"Hmm?" Urtho sets down the artifact he's been working on and unfolds himself from the mattress. "Oh. How odd." 

"It doesn't look like anything I recognize." 

"Not to me either. Perhaps we ought go have a closer look." 

They're not exactly supposed to be going off on random side trips; the plan was just to map out a new region, and for Ma'ar to continue his magic lessons with Urtho along the way. But Urtho isn't going to not chase down some bizarre new anomaly - it's probably nothing important but it might still be interesting...

A bubble of ordinary space held pinned inside a nigh-indestructible shield whirls through the Void, chasing ghosts. 

"Visser," says Mhalir's lieutenant sharply, after about an hour, when the readings resolve into something rather than probably-nothing. "We're. Uh. Being pursued."

And all of Mhalir's attention is suddenly on her. And then on the screen as he brings up the readings himself. Yes, that's definitely something. What is...much less clear. 

"Do the computers recognize it."

<Carissa, does that look like anything you know?> he adds, though with much less hope of getting a useful answer. 

Carissa has absolutely no idea what that is.

"Computers have no idea. It's not a ship like ours."

"- What other than a ship could be pursuing us in hyperspace?" Pause. "How fast are they - can we evade - do we have long enough to plan an urgent re-routing to lose them...?" Jumping through some additional planes at random is going to be incredibly inconvenient in terms of their total travel time, but they should have fuel to spare, and Mhalir doesn't at all like the idea of...whatever it is...catching up to them. 

"They're faster than us, though they're not tracking us all that closely - we could try a jump but it'd be off a bit of guesswork, unless they give us an hour -"

"Keep watching them, get a clearer model of their trajectory - try to figure out what they are, and keep me updated -" And to the engineer: "Start putting together a plan for a jump. On the assumption we have an hour. I will do the guesswork one, if we end up not having that time." 

Mhalir did a lot of the engineering design for the ship, and Carissa has the fanciest int headband that gold can buy, and he's in general more comfortable thinking under pressure than most of his current staff are. He turns to focus on another screen. 

"Should we attempt communications?"

"One moment." 

<...Probably?> he thinks to Carissa. <But it will reveal our position more closely - what do you think...?>

Presumably if the other ship wanted to talk they could do it themselves and it might be better not to have acknowledge having noticed them.

"Hold off on communications for now," Mhalir says, and goes back to figuring out the most quick-and-dirty jump coordinates he's ever attempted, occasionally glancing over at the other screen or barking a question to his lieutenant. 

The pursuit draws closer. 

"Ma'ar?" Urtho says, inside a barrier spinning through the Void. "Try the crystal ball?" 

"There's no way it'll work," Ma'ar objects. "It's not like our scrying, it scries for people, and -"

"I think that whatever is directing - that - it is alive and intelligent," Urtho points out. 

"Right, but I don't have a name or face - or species, even - huh I wonder if elementals from the other planes have the magic to travel here too..." 

He tries it anyway. It doesn't work. 

"Take over steering," Urtho says to him. "I want to try some detection spells on it." 

"Sure." And Ma'ar does this. 

A long time later: 

"It is not - I cannot figure out what it is doing! It is - not even magic, precisely, not as we know it..." Urtho doesn't look worried or alarmed, though; his expression is one of childlike delight. "Ma'ar, let me take over. I want to catch up." 

"Sure. - Uh, should we try talking to them? We're still way out of Mindspeech range but if we can get closer..." He shakes his head. "I bet Leareth could figure out how to communication-spell them even though we don't know who's over there. I don't think I can." 

"We can get closer."

And they do. 

"Closing the distance," Mhalir's lieutenant reports.

"- Any progress on identifying what they are? Another kind of ship?" 

"It's not showing up like anything we've seen before. The magic sensors are getting a reading. It's not very big." Headshake. 

Mhalir glances back at his screen. It'll do, he decides; he saves the coordinates. "Prepare for a jump on this course," he orders the engineer, "but hold off until my go." And to his lieutenant. "Please transmit a message asking them to identify themselves." 

She has one prepared, and sends it off.

There is no answer. 

The strange not-ship draws closer. 

"Nothing. Is the jump ready -"

Mhalir looks over at the engineer. "Jump when ready, please." 

The ship jumps.

"- What?" Urtho twitches on his stool. "Ma'ar. Come here and replay the detection wards for me - they went somewhere..." 

Ma'ar hurries over. Does this. 

"They're - doing planar manipulation?" he says uncertainly. 

"I gathered that! Help me figure out where they went..." 

On the other ship, everyone relaxes. "I guess we can just.... avoid that sector?"

"Or figure out how to negotiate with it...."

You can't Sending "whoever that is in pursuit" until you can see them but if you get a view of them you can do that.

<How good a view do you need?> Mhalir asks Carissa, at the same time as he directs the engineer to figure out their current location - the jump was hastily planned enough that there's considerable room for error there - and to re-plan the route back to Golarion. 

(Elsewhere: "Right, so they went this way -" and the Void-ship twists the planar fabric around it and bubbles itself through the Elemental Plane of Air and suddenly they're in the Void somewhere else... "- and then I think this way...") 

"- well, fuck. Pursuit's back."

I'd need to see their bodies not just their ship.

Mhalir can't think of a way to do that from here - scrying wouldn't work either when they don't know who's there, they can't get a camera in - and he's kind of in a hurry right now.

"Try to open comms with them again," he snaps. 

"Attempting that!" They're not getting a response.

Mhalir gives it fifteen seconds of waiting. 

"Jump to normal space," he orders. "Before they get a lock on our location - do it now -"

"We don't know anything about normal space at this coordinate," the pilot says very unhappily, but does it anyway.

It's not immediately deadly or anything. There's a star nearby. (Unstructured jumps usually land near a gravity well). It has some planets.

Urtho makes a frustrated noise. "Where did they go? ...They - left the Void, I think?" 

"I think so - the wards think it looked like a Gate signature -" 

"How did they do that...?" 

The Void-vessel is not designed to leave the Void. It was built there; it can twist its way through other planes, doing the equivalent of an interplanar Gate, but it can't stay there. 

"I want to know what they are!" Urtho says, insistently, with the thirst of a man lost in a desert chasing a mirage of water. 

"I can't Gate over," Ma'ar says, thoughtfully. "And I don't know how to anchor a scry from here and see where they went. But - Leareth could do it, I bet." 

A long pause. 

"Then," Urtho says firmly, "how about we record this location in the charts. And then we go back, and inform him that we have found something very, very interesting." 

There is no immediate sign of their pursuers following them, at least. 

"Get us in closer," Mhalir orders. "I want us near one of the moons or planets, so we can hide behind it if we see a hyperspace jump signature." Pause. "- Oh, first. Any signs of habitation? Technology?"

Most star systems aren't inhabited, so he doubts it, but scaring a local spacefaring society would be ill-advised and it won't take that long to check.  

"No artificial work in space, no radio signals. ...one planet with water."

"And life, I'll bet you ten to one, it's going to look green. Ha, see, green."

"...Well, regardless of what brought us here, this might be worth a closer look then. Take us in behind one of the other planets, though, please. We can wait there and gather sensor data, and investigate the planet in twelve hours if - whatever that was - does not follow us." 

"All right."

Now that they're not in immediate danger she's going to be mopey about how if they die on a Void-exploration mission they might be dead forever even though there's really no point to thinking about this.

Mhalir wishes he could reassure her. If they had morph... But they don't, and Yeerk-Andalite relations on Golarion are nowhere near good enough to finagle getting it, and at this point, with their fancy headband, he plausibly could reinvent it on his own but it would take him decades and they have other things to do. 

