"I bet my copper friend will play, if it's really a problem. Anyone from my world who knows about dragons at all will know that that's faked and this one is real, though."

"Well, they're not the audience. I think we can use the real one. Your friend's lovely too, this one's just fantastically dramatic."

"Mmhmm. That's one of my favorite things about being able to teleport, being able to get so close to things you usually shouldn't."

"Sounds fun," remarks Ramona.

"Incredibly. This whole thing was a lot of fun."

The mockup on the wall changes colors; pictures appear to illustrate this and that.

"How have the librarians been doing, any questions that are tripping them up?"

"They had some trouble with alignment questions and also it turns out your maps are - well, better than we ought to have expected, actually, but worse than ours, not that this matters this week," says the site designer.

"Hard to summarize species without sounding racist any which way," says Ramona.

"If I'm going back to Hempholme anyway I can see if the wizards have a better map, I don't know which way to expect that to go. And I'm not really surprised we're running into some problems with racism - I expect we think about that differently to begin with, I can explain how we see it but I'm not sure it'll help anything."

"Couldn't hurt," says Ramona.

"Okay. So we do have what I expect you usually use the word for - where members of a single species assume that members of that same species are different just because they're from a different place or culture or background. For humans, that's just wrong, in the ways people usually mean it - people from different cultures are different because of it, obviously, but they're not better or worse in an innate way, they've just applied those strengths and weaknesses to different things, if that's all that's going on. But across species, and between subspecies, there are innate differences - elves actually are more dexterous and more perceptive and frailer compared to humans, and gnomes are hardier and better at alchemy and weaker, and dwarves are hardier and better with stone and metal and worse at figuring out how to deal with other people, and all of them are less flexible about their lifestyles than we are. It's not offensive to say that; it's not an assumption people are making because they don't like strangers, it's just true, and it'd be offensive to pretend that the other species were the same as us, because that would be saying that there's something wrong with the way they are."

"There are some things that differ among humans more than culturally that are OK to talk about," says Ramona. "Scandinavians are tall, people from Luna don't win weightlifting contests - though nobody'd claim the latter's genetic. Uh, what happens if people get raised by another species, that ever happen?"

"There's actually a saying about it! 'When humans raise a halfling, you get a sad halfling, when halflings raise a human, you get a tall halfling.' Halflings are the example there because humans and halflings are considered the most similar of the common species."

"I think what I actually want to do - sorry, Naksh, this is going to rewrite half the section - I wanna use vocabulary around neurodivergence as much as vocabulary about race. It'll attract a more sympathetic discourse if something does blow up and gives a better frame, I think."

"That sounds pretty accurate to me."

"It'd also be good to have a diverse bunch of people working here on things. It'll look unavoidably tokenistic but I think that's better than the alternative."

"Pelor's been trying for that, from what I've seen. I'd expect him to have trouble finding a dwarf willing to change projects on short notice, partly because he doesn't have many to start with, and gnomes are bad at keeping things to themselves, is why I expect you haven't seen any of them yet."

"Keeping things to themselves? You're public as all get out here - not so much there?"

He nods. "We can't let it go public without letting the other gods know, for one thing. And once it's common knowledge it's going to be hard to keep people from coming and going, from our end, and you're not prepared for that. It won't happen instantly but I don't think we have a good feel for how long it's going to take to get everything ready."

"Gotcha. We don't need literally everybody and can explain some disproportion of humans as relating to us only having humans here, but all the others you can round up will help. The thing we want to avoid like the plague is anything suggesting that a member of whatever species couldn't do whatever they wanted, if they did want to, there's only so much the neurodivergence frame can rescue us from that and only so far 'they just don't actually want to' will stretch."

He nods. "That's more or less true, anyway, except for physical things like not having hands or wings or what have you."

"Yeah, physical inability is much easier to avoid talking about and to navigate if it comes up."

"Good. I'll see if I can find out if Pelor thinks we can bring in anyone from outside his church yet, too - I think we can bring in a few wizards before too long, if they're chosen well, and I can probably find a gnome or two who will be all right to just stay here. Dwarves will be trickier all around, I'll think about it and see if I can come up with anything. -that's if the citizenship situation has gotten straightened out at all, has there been any progress on that? Can they just join the Federation or whatever?"

"Federated Stations. They can if they want to, but it does come with - pretty minimal, but any - responsibilities," says Ramona.

"Like what?"