And there's a weird blue flash in the air - strange symbols briefly glowing - and then a woman appears, landing smoothly on her feet. She's wearing a dark blue sweatshirt or something under a pale green vest - looks almost military, or else someone who really likes tons of secure pockets - and loose black pants, also featuring a ridiculous number of pockets. Her eyes immediately dart around under her bangs, and her pink hair's fairly short and messy, controlled only by an alice band or something with a metal plate in the middle.

She finishes scanning the room pretty quickly, gaze then snapping to the two she's interrupted. Her posture's wary, closed in.

"Hello?" says the one with the fork. A mushroom slides off it onto the kneeling man's thigh.

"...Ah. Hello."

"...I apologize sincerely for intruding. I appear to have been transported to an unintended destination."

"Where... were you trying to go?" asks the fellow with the fork. The other grabs a napkin and tries to get sauce off his pants.

"Konohagakure no Sato."

"Is that in Japan?" asks the kneeling one.

"...I'm not sure what's 'Japan.'"

"...where's Kono-all-that, then?"

"...In the Land of Fire, part of the Elemental Nations. Where is this?"

"The United States," says the one in the chair. "Uh, my name is Brian and this is my sub Jackson."

"I'm Haruno Sakura. I don't recognize 'the United States.'"

"Sakura's definitely a Japanese name, it's those cherry tree flowers," says Jackson.

"More than one language can have the same name in it, I guess," says Brian. "Uh, Jackson, go look up a map."

Jackson hops up and scurries to the next room.

"My name does mean 'cherry flowers'..." she says. "Is it unusual, that I wouldn't know what the United States or Japan are?"

"Uh, they're countries," says Brian. "And you have a Japanese name and speak English. Also your hair is pink so probably you aren't from a monastery or something... yeah."

Jackson returns with a laptop displaying a Mercator projection of the Earth.

She examines the map, brow furrowed.

"...I think I might be very far from home. I don't recognize any of this."

"How can you be a space alien if you speak English and have a Japanese name?" asks Jackson.

"I honestly have no real idea. I know dimensional travel exists, though. Some people can make portals between worlds with different sorts of base rules... But I haven't heard of two worlds being so similar they have the same languages but different nations before."

"I've never heard of a mage who can make portals," Jackson says, "and I went to magic school."

"'Base rules' varying means magic, usually, at least for worlds we can survive being in. My world has a sort of omnipresent energy we call chakra, which everyone can manipulate, but most worlds lack it entirely." She frowns. "I'm not trained in sensing natural chakra, but - your world probably doesn't have it, either."

"...don't think so, yeah," says Brian. "I might have heard the word but I could be mixing it up with something else, like tai chi maybe."

"Yeah."

"The problem is I can't make portals, do not know what I did, and do not know how to get back at the moment."

"You could maybe get a teleporter to figure it out," says Jackson.

She nods. "Teleporting and portal making are often related in my world, too. I'm sorry to keep imposing, but - could you tell me how to find a teleporter?"

"I can ask people I know from school if any of them know anybody?" Jackson says.

"Yeah, you do that," says Brian, and he pulls Jackson in by the braid for a kiss before releasing him to complete this task.

"Thank you," she says, still sincere.

"I have some questions about this world, sort of just in general, but I would like to repay you for your kindness, as well."

"Magic pays the big bucks," Brian says, "can you do any?"

"Yes," she says. "Though my skill sets might not overlap entirely with what's common locally."

And, of course, it's strategically dumb to share more here than the minimum needed for being polite.

"That probably just makes it even more expensive, people who can do rare things are usually very expensive," says Jackson absently, typing.

She nods, humming. "A familiar principle... The income gap between those experienced in a niche specialty and those who just graduated with the basics is rather astronomical."

Shrug. "Of course, I don't know how much would just be replicating what's easy local - my main specialty is in healing. I'm somewhat better at physical issues involving solely the patient's own body than at treating toxins, and better at toxins than at externally sourced diseases. Still, I'm at least proficient in all of them."

