing their powers. Enforced good behavior in my territory." 

Delin nods. "Do you think your presence here might attract attention from any other aliens?"

"I don't know. --This is hearsay but the hearsay is relatively consistent; if aliens do show up and start offering people powers, the ones that pretend to look like you are less trustworthy than the ones that look openly alien." 

Delin looks at her.

"--Okay I realize how that sounded but that's not what I meant, the kind of aliens I mean show up, offer to make a deal with you and then leave. I'm going to have to stick around and be accountable enough for my actions that nobody's sufficiently motivated to figure out how to assassinate me at the very least." 

"All right. And there's a kind that look overtly alien? Do those also make deals?"

"I'm less sure. There are fewer people who've gotten their powers from them than from the other side, and I wasn't exactly in a position to interrogate either of the people I met who got their powers from them." 

"Why's that?"

"Why do they give fewer people powers or why wasn't I in a position to interrogate their beneficiaries?"

"Both, but I was more optimistic you'd know the latter."

"Well, Hiroko was the leader of a major governmental agency, and Kanimir was at first under the thumb of Lia Malolu and later recovering from same, and then Hiroko scooped him up to come work for her agency." 

"Who are these people?"

"Hiroku Tokugawa is the three-hundred-year-old leader of the Grey Sector, a government agency for dealing with people with powers. Lia Malolu is--was--a powered person who had the ability to control other people with powers, but only if they set foot on the island she was born on. Kanimir Kozlov is someone who functions essentially as a human supercomputer." 

"I see. I'd ask more about them but they seem less than immediately relevant. What are your interests here?"

"It's difficult for me to identify specific interests relative to the local political climate because I haven't had very much opportunity to assess the local political climate, but in general what I do is I use my power to leverage people into dealing in good faith with one another, and in general promoting positive-sum interactions and the wellbeing of everyone I can reach. So far my only specific goal here is to amass enough of a power base to make Tapa cut it out on the killing babies front; but that's because they're the main problem I've identified, not because I expect it to be objectively high-priority once I have a better handle on the local situation." 

"That's a priority everyone but Tapa will appreciate," Delin assures her. "How does the leveraging people into good faith work?"

"The way I started out, the first time, was that there was a local business interest that was providing low-quality products and using unethical tactics to get people involved with them, and what I did was I used my power to provide higher-quality alternatives and protect myself and my allies from their retribution until I had managed to completely outcompete them. And then I identified business practices that companies use to maximise profits at the expense of consumer welfare and flatly forbade anyone in my employ from using any of them." 

"So less of a diplomacy-directed practice than I was imagining, all right."

"I grew up in a rough neighborhood; my planet doesn't have a caste system but if we did I'd definitely be purple, not blue. Diplomacy wasn't a priority in my education." 

"Kamuor mentioned something about space-folding?"

"Yes. Any space I own I can make arbitrarily bigger on the inside." 

"- arbitrarily to what scale?"

"Well, I've never had reason to try to fold space more densely than about a city's worth to a room, but I haven't run into any limits." 

"Would it persist if you died? I don't have any reason to expect anyone to wish you harm, I merely imagined a city's worth of inhabitants and their possessions suddenly crammed into the space of a room..."

"I...can't say for sure, never having died, but I think it would persist." 

"Most people don't own their homes," Delin explains. "Landowning is blue. It's not more planets, but it's meaningfully quite a lot more space, if you don't run into limits on what ratios you can accomplish or how much of your attention it takes..."

"Changing things takes attention but once they're changed they stay like that until I change them back." 

"Does the amount of attention depend on the scale of the change? Does it take longer to turn a room into a city than into a block?"

"Not exactly--it depends more on the level of detail than the size of the result; I have to imagine a change but once I've got it put together enacting it is simply a force of will." 

"That makes sense. I'm sure there are many applications of your abilities, that's just the one likely to be of the greatest interest to the most people."

"Yes, I'm getting that impression. My species' reproductive drive is much smaller than yours; we like babies but for the most part we don't desperately want them. Evolution hasn't caught up to reliable birth control yet." 