<...Maybe at some point we ought return to Yeerk space briefly> he suggests, finally. <It is not an ideal solution, but - I had a copy of my brain made, once, using technology. It could in theory be run on a computer - not perfectly, and without a body, but - better than vanishing forever. And if I retrieve mine and make one of you as well - the scanning method causes brain cancer in humans but probably one of the kinds of magic Healing we know of could fix it - if I do that, and give the files to Aroden, I - trust him to find a way to bring us back. If we die somewhere where our souls cannot be retrieved...> 

Carissa has never contemplated the question of whether it is bringing you back if someone uses a brain scanning method to make a copy. It seems like they - wouldn't have your soul? And wouldn't have - you would still have the experience of dying and then no experiences ever again -

<...Maybe we have different intuitions about what it means to be yourself? When I thought about it, I was imagining - hmm, picture a scenario where we are attacked and struck over the head and you think we are about to die, but actually we are rescued in time and just lose the last year of our memories from the head injury. Is there a you who dies, there? - Even if there is, it seems clear there would also be a you who survives...> 

That seems different because your soul is still there.

<I suppose I spent most of my life not thinking that souls existed separate from the body at all! ...In fact, I wonder if it is even true, or if a soul would spring up and reattach as soon as the file was run? Since I did not start out in a place where souls were known to exist in any measurable way, and yet I apparently had one in Golarion...> 

She has no idea how to think about that but if it's a different soul she is not sure that counts. It might but it doesn't seem obvious.

<Hmm.> 

Mhalir isn't sure what else to add, so he leaves the matter alone and turns his attention to the incoming sensor data. 

The planet has life! Some settlements, even, mostly wood and stone not metal. They can't see what the settlement-builders look like from this distance. The magic sensors aren't noticing anything.

They can watch from here for a while. Eventually get some sleep. 

Once it's been a full twelve hours and there's no sign of the pursuing something-or-someone, Mhalir returns to the sensor screen. "If there is still no sign of satellites or other space technology, then - take us in closer, I think, we will be able to see more from orbit." 

They do that cautiously, even though there should be no magical or mundane way the locals could see them. 

The planet is mostly ocean with two continents, a little warmer than Golarion or Velgarth, inhabited along all of its coasts. Their images of the cities are slightly less blurry, now, but don't reveal much; some of the cities are quite dense for their apparent tech level. The inhabitants aren't human but they'd be, in Golarion's classification of things, humanoid; they're a bit taller and more stockily built, with less hair and odd coloration.

Still no magic detected?

....maybe not none? If they sweep the whole planet they get blips occasionally, in locations of no particular note, consistent across scans so it's not just nothing, but it's not much and it doesn't seem to be something the civilization uses; there's none of it in most of their cities.

How odd. 

"Interesting enough to spend a day or two investigating, I think," Mhalir says, cautiously. "We can prepare to send a shuttle down." 

<Carissa, what do you think? It - looks less likely we can obtain either additional magic or new technologies from this world, but - I am still curious...> 

It's still bodies that might want Yeerks. Now that she's done all this thinking about death she does not strongly want to go herself but - :I think it makes sense to check it out.:

<We can stay up here.> Mhalir is curious, but - well, he was a lot more cavalier about exploring potentially-dangerous places himself when he had morph. He really misses morph. 

Mhalir gives instructions to send a small team down with one of the shuttles, do a pass over both continents, get closer-up footage of both the cities and whatever those magic blips are, if they turn out to be anything and not just noise. 

They get video back a short while later. The cities are - varied, some of them the dense messy chaos typical of premodern cities, some in other parts of the world tidy and symmetrical and obviously the product of a much richer civilization. The magic spots are....

....nothing? This one is a canyon and this one is a meadow and this one is a forest and this one is another canyon and this one is a cave.

But they still ping the magic sensors? 

Yep.

Huh. 

<The problem> Mhalir thinks to Carissa, <is that - we are the only ones who have permanent Tongues... Can you prepare and cast Tongues temporarily on one of my staff, to go down and talk to the locals, I suppose that might work...?>

She can do that! They can also do an earpiece though that puts the person on the ground in the awkward position of repeating things they don't understand.

Well, they can do Tongues for the duration of the spell and fall back on the earpiece if necessary. To start with, Mhalir wants to send them down to one of the richer-looking cities; they seem more likely to have a sense of what's going on more widely across the planet, or at least continent. 

She casts Tongues on someone on the expedition.

And Mhalir watches the various screens, somewhat anxiously, as the shuttle descends. 

The city is done with radial symmetry, in the shape, from the air, of a rose; the streets are paved with colorful stones and glass. The buildings appear to be mostly wood.

...the local humanoids look different than the ones in the other cities. Taller, neater, with more hair and none of the odd coloration. They could pass for human individually, though not really collectively; they're taller and move differently.

Whoever approaches them first is inevitably going to stand out, Mhalir thinks. And Tongues is limited duration. 

He desperately wishes they had a Thoughtsenser to scope the area first, but none of the human Thoughtsensers from Ma'ar's world, even the ones who agreed to work with Yeerks, wanted to volunteer for long exploratory hyperspace trips. 

"Find a place to land the shuttle at the outskirts," he transmits. "Approach one of the locals and - play it by ear, I think, but likely it makes sense to pretend you are from some remote village. The shuttle should still have some Velgarth clothing, that might stand out less than ours." 

"Acknowledged," Ashran 452 transmits back. 

The shuttle hovers, cloaked, and scans for any abandoned fields or buildings to land in. 

This field isn't growing crops right now, and is quite a distance from the nearest outbuildings, which are some very pretty wooden barns.

They request permission from Mhalir, receive it, and take the shuttle down. 

Ashran, whose host is an Earth human named Eliza, don the Velgarth clothing - it's a lot less pretty than anything spotted in the footage but at least fits with the local technology level, roughly - and leaves the shuttle, which lifts off again to hover and follow her. They search again for the closest passerby and provide directions to her earpiece. 

The closest passerby is nudging some cows out into the field, singing to them as she (he?) does so.

Ashran approaches. She hasn't tried to speak foreign languages with Tongues before, and isn't sure exactly how it works, but... "Er, hello?" 

 - the stranger stops singing. "- hello. Are you all right?"

"- Yes, I'm fine. I'm not from around here, though - er, where is 'here'...?" 

" - well, I haven't named the farm. The nearest town is Lothran, it's about a day's travel along the coast. - we could go faster, probably, if you're having some kind of head trouble."

"I'm not having head trouble," (she is SO CONFUSED), "I'm just new to the area. I can head to Lothran on my own, I just wanted to know more about it." 

"...I mean the thing where you, uh, have to walk up right close to someone and talk out loud to hear them? Is that...have you always been like that?"

"...Yes?" She is not for now going to mention her earpiece or radio. "Er, in my - area, some people can talk with their minds but not everyone, and I can't." 

(Does everyone here have telepathy? She hopes Mhalir is getting this; she's not going to ask because talking to herself out loud will stand out even more.) 

" - huh.

Well. Lothlan has a school of music and a school of fashion and a market, though not one with Dwarves. The gardens are beautiful. They put in new fountains last year and I think the advantages of the old ones weren't fully considered."

(Eliza is making a bit of a face, internally, about the superposition of 'school of fashion' and the visible technological level here, it seems out of place?) 

"Oh, I see," Ashran says out loud, as though all of this makes perfect sense. "Dwarves? I've never met one of them." 

"They're all right. Sort of singleminded, but, lots of people are sort of singleminded." The person prods a recalcitrant cow along with a slap. "But they don't come through Lothlan, they prefer the bigger cities."

"Oh, I see. Where's the nearest of those?" 

"Brithombar, probably, it's two weeks by ship down the coast. It's where King Círdan lives. I've never been, though I have a friend who moved there and shows me all the theatre and concerts."

"- Wow, can you talk to them from that far away?" 

"My soul isn't - malfunctioning, or whatever is up with yours, so, yes."

(Eliza is now mentally snickering, wow these people do not hold back at all. Interesting that they have souls too - or believe they do, Eliza used to, she was a Christian until she was kidnapped by aliens and eventually ran into enough weirdness that she admitted that Earth probably doesn't have afterlives.) 