A rather dramatic understatement, of course.

"Mages can do that and there's lots of demand so lots of them learn it but they still make bank," Jackson says.

She nods. "It's an exceptionally common skill in my world, too - we try to ensure one out of every four people trained in chakra has at least some medical training."

"Many of my rarer skills benefit most from their recipient being able to use chakra as well..." She hums, making a little show of thinking her skills through.

"Like, what, chakra transfusions?" asks Brian.

"I can imbue items with chakra - it's very hard, especially to get fancy effects, and doesn't often last long, but it's very useful for short term applications - but activating them requires a small burst of chakra, even if it doesn't require any training."

"Yeah, we probably can't do that," says Jackson.

"I might think of something else, though, especially once I'm more familiar with magic here. Some things might seem too obvious to me to actually mention..."

"Give her the basics on magic, Jackson," says Brian.

"Yes Brian. There are two kinds of eclipsed, that's people who can do magic, psions and mages. Mages do things with physical effects, like healing or flying or telekinesis or setting things on fire. Psions - I'm a psion - do things without physical effects, like seeing the future or telepathy or lucid dreaming or running a virtuality which is what I'm working on being able to do. - a virtuality is a sort of imaginary world that new eclipsed go into, so their powers think they're there instead of in the real world, and don't hurt anyone. New eclipsed are dangerous."

She nods.

"Most shinobi can do all the same sorts of things in theory, though there's some things that're easier or only possible with a specific bloodline power. Children's powers aren't usually dangerous, though some bloodlines can manifest out of control."

Or that child can be the poorly sealed host of a tailed beast, but that's sort of a weird edge case.

"What do kids learn first?" wonders Brian.

"Eclipsed start with control training but can usually come out of that with something minor like lucid dreaming or a bit of self-bioregulation," Jackson adds.

"Kids mostly learn the sorts of small techniques that aren't dangerous if you mess them up, and that require a few different skills - the standard ones my school taught to everyone were a technique to make illusory copies of yourself, one to change your appearance, and one to let you move very quickly. We also learned meditation, how to control our own emotions, how to break illusions, how to feel the chakra moving in our bodies and use it for very minor physical enhancement, and some general control exercises that aren't really formal techniques - like sticking items to your body, or floating a leaf an inch above your skin."

"Children with a lot of power but almost no control do exist, but they're almost always doing things like 'making a large fireball while trying to make a small fireball' or 'pushing off too hard while trying to do a powered jump.' Out of control bloodlines can be less predictable, but they're usually things like 'a child with a talent for summoning ice gets very scared and summons a lot of ice reflexively.' Which any trained adult can avoid being hurt by, and any untrained adult with enough sense not to scare a shinobi child can avoid having happen. I've only known one case of a child who was consistently dangerous, and he was being abused and got into the habit of lashing out - but most children will pass out very quickly if they use more than a little chakra, and they're actually bigger dangers to themselves than to others when they have no control, since dying from chakra overuse is kind of easy."

"We also don't really have 'new shinobi', though - I started chakra training at five, but kids can start as soon as they can be trusted not to experiment without supervision. There are biological differences in how much power or control someone's inclined to have, which can make some kids more efficient to train than others, but the things stopping us from training everyone universally are pretty similar to what's stopping us from having a universal literacy rate."

"...what's stopping you from having a universal literacy rate?" asks Brian.

"Technology issues - especially technology roll out issues. Most of our agriculture is still at the subsistence level, so farmers and weavers can't spare their children for school. Infrastructure issues, too - we don't have very good roads or transportation technically, and most of our population is extremely spread out, so establishing central schools is hard. Greater needs issues - a lot of the countryside was destroyed or damaged in recent wars, and we're focusing on fixing that. Political issues - there's no a lot of funding for schools. Bootstrapping issues - we don't currently have a lot of people trained as teachers. Cultural issues, too, somewhat, though that applies more strongly to teaching everyone to learn to use chakra than to read. Chakra techniques are traditionally restricted to specific families. Teaching people outside your family only became an idea within the last century."