"How interesting, we weren't expecting everyone to have castes but we were expecting everyone to want babies at least as much as us..."

"Sex being fun did the job fine up until a few decades ago." 

"Do you not have sideways people?" Kamuor asks.

"Oh, sure, but there was still social pressure to marry and produce heirs."

"I'm sure a lot of greens would be thrilled to interview you about that and a dozen other topics to do with your homeworld," remarks Delin. "How do you feel about publicity - pacing, scope, content."

"I will be irked if I find out I have been used to push an agenda I wasn't consulted on. I would prefer not to become public knowledge until I have enough of an understanding of how things work here that I can be sure to avoid saying 'I'm pretty sure soap isn't a caste' to someone who'll take it less well, but I'm alright with being made known to and working with people who can be trusted not to immediately--ah, post me to their favorite social media accounts--in the meanwhile." 

"Anyone affiliating with you will have darha up to their eyebrows; that will tend to push any agenda they so much as nod at," Delin points out. ("Darha" does not translate neatly.)

"'Darha' doesn't translate neatly," she reports, "but I think I get what you're saying. I understand that; it's why I tried to get as much information on you as I could before I agreed to meet you. I don't expect to vet every pet cause anyone I work with ever has, but I expect that my image will not be explicitly affiliated with anything I didn't agree to and that you won't deliberately choose greens who are likely to nod at agendas you expect me to dislike. Or if they're brilliant enough to be worth it you'll warn me." 

"- In credit countries the way you get children is money," says Delin. "In permission countries the way you get children - at the blue and green and sometimes yellow level of competition, anyway - is called 'darha'. It's no single thing. At any rate, I don't think it will be hard to avoid announcing your nonexistent endorsement of a plan to reform occupational licensing or what have you."

"Good. --Although being from a casteless society you can probably assume I'm biased in favor of dual-casteing things and other policies that introduce flexibility to the system." 

"It wasn't actually obvious if casteing would look like a good idea to people who hadn't invented it," says Delin, "but good to know."

"From where I'm standing it looks unnecessarily restrictive. I'm sure it has benefits that aren't obvious to me, and even if it were the case that an absence of castes was objectively better that doesn't mean attempting to rip them out from everyone would be a good idea, so I'm not going to meddle with it, but it's something I'm just as glad not to have grown up with." 

"All right. I do think it might be useful for you to generally present yourself as though blue, with the understanding that if that's ever inconvenient it won't limit you because really you're an alien."

"Yes, that seems wise, at least as a starting point." 

"I'm going to finesse getting you a legal Calador identity so you'll be able to own property here; do you have in mind a way to spell your name, any other facts that would go with that..."

She confers briefly with McElroy and produces a spelling of her name; she gives her age: "Twenty-eight and a bit years, but I don't know if our years and yours are the same length." 

"They might not be, though I assume you needn't look your age..."

"I look only slightly younger than I am. I was--basically an adult but not very good at it yet at sixteen?" 

"If the aging rates are the same which we also don't know and have no reason to expect, that'd suggest our years are longer by a factor of four."

"Well, when I've been here a few days I can guess how much if at all my sleep cycle is off by and once I have an idea of the comparative lengths of our days I can see how many there are in a year." 

"Anyway, I'll put down that you're seven."

"That sounds a little weird to my ears but is probably about right, developmentally speaking." 

"Anything else?"

"My instinct is to give you my demographic information but but I don't fit into any of yours and you wouldn't have context for any of mine." 

"All right. I'm going to pass you off as a cousin of mine, for now."

"Do I need to memorize any genealogical information for that?" 

"It shouldn't come up."

"Alright then." 

"Is staying with Kamuor for the time being workable for you? I could find other accommodations but it would increase the risk of someone noticing you who hasn't already."

"I'm fine with it if Kamuor is." 

Kamuor nods. Delin smiles. "Next steps, it seems to me," says Delin, "are that I find you a house - I assume you can customize the house however you like but might have preferences about the location?"