"Mmm," Ashran says. "Er, how long has Círdan been King?" Mhalir would be so much better at coming up with smart questions to ask, here, but unfortunately he's up in orbit being his usual paranoid self. 

"...the Founding was in the year of the Departure. So.. two millenia, give or take a few years for when they had enough of a place built to crown him. Or maybe he wasn't a King at first?" He pauses meditatively. "- he wasn't! He was just the founder, for the first thousand years, and then we had enough trade with our neighbors and disagreements to settle that it made sense for him to be a King about them, which he has been at thirteen centuries."

"Oh." How long do these people live. "Is he a good King, then?"

"Obviously! He's had so much practice!"

She smiles. "Right, of course. Er, is there anything else that'd be important for me to know before I head to a bigger city? I don't - I know I'm a country bumpkin right now but I don't want to embarrass myself too badly." 

"...well," gesture at the person's own hair, tied back with ribbons, "I've never seen anyone, uh, wear their hair like they're washing it when they're not washing it? Also it's short but I know it takes some time to do anything about that. And, I've...never heard of anybody with a soul that doesn't work, and people are going to be concerned."

"- Oh, thank you for the warning, that's very good to know." Ashran thinks that they can send a different person next, someone with long hair, not that hers is even that short in her opinion. "And, no, I can't do anything about the, uh, soul, but I'll - keep in mind that it's concerning. Thank you." 

"Of course. Would you like some food before you go?"

"Yes, I'd appreciate that." Ashran smiles as warmly as she can manage. 

"My pleasure." He starts singing again and continues down the road, unhurried.

The singing is very pretty. She wonders if it comes across at all through her concealed microphone. Probably not well. Come to think of it, Ashran has no idea if either Mhalir or Carissa appreciate music much. 

She follows. 

He shoos the cows into the field and then makes his way back to his house, where he makes some kind of oatmeal on the stove and fries three of the sausages hanging over the stove. "What're you looking to find in Lothlan? Or Brithombar?"

"Something to do with myself that's more interesting than farming, I guess? I don't know, yet, I'm mostly just curious what cities are like." 

"They're all right! Though it sounds exhausting to have to accommodate all your neighbor's design sensibilities all the time."

"- Huh, really? What're they going to do if you don't?" 

"....well, you can't own a property in the city if everyone's unhappy about how it's decorated, right? No one but me cares how my farm looks."

"Really! I don't know how, er, owning property works here, legally, but that seems surprising - is the local leadership going to take it away from you if your neighbours complain enough...?" 

"...yes? I mean, I complain about it, but it'd hardly be a solution to let people with bad taste put up eyesores."

"Good to know, I guess. Thank you." 

Ashran isn't sure how much longer she has with Tongues, so she finds an excuse to wander over to the other side of the local person's house, pretending to examine the decor, and whispers into her microphone. "Mhalir, how much longer -?"

(Mhalir always lets Carissa answer magic-related questions.) 

Her Tongues lasts ninety minutes, these days. There's about forty of them left.

Phew, then Ashran isn't in a huge hurry and can stay to eat and chat with the local. 

"So what's in fashion in the city these days?" she asks (well, Eliza does, feeling more comfortable with this genre of small talk.) "I wouldn't want my outfit to offend anyone's taste." She gestures vaguely at the Velgarth-style tunic. 

"I don't think it's tasteless so much as...incompetent? It looks like your hand was injured when you did the stitches. What did you want it to look like?"

"I, um, didn't have good lighting when I was doing it. I was going for..." And Eliza makes up some things on the spot. 

This person seems content to serve the oatmeal and sausage and spend the next several hours talking about her artistic vision for her outfit.

Ashran needs to excuse them much sooner than that, of course; she gives it thirty-five minutes from Mhalir's warning, at which point she's at least finished eating, and then apologizes and says that she really must be going now because (some reasons she makes up on the spot without much eye to whether they make sense.) 

The person is startled and somewhat put off but makes no effort to stop her from departing.

They do watch her go from the window.

...Apparently that was rude or something? 

Ashran isn't in any particular hurry, now, if she runs into any more strangers she can pretend to be from somewhere far away and not speak the language. She keeps walking until she's definitely out of sight behind another of the pretty barns, and then calls for a ride. 

Mhalir orders the shuttle pilot to scan the area again and check that no locals are in a position where they could see her. 

No one's closer than half a mile off.

Mhalir gives the go-ahead, and the shuttles descends, cloaked, and collects Ashran and her host, and then soars back to orbit to debrief. 

Mhalir was, of course, listening to the recordings the whole time. He tells Ashran to take a break until she's ready to sit down and talk through what happened, and then he paces. 

<Carissa? What do you think.> 

:I don't like it. Maybe the person was just an eccentric, but - if not, something's up.:

<I mean, they seem - culturally very different? Which is not surprising, this is an entirely different world. I - would not necessarily find it concerning beyond that, though obviously there is context that we are still missing and will need to understand in order to operate here.> 

Carissa thinks it's pretty concerning! There was - something about the stranger's friendliness, not flirtatious, not appeasing, not even uncomplicatedly friendly, while offering a meal with meat and wanting to talk about embroidery - she's travelled through farm towns and they want - news of far away, to talk about the life-and-death matters of farms themselves - and farmers don't live alone...

<...You might have something important here> Mhalir acknowledges. <I want to try to unpack it further. ...Hmm, actually, though - why do farmers not live alone, in your experience? - Also I am not sure we know for sure that he did, Ashran did not think to ask about family.> 

They don't live alone because there's too much work to be done on a farm for one person to sensibly do it and also because most people want lovers, and those inevitably produce children, and they have parents and siblings and so on and they get sick or injured and will starve or lose the farm, if there's not anyone attached enough to look after them while they mend.

<Hmm. Those reasons seem likely to also apply here, but...maybe not, I think we lack context to determine for sure. Anyway, what else - you were surprised they did not want something, or want the category of thing you expected, something about the exact style of their welcome seemed off...?>

:Didn't seem to be asking the right questions, didn't seem to be at all suspicious or even very curious, had never heard of anyone not having telepathy before and thought of it as a soul malfunction but didn't have questions or worries about that either - it could be contagious! And I have no idea what to make of the claim that they've had the same king for 1300 years and the - responding to a question of his fitness with 'he's had a lot of practice' - that's a way of talking around something...:

<Hmm. What would your - theories, be, for why someone might appear that way - the lack of suspicion or curiosity, I mean?>

:I don't know. Maybe they're Dominated. Or an automaton. Or very dense but then they'd have a hard time living alone.

<....Hmm. I think there are - probably more likely hypotheses than that. I will see what my other staff have to say, their hosts have exposure to a wider range of cultures.> 

Carissa is SO SUSPICIOUS.

...Well, they can sit down and let Ashran and Eliza give their full report and then see what the other Yeerk staff have to say. 

Hosts are divided! Earth isn't preindustrial and they don't know what farmers were like. Some people are just lonely. The hosts from Predain might have more of an idea what to expect?

The hosts from Predain share more of Carissa's impression that something is off, but are less sure than Carissa is of the causes; since the discovery of Velgarth, they've been back to visit Absalom and Osirion, which also felt starkly different from Predain, so maybe it is just a culture gap? Probably they just need to get more information, from a wider range of sources. 

Mhalir approves of this. He wants them to plan another shuttle expedition for the next day; they can try to visit the nearest town, now that they know how to blend in better, and maybe also make a visit to the other continent and the less tidily-organized cities? 

<...I would very much like to read some of the locals' minds> he admits to Carissa. <I do not want to place either of us in danger, but it does seem we have better technology and magic than the locals, so perhaps we can hide unobserved while you cast Detect Thoughts somewhere?>

That seems like a good idea. It's not safer to be totally ignorant of the situation, and something is wrong.