"Huh. Since you mysteriously speak English maybe if you figured out how you got here you could import English teachers and stuff."

"That'd be great, yeah."

"...since you don't know how you did it though you can like, crash here, if you need to, we have a spare room," Brian says.

"I wouldn't want to impose..."

"I mean you probably can't stay forever but you don't have, like, money, right? Jackson, go fix up the spare room."

"Yes Brian," says Jackson, hopping to.

"I'll try to find a way to pay you back, then."

Jackson bustles around with sheets and spare toiletries. "Do you need anything in particular like, today?" asks Brian. "I can send him shopping."

"I don't have any weird dietary things," she says, "And I carry a lot of supplies with me. Thank you, though."

"...you don't look like you have a lot of supplies."

She smiles a little. "I mentioned seals, right?" She taps one of the scrolls on her belt. "I can store a lot in one of these."

"...wild," Brian says. Jackson reports to him after turning over all the contents of the guest room and Brian seizes him by the braid and gives him a kiss for his trouble. "Uh, we were just having dinner when you showed up, there isn't more of this but we have leftover chicken soup, you want some?"

"A little bit wouldn't go amiss - my food stores are all rations," she says with a little smile. "Edible and filling, but not very tasty."

Brian tells Jackson to warm her up a bowl of chicken soup and he does that. There's noodles in it, and carrots. This accomplished, he kneels back where he was before and gets more of the food off Brian's plate fed to him.

She thanks them again, glancing around for a place for her to sit and eat - she can easily eat standing, but civilians find that weird sometimes.

There are two chairs and Jackson is not in one so it's all hers; that's where he put the soup.

She takes that, then, mentally musing over just - all the questions she has. She knows just enough about civilians to not find them less strange than space aliens, but... She's only pretty sure the sort of relationship she's seeing is uncommon among her nation's people.

"I'm curious if there's other cultural differences than just a divergence in magic types..." she says after a few bites.

"I mean, you mysteriously speak English, so maybe everything else is the same too," says Brian. "I guess you sound lower-tech."

She hums. "Possibly overall."

"There's also - your relationship seems a bit strange to me, though I admit I'm not very familiar with the private lives of most civilians..."

"Some people on Earth think that girls are all subs and boys're all doms but that's not actually true," volunteers Jackson, gazing up adoringly at Brian. "Is where you're from like that?"

" - Oh, most of our relationships aren't that structured," she says, eyes brightening a bit. "Or - are more fluid than that. Civilians tend to have more fixed roles in their lives, though, as far as I know, and to be significantly more monogamous."

"...structured?" says Jackson, puzzled.

"Hm... Set roles of dom and sub in a - romantic context or a gendered context."

"Arguably, one spouse will be consistently submissive to another in a clan ranking context, if one is from a lower ranked clan or if one is from an internally high ranked branch of the clan, but that's mostly in traditionalist families or formal situations and doesn't just impact romantic relationships, except as far as you can assume spouses aren't trying to insult each other."

"I'm not from one of the clans, so no one would expect any of my relationships to have a dom and sub structure like that - unless I married into a clan, I suppose, but if I was just dating a clan member they wouldn't expect me to follow their rules unless they were very traditionalist."

"If two people are the same rank, dom and sub dynamics are pretty common and fun to play with, but... You wouldn't self describe as one or the other, generally?"

"...if you don't describe yourself as one how do you find somebody who has the other one?" asks Jackson.

"Most people do both, or you could seek out someone at a different rank than you and figure they'd be doing the same thing in the other direction if you didn't like using match makers or speed dating or anything."

"Most people are switches on your planet?" says Brian.

