Quickly written in response, "Yes, we want you to give a quick overview of what you believe to be relevant."

He makes a face about their response as he thinks about it for a few seconds, and then sighs.

How about they give him another of those living hats and he can just show them, there's also a question of whether it'll work at all. With the understanding that he's not going to do anything that might hurt the other group without a lot more evidence that it's necessary.

There's a bit more discussion before one of the two green-clad new ones gets up, walks back through the pseudo-curtain of the opened vine-box, and holds out their vine-hat, which is levitated up and over onto the table.

He makes a shallow tub of goopy crafting material and rests the hat on top, then grows it to double its volume and passes it back over to them.

It'll still be alive, he conveys; if it still has the property they care about alive things having, well, he can do other living things that way too, with some caveats.

The familiar five take the hat back and seem to consider it carefully, before levitating it over to the ten other flying people now waiting around the unopened vine-box, who do the same, before sending it back over, with it eventually returning to the green-clad decision-making-person who offered it, now wearing it more like a hooded cloak than a hat.

There's some more discussion before the next message is written. "None of us are eye-power-people, whose abilities are generally much more precise, but we do not power-hear more all-part-power within the expanded hat. The quantity already present has been rarefied across its increased volume. It is good to know that this aspect of crafting does not seem able to supplement living things' accumulation of all-part-power."

That still sounds to him like they might want to worry about the other group suddenly being more able to get people to donate body parts for eating - the caveat is that the donor does have to have the mass to spare, but he can get it into a form that can be removed safely and relatively painlessly - but they'd know more about the details of their thing than he does. He'll get started on the book now if that's all.

There's an odd mixture of fear and relaxation, as well as something like regret or shame, apparent in the faces and postures of the familiar face, and one of the three decision-making-people gives him a sad smile.

After just a few words of discussion, the next message is brief. "That is all. The decision-making-people can remain here to help answer questions you have, or can depart if you want to be alone."

He doesn't strongly care whether they stay or go; he can take notes on his questions if they have other things they'd rather be doing.

He already has a comfy chair; he makes himself a sunshade and a mug of tea before settling in to read.

It appears they don't have other things they'd rather be doing, given they all remain in their own seats.

The information packet's content are organized such it starts with the earliest information and proceeds through time from there.

Thus, it begins with archeology. The oldest evidence of human existence in the world lie in the shallow cave system of Zestsaksanrewp Island, a relatively small island  at the vertex of Peddzjen Bay, which accords with the legends that this region was where humanity first arrived after their banishment from the secret land. Notably, the soil is deepest here as well, and it's an increasingly popular theory among archeologists that life itself may have arrived with humanity, perhaps around 600,000 years ago, with Narmjesa not only uninhabited by humans but completely desolate previously. Little is known about the earliest human inhabitants except for the legends and what can be determined from their stone tools, pottery, and skeletons. They are believed to have lived as nomads, traversing cyclically through territories largely defined by the continent's watersheds, a status quo which is believed to have held until approximately 12,000 years ago, when sedentary agriculture began to supplant it.

It is not known exactly when magic, abilities born from special structures within one's spiritual energy (or all-part-power, as it was previously referred to), but it is generally believed to have arisen roughly during, or shortly before or after, the transition to agrarian lifestyles. Eye-magic, the ability to perceive spiritual energy in a manner analogous to sight and strongly tied to its user's physical eyes, and through this perception and study of the patterns of spiritual energy to read the thoughts of other living things, observe the health or sickness of their bodies, and to divine the weather in the spiritual flows of the atmosphere, likely arose first. Flow-magic, the ability to extrude spiritual pseudopods which can interact with both other forms of spiritual energy and the physical world, as well as to sense sense vibrations or oscillations in spiritual energy, a sense often referred as mage-hearing (or power-hearing previously), which with practice can allow for the observation of the emotions or mood of living things in a similar way to which eye-mages read thoughts.