"Accurate, although I confess I don't know enough about the local--everything--to have particularly fine-grained location preferences." 

"Near transit, near particular businesses or types of neighborhoods... I don't have quite the sphere I'd need to have a lot of choices on the weather..."

"Weather doesn't bother me too much, near transit is good, near businesses is good if they're businesses I can't trivially replace with creating objects inside the house or altering my own appearance, and I would normally have opinions about types of neighborhoods but a lot of that had to do with the cultural context of how I fit in to society that doesn't apply here." 

"All right. Near the subway and predominantly yellow offices in case you need accountants or additional translators or what have you. House, legal identity, and filtering my network for discreet people to learn more about you and your powers and how they can be best used. Sound good?"

"Sounds excellent." 

"All right. I'll have that sorted in the next few days. Kamuor can take you home."

"Alright," she says, and nods to Kamuor. 

And Kamuor takes her two subway stops home and pays her cook and guard some hush money and shows Rhonda to a guest room.

Rhonda thanks Kamuor and flops down on the bed and takes out her everything and tries to see if they have something vaguely like wikipedia. 

They do, it's called Summary Bank.

Cool she's just gonna semi-aimlessly wikiwalk for a while. And then go back to the language-learning app, because bleah. 

Summary Bank is suited for wiki-walking and she can learn things about hair dye and the time zone system and fishing regulations and hypersensitivity and the effects of lineality on immigration.

Hypersensitivity is definitely a "hoo boy" kinda subject. She is so glad she glossed over a buncha things about her world. If anyone asks her about San Francisco she's gonna have to lie so hard but fortunately she can't imagine that coming up. Meanwhile she's going to have to figure out a fake decontamination procedure other than "you just take a normal shower, seriously, dead bodies are not objectively that gross;" she feels like that wouldn't impress them much. Maybe she can say they have the same thing but with different soaps and no she doesn't know anything about what the soaps are made of she could just clean things directly. That'd make sense.

Bleeeaaah. This pollution instinct stuff is dumb. On...the other hand...the middle ages on Earth. So it's got some stuff going for it. 

She keeps doing her language-learning app until she gets tired of it and then decides to compromise by listening to local music with lyrics. 

There is local music with lyrics! Lots of it! There's ads mixed in.

Well, par for the course. What can she figure out about what the ads are selling? 

Shampoo, foot massages, vouchers to try five different sex workers of your choice from this particular business and get an extra booking with your favorite for free, fluffy towels, tropical cruises.

Prostitution is legal here? 

Yup! Looks like that's the case all over the planet. It's gray or orange depending on the country. If she looks, indistinguishable numbers of male and female prostitutes are available.

Huh! What about drugs? 

They have those. The ones that are actually illegal are the ones that are especially easy to die on or that have some kind of political issue with their import or that make people behave in criminal ways; if you just want to get high, you can find a way to do that almost anywhere. Some countries screen for addiction as a eugenics measure.

Huh. Easy to die on like tobacco or easy to die on like your trip lasts too long and you dehydrate? 

The latter (also things people are often allergic to or that are hard to dose). Mostly they seem to solve things in the class of tobacco with aggressive taxation for the externalities and the cost to their health systems.

Sounds valid...what do they have for organized crime? 

They mostly don't seem to treat it as a special category.

Well, she was planning to be more aboveboard here anyway. She idly skims through the drugs banned for political reasons, but she mostly invents her own drugs anyway so it doesn't seem super important. 

This one was subject to an import problem that also affected molybdenum and eyeshadow, and some people had withdrawal, and tried to pressure the government to make concessions necessary to reopen trade, and that backfired; this one in its therapeutic applications was involved with some sketchy medical practices and got expensive suddenly when it was taken off the therapeutic market and then its addicts started committing crimes and it was banned outright for a five year term while law enforcement dealt with that; this one was a favorite of illegal immigrants but unpopular domestically, and making it illegal made it easier to track down the illegal immigrants.

...Making it illegal when its addicts started committing crimes worked???

Well, since it had been legal before that, most of the people selling it were law-abiding types who removed it from the shelves and most of the rest were willing to turn in their customers after taking some government money about it.