"In my culture, at least; the other classes all seem to do relationships a bit differently from each other."

"Wow. I guess that sounds... sort of convenient?" Brian says. "For the switches, anyway."

"What if you're whatever the highest rank is, and you're a sub?" asks Jackson.

She shrugs. "There's matchmakers. I've never used one, but I'm young enough it'd be a bit weird if I did."

"Huh," says Jackson. "Uh, what are you gonna... do, here?"

"...I'm not sure. Find a way to support myself, find out what from this world would be useful but not dangerous to import to mine, try to reinvent interdimensional travel?"

"I don't know how you'd tell an eclipsed job agency you have shibari powers," Jackson says.

"...shibari powers?" says Brian.

"Or whatever you said."

She snorts. "Depends on if job agencies are the only possibility."

"It's how I got my job," says Jackson, "I don't know how else you'd do it. If you want a magic job and not, uh, a carwash or something."

She nods. "Does anyone do like... Networking? Knowing people who have similar jobs."

"But I should also be able to just explain my abilities to an agency, or demonstrate some..."

"That might work, yeah. Uh, there aren't that many eclipsed but I know some from school?"

She nods. "Would you mind introducing me?"

"We're not really... friends, but I can dig up some emails..."

"I'll make it up to you, if it's inconvenient," she says.

"It's not really inconvenient just - socially awkward," says Jackson. He produces his phone and, while intermittently nibbling candied nuts out of a bowl on the table, sends some emails.

She... Hovers socially awkwardly! Wow everyone in this room is very talented at being socially awkward, aren't they.

Brian doesn't seem very awkward! He starts collecting dinner dishes.

"Okay," says Jackson eventually, "I sent some school people an email."

"Thanks."

Jackson's phone bleeps at him after not too long. "Isabella wants to know what kind of unusual powers, what should I tell her?"

"Well if nothing else I can put most non-living things into interdimensional pockets anchored to pieces of paper, which can be very trivially transported, but I have to be on the other side to get them back out. I can effectively indefinitely store all non-magical hazardous materials I know about. I can prevent people from using my native magic system, but I'd have to experiment to see how easily that is to adapt to yours - you mentioned new eclipsed being dangerous? The thing I'd make to prevent someone from using my magic is anchored a piece of paper you can stick to their forehead and pull off when you don't need their powers locked down, which might be more convenient than whatever you're using now. Depending on why new eclipsed are dangerous, I might be able to help address that, too."

"I can sense magic use from my native system. I don't know if that applies here. And I can amplify some types of magic use, too, but same problems as with the lock-down - I'd have to experiment here."

"My medical powers might have advantages yours doesn't - I need to touch people to heal them, but I can affect what I'm counted as 'touching,' which, with some set up, lets me heal people at a distance or very large groups of people. I can also keep going with healing for very long times if I need to - my world had a continent-scale disaster a few years ago, and I ended up healing large groups of people near constantly for over three days without stopping to sleep."

"Can anybody stick the paper to them?" Jackson asks, typing.

"It's possible, but it'll depend on what I end up working out - it needs to be activated each time and I could make one that self activates, but I don't know if I'll be able to get it to sense when it's touching an eclipsed, and the design I'm used to breaks if it's active when not touching someone - though making them deactivate on removal is a lot easier. I can probably create other ways for it to activate itself, but 'will only activate when touching an appropriate target' has the best safety margins and is the most reliable."

"Maybe a kind that works on kids," suggests Brian, while Jackson types more.

"I'd have to define 'kid' well enough to it, but that might be possible actually..." she muses. "There's some other things I can do but they mostly would involve secondary activation seals that'll run down their lifespan faster than the hindrance seals proper, which could cause logistical issues, and that would introduce some risk for false positives and negatives..."

"False how? People can tell if they eclipse or not," Jackson says.

"From the seal's perspective. It might activate when it shouldn't."

"Oh. Well, probably you should talk to lockdown people about that."