The black magic, also called smoke-magic when being more clinical, almost certainly arose last, as none of the Cannibal Kings (previously referred to as eat-human-power-decision-making-people) have claimed to predate either, not even the High King, and their autobiographies all either explicitly state or imply the existence of well-established eye-magic and flow-magic traditions It is now believed that there was likely some extant but marginal smoke magic traditions at the time as well, the antecedents of the Federation's own White Matron's school, though hard evidence of them is rare due to active efforts to co-opt or destroy them by the Cannibal Kings. The High King did not keep perfect track of the years since her birth, or at least not in a way which modern historians can access, but analysis of the remaining physical artifacts of the time and the records of the younger Kings indicate that her initial conquest and assumption of Kingship took place approximately 10,000 years ago.

The following hundred centuries of history are defined by her and her ilk's inhumanity. The power of smoke-magic is the augmentation of the natural ability of all living things to digest and convert the spiritual energy in the food they eat into more of their own. A black mage's spirit is not limited by their physical body, and can grow seemingly without limit, and even more, can be 'burned', forming a kind of substance or substance-like aura, billowing and oily and black, the 'smoke' from which their other name derives. Smoke's shape, movement, and character are all under the control of the black mage who creates it, so long as that black mage is in contact with the smoke or connected to it through certain spiritually conductive means (including other smoke-constructs). The only limits on how a smoke-construct can behave are its creators supply of spiritual energy, their imagination, and their access to the underlying 'material patterns' which they imbue into the smoke, which they in turn gain from eating as well, though they are absorbs these patterns even from things which nearly lack spiritual energy, such as stone or metal. Even without burning it, however, a black mage suffused with superhuman spiritual energy experiences a holistic physical augmentation as the pattern of their body's existence is amplified and reinforced by their spiritual energy, and possess regenerative abilities even further beyond this baseline enhancement as their spiritual energy expends itself to undo whatever harm befalls them.

The spiritual energy that can be garnered from what is consumed depends not only on how much is present in what is consumed, but also how 'similar' the resonance or structure of the spiritual energy being consumed is to that of the consumer. In nature, this is why mammals often have the greatest density of spiritual energy, with children being fed on their mother's milk and benefiting from a near-perfect transfer of spiritual energy therefrom. In the Cannibal Kings' case, this also meant that in order to grow in power as quickly as possible and maintain their ability to defend against the depredations of their peers, they had to grow and consume living human flesh, at a scale which quickly grew to eclipse the husbandry of any other animal. For a hundred twenty five lifetimes, humanity existed to feed the Cannibal Kings' hunger.

177 years ago, this regime fell. A flow-mage known as Sjesjerkwapar, meaning 'Despiser' in a southern dialect and generally believed to be a name taken up after the fact though no records of him from prior to the fall have been found, discovered a technique which allowed their magic to touch the spirits of others, and to strike at them. When levied against a black mage, this could shred their spirits, temporarily disabling their magic and regeneration, rendering them just as mortal as any other human. When levied against a smoke-construct, this could dispel them entirely, severing the spiritual threads which tether smoke to reality and causing it nigh-instantly evanesce. Before the end of the year, an army of flow-mages had formed and swept across Narmjesa, killing every King they came across, before ending their campaign in the city-palace of the High King, built around the coast of the same Peddzjen Bay where humanity first appeared.

Sjesjerkwapar and the army that followed him founded a new nation there, one which would serve no Kings, which after a few tumultuous years would become the Federation, the eastern group. In the west, in the lands which the flow-mages who fought with Sjesjerkwapar left behind, other, smaller groups came together to organize the people in the absence of the Kings, pursuing their own methods and goals in the aftermath. These groups steadily grew, incorporating one another and occasionally coming into conflict, before eventually a single Coalition of the most powerful and influential of these fragmentary states, the western group, came to dominate. Now, the two stand on opposite ends of Narmjesa and neither is willing to submit to the other, but both find overt war unappealing. They seek to secretly develop methods to overcome the other in a single fell swoop, and spy on one another to discover these methods and develop counters in turn. He presents a major opportunity on that front, and while the Federation will do its best to protect him, if he journeys into the territory of the Coalition, there is every chance that they'll kidnap him and try to turn him into a weapon, or at least a tool. Perhaps even if they already have a crafter under their control.