...And this didn't cause a huge black market for it or anything. Okay. She...can see how that might work, if governments were actually sensible instead of treating drug addicts like lepers...

(It's still weird.)

What kinds of processes do countries have for making drugs legal to distribute? 

Typically: You need to do both animal testing and have a computer model of how you expect it to work on Amentans, then you need to test it on some number of people (the numbers vary depending on the cost/benefit analysis, plus nationally), then you can test it with fewer restrictions on a larger number, then you can have it available for sale. Most countries have reciprocity agreements, occasionally with a delay in case a drug takes a couple years to turn up an obscure problem.

...Do they have any kind of controversy over animal testing? 

Some people think it doesn't work very well and they should be testing more things on reds instead. A country called Doet in fact does that instead.

Okay! Not the answer she was expecting! Fuck! Man, she is gonna have her work cut out for her on this reds thing. 

...She hesitates over doing more research on the reds thing, then decides it can wait until she has a place she can soundproof for when she inevitably has a fit over how they're treated. 

What unsolved medical problems do Amentans have, let's try that instead. 

Some people have sensitive hormonal systems and can be thrown into unseasonable spring if they travel for even just a few days or spend too much time underground. They have old age and diseases thereof. There are assorted infectious diseases which they can treat more or less well and have very aggressive policies against doing anything to spread. They don't know how to repair all possible injury damage. Some people have mental health problems. Apparently Amentans don't have fixed skin tones and don't normally sunburn; instead they "brown" and people who don't brown right get a lot of cancer. They don't have a cure for cancer, though they're decent at treating it. The eugenics boards helpfully supply lists of hundreds of conditions you aren't allowed to reproduce if you have and hundreds more you need to screen your embryos for if you carry.

She doesn't have a problem with screening embryos but man, fuck eugenics boards. 

The browning thing is sorta interesting, she indulges in a handful of seconds of fantasizing about Amenta making contact with Earth in a way that super freaked out a buncha racists. 

Do people who don't brown right get more skin cancer than white people? Do they not have sunscreen? 

People who don't brown have an albino-like cancer rate, correlated similarly with how religiously they use sunscreen. Some people are stuck permanently brown, which isn't a big deal at all unless you're an actor or a model or really want to emulate certain fashions which require particular skin tones.

Heh, interesting. 

Well. She can fix arbitrary things, or for that matter replace all of someone's melanin with chlorophyll so they get calories instead of cancer, or...but that only works for people who are hers, or who live somewhere that's hers and don't leave. She makes a note to talk to some pharmaceuticals people, because if she makes a chemical and someone analyzes it, that scales independently of her. 

She makes a challenge to herself of making notes of things to do with her powers in Oahkar, consulting McElroy for vocabulary the app doesn't wanna give her yet, then goes back to playing with the language-learning app for a while, then decides to write up a partial dictionary with all her vocabulary in Oahkar so far with English translations for anyone who wants to learn English, then goes back to looking things up. How is this society stratified, aside from "castes: exist"

Castes exist a lot. Credit countries have pretty low wealth inequality because if you have extra cash beyond yea much you just dump it all immediately into child credits - people with higher incomes do also have nicer houses but they don't have six nicer houses and a boat for no reason, they just put pictures of themselves surrounded by their six or ten children up on their website to brag instead. Class is much more of a thing in permissions countries and much much more of a thing in two-per countries, where there's a substantial cultural gulf between purples who've been farmers for a hundred years and purples who go to fancy engineering schools to design the next generation of bubble wrap. Nepotism, particularly in blues, seems expected. There is a fair amount of intercaste bickering about emerging fields; apparently yellows won computers a while ago and got a population boom to go with it, which is why people make jokes about yellows all looking the same.

...Hm. She has a lot of feelings about all this but they're sorta murky and mixed-up and she doesn't super have a solution to any of this. But it's good to know. 

She spends a bunch more time randomly wikiwalking. 