She nods. "Depending on how much they want to pay upfront for research, I might want to find somewhere to crash or another job while I'm poking at development, though, if they are interested..."

"Places that hire eclipsed usually do a contract thing where they pay you for some R&D but then you have to work for them a while."

"That'll end up depending on the contract, then, as well as how it's enforced - I'm under existing contracts back home, and new contracts would need to not conflict and to be fairly time-limited, or I'd need to be able to get out of them easily. Admittedly 'easily' includes 'I leave for home without fulfilling it and if our worlds are in contact no one makes this a political issue.'"

"I wouldn't expect it to like start a war or anything."

She shrugs. "I'll read things before I sign them, regardless."

"Yeah, that's a good idea, I kind of didn't but like I work for the government so it probably can't be that bad," says Jackson, "somebody would've noticed and complained by now."

Wow 'contracted with the government' and 'it can't be that bad' are incredibly incongruous statements. Not the most ridiculously so of ones she's ever heard, but, like, pretty up there. Especially sans the usual 'government propagandist' smile. Maybe random distribution of magic users in the population prevents the accumulation of power her world's had? Or disrupts it - you'd either need a government nearly all the randomly selected superpowered people want to defend, to aggressively cull young eclipsed who look likely to cause issues, or just end up with anarchy.

Or her priors don't apply very strongly to this world. Jackson is an eclipsed and doesn't seem to be part of anyone's army.

Maybe they're all adorably non-violent? That'd be a nice break from the other magic aliens she's met.

She nods. "I might disagree about what's a reasonable contract, anyways, and it'd be nice to know that up front."

"Yeah, that makes sense if you don't know basically what would be boilerplate."

Small smile.

"So looks like my first pass employment opportunity might be talking to people who do lockdowns?"

"Yeah, if you can do it by sticking paper to people that's probably faster and less of a scramble than having psions do it."

"It'd probably scale better, at least, though hindrance seals are likely to be slower than how fast I could react if I was physically near someone needing lockdown - once I figure out how to lock someone down with my magic system, anyways, which'll be preliminary to a lockdown seal."

"I mean, people eclipse all over the world, the good thing about paper is that you could give it to anybody," says Jackson.

She nods. "If 'eclipse-related emergencies' tend to trigger all at once it'd be a big deal, yeah, though seals can be hard to truly mass produce - for a 'worldwide' scale I'd have to spend some time simplifying it more than usual so I can make each one faster... Though if eclipsed are rare enough it might not take me long to make more seals than there are psions trained to do lockdowns."

"Yeah, they're all at once. Some lockdown psions can work remotely, but not most of them. And they have to get it all done fast 'cause the other way to keep an eclipsed kid from causing disasters is to not let them eat and they've mostly already been kept away from food a couple days before the eclipse. Or get them into a virtuality but not everybody wants to go."

She nods. "...Hm, I can induce starvation states very quickly with healing magic, if that would affect the thing 'not letting them eat' does. If there's an eclipse soon and if especially which kids might cause disasters are fairly predictable, I could distribute the thing that lets me cheat at 'who am I touching' beforehand and then meaningfully be next to everyone affected as quickly as a seal could, as long as that number's not higher than... Under reasonable constraints, probably a thousand if I'm not doing much else. - That strategy should also work if I get the ability to do lockdowns but not the lockdown seal before the next eclipse. Wouldn't be sustainable without me on the planet, of course, but seal development can take years."

"There's not one super soon, I don't think. Also we don't usually know everyone who'll be eclipsing in advance so you'd be touching a thousand random kids and probably only one of them would eclipse."

"I was imagining it'd get to the kids the same way whichever seals would, I am not physically capable of making one seal for every child in even a fairly narrow age range on an entire planet."

"What happened to a kid in my virtuality was he got super hungry and was trying to pick the lock on the fridge at night and then a cop barged in and cuffed him because a psion saw he was going to kill all the plants in Mississauga."