<One more day. We can try to send multiple parties tomorrow, to gather more information, decide where best to try this - how many times can you cast Tongues for them...?>

Ten, if we don't want me to do anything else. We might occasionally want me to do other things, though.

<We almost certainly do not need ten of it for tomorrow! Perhaps you can prepare - three, to start, and then leave some spell slots open until we know what we need you to do...> 

Sure. 

The planet makes her nervous, now, because of the creepy people, but obviously gathering more information is a reasonable next step.

And for now they're going to gather information without risking either of them personally, because Mhalir is willing to trust Carissa's gut feeling on it even if he's a little dubious that its source is just 'these people don't seem Chelish'. 

They sleep and once Carissa has Tongues prepared three times, she can cast it on the landing parties; one shuttle headed to the other continent that they haven't visited, and one headed to the first continent, with people picked out to explore both Lothlan and Brithombar, or at least their best guess of what corresponds to said big city based on their satellite maps. 

They can all get ninety minutes of translation. 

The largest city on the coast with Lothlan is a precise, symmetrical one mostly with buildings of elegant white stone, and docks that are angled to, from a distance, give the impression of rays of light from a large complex of buildings on the shore. 

The other continent has some of the cities in the dense sprawling style of the other kind of humanoid.

It's slightly risky to send in all three at once, especially since they don't have existing intelligence on the other continent or its local humanoids, but the people sent in all have concealed weapons which they're pretty sure the locals can't detect, and shuttles nearby. 

Mhalir pays particular attention to the party sent to land nearish the dense-sprawling city. He's curious if this other species of humanoids will seem equally creepy to Carissa. 

Eltran 238 disembarks from the cloaked shuttle a ways away from the settlement, and follows the directions provided through his hidden earpiece to approach the nearest local. 

In the outskirts of the city, it's not too dense; buildings are mostly two-story, with trees between them. There's a bunch of children playing on a rooftop that seems at least moderately designed for that, with awnings that'll mitigate a fall. The nearest adults are a pair mucking out a pigpen, one of them with a baby tied to her back.

Up close, the other humanoids are - a bit grotesque? Their faces are lopsided, their ears scarred and ridged, their eyes bulging and bloodshot, their veins visible in the places where their skin is pale. They seem cheerful, though. 

They look somewhat surprised by Eltran's approach. "Are you lost?" someone hazards after a moment.

"- Uh, yes, a little." Eltran had not realized at all that he and his human host would fail to blend in this badly! "Well, I'm - from a really small farm, see, and I decided to leave and go look for a city - what's this city called -?" 

"You want an Elf city," the man says. "This is Erdegar, and it's lovely, but Elves hate it, as I understand it."

"Maybe not all Elves," says the woman. 

"Well, I've never heard of any Elves wanting to live here."

Elves are presumably the other local humanoids, then? 

"I think I want to hear why you all think it's lovely, then," Eltran persists. "It's definitely better than my little farm! ...Your children seem very sweet, uh - are they your children, playing there -?" He's discreetly trying to peer at them and see if they seem disfigured as well or if it's just the adults. 

The children are disfigured too! The adults look mildly suspicious of his claim but quickly abandon this in favor of pointing them all out. There's Terr, the oldest, and Nietse, and Kleo, and Abde, and Sava who is the baby. 

"Erdegar has trolleys that go the whole length of the city," the man says, "and the people are very friendly, and the mayor has grand ambitions of growing it to support five times as many people by the time the children are all grown - bigger, and taller, and also underground."

"That's very fast for a city to grow! ...Um, it seems like it to me, anyway, I - don't know how fast your cities would usually be expanding. What powers the trolleys?" 

"I have no idea. Not horses, it's some fancy modern thing."

"It's how they do it in mines," the woman says. 

"Whoa, that sounds fascinating! Will they let me look at it up close, if I go into the city?" 

"I can't think why not."

"I think I'll do that!" Eltran glances around. "...Do most people here have this many children?" 

"...well, some just got married and haven't yet?"

"Right, that makes sense. ...Uh, what's trade like in this city, and how do people generally make a living...? All I know is farming, I'm not sure if I could make my way here." 

"I don't really know what trades Elves find tolerable," he says a bit dubiously. "I'm not sure what work people do in cities. I suppose some of them are soldiers and some of them serve the King and some of them write religious texts and such."

“Oh, writing sounds like fine work. What religion do you practice here?”

"We follow Melkor, the god who made orcs and defied the other gods for us."

...Ooh, the Visser is going to find that very intriguing, Eltran thinks. 

"I see. I don't know much about any gods, really - what's Melkor like, how and why did he defy the other gods for your people...?" 

"Melkor is the god of growth and change and - things not staying in an inadequate state just because there aren't obvious improvements nearby. He made orcs, because at the time the only peoples in the world were elves and he thought they were - well, it's good to have elves, but not everything should be elves, right. The other gods hated us and went to war with him over creating us, and he surrendered because a war among the gods would destroy the world, and they took him away. But he has been explaining to them how he sees things, and their hearts have softened, and he's been released, and will return someday."

"Interesting! Thank you, that's - definitely something to think about. Uh, I think I'm going to head into the city now and try to get a look at the trolley? It sounds so impressive. Do Elf cities have that or is it - more a thing you have because Melkor thinks growth and change are good...?" 

"I don't think Elf cities have that because Elves...don't care about getting places quickly and they care a lot if their cities are very pretty so it'd get held up in argument for a century."

"We haven't met any Elves," says his wife. "It's just what you hear."

"That sounds kind of frustrating!" Shrug. "Which way should I go from here to see the trolleys?" 

They point towards the denser part of the city and give confusing directions relative to their cousin Ihrad's place and the tall tower that's got a slide and the place with the chickens.

Well, fortunately he can get further directions from the shuttle hovering invisibly over the city, in position to try to spot things like the tall tower with a slide (why a slide? Eltran is so curious!) 

The slide seems to be just so kids can slide down it, which they are doing by the dozens. The trolley seems to be a very early steam-powered rail trolley system, not very reliable and demanding lots of coal.

It's nonetheless pretty impressive, compared to the visible tech level in the other ('Elf'?) cities. Eltran wanders around and looks at architecture and mostly tries not to draw too much attention to himself, an obvious interloper, but if any of the locals approach he'll ask them more questions about their lives in the city. 

He intermittently checks in with the shuttle about how much Tongues time he has left, and when he's down to fifteen minutes starts heading for the outskirts of the city, while the shuttle crew look for an isolated or hidden area where they can land. 

People are very startled to see him but mostly not rude. The average age looks to be early adolescence; almost everyone has some young children with them. The steam powered trolley is the only example of such technology in the city; it otherwise looks preindustrial. There's a lot of construction.

He gets a look at as many city features as he can, tries to ask people he sees about the invention of the trolley system, and then escapes before he loses the ability to talk to them. 

They mostly don't know much about it except, yes, it's based on mining technology, and it runs on coal, and no other cities have it so it's a tourist attraction.

It's all very interesting, and then Eltran takes the shuttle directions to head out and be collected. 

...

Meanwhile, another few of Mhalir's staff (both selected because of their long hair, now properly tied back with ribbons) have been poking around the edges of Lothlan and Brithombar. 

Mhalir has been paying somewhat more attention to Eltran's microphone transmissions; he has one of the ship's crew assignment to monitor each, of course, in case of any problems. 

<What do you think?> he asks Carissa. 

Lothlan and Brithombar are beautiful cities, shockingly prosperous for how they evidently haven't invented industry, both of them built around their ports. Everyone is richly dressed; most of them wear jewelry; they sing, sometimes a whole block of them the same song, presumably telepathically coordinated. There are a few children, but few even for a human city, not just in comparison to the orcs. Many of the houses have stained-glass windows and all of them have exquisite wooden porches, where their residents stand around singing to each other. 