Yvaltan theatrical traditions, moon colonies (there are several moons, and several colonies), vertical gardening, train schedule timing, end-of-spring pet euthanasia, artisanal coffee, crackpots who think oysters can predict the future!

Several moons! Neat! Oyster crackpots! Amusing in a way comparable to astrology!

Pet euthanasia! Eurgh! Do they...not have a concept that you shouldn't have a pet if you're going to lose interest like that...

The opinion exists but it's widely considered silly and not very compassionate to people who need something to hold to get through spring.

What about being compassionate to the poor animals. 

...Do they have vegetarians? 

Some people can't eat meat for health reasons and ethical vegetarianism has been invented but is super fringe.

Hmm. What about environmentalism. 

People care about air and water quality, and about resource extraction sustainability, and there's some handwringing about how you can't actually replace a natural place and this should be priced in when people are talking about developing on places that aren't bringing in that much in tourist revenue (or can't take much tourist traffic without getting less nice) but certainly will never bring in any tourist revenue if turned into paper mills. Some biologists try to catalog and get genomes of things before they are all dead. But otherwise no.

Yeesh. At least her poor abused planet has people who care about it for its own sake. Although she supposes she isn't sure that caring about air and water quality doesn't do more actual good on net. 

This is all so unfamiliar. She's going to feel much better when she at least has a place she can properly use again. 

Delin doesn't offer her the title to a house that night.

Naturally. Anyway, she can cope alright in the meanwhile; she's still objectively much better off than when she was sixteen and hadn't gotten her power yet, and she managed to be okay then. She just needs time to adjust. 

She doesn't hole up in her guest room; she comes out and socializes with Kamuor at no worse than introvert time intervals, and she eats, but she spends all the rest of her time cramming as much language and culture into her head as possible, one way or another, switching between tasks as needed. 

Kamuor's cook feeds her three meals a day and seems too nervous to talk to her; Kamuor herself takes time off from work to be available.

Delin says she has a house picked out the following afternoon, would Rhonda like to look at the pictures?

Sure! 

(Rhonda doesn't super care about the pictures, she's hardly picky especially right now, but coming off as desperate would be a bad move and she certainly doesn't object to looking at pictures.)

Here are pictures of a nice house; it's freestanding, though it's still quite close to the neighboring houses, and it's across the street from a subway station entrance and the next block has a bunch of yellow businesses.

Perfect. 

Then Delin will get underway on buying it for her! That will take a day or two to own outright as opposed to just having permission to move in.

Waiting that long is no trouble at all, especially with as much language study as she still needs to do. 

She gets a legal identity; she should memorize this long number.

--Okay! She can do that! Why is she doing that. 

Because that's the number associated with her legal identity and might come up.

Shrug. Okay. She adds repeating the number to herself in Oahkar into her cycling list of ways to practice the language without getting too bored. 

And then she is provided with a house!

Cool. Do Delin and/or Kamuor want to come see what her power can do when she has more than her own body and clothes to apply it to?

Kamuor will come check it out and take video!

Excellent. 

She visibly relaxes once she steps inside, and then grins and picks a shallowish closet and opens it to confirm there isn't anything in there anyone'll mind losing convenient access to, and then closes the door and opens it again. 

This time it does not open out into a closet. 

This time it opens out onto what can be presumed to be a mountainside. A few meters away is a train station, with tracks leading down the mountain to a city in the center of what appears to be a bowl-shaped valley surrounded by mountains of varying colors of granite that sparkle gloriously in the morning sun. The city itself can be presumed to have steel-and-concrete cores like every other city made of skyscrapers, but the exteriors demonstrate a complete lack of material constraints. Most of the buildings are covered with vertical gardens, but where the plants peek away marble and lapis lazuli and porphyry show through, the exact stone chosen to complement the building's gardens' contents. The gardens themselves are filled with plants native to both Amenta and Earth, with a few she came up with herself thrown in for the heck of it. 

Kamuor gasps in undisguised wonder.

"Wanna go see the city up closer?" 

"I would love to. You had to design all this, right?"