How horrifically undisciplined are their twelve year olds.

...Never mind, she was on a team with Naruto and Sasuke. Their twelve year olds are quite possibly amazingly disciplined.

"...Oh, just occurred to me - I can have more points than I can have active, a thousand is the number of simultaneous points I can affect so the number of kids I could lockdown in a short amount of time - there's trade offs that usually start getting very prohibitive if I have more than... Something like a hundred thousand points? But if I'm not doing anything complicated or monitoring people those trade offs don't matter."

"I don't really know how they'd wanna handle this. Do you write English same as you speak it?"

"The language I can write uses a mix of logograms and syllabaries, I'm not sure if that describes English or not."

Jackson shakes his head.

"Then, yeah, I don't know it."

"...I guess I could email the lockdown people for you, or -" Phone bleep. "Oh, Isabella wants to telepathy you? Can I take your picture so she can do that?"

" - Sure!"

Jackson takes a picture of her with his phone. And then there is a telepathic voice! [Hey, I thought this might be faster than trying to get Jackson to type in full sentences. I'm Isabella.]

[Hi! I'm Sakura. And, yeah, telepathy's very efficient.]

Her thoughts are very fast. Normal humans cannot think that fast.

[- so he wasn't super clear on whether you're a mage or a psion but I'm going to guess psion.]

[Technically neither, I'm a shinobi - different magic system entirely, doesn't split like that.]

[...uh-huh. How'd you get here?]

[Experimental teleportation technology was, it turns out, experimental.]

[Teleportation technology?]

[...I'm not sure how much got filtered over, direct telepathy was a very good idea actually. So my magic system runs on a sort of energy that's omnipresent on my planet, but that concentrates in living organisms, and concentrates more strongly in cognitively complex organisms. You can make technology that interacts with that energy, like any energy. There's magic techniques that let you teleport, and there's existing technology with dimensional effects, and I was part of a team trying to combine them. However I'm not sure how useful that technology will be to import here here since most of it requires you have the same sort of energy as us to activate, and I haven't felt any in my vicinity.]

[Jackson also didn't tell me you were from another planet!]

[Uh wow yeah, I am from another planet, I do not know for sure why our languages are at all compatible, even given convergent evolution of how languages should work, on particulars I would expect them to drift very - far - ]

[...]

[Anyways I can try to prove I'm from another planet?]

[Whaddaya got?]

[Memories, if this link can support images and those can't be trivially faked. Or I could demonstrate my magic in person.]

[Link does not support images yet, it's on my to-do list. I'm not near Jackson and Brian, you'd have to come here. Or I could go there but I'd have to take off work.]

[I can travel. If you're literally on the other side of the world it would take me a while, though.]

[No, I'm just a few hours away by plane.]

[What's a plane?]

[Flying vehicle, goes real fast. How were you planning to get here?]

[I don't know your units of measurement but I can run faster than the speed of sound, including over water - though preventing sonic booms is annoying so I usually don't do that.]

[Wow. Okay. Uh, there's stuff in between.]

[Yeah I don't think this planet's a featureless flat plane or anything. I can navigate enough to run through a forest at that speed, and I can just skirt around any major settlements. But a plane sounds simpler?]

[I'd think so, yes. I can, conveniently, get you a ticket even if you don't legally exist.]

[Oh, nice.]

Possibly someone in or working for government, too, then.

[What does getting on a plane involve?]

[You'd get Jackson or his dom to drive you to the airport, tell the staff at the counter you're a 114 and have them print you a boarding pass, I guess get directions verbally from employees since Jackson says you're not literate in English, and then sit in an uncomfortable chair for a few hours and I'll meet you at my end.]

[Sounds easy enough.]

[Cool, I'll get on that. What's your name?]

[Family name Haruno, given name Sakura.]