Everyone is very concerned about the malfunctioning soul, and of the opinion that the victims should get that looked at.

:The orcs seem more like people: she says immediately. :I guess if the gods made the others like that that might explain it....

...maybe they don't have free will.:

<....Huh. Can you - unpack that more? They seem odd to me but not nearly that odd.> 

:Outsiders in Golarion don't have free will and they can still carry on a conversation fine. They're just missing - discontent, contradictory goals, the impulse to disobedience.... it'd be a god of art or something, who just wanted friendly trusting people who make art all the time...:

<Hmm. How do you know that Ousiders lack free will, for this definition of it? ...I think that on Earth there are some humans who are low on discontent and contradictory goals and the urge to disobedience, and this is just what one ought expect given various traits on a bell-curve distribution, and chance, and the population size on Earth, but - you seem to think of it as something more fundamental than that...?>

:...yes. It' s not just an Asmodean thing, though I guess I don't know how Aroden would describe it. Originally people didn't have free will, and outsiders don't, and someone gave it to mortals but it was stupid of them. I think it's more of a difference than just 'people vary in how compliant they are', like, I score very well for that but I'd still need a lot of correction if you didn't like me thinking things you disagree with. Someone without free will isn't just good at being cooperative they don't have any desires that are in conflict with it.:

<....That seems - kind of horrifying to me? An agent that - doesn't question the orders given to it...?>

:The ship doesn't question the orders the pilot gives it.:

<...You mean the ship computer? But - that has far less intelligence than a human mind...at least, if we consider intelligence pointed in the direction of - agency, of interpreting ambiguous instructions and comprehending complex realities and...making sane choices based on those.... This ship would jump us into a black hole, if that were in the instructions the pilot gave it, and think nothing of this even if it knew the inevitable results....>

:I think not having free will still permits, uh, noticing that you probably don't want to jump into a black hole. I don't know. I haven't thought about - theology - much recently -

- and maybe something different is wrong with the locals but I can't think what. And the orcs said that the gods were angry about how they were made, which fits.:

<I am not sure what to think of that. I think - well, no offence, but if I had taken everything you said and believed about Asmodeus seriously, I would have ended up believing something very wrong according to what I actually care about...>

A mental shrug. <I agree that something here feels off. I think we need more information on the Elves side of the story, regarding theology, but...well, we already have significant evidence that the Elves are...non-agentic and nonviolent. This is not the lowest-risk plan for us, but - I would propose we hide ourselves within Detect Thoughts range while one of my staff asks an Elf difficult questions about religion. What do you think?>?

:Sure.:

<All right. We can of course take all the reasonable precautions, but - I think we need this information...> 

And they can sit down and take the full debriefs from everyone sent down to talk to the locals.

Mhalir, to be honest, shares Carissa's impression that the orcs seem...more like people? More like his people? He's not quite sure what the concept is, here, but there's something. 

They think and plan and discuss, and then sleep, and then Carissa can prepare her spells - Tongues to cast on Mhalir's staff, and Detect Thoughts a few times, and Mhalir suggests Teleport just in case they need to bug out to the shuttle, which can make sure to stay in range...

And elsewhere:

"Show me the coordinates again - here...?" 

"Yes, here." 

Ma'ar just nods. 

Carissa prepares Detect Thoughts and Invisibility and Tongues and the teleport to get back to the ship if she needs to, and she and Mhalir accompany the next expedition.

And Ashran 452, this time with a long-haired wig appropriately tied back and braided with ribbons and a ship-fabricated outfit that roughly matches their footage of what farmers nearby wear, advances into Brithombar while Mhalir and Carissa hide behind a building, looking for someone local to talk to. 

This person is laying paving stones by hand, and singing, as usual.

"Er, hello? Are you busy?" 

The person thinks at once that that's really really weird, who interrupts people out loud, she said hello when he came into view like a normal person and he didn't answer. "Are you all right?" she asks rather than answer the question 'are you busy', the answer to which should be in evidence with the paving stones. 

"- Er, yes, sorry - I have a malfunction with my soul, it means the telepathy thing doesn't work. I'm from a farm far away and I'm trying to learn things about the city?" 

"I didn't even know that could happen." She is still not totally sure that could happen but it's not really her concern. "What did you want to know?"

"Er, right now I'm especially wondering what gods people in the city worship?" 

(Eliza feels like this is an incredibly awkward conversational non-sequitur, but Ashran ignores her.) 

<...You can start reading her mind now> Mhalir indicates to Carissa. 

Detect Thoughts.

The person is baffled by the question. "What gods they worship? They...mostly don't? I guess Ulmo.....is around sometimes....but not very often. Do you wish you were golden or something, because there's not any more of that in Brithombar than on a farm."

She's saying more or less exactly what she's thinking; 'wish you were golden' comes with a literal mental image of people with blonde hair.

"....Er, right, but - what do you know about the gods in general? How many of them are they, what sorts of things do they do?" 

She suppresses a flash of irritation. Having your soul broken would probably be annoying. And she - looks it up, with a mental motion kind of like Mindspeech - "There's fifteen. They....came here, and fought Melkor, and asked who wanted to come back to their planet with them, and left with the ones who did, and now they mostly hang out there, except Ulmo, who is friendly with some people here, I think." She has not stopped laying paving stones. "Do you need one of them to fix your soul?"

"...Er, go back to their planet? What planet is that?" 

"Valinor? It's the planet the gods made because there was too much design conflict on this one and they didn't like how it came out." She is again saying exactly what she thinks.

"There was, er, design conflict. Over the - planet," Ashran repeats, blankly. 

She concludes that he has some kind of brain injury making him very stupid and socially inappropriate. Poor thing. Probably she should take him home or something and make sure he can at least feed himself and clothe himself and figure out whether he has family he wandered away from. 

"Yes. Artistic disagreements, you know how those are."

(Eliza is not the one reading thoughts but she's nonetheless fairly sure they're making so many social faux pas right now.) 

Ashran ignores her. "Why did the other gods fight Melkor, anyway - what was He doing that was bad?" 

- oh, this probably requires some delicacy. And maybe assessing the extent of the brain damage. She sets down her paving stones. 

"He was doing a lot of bad things, some of them things that are scary to hear about when you're all alone with your soul not working. He has stopped, now, and no one will let him do bad things again." She's not thinking specifically about what they are, just that they're inappropriate to tell the brain damaged about.

(Eliza can't IMAGINE that whatever Melkor's done is scarier than the war against Hell, regardless of whether their 'soul' is 'working', but she lets Ashran handle this.) 

"What sort of bad things?" Ashran says, insistently, hoping that even if the person doesn't answer, Mhalir will be able to read their mind and get something useful. 

"He hurt a lot of people very badly," she says vaguely. She is thinking that she doesn't entirely understand the details herself. "And he made orcs, by torturing Elves until we came out differently, twisted and misshapen and in pain. But it's over, it's not going to happen again."

"That's - what - how do you make, er, a different species by torturing people, that - isn't how biology works -?" 

"....well, I guess it works differently if you're a god," she says, not sure how you'd know anything about biology if you don't even know who any of the gods are.

"Is there anywhere else I could go on this planet where they'd know more about the gods?" Ashran says, stubbornly, thinking that Mhalir would definitely be better at thinking of questions and hopefully he'll prompt her if she's failing to.

"I guess you could go to a library, and ask someone to read the books to you?"

"Er, sure," Ashran says, resisting the urge to mutter that of course she knows how to read. "Who's written books about the gods?" 

<Pay attention here> Mhalir thinks to Carissa. <...What do you think of this? Where else should we be pressing her?>

Carissa wants to know what the laws are, whether there are opinions about the gods you aren't supposed to have, what sorts of things get you into trouble in the city. 

"I don't know who has written books about the gods because I have never read any," the woman says, a touch condescending with the precision with which she is at this point speaking. "I do not personally think it's very interesting. Probably the same people as write books about other things."

