"Well, I wasn't actually thinking of deserts," Tateneka admits. "Does your world have other worlds in the sky too? We think the two nearest other worlds could be places to live, if we figure out how to change the places or ourselves. The further-out close world is like a big, cold desert. Neither of them have magical beasts."

Other worlds in the sky...

"Planets?" Another word that he's surprised he needs. "Other large, spherical bodies that are orbiting the Sun?"

And they have one that's like a big, cold desert. "Maybe? I'm not sure how sustainable it'd be, though."

"Planets!" she repeats, mentally adding it to her vocabulary. "And it would definitely be very challenging. It is a far, far future wish, not something to do right now. But many people would feel good about knowing that if something bad happened to this planet, there were people on other ones."

She shakes her head.

"Anyway, that is not really most important to talk about. That is just one reason that we would quite like magic. Can you tell me, you said the Kings were killed in a rebellion — that sounds like it would have been a lot of change. How are your governments organized now?"

Tsarer nods along to the explanation. He supposes if they can get things from their planet's surface to orbit, then going to other planets is a natural next step.

"Well, I don't know much how all the Coalition's member states organize their things. I know they all send a representative to the Coalition oversight council, but I don't really know much about the specifics of that either, really. In the Federation, we have a bunch of municipal administrations for cities and special interest regions, which are all grouped up into a handful of provinces with legislatures to draft laws, charter executive organizations, and whatnot, and then there's the federal legislature, which does the same stuff but for the whole Federation, though the main executive organization they charter is the military."

Tateneka looks puzzled.

"I'm not sure about 'military' or 'Federation' either. Sorry," she remarks. "I tried to learn as much as I could. I'm sure we'll be able to speak better after looking at your books."

"It's okay, I didn't exactly have a plan for communicating all my vocabulary to people from another world." He's pretty confident he knows people who do have plans for that kind of thing, even if only for fun, and he feels a bit guilty for not participating at least a bit himself now. "A military is an organization of people who are trained to use various weapons and to fight in various ways. Ours mostly helps enforce the laws, and makes sure that the Coalition doesn't think they could just march there's over and take everything. The Federation is the country I live in, and it was founded by the army that slew the High King at the end of the rebellion, along with the various castellans that the High King and their vassal Kings delegated the management of their human farms to and some of the freeman bands that had been struggling along in the Interior. They all got together, and after a couple years of hashing things out they wrote the Federal Treaty and then went up and down the coast and had the leaders of every community they could find agree to it, and to sign the Treaty as proof. The original copy's in a museum back in the city, and it's quite a sight with how long it is."

...

"Oh, because magic is good at manipulating the environment, so you can't just salt the fields and burn your infrastructure if they try to take them!" she concludes. "That's sad. I'm sorry you have to spend so much effort on a contingency because of something that is otherwise good."

"That treaty sounds kind of similar to how we organize things," she continues. "Our cities are all in various agreements with each other. The group I work for ..."

She trails off, seeing the look on his face.

He's a little surprised that the first thing that came to mind for her is burning everything down and salting the ashes, which probably leaves a lingering twinge of confusion and concern on his eyebrows and lips when she checks.

When he notice her looking, it occurs to him to school his expression (or at least, attempt to). "It's unfortunate, I suppose. It's hard to not see them as just part of how the world works, though."

She nods in commiseration.

"That makes sense," she agrees. "Ah. In any case, that treaty sounds similar to how we do things. There are a bunch of different treaties for different things, but your island ended up near the loose group of Larger Continent treaties. I usually work in Smaller Continent, but I was in Last Stop Before the Ocean City — not far west and south of here — for a treaty meeting."

Interesting. "What was it about? The federal legislature has a yearly meeting around mid-spring to decide on yearly budget changes and to renew charters that are about to expire, but other than that they usually only gather together in the federal building if one of the legislators is making a big proposal."

