"Hm. Announcing it's reversible might not actually be a good idea, but you should certainly say it is if asked - it implies that reversing it would be desirable if you say it up front. Gonna run an internal poll on which phrasing's best."

"Thank you. Next - immigration issues - " he looks from Raafi to the half-elf, and Raafi gestures for her to go ahead.

    "So lots of people in our world just don't have a nation that they're a formal citizen of. Some places have nations that people could consider themselves citizens of but not all of them have a formal government, and not all people live in a particular place - halflings as a species are overwhelmingly nomadic, as the obvious example, but plenty of humans travel too often to belong to any one place, too. Elves and gnomes are more settled by nature but don't reliably have formal governments that you can negotiate with. And the less common species live any number of ways, up to and including 'completely solitary and without answering to anyone at all'."

"That's... very different," says Skip.

A person who's been quiet so far speaks up. "There's a personal rights declaration that at this point I think everyone except for wildcat stations on Pluto and stuff like that is signed onto which includes the right to a nationality. The history here of stateless persons is such that being one is considered a deprivation. I think maybe in your world gods are taking on some of the roles we rely on states for. This might work fine for you. It does mean you'll want delicate handling because you've got a large population lacking in a fundamental right. Even local nomads have some citizenship. And government has gotten more formal over time, you seem like maybe a younger civilization."

"What would you consider them deprived of, in practical terms?" asks the halfling.

"Partly it's just correlative," he says. "Statelessness happens when someone's being discriminated against or the place they're from is under serious upheaval. The things that then happened were people with nowhere that wanted them - who couldn't legally be anywhere - or people who, wherever they wound up being tolerated as residents, weren't prioritized for protection under the law because they weren't enfranchised and considered relevantly that country's people. There are some places where people don't have formal enough governments to be really citizens, but there's a subset of Federated that will take people under such broad conditions that no one's ever actually been turned away, so it's understood that no one is currently stateless in this solar system unless they want to be, are being actively detained by a non-signatory entity, are subjected to a misinformation campaign about the policy of those stations, or are too young to have made a determination about their desire to continue being stateless after having been born on Pluto-for-instance."

    "Okay. Well, not having a nation isn't - marked, like that, for us, and it's not something people would be discriminated against for - they might be turned away from a city but having an association with a different one wouldn't help by itself. In theory the laws of a place apply equally to everyone there; in practice that's not as true as we'd like but where a traveler lives when they're at home doesn't usually come into it - I'd expect it to hurt more often than it helped when it did, too."

"This came up on my blog, briefly, and I think what I said there might help us out some - one of the rights we consider people to have is the right to live in the manner of their species, which includes not having human-style societies. You're going to look very racist to us - which may be less taboo in our world, but is still bad - if you don't accommodate that."

"Well, we aren't the - this world's - PR organization," says Skip. "We're working for you, here. Calling people racist is a pretty loaded move, anyway, just because saying something racist on Shortform can end a career doesn't mean that jumping all over people for things doesn't have its own consequences. And opens you to a lot of counterattacks that I don't think even with us on board you're equipped to navigate."

"It sounds," says the other recent speaker, who hasn't given his name, "like you manage to have a lot of the effects our states have - like everyone having particular rights - without them. Which is fine, but doesn't explain how you are in fact doing it unless like I guessed the gods are doing it. It still leaves you without a good substitute for the inter-polity negotiation role of states, which we have because we have many of them interacting with each other, and you sound like you just don't - but you're going to need some way to adjust for that to interact here."

"What are they negotiating, exactly?"

"Extradition, where which rules apply, whether one set of rules is acceptable to the global community, trade, coordination on global problems and projects."

He nods. "We handle those in a variety of ways. Dealing with worldwide problems and projects is the realm of the gods and our churches, usually. Trade is handled privately, and so is extradition in most cases, via the bounty system. Territory and law enforcement within it is handled by nations, or whoever lives in an area, or internally within nomadic groups on the road; how borders are determined is often thorny but I don't expect us to have that problem, at least to start with. I'm not sure what you mean by determining whether a set of rules is acceptable."

"If a country is oppressing a minority or failing to enforce rule of law such that its people are safe or mishandling fiscal policy in a way with ripple effects abroad or something, the other nations may intervene."

Skip says, "So you need something to render gods legible to our countries so you can coordinate with them. And while you could sell a TV show about a magic bounty hunter people will not tolerate it in real life in this world."

"We handle some of those other things, too, so yes. Getting word to everyone that the bounty system shouldn't be used here will be complicated but once we're ready to let the other major gods know about the world they'll help with that. We should be prepared for someone to try it anyway, though."

"This is again a thing you need to be in conversation with governments about," says Skip. "We can vet a press release about how, oops, a magic bounty hunter showed up and kidnapped an American citizen, but we can't actually set policy about how to react to that."

"All right. Where do we start?"

"Governments do PR in-house, so we don't have a special leg up getting in touch, but we can help you write emails to them all. Or maybe one to start if you're personnel bottlenecked."

"We're still working on that, yes. Is there anything else that's especially urgent?"

"I think you need a single source of truth website up even if it starts pretty bare bones, and see what kinds of questions you get, and workshop answers with us."

"All right. I'm not entirely clear on what that is, you may have to explain it to us."

"A website is a little like a book that anyone anywhere can read with the right device. Single source of truth means you're committing to maintaining the site so that it's the final word on information about you, complete and up to date, so that it's not necessary to look anywhere else to know what's going on. You'll need to have summaries of all your news items and answers to common questions about your world and plans."

"That sounds good. I have a few scribes I'd like to bring in, if you don't mind-"

"...do you mean something more complicated than people who professionally copy writing and take dictation?"

"They also work with the librarians more generally."

"...I don't mind bringing them in to the meeting but I'm worried they won't wind up having much to do."

"This sounds like a fairly complicated project; I'll want to arrange for a library order to handle it. The scribes would be here to observe and explain the project to the clerics who will figure out which librarians I should assign, and then to the librarians."

"What are you imagining the librarians will do?"