"Can you ask about laws in the city and what opinions about gods you shouldn't have and what would get you into trouble," Mhalir whispers into his earpiece, to be relayed via the shuttle to Ashran. 

"- Right, er, thank you," Ashran says, slightly distracted. "I - er - if I go to the city, I don't want to get in trouble, or - make people think I'm bad by asking the wrong questions? What laws and, er, cultural norms, should I be careful of?" 

"- you're different," she says, condescending again. "But that doesn't make you bad. If anyone thinks poorly of you just because you ask strange questions and your soul is malfunctioning, that speaks poorly of them, not of you. I would not expect you to be in any trouble just because you don't know anything and can't learn it or remember it yourself. And I can't imagine you would need to worry about the laws? If something looks valuable, you shouldn't break it, and you shouldn't take it without asking. That's about all there is, and no one'll be angry if you forget, what with your problem."

Is Carissa getting any discordant notes from this in her Detect Thoughts read? 

This woman more than anyone Carissa has ever met seems to just say what she's thinking, except when she thought she should be gentle to the brain-damaged stranger about the horrors of what Melkor did. It is reinforcing her conviction these people don't have free will; how, otherwise, would you end up with that habit.

Mhalir remains fairly sure that there are other ways to end up with this habit, but he's not sure they're going to learn much more from this particular person. 

"Tell her to move along," he whispers into the microphone. Ashran and Eliza should still have another seventy minutes or so of Tongues to ask more questions. 

"Er, thank you, I'll be going now," Ashran says. 

(Eliza thinks this is SO AWKWARD but, at this point, whatever.) 

The elf notices the crackle of sound from the earpiece and finds it unpleasant but doesn't have a theory about what it might be and is happy enough for the interaction to end. Then she remembers she shouldn't let this person wander off when they're this confused and disoriented. "Oh, must you?" she says. "I really ought to take you home and ask around if anyone lost you. Have you had anything to eat today?"

"- Er, I've eaten today, thank you. I don't need you to take me home, really." 

Ashran is now starting to agree with Eliza on this being SO AWKWARD. 

"And drank water? I guess you're taking care of yourself all right... do you live alone?"

"No, I live with my, er, mother..." Ashran accepts Eliza's help in very quickly making up a name and living circumstances for said imaginary mother. 

"And does she know you're here? Do you have any money?"

"Not here but I told her I wanted to go nearer to the city and talk to people there, I don't have money on me but it's fine, really - I should go back home to her now..." If this overly-concerned person doesn't give up soon then Ashran is going to start considering more extreme routes such as "literally running away." 

"All right," she says, thinking that probably he won't get himself badly hurt or killed, there are enough people here to see him if he yells, and he's clearly competent to do his own hair if awfully clumsily. "Have a good day."

"Thank you!" And Ashran escapes as fast-yet-discreetly as possible, and whisper to the shuttle for further instruction as soon as she's fairly sure that they're out of earshot.

<...Should we sent them somewhere else?> Mhalir thinks to Carissa. <The locals seem so absurdly - possessive, or overprotective, or something -> 

:I think they think of everyone as, like, their military unit. Their whole species. She just seemed to consider it her problem, even though she didn't like them and wasn't at all equipped to help, and also seemed to expect that if they met anyone else they'd do the same thing.

I don't know. I don't get it. 

We could do it ourselves, though. Whatever it is it doesn't seem immediately physically dangerous.:

<...Sure. I think we could get - higher-fidelity data that way, you are very good at this.> 

:I bet I could act like I had no free will better than your people can. And if I'm mindreading then I'm better positioned to adjust our presentation, too.:

<Yes, I agree.> 

And Mhalir whispers orders into their microphone for Ashran to back off, he and Carissa are going in - can the shuttle give them directions to someone else to talk to -? 

Sure, a quarter mile up the road there's someone with a wagon that has broken down; he's repairing it.

Mhalir takes them over that way, and then lets Carissa take the lead as they approach; he can focus on maintaining awareness of their surroundings.

She casts Detect Thoughts again as they're getting close. "Excuse me? Is Brithombar this way?"

He is thinking that he was confused when she approached that he couldn't hear her at all but the woman just down the road mentioned there was someone wandering around with her soul malfunctioning. This woman doesn't match the description at all, though. He asks the first woman to look through his eyes and get a clarification. 

No, that's not the poor soul I ran into, the other elf reports. 

That's alarming. He hopes it's not an epidemic. "Is your soul not working?"

"It works fine! Can they break? I didn't know that! I have just stopped using it, as an artistic project. I want to explore what I notice about the world when I try to live in my body rather than my soul."

He thinks that's perfectly reasonable and very reassuring compared to there being contagious soul problems. "Huh. What've you noticed?"

"Truth be told, I don't have words for it. I think I'd grown too accustomed to having every friend and every answer at my fingertips. When you don't have that, it changes how it feels to interact with people."

"How long have you been doing it?"

"Two years."

He finds this not notable at all. "Well, yes, the city's Brithombar."

"Is there any recent news I wouldn't've heard about?"

"In the last two years....hmmm. They resurfaced the library, and there are some designs under consideration for the dock quarter."

"Well, I haven't been by in a long time but I remember thinking the library didn't fit the locale very well."

"It needed resurfacing but I'd have gone in for a stone facade, I think."

"What'd they do?"

"Oh, it's tiled. There's a new glass tile technique, and it's all right, but I think I wouldn't personally use a new technique on a facade for a big building like that, a lot of the imperfections aren't really visible until you've tried it at scale."

"That's a good point. What're they doing for the palace balcony project?"

"I haven't actually seen the designs yet? Do you want to help me with the wagon and we could go look it up when we get into the city?" This isn't flirting but it isn't categorically not flirting; she has demonstrated interestingness and good taste and they met in a moderately romantic fashion (by chance on the road when his wagon broke).

"I'd be happy to try, but I don't know very much about, uh, wagon repair."

"Oh!" he says, delighted, and launches into a detailed explanation, seemingly on the premise that anyone who doesn't know about wagon repair would dearly like to learn. 

"I'm afraid teaching me all this will just slow you down," she observes after a few minutes of explanation of axel alignment. 

He is baffled. Obviously it would be faster to fix the wagon himself but then she wouldn't know how. "Do you have an...urgent appointment?" To his mind such things are very rare. 

"Just a cousin who is expecting me for dinner."

"Oh? Who? I can let her know not to worry if we're in past nightfall."

"That's very kind of you but I generally prefer people don't do that, it defeats the purpose of trying to live in the moment without relying on my soul, if I'm just relying on other peoples'."

"Hmmmm. Perhaps I can just explain what I'm doing while I do it, and then we can be in the city sooner, if that's on your mind."

"I appreciate it. I just prefer not to be out in the dark, you know, lest I get myself into trouble and need to call for help and ruin my experiment."

"There's not really any wildlife this close to the city," he says, not even thinking of any threats other than that, and then explains his wagon-repairing.

Mhalir continues to be IN AWE of how Carissa can somehow manage to play this part so perfectly. 

<...We should maybe try to ask him more difficult questions about the gods> he thinks to her. <Or other things where we specifically want information. But - carefully, I suppose, I would not want to ruin the character you are playing here.> 

"I hear Ulmo makes himself known in Birthombar sometimes."

"I don't think recently. He keeps an eye out for the ships that go all the way around the world."

"And a good thing! That's a dangerous journey.

You know, the orcs say that Melkor's going to come back."

"I heard that! I don't know if the Valar will allow it. Obviously we shouldn't punish someone forever for crimes thousands of years ago, but, you know, he seems like trouble."

"Melkor? Yeah. He created orcs, that doesn't seem like a very Good thing to do."

"He created orcs and he killed so many people and he did horrible things to their souls and I know he's sorry but I think he ought to be sorry in Valinor where there are gods to keep an eye on him."