"Yeah. I cribbed some of it from previous designs and some of it from stuff I read about vertical gardens and I did the rest in between language lessons over the last couple days." 

"Is it, you know, structurally sound and all -"

"Oh, yeah, I've been studying engineering since I was--four--so I could make stuff that would work." 

"It's gorgeous. It's so big."

"I can probably do bigger, this is just the best I could do on a few days' notice." 

"You could be the best thing that's ever happened to the planet."

"Sounds about right for the scope of my ambitions." 

"Can it all be - conventionally interacted with? Or do you need to authorize any changes, if someone were renting a place and wanted to replace their fridge... I guess the bottleneck at the closet door could get to be a pretty big deal if you were trying not to do it all yourself."

"I could probably rig something up with connecting the train systems, eventually. It can all be interacted with but if I make something out of whole cloth if it's taken out of my territory in its original form it'll stop existing. So if I make a fridge and someone hauls it out the front door it'll disappear, but if someone eats a piece of fruit I made it won't disappear out of their stomach. Bringing stuff in is fine. I can make stuff act weirdly but if I don't specify otherwise it'll obey the laws of physics." 

"Oh, if you can hook up to the train then there won't be a bottleneck to speak of. - Oh, except I guess reds don't take the train. Maybe you can make stuff act weirdly so you don't need any in here?"

"I probably could. I did back home, but of course I wasn't hosting nearly so many people there." 

"Does that make it harder?"

"I've never had someone die in one before." 

"They're trialing a system in Orvara where they have purples and oranges handle red stuff on careful rotations wearing a ton of plastic, so they don't build up too much pollution."

"Pity they couldn't have come up with that in the first place before any of those poor people got so badly contaminated in the first place, back when your caste system was getting started." 

"Plastic hadn't been invented then. Or really scalable water treatment either, I think."

"It's still unconscionable to turn a people into that." 

"I haven't really studied, uh, the history of reds, so I'm not sure what the other options might have been."

"I can see why you wouldn't wanna, but I can maybe do something about it, so I hafta." 

"- what would you do about it?"

"Magic. I can turn anything into anything else, as long as it's in my domain. I can't make it stick unless they swear to me, but if I'm gonna have people living in my pocket dimensions anyway..."

"I mean, the people in your pocket dimensions are going to want to come and go."

"I'm not going to force anyone into anything. But I don't think it would hurt anyone to offer the option to be clean in a pocket dimension they couldn't leave instead of red in a ghetto they couldn't leave."

"- you're talking about moving reds in there? We need them, though, they do essential services."

"Orvara." 

"Yes, but we don't have that process set up here! And some people are making noises about restricting imports from Orvara."

"I'm not suggesting starting anything now. But if things turn out a certain way, it'll be good to already have thought about what to do." 

"I suppose it's silly to think about it being a waste of space if you can make this much space this fast..."

"I could do faster if I needed to." 

"And probably you could keep them from bothering people too. I guess that would probably make transitioning to the Orvaran system simpler."

"I'm really not impressed with the part where they turned them loose to touch arbitrary wilderness." 

"I think the idea is the natural processes in the wilderness will take care of it, but yes, it's not the most palatable idea and I'm not sure why they didn't just kill them instead."

"Well, I'm sure they will eventually, but people can survive in the wilderness for a while." 

"I suppose," says Kamuor dubiously.

"I guess I don't know if that's as true of Amentans as my species," she amends. 

"Well, reds aren't very smart and aren't used to running around in the woods."

Shrug. "I don't know, I just don't like the situation." 

"Yeah, I hear you. Gosh, I am not used to thinking of things like - this much space, and all the stuff in here - as being basically free resources..."

"I think I got the very best of all the powers they were handing out." 

"Is this one of the things where everyone thinks that?"

"I think Kanimir does, but I can sorta see his point, his brain got souped up in a way I've hesitated to experiment with...Lia Malolu was really dissatisfied with her power but she was sorta fundamentally dissatisfied as a person...I know Hiroko likes her power but I don't know what she thinks of it in comparison with other powers...I dunno, people seem to mostly like them but I think at least some of them woulda picked a different one if they could pick."