The Interior, the wilderness of the continent away from it's coasts, is not controlled by either of the great powers, or indeed much inhabited by humans at all. It's a hot and dry desert, speckled with densely packed jungle oases, and populated by dangerous magical beasts of numerous kinds. There are also scattered husks of the Cannibal King's attempts to colonize the Interior, later used as testing sites as they developed newer and stranger smoke-constructs, which are equally dangerous as the wildlife though in a different way. He might be able to get away with moving through there, though there's a risk that one of the magical beasts or royal experiments might interact explosively with crafting material or crafting.

He reads.

Mindreading, huh. Is that why they have the living hats? Assuming yes: Is it only specific plants that work to block eye magic?

These questions don't seem to require any discussion before the answer is written. "Yes, living hats are commonplace as a means of preventing your thoughts from being read. A sufficient quantity of any living matter will do, but the spiritual energy density of these vines means they are the lightest option in terms of weight for the level of privacy offered. Sometimes people less concerned with total coverage will wear lighter moss caps, also sometimes woven with flowers for the sake of prettiness."

Huh. He might want a cutting or some seeds or whatever from one, then.

He continues reading.

Their species is pretty fucked up, they know that, right?

"It is understandable for someone from a place seemingly as pure as the secret land would find us to be fucked up in comparison," is written in reply, again without verbal commentary. There's definitely some building tension visible in the flying people, and to a lesser degree in the Federation executives.

He's not going to do anything about that, to be clear, just, yikes. If he decides he doesn't want anything more to do with them he'll go check out the interior - which he might want to do anyway - or go see if their ocean is as uninhabitable as it looks like it is or something.

There is a bit of discussion on that before another message is written. "The sea is vast. Much of it is unexplored. We have circumnavigated the hemisphere, but the islands we've found in the vastness are small, and many could easily have been missed. It would likely be safer, at least from unknown interactions between spiritual energy and crafting, than the Interior, so long as you remain far enough from the Stormwall*."

(*A symbol introduced in the information packet's section on non-living magical phenomena. It refers to a ring of perpetual storm that encircles this planet's equator. Its clouds and rain are intensely saturated with spiritual energy, nearly equal to the density of a human's despite being dispersed through a gaseous medium rather a fleshy body, and spread across hundreds of millions of cubic kilometers rather than just a five or six dozen liters. There have been a handful of expeditions attempting to either analyze the storm itself or find what's on the other side, including one lead by a Cannibal King approximately three hundred years ago. None have ever returned. It is also the source of the southern coast's yearly monsoon season, and the reason why that season's storms are so unpredictable compared to other weather.)

He'll decide that if and when it comes up; they have actually been basically fine to him so far.

They all relax a bit at that, though there's no written response, just some acquiescent head-bowing from the flow-mages.

So, they wanted him to do some stuff for them?

There's a bit more discussion, though there's a lowness or enervation to it, before the reply is written. "Yes, we would. Further requests are being considered, but for the moment we are asking for however many ansibles you are willing to make for us before you move on, including one to maintain contact with you and more for our own analysis and incorporation into our intelligence network."

One to maintain contact with him is no problem; what do they want to do with the others?

Another, lengthier explanation from the executives precedes the next response. "Our first priority is to determine what method of incorporating them into our long-distance communication machines are most effective, followed by implementing this method and distributing the ansible-equipped machines to various locations where they will help send and receive messages without alerting Coalition agents listening for radio* transmissions or the vulnerability of human or animal messengers. If you are able and decide to produce more than is needed for this, the remainder may distributed to individuals of high value as a means of secret emergency communication, or else studied to try and determine the underlying mechanism by which the halves of an ansible are connected, and more generally to gauge the risks presented by exposing crafting material to spiritual energy, and spiritual energy to crafting material."

If they're going to do experiments it makes more sense to him to do them on generic crafting material rather than ansibles, and he has no problem giving them some for that purpose; he'd like to know anything they find out. (He takes some of the material making up his end of the table, fashions it into half a dozen lightweight grey bricks, and slides the bricks over to their side of the table.) He's probably fine with giving them some ansible versions of the communication boards he's been making, for them to give to people, but he's more hesitant to make them ones to use in machines because machines can do all kinds of things, he'll want to think about that.