"This one was about anti-taxing parent-friendly cities. Some cities make it easier to have children in various ways, and the people born there tend to move to other cities. But government programs always have a cost, and cities do actually need people to maintain their infrastructure and so on. So it wouldn't be fair for the cities that make it harder to have children to benefit from the cities that pay to make it easier. But you also can't just tax people moving between cities because of various free-movement agreements. And collectively, we don't want a situation where every city feels the need to compete to be less child-friendly, because that will eventually drive bad outcomes," she explains.

"So right now this is handled by some general regional agreements, with the rest mediated by long-term infrastructure insurance. That insurance isn't going away, because cities need it for planning purposes, but the hope is that by coming to a global consensus on a framework for anti-taxing parent-friendly cities, less-parent-friendly cities will be able to pay money directly to more-parent-friendly cities while also bringing down their insurance premiums. That means more money being spent directly on making places that are better for people to live, and less money being spent on planning for the contingency where the birth rate starts dropping over the next few twelve-year periods."

"But with all the cities involved, everyone has opinions and caveats and things that they want to make sure are required or forbidden. And it's not as urgent a problem as something like recycling standards or judicial cooperation agreements, so the whole process has dragged out for years at this point. At this meeting I was mostly trying to resolve a bunch of concerns around ensuring that the system doesn't incentivize anti-taxing emigration either, which Backs to the Mountain City is particularly worried about."

"Wow, that seems awfully complicated. I guess that's sort of inevitable with how many people you must have with all this extra land, though."

How does the Federation handle this problem? He gets a contemplative look as he considers it. "I guess we also mostly just try and make sure that none of our cities are all that different in terms of how good they are for raising kids. That and if there's a big population shortfall probably the federal legislature would charter some kind of incentive for people to move."

"There are definitely things where we have to standardize like that. But it's generally a good thing to try and give people options about where to live, so it's worth spending time working on," she responds. "I'm not sure you can assume our worlds have the same population density, though. We have about a billion people, worldwide. How many people does your world have?"

"Huh. That's only a little over twice as much as the Federation, if I remember the fact. We have something like 544,195,584 people I think, give or take. Narmjesa as a whole might actually be pretty comparable. Why do-- well, I guess probably the fact that you didn't have any Kings is why you don't live that densely. I guess the real question is, why do you live in cities at all, if you weren't being packed into them by sheer necessity?"

"Cities are convenient! There are things that are easier when you do them in large batches, and if everyone is close together that means you can share more of those kinds of jobs. Like cooking — when you live alone in the country, you need to cook for yourself. When you live in the city, a group of 24 people can all share one big meal, which takes less effort per person to make."

"There are lots of things like that; when you have a large enough community, it sort of forms a feedback loop where the way to improve a bunch of different things is to build denser and denser. We actually have to have laws to make sure our cities don't get too dense, because if they get too dense they get less pleasant to live in. So there are laws about how narrow streets can be, and how much green space there has to be, and so on."

It's a little amusing to think that people need laws to make sure they have green space, rather than trying to make sure people aren't filling every available space with plants that are going to end up breaking through nearby walls, floors, or roofs. Tsarer nods along, but gestures in a vaguely frustrated way at the end. "That all makes sense, that's why we aren't really trying to get rid of our cities. I didn't ask the right question, I think. I want to know about your history. How did you start having cities? The feeling I've gotten from occasionally keeping up with archeology news is that the transition from pre-city nomadic bands to cities was pretty unpleasant, and distinctly prone to reversing until the Kings came around and took people's choice of lifestyle out of their hands."

"Oh! I see. We had an intermediate step between nomadic bands and modern cities," she explains. "Unfortunately, the transition from nomadic bands to the first stationary farming villages predates our written records, so we can't be sure, but we think there was a particularly bad famine that wiped out our ancestor's normal prey animals. So they started investing in stationary farms that needed tending year round in order to secure their food supply against things like that. But the villages they formed were still pretty small — usually 12-144 people — and still did plenty of ranging through the surrounding countryside to hunt and forage. So the transition would have been less of a change."