Kamuor nods, still taking in the scenery of the valley city.

"Of course, a lot of them were abusing their powers flagrantly and I wasn't exactly stopping to chat about their opinions." 

"What were they doing?"

"A surprising number of the powers involved controlling other people and a disappointing number of the people who were granted powers used it to accumulate brainwashed sex slaves and money." 

"I guess that's the first place somebody'd go if they didn't want any kids and weren't very creative."

"Some of them were more creative. There was this one woman who could copy herself over onto other people temporarily--the copy would have her personality and appearance but the original's memories, I dunno all of what she did before Hiroko recruited her but I did get this one anecdote out of her about using her power to collect evidence on this--uh, I don't think you have the relevant social structure but this group of rich kids who had been getting away with stuff because of their connections." 

"That happens sometimes, yeah."

"Anyway she copied herself over them, which she could get close enough to do because she was hot, and used their memories to collect enough evidence that they couldn't just make it go away." 

"I guess that'd work, if you knew who it was. What were they doing?"

"Uh, inviting girls to parties, getting them drunk and taking advantage of them if I recall correctly."  

"Girls in particular?"

"Yeah, it was a gender-specific group and I think statistically speaking most people aren't sideways." 

"Oh, here either, but why was it a gender-specific group?"

"Oh, a bunch of things are arbitrarily sex-segregated for weird historical reasons." 

"Huh. Including crime! Huh."

"When it's sex crime, yeah. The thing is that we're fertile all year round, not just in spring, so making it so men and women had fewer excuses to be alone together cut down on reproductive infidelity." 

"Oh, that's interesting, and must be so distracting."

"From what I've found we generally feel more like Amentans do outside of spring than in spring, I think that level of--intensity--would be disadvantageous as the default." 

"Oh, it is, that's why there's all that uninhabited tropical and arctic territory. Calado has some tropics, at some point they might try giving them to you and seeing if you can fix that."

"I think I should be able to season pocket dimensions but I don't know if I can do outdoors as well; it might depend on what cues your bodies are taking." 

"I know it's not something simple like temperature or it would have been sorted out ages ago."

"It might have something to do with light, humans get more depressed during winter sometimes but artificial sunlight helps." 

"That might be it but it's nothing we can solve with lamps, I think the greens would have solved that."

"Well, I can tell my pocket dimensions to behave exactly like each of the seasons in succession, but I can't do much about the sun in places where the sun is real." 

"It'd also work if you had to pave the place and cover it in buildings, as-is that won't even work."

"True...enough, although I'm sort of reluctant to destroy irreplaceable biodiversity to put in physical buildings when I could instead just install pocket dimensions." 

"Maybe all pocket dimensions is the way to go," acknowledges Kamuor. "I think they'd probably have the greens bag some of everything and sequence it first?"

"Back on my home planet we're dealing with some unintended side-effects of damaging the ecology so my instincts there are pretty conservatively calibrated." 

"Oh no, what happened?"

"We cleared out a bunch of plants we thought we didn't need and it turned out they were cleaning some chemicals out of the atmosphere and now the chemicals are magnifying the sun's rays and the planet is getting warmer and the polar ice caps are melting and the sea level is rising." 

"That does sound like a problem. There's not a non-plant-based fix?"

"Not an efficient one. We're trying to put the plants back but it's logistically complicated." 

"Well, I hope it works out all right."

"Me too. Not that I'm likely to find out." 

"I hope we can figure out a way to contact your planet eventually."

"That'd be nice. But it's not my highest priority."

"What is?"

"Fixing this planet. See--the incident that got me sent here forked me first, so there's also one'a me back home dealing with Earth. She handles that planet, I handle this one, it's all very tidy." 

"Oh! How do you know, are you in contact with her?"

"No. I guess it's possible she also got zapped, but the forking happened like half an hour before the sending, it was kind of an extended crisis. But I'm pretty sure that once she saw what happened to me my fork could squish the sender pretty easily; we were on property I owned at the time. I was taken by surprise." 