[Okay, I'm going to give that to the airline as Sakura Haruno because that's the local ordering. Apparently Brian can give you a ride to the airport.]

[Thank you. Everyone's been very helpful.]

[Welcome to Earth, glad you find it hospitable.]

As wryly as telepathy will communicate: [Better than the last alien civilization we met.]

[You've met more?]

[Yeah. Not friendly. Very long story that sums up to 'our planet has a resource they wanted, retrieving it was destructive, they did not consider our species worth acknowledging, we kicked their ass.' We are now playing extreme catch up, both technologically - we didn't win with pointy sticks and rocks but we may as well have as far as power gap goes - and trying to figure out the best way to get a unified planetary defense in case they come looking for their - we think independent project runner, not someone who would be reporting back often. And definitely before they send an actual military force. Luckily we think we have time...]

[Wow. What did they want?]

[Pretty sure they were after something that's causing our planet to have the magic system it does - this planet not having that system supports that theory, since it means our system is definitely localized.]

[Might mean they want to steal our moon or something though.]

[Yeah, I don't know what they're interested in. They already had our magic system, though, they were - acting like our thing would be a power source or something.]

[Huh. And they don't have ours?]

[I don't think so, but we didn't exactly compare notes.]

[Fair enough. Uh, do you have any idea why you speak English.]

[We're pretty sure we're not native to our planet - like I am not a person who looks at bones but I saw a report from one that our species and a few others appear really suddenly in the... Record of really old stuff we don't have writing about. And our written records go back only a few centuries, except for like one thousand year old stone tablet. Human bones do show up old enough that it might be weird the languages aren't mutually unintelligible by now if our population split off from yours somehow, though. We do though have multiple languages which really are not at all related to each other with no idea how that happened, so my vague sense might be very wrong about how languages evolve.]

[There are places on this planet with shared Internet access where they have thick enough accents I'd expect Jackson and his dom to have a hard time understanding you, so I don't think you being a weird secret human colony extracted from Earth quite explains it, but it sounds like it's probably part of the puzzle, we do have an archaeological record here.]

[Possibly, yeah.]

[Weird. Uh, how hard do you think it would be to reproduce the transit?]

['Exactly what I did' would be easy, but that probably won't send me back. It'll take some work to reverse the transit, I don't know how much until I've gotten a chance to sit down and work out some math. Getting that estimate might take a day or two, depending on how efficiently I can work on it.]

[Okay, but more like weeks or like years? And will anyone be trying to get you back from your end?]

[Probably weeks or months on my end. They'll be trying to get me back but our one person with a targetable teleport was off planet so it might be a bit.]

[Okay, weeks or months is definitely faster than getting an eclipsed to try it. How many planets are you guys spread out across?]

[Only the one.]

[...so where's the person you mentioned?]

[Exploring. It can be irregular when he's able to return.]

[Exploring off the planet??]

[Yeah. Ones we know about from the aliens, mostly, and trying to - follow trails. Scout.]

[It does mean he's sometimes out of contact for very long times, though - there's something keeping him from going from any point to any point - and it's easier for him to send us messages than the other way around.]

[...I don't think I really get the situation with that but perhaps this is not of immediate import.]

[Yeah. Result is there's an essentially random chance I'll be found, but most likely I'll find my own way back.]

[All right. How scalable's the method?]

[Should be repeatable, single seal per person is likely to be more efficient than multiple people per seal, non-living matter is essentially free but can take time to prepare if there's a lot of dissimilar items. But I don't know how much experience activating complicated seals it'll take to use, or how much energy it'll require, or if it could be activated by people without my magic system - I'll probably actually send a message with instructions for how to get from there to here, that's less risky if my aim's off, and pulling's likely going to be easier than pushing, so I could pull someone here and then we could coordinate about when I should be pulled back. Then if we want repeated interworld travel we could try to get anchors set up, or just get someone stationed at either end.]