"Are they going to be any good at keeping an eye on him?"

"I'd expect being a god is a leg up, there. They didn't have any trouble with keeping him a prisoner."

"Do you think it might mean a war with the orcs, if he came back?"

"A ...war? Like between the gods? I...how would that even work, we're not gods. I haven't a grievance with any specific orcs and they haven't one with me."

Do countries here not call it war.

"I mean, they might want our territory, once they've filled up theirs."

"They can't do that. Ours is ours and theirs is theirs, and if they want to have lots of children and fill theirs up, that's up to them, but it doesn't give them the right to ours, that'd be very silly."

"What would stop them."

"....what stops people from taking each others' things normally! That it's a very rude thing to do!"

"I would have answered that question with 'the city guards!'"

"I have never heard of the city guards stopping someone from taking something that wasn't theirs!" Pause. "Apparently they do it occasionally but it's usually a confusion, or a chlld, or someone is hungry or something."

"The orcs will be hungry, when they run out of land."

"...they wouldn't have children if the children were going to be hungry."

"I mean, there might be a good year, and they have lots of children, and then a few years later there's a bad year, and they can't feed them."

"...well, I guess we'd have to let them have some farmland, then."

"Do you think Ulmo would allow that?"

"I don't think he pays much attention to what's happening on land."

"That makes sense. Just, it seems someone ought to be paying attention to that, and he's the first one I thought of."

"Well, maybe that's why they left Melkor go, is so he can keep them from making bad choices. Since he created them."

Carissa feels - cold. "Maybe. I guess he'd be the best person for it."

Mhalir is still quietly impressed with Carissa's performance but mostly he's SO CONCERNED. 

<I...am starting to share your impression that these people are very very disconcerting!> he admits. <They - are like very sheltered children - and cannot imagine that anyone else, anywhere, is not like them...> He very carefully keeps his shudder of unease purely mental, cut off from Carissa's body. 

"Is this something you got all concerned about once you stopped using your soul?" the elf asks.

"I guess so. I have more time to think my thoughts without talking to other people so I guess I get some thoughts that other people don't."

"You should write a book! Or do a stage-play." He reattaches the wagon axel with deliberate precision.

"I worry it might disturb people, if it was about things like that."

"Well, I wouldn't have it be about things like that, but there must be other things you thought of that aren't horrible."

"Well, not using my soul makes it harder to know which things will be just an appropriate amount of interesting for an art project and which go too far and are shocking."

"Huh, does it! I suppose it would. It doesn't seem hard to guess but I suppose that's because I will be shocked by the same things as other people, and if you barely talk to other people you don't know if that still holds."

"Yes, exactly. Does anyone ever visit the orcs? I'd think that'd make people think of some of the same things as me."

"...well, no, of course not. Do you know what they look like?"

"What orcs look like?"

"Yes. They're awful. Being surrounded by them would be -" Shudder. "I know some people write letters and that's all right, especially now that they can use a typewriter."

What. 

"So we can't go visit them because they're so ugly that it'd - offend us?"

"Have you ever been somewhere ugly? I don't mean, the design didn't translate spectacularly well to the building and it's a little off-putting, I mean - a construction site where there was a hurricane and now everything is everywhere, or a Dwarf settlement that's not in one of our cities..."

"No, I haven't. What's it like?"

"Everything is awful. It's - hard to remember that the world is a good place, with nice things in it. Most people just close their eyes and look at their friends' sunsets or something. - I don't know what you'd do -"

"Maybe I would think of something that most people haven't thought of since they can look at their friends' sunsets."

"Maybe."

Orcs are kind of ugly even by human standards, Mhalir thinks, that's a fair point. 

<...Fascinating. Maybe a species difference. They - have the same strength of reaction to visual ugliness as humans do to - I am not sure, the smell of rotting meat or something comparable. It sounds so inconvenient!> He thinks for a moment. <...I would be interested in talking to one of them who exchanges letters with orcs, if he knows someone specific or has other leads on that.> 

"Do you know anyone who writes letters to orcs?"

"Hmmm? No, not personally. You might ask at the palace, we have diplomats and such and I'd expect they write letters, or know people who do."

"I've never been to the palace before, are you allowed to just walk in?"

He flips the wagon back over and starts reloading its contents; they're very heavy, and he lifts them effortlessly. "....yes?"

"If I were a King I might worry that if too many people wandered around my palace they'd scuff things or break them or wear them down."

"Well, if it's crowded, probably you'd want to come back at a different time, but I don't think it usually is."

Mhalir is, again, kind of amazed by Carissa's ability to pick the arguments and examples that will land best with this incredibly bizarre people.

<I think we should show up there> he tells her. <They are not exactly likely to hurt us, are they, given...everything we know about this species...> 

It seems possible, even plausible, that the makers of this species didn't want its rulers to be like this even if they wanted its merchants and road-layers like this. If there's no magic on the scanners I'm willing to chance it, she thinks at him. 

"I guess lots of people wouldn't need to go personally with their queries, since they could direct them to the King's secretaries the normal way."

"Yes, I think people mostly go personally when they want to see the building, or if they have a gift or expect to receive one or something."

<...You could ask about gift-giving practices here> Mhalir suggests. <I - cannot tell if the implication is that sometimes the King will give gifts to random Elves or something.> 

He's now kind of impatient to move on, but probably Carissa can manage to learn more from this particular local. 

They are probably almost done with the wagon repair at which point they'll be walking in the right direction. "Well, I hope it's not presumptuous, to go without a gift for the King, but I haven't got anything nice enough."

"I would say it's more presumptuous to give a gift to the King, if you aren't entirely sure it's nice enough!" He finishes putting his things on his wagon, thinking that it's rude of her not to have offered to help, and starts towards the city. 

"I've never met a King and haven't the faintest idea how to not be rude to one!"

"Well, I haven't either, but I think the main thing is that there are lots of people who want to talk to him, so you've just got to be mindful of that, and only talk to them about, say, the most important thing that's come up in a thousand years, and then that'll keep his workload manageable."

"You'd think some people would be bad at guessing and make a nuisance of themselves."

"Well, I don't know that that doesn't happen with anyone but I think across the whole population we must have about the right amount of caution or probably he'd say something about it."

"I hear sometimes the orcs change their King, if they're not satisfied or if he loses a dispute with someone else who wants to be King."

He makes a face. "Well, orcs are ...kind of terrible? One shouldn't generalize, but. I think it'd make them both worse at governance and harder to govern, which is not a healthy combination."

"Whereas elves are...good at governance and easy to govern, so we've never been disappointed in a King."

"You could say people were disappointed with Elu, right, after a fashion."

"Right, of course. But those were very unusual circumstances."

"If Círdan wandered off for a thousand years we'd probably have replaced him before he got back, just as a practical matter. Especially if anything had come up in the meantime."

"Was ...Elu... gone a thousand years?"

Mindspeech-motion - "No, no, it was just a couple of centuries, but things were eventful back then, right, so it hurt more, losing him right then. I think if Círdan were gone a couple of centuries that'd be fine."

"It'd probably be all right, but if something eventful did happen, that'd be awfully difficult!"

"Probably someone else would have to handle it and then they'd be the King in a manner of speaking. Or, some people think we should all vote every century for who we want to have as King."

"Do they. Seems rude to the King."

"Well, they'd all vote for him. Just, as a symbolic measure, right, an expression of how power is located in the people. That's how some Dwarves do it. They're debating it to the city, if you wanted to go and listen."

"I might want to do that."

This is incredibly fascinating! Mhalir thinks that he's also curious to hear the debates. (And mindread the people engaged in them.)