"Who forked you?"

"This guy the zapper-person was working for." 

"Why? That seems like a weird thing to do to an opponent."

"I'm not sure he knew exactly what was going on, things were pretty chaotic at that point." 

"Oh. Well, at least you don't have to worry about how your family and so on is getting by at home."

"Yeah, I'd be a lot more freaked out if I had to worry about how things were going without me." 

"I suppose I thought I didn't have a good idea of how to assess how freaked out you might be since you're an alien."

"And I would have been hiding it anyway, people who are freaking out can be more dangerous and I wouldn't wanna scare you." 

"I appreciate that."

"Being conscious of--who has power over who in what ways--has been an important skill in my life." 

"Does it come into play with your power, or is whether you own something either-or?"

"Whether I own something is a binary yes or no, yeah, although I can co-own something with someone else and it still counts as yes--no, it's important because I was born a--you don't have the relevant cultural category or anything comparable that I've found but my ancestors were slaves and we sorta never caught up--in a poor neighborhood and had to watch out for myself and then when I got my powers I had to be super careful to not take advantage of anyone." 

"I guess they'd make it pretty easy to take advantage."

"Do they ever. Not to mention that I ended up slotting into some pre-existing power structures that were created by people who were very much the taking-advantage type and had to manually dismantle a whole buncha pieces that enabled that without tearing the whole thing down around me." 

"Hm?"

"A lot of the historical context doesn't exist on Amenta, how thorough an explanation do you want?" 

"Oh, I suppose it doesn't matter practically, it just sounded interesting."

"I think it's pretty interesting but only if it makes sense, which it sorta doesn't without the background." 

"There's lots of city to see yet, if you don't mind giving context."

"I don't mind! So about a hundred years ago, some people did research and discovered that alcohol use correlated strongly with spousal abuse, and started a movement to get people to stop drinking alcohol. Eventually that movement acquired enough political power that they managed to make alcohol illegal. Alcohol being an extremely popular drug, this did not especially work. Huge black market organizations sprang up around making, buying and selling various alcoholic beverages. Eventually the government noticed that this law was extremely not working and reversed it, but by then the criminal organizations were large and powerful enough to be a separate problem. They ended up branching out into other crime, like other illegal drugs and paid violence and coerced sex work, and the demand for any one of these things was much much smaller than the demand for alcohol but they had managed to get into so many things that it was all but impossible to stamp them out. 

"I got my powers when I was four-equivalent, and I didn't have a lot of ways to apply them, but one thing I could do was create safe, non-addictive drugs and personally administer them. This was not strictly legal but mostly because the law had not been written to take powers like mine into account. Well, the local organized crime group found out, and decided to recruit me by force. I declined to allow this, mostly by being very hard to kill or keep captive--I have carbon nanofiber mesh under my epidermis, and I can turn my fingers into bolt cutters if I want. It's not especially comfortable, but needs must. Once it became clear they couldn't keep me, they tried to kill me. After the first failed attempt on my life it became clear that I couldn't just wait for this problem to go away, so I found the apartment of a guy in the gang, broke in, sedated him when he got home, tied him up, and injected him with inhibition-lowering drugs until I could get him to give me the name and location of the guy next up the ladder from him, went there, and did the same to him. Rinse and repeat until I had the location of the guy who was ultimately in charge. He was trickier--he had much better security, for one thing--but they didn't know I could change as comprehensively as I could, so I found out what the guy's girlfriend looked like, turned into a perfect copy of her, and managed to get through the guards that way. I...killed him. I'm not proud of that part, but he had been trying to have me killed for weeks, so I'm not especially ashamed of it either. I left a message making it very clear what had happened and who was responsible. 

"I thought that was going to be the end of it, but...well, I had sorta incidentally terrified the hell out of these people, and there was a power vacuum, and...they...sorta put me in charge. At which point I threw up my hands and went 'fine' and made them cut it out with the coerced prostitution and violence and the predatory marketing tactics on the drugs." 

"That's a really strange way to wind up in charge of something!"