"I'm not a diplomat or even a particularly sociable person, but I can at least, uh, recommend you books once you've learned to read - shouldn't take long, you're bright and already speak English - do you have a lot of people interested in defecting, normally?"

"I could read some of the signs that weren't English at the airport, actually - they were in the other major language on our continent."

"And kinda depends on how you define 'a lot' and also on what's going on? Time's we're at war with people very interested in bribing defectors tend to have more of that, and places that're internally unstable can hemorrhage people fast. But it's not really - a problem, right now, we're not in conflict, and there was a general amnesty after the cataclysm for... Actually basically everything, people got amnesties for behavior a lot worse than 'ran off with state secrets' or 'ran off to be a bandit somewhere.' We still keep track of shinobi, because we're not stupid, and abandoning your post will still get you a court martial, but it's - laxer, and you can ask permission to join another Hidden Village's command, now, and it's easier to actually retire." 

"What's the other language?"

"Japanese."

"Huh. Do you - somehow write English in Japanese characters - or do you just not happen to know how to read English but both speak and write Japanese - or have a separate vernacular and literary language -"

"Combination of 'this is a minority language' - so anyone who speaks it is usually bilingual or part of a remote community; 'Japanese was the official language of the Empire' - and they did a lot of cultural imperialism, honestly, so stuff they disapproved of that's easier to ban might've vanished; and 'nearly everyone is illiterate' - if you have the free time to learn to read, you can learn Japanese, which I guess in some areas ends up as the third of those. And some of the first, too, in areas this is closer to a majority language - though we might also have a weird adapted script for it by now. Not all the types of symbols we use were on the signs, and we only use the one script system across all languages."

"Well, a lot of Wikipedia pages will have Japanese versions, though I'm not personally able to vouch for the quality of the contents."

"It might help, though. What's Wikipedia?"

"Do you have computers?"

"Some."

"So, we have ways for computers to access content that is on other faraway computers, and this whole network of information sharing is called the Internet, and Wikipedia is a repository of information on the Internet which is user-editable and, surprisingly enough given that, is really high quality."

"We have some internal networks like that, but nothing generally publicly accessible. That seems - impressive."

"I like the internet. It's got icky parts but they're part of it being generally freely usable, you know."

"Icky parts? ...Actually, given humans I'm guessing a lot of that's porn. Or bizarre takes about reality. Or really fundamentally horrifying moral opinions."

"What do you mean 'or'?"

She snorts. "I'll avoid the icky parts, then."

"Wikipedia's largely safe. At least English Wikipedia."

"I'll make sure to head back there if I accidentally wander into icky parts, then."

"How do you get to non-Wikipedia places? - And is activity on the internet tracked at all?"

"There's search engines, most quintessentially Google, which you can use to look up whatever you want, and - mostly no, and the tracking is largely advertisers and not shadowy agents, and I have some anti-that software, but it wouldn't hold up to a really determined NSA agent if one were interested."

She nods, thoughtful. "NSA?"

"National Security Agency, they do domestic spying things. Our country has many fine qualities but also stuff like that."

"...Do countries here usually not have domestic spying?"

"I think most of them do, but it's acknowledged not to be an attractive feature, nobody's like 'visit the States, we have beautiful national parks and also the NSA'."

"Ah, yeah, domestic spying that's bad at being unobtrusive is annoying."

"Not... really the top complaint, but sure."