<They seem very...> He isn't sure how to describe it, actually. <...Not Good, exactly, that does not capture it, but - like they cannot even comprehend Evil at all? In their minds they - live in a world without enemies. I cannot understand how this is a stable equilibrium, but...apparently it has been, somehow, for thousands of years...> 

:No free will, no criminals. It's not stable with the kind of people you and I are but you could do it with a population of angels and archons. I assume the orcs haven't conquered them because they have gods backing them, even if the gods are not very overt about it and not particularly worshipped.

 - obviously free will is a terrible thing to do to people but I find myself a little sympathetic to Melkor all the same. This is all so ...fake.:

<As someone who does not think free will is terrible, I - it troubles me. I suppose they seem happy, but they are also so...helpless. And - not doing much that I would consider of great importance? Though I suppose they have their own priorities.> 

:I'm sure this serves their gods somehow. And people aren't supposed to have their own priorities, they're supposed to have gods'. 

But it does seem - kind of sad, when you actually face it.: 

She asks the wagonmaker about local crops and local holidays - there is the reported anniversary of when Melkor was defeated and when the creator god made elves, but mostly they seem to have fewer holidays than Cheliax or anywhere else. Some people have children; it is generally discouraged to have several young children at the same time lest you have to split your attention, and both men and women are expected to be around to do lots of childrearing. Marriages last forever, apparently. 

:And there's no reason they wouldn't, because people without free will don't drift and change like free willed people do.: Carissa is aware that she's leaning perhaps too much on this hypothesis but it makes things make sense.

<They do seem rather unchanging.> 

They reach the city proper, eventually, and Ma'ar directs most of his attention to their surroundings, instinctively watching for danger even though it seems rather unlikely here. He lets Carissa lead the conversation and find a good opportunity to split off and look for the palace; in the meantime, if he can cast Detect Thoughts without being too noticeable, he's very curious to glimpse what some of the Elves they're passing by are thinking. 

They are thinking about the music they're singing and the sights as they pass them by and the debates they're listening in on and the presents they want to buy their friends. Several of them notice that Carissa is oddly short for an adult and yet doesn't have the body of an adolescent; also her ears are round, what an odd style choice. Someone tries to compliment her on it and is surprised to find out she's unable to be contacted telepathically.

Mhalir had already noticed that the Elves seem taller and stronger on average than humans, though this is relatively uninteresting as species differences go. 

<Listen to debates first, or try to go ask someone at the palace to talk to their orc diplomats?> he asks Carissa. 

:Let's do the debates first, there's less chance of drawing enough attention to us that we need to leave.:

<That makes sense.> And maybe they can ask people for directions there, to get some more practice having low-stakes brief interactions with the locals? 

She makes her excuses to the wagon guy and peels off, flags down a random person to ask for directions. Explains her artistic lack of soul use. 

The debates are held in a sloping wooden auditorium looking out on the cliffs and beyond that, the ocean. There are a few dozen elves present, some of them speaking, some of them standing or sitting and writing furiously, one knitting while she watches and one drawing the arguers. They're all spectacularly well-dressed. They're currently arguing over whether if you were going to hold elections it'd make sense to hold them once a century or more often than that; too often, of course, would waste the time of all the citizenry who have to contemplate and place their vote.

Mhalir is...kind of impressed, actually, the most impressed he's been so far. There's still the same uncomfortable lack of any particular urgency or - a sense that this matters, that anything here could make the difference between a more-okay and less-okay world. But they're making intelligent points, they're being open and curious, there's - a sense in which they're still trying, even if it feels unclear to him whether, deep down, any of them believe it has real stakes. 

(...Maybe it doesn't, not meaningfully, not the way he knows it? They seem to be at least quasi-immortal, living in an idyllic high-trust society in peace and plenty, their gods watching over them. Maybe it fits, culturally, that people in those circumstances would end up being this way... He's not sure what to think about it, and for some reason it's obscurely painful to look at.)

He wonders what Carissa's impression is. Probably less favourable than his. 

They don't seem stupid. 

It does seem - kind of wasteful? She's not sure what the Asmodean stance on this is and she's not sure what the Iomedean stance on this is and she's - not sure that hers would be either of those, anyway, at this point. 

It - feels like it matters, whether they are right, whether they really do have the unconditional protection of their gods and can concern themselves with art and music and debates about the merits of democracy divorced from considerations like 'peaceful transitions of power' or 'legitimacy' or 'continuity of the government'. Or whether one day in a couple hundred years when the orc lands are full it'll all go up in flames they can't even understand.

<That is definitely a possibility that frightens me> Mhalir admits. <And - well, Melkor may seem rather sympathetic to my viewpoint - the Elves seem to think he did very bad things but they are so unclear on what - but, either way, the fact that the gods were at war once seems reason to think it could happen again. And would presumably not be very good for the Elves.> 

He pauses for a while, half-listening. Thinking. 

<...I wonder how one gets to Valinor> he muses finally. <We - could perhaps learn more, there, about the overall situation.> 

(At the cost of maybe attracting the gods' attention, which he's not at all sure how he feels about.) 

:No other inhabited worlds in this system, right?: 

<Not that we could see - and if the gods can somehow cloak an entire planet, then they are terrifyingly powerful and I am not sure I would want to approach them! ...We can have the ship go further out in the star system, gather sensor data on the nearest other stars. Even if the locals have no spacefaring technology at all, I would not put interstellar travel past their gods.> 

It could also be in another plane. An afterlife, sort of, except without getting there being necessarily mediated by dying, since I don't get the sense they die often.

<...Maybe. In which case it could be more inconvenient to find - I suppose we could ask if anyone in the city remembers travel between here and Valinor, since they are so long-lived someone might.> 

:That's a good idea. Probably not here, I guess I can ask people in the streets on the way back towards the palace.:

<That makes sense. Did you want to do that today as well?> Mhalir is feeling kind of exhausted, but Carissa seems to have more stamina for this kind of thing. 

:If anyone who has the capacity for paranoia has noticed us it seems worse to give them more time to learn about us before we've learned what we need from this place, right. I'm worried word is getting out about me and my artistic project since they're all telepaths and talk to each other.:

<...Yes, that makes sense. And visiting the palace will tell us more about whether their leadership at least is capable of paranoia, perhaps. And then we can judge whether it is safe to return to this city again.> Pause. <...Though, honestly, I think I get along better with the orcs.>

And they can sneak out of the debates and start making their way to the palace, on the lookout for passersby to ask about Valinor travel. 

She explains her art project which requires her to interrupt their singing instead of just telepathying them. She claims a related art project requires talking to people who knew people who are now on Valinor, do they know anybody?

"Hmmm, anyone at all who was around back then? Did you talk to your grandparents?"

"They don't know anyone who left for Valinor."

"Huh. I bet my grandmother knows some who did, I'll ask her. - a couple of them, yes. She's got - how do I tell you where she lives if you don't use your soul - she's got a place at the top of the cliffs, on the road that's paved crosshatch, the house is blue and gold with stained-glass windows..."

How bad do we want to chase this?

<I think it is important. But we can go to the palace first.> 

Shiver. It still seems possible that the people in charge aren't - like this, in which case they might notice that she's not one of them and then -

- then she teleports out. There's still no magic here.

They head towards the palace. It is an exceptionally tasteful palace in the style of the surrounding buildings but more ornate, with everything hand-carved. In Golarion it'd communicate a very powerful King, to have had so many artisans on call for the project. Here they may well have done it for fun.

Mhalir is also on edge. He - agrees that he's not sure what it communicates, here, that the King is apparently widely respected, or that he has copious resources, or any of it... 

His attention is somewhat scattered, skimming the surroundings, trusting Carissa to handle the social aspect here. 

The interior of the palace is just as exquisite, and the first person they meet is a servant in a rich, deep blue dress, polishing a doorknob. 

Carissa repeats her cover story about an art project explaining the lack of telepathy and a different project which makes her want to talk to diplomats who talk to orcs.

"Yes, I heard about you!" the girl says cheerfully. "I'll check if Sadar is free....he could see you in the morning?"