"Then, having stationary locations allowed our ancestors to invent technologies that need lots of equipment or access to local resources, which in turn gave a reason for steady trade between people living in different areas. The random geography of the land concentrated traders in some locations, and the villages where they stopped got larger in order to cope and offer supplies and services to the traders. Those were the first proto-cities. Eventually, they did become sort of disgusting and terrible, until people established forms of government that work for larger numbers of people and started cleaning them up. At that point, they noticed how the cities were actually producing things more efficiently, and not just acting as trade hubs, and we realized that cities could be more pleasant and efficient."

"But most of our population still lived rurally for a long time, because cities are not as good at producing food, since that takes a lot of space. But having people in cities allowed for the development of schools and universities, which sped up our invention of farming techniques, which made farming more efficient, which let more people move to cities, etc. It formed a cycle that drove things to the point that a single farmer can supply food for hundreds of people, and now a large chunk of our population lives in cities."

He continues to nod along, occasionally humming curiously. "I guess our ancestors turned out more sensitive to that unpleasantness? Or maybe just didn't have enough time to figure out alternative forms of government before the Kings showed up. It's interesting how we still ended up in mostly similar places either way."

That particular curiosity of his has been satisfied, and he's drawing a blank of what more to ask about, so he'll let Tateneka (or anyone else who happens to enter the conversation) take the lead.

Well, Tateneka has an agenda — namely, trying to get latent cultural information out of him, both for ethnographic purposes and to figure out whether it's going to be a problem to just leave him alone on his island if that's really what he wants.

"Could you tell me more about the Coalition and how your argument with them got started?" she requests.

Tsarer scratches his beard as he considers what he knows. "I don't know much about the details, really. I'm not sure there really is a single particular argument with the entire Coalition exactly? It's more like we have problems with a bunch of member states in the Coalition, and the Coalition isn't willing to do anything about it, and the Coalition's biggest member states don't like that the Federation isn't something they can boss around like the rest of the Coalition is." He shrugs. "It's not exactly the most unbiased perspective, though. I don't really get into the political weeds. I work in a nature preserve."

"That's fair!" she agrees with a smile. "Maybe we can talk about that, actually — I know we already checked that you didn't know of any invasive species that we'd need to be particularly aware of, but are there things that the plants here need to stay healthy? If nothing else, we can probably transport samples to a greenhouse in a climate they're more adapted to, to try and preserve any species that react badly to the winter here."

He opens his mouth to start an answer, before remembering that he has notes that he should probably reference first.

After searching around for his notebooks, and then through his notebooks for where he's been keep tracking of yearly atmospheric spirits, weather patterns, and observations of the island's wildlife. "Do you have-- no, you don't have magic. Hm..." He considers for a moment. "But you've got things in orbit. Do you have records of what the weather over this sea-region? We had some winter, but if this area gets lots of snow, or gets cold enough to have seasonal sea-ice, or doesn't ever get much warmer than it is now, those might be problematic."

"We do have records, yes."

She pulls up a graph of historical temperatures in the cold sea region.

"You have the luck to be actually on the ocean, near the north warm current. So it doesn't get as cold as it does on land," she explains. "That line there is where water freezes; the ocean won't freeze here, but when the temperature is below that you might get snow. The water in the sea-air means that snow is typical, but I don't know how much is 'lots'. The highest temperature is about a fourth of the way from water freezing to water boiling, but it stays that temperature for most of summer."

He has more info, and some sketches, for this! He flips to a different section of the notebook he's holding, and produces a few sketches of what a few of the higher up parts of the island look like after the snowfall, as well as statistics on the average depth. It doesn't seem like it consistently gets more than a couple thirty-sixths-of-a-'meter' deep in terms of actual snowfall (though around the steeper slopes the snow can pile up higher as the wind pushes it down). "The lower areas, around the docks, usually don't get much proper snow, more pellets or hail instead of flakes, and maybe about half as much than the higher areas. And, that temperature sounds pretty close to what it usually got to before."

Tateneka frowns, and pulls up some precipitation measurements.

"Having an island here might change the winds," she warns. "But I think you might see half a meter of snow. So more than usual, but not much more than it can drift to. What species do you think will have the hardest time with it, or are most urgently in need of conservation?"