[Things like complicatedness and energy use can also be refined over time, but the initial versions of seals are usually stupidly inefficient.]

[Can I get a summary of what seals... are.]

[So a technique is a specific pattern of magic use that produces a consistent effect. They have to be performed at the same time they take effect, and they take energy we call chakra. Chakra is omnipresent on our planet but concentrates in living organisms. Most people can only use their own chakra, and there's a limited amount in their body at any given time, and running too low will kill you. Mostly depleted chakra stores will regenerate over a few days, usually, but that sets an upper limit to how much you can do at any given time.]

[A seal is a way of essentially delaying when a technique goes off, usually until a trigger condition. You preload them with chakra, and many can draw on ambient chakra, reducing their total cost, and a well designed seal uses chakra more efficiently than most people can.]

[They have to be anchored to something physical and made with inks containing bits of a chakra-sensitive organism - you basically write out a... Circuit? For the chakra to follow. Most people use inks made from chakra-sensitive plants, drawn on paper made to handle being an anchor, but technically there's nothing except common sense stopping me from cutting my finger and drawing a seal in blood on the floor. - Experienced seal masters can do that, but it tends to go poorly for anyone else. If your circuit is faulty, chakra will gather in places it shouldn't and basically explode, and unlike your body a seal doesn't have defense mechanisms to stop overloads.]

[I carry seal inks and paper with me, but also I do know how to create safely usable ink from my own blood if I run out.]

[Seals usually require a pulse of chakra to activate, which is a safety measure and also a way to simplify the seal. Simple seals are faster to make, and you're less likely to make a mistake when drawing it. Seals also usually have a practical upper limit on total complexity.]

[Why can most people only use their own chakra? Can technology do anything with chakra? Will yours regenerate normally on this planet? Will you be able to make more ink here, how much do you have? Why do you draw them by hand instead of printing them?]

[Chakra has... Different subcomponents, that can be arranged different ways, and taking external, unfiltered chakra into your body can cause really bad issues if it's incompatible, and you have to be specially trained to figure out chakra compatibility - uh this isn't exactly like transfusing incompatible blood types but if you use the metaphor vaguely enough it's similar. Your body can process and filter very tiny amounts but not well.]

[Seals are a technology and you can interface them with things like electronics to get compounding effects but that is an extremely specialized and hard field, and we haven't managed very many different things with it yet.]

[Mine should regenerate normally, but I'll be cautious until I'm sure.]

[I have enough ink for... Probably four experimental seals. I can make more, as well as more paper.]

[Our printing presses aren't very good, seal inks corrode a lot of non-organic materials, and wood is really terrible for printing with zero stray markings, can sometimes set off a seal when printing, and wears out quickly. Also, it's easiest and safest to charge a seal as you draw it, rather than all at once, but my control is good enough that's usually not a problem for me.]

[Can you make more without personally bleeding, though, I don't know if our plants and animals have chakra. We have assorted kinds of printers, what kinds of materials does seal ink not corrode -]

[Probably not, but it wouldn't be much blood, and I'm guessing your civilization has invented needles? So I'd draw blood and use that to make a large batch of ink, I wouldn't cut myself and drip into a bowl.]

[Glass is usually safe, though glass with impurities sometimes isn't. Metals aren't but you might have weird metals. Plastics aren't and can also do very weird things. Rubber varies depending on what it's actually made of, usually it behaves like either plastic or wood. Things like shells, horns, bones, tusks, and the like actually behave well as long as they have no living cells, but then we get back to 'fragile.' Seals need to be painted with natural hair brushes, too, usually with a bone handle, though my seal brushes shouldn't wear out anytime soon.]

[We generally store ink in glass or bone vials.]

[We've invented needles, yeah. And we have lots of kinds of glass, some of which is tough enough that it could probably compose all the ink-facing parts of a press. Stone? Ceramic?

[Most stones don't degrade, but they're not ideal - I think obsidian usually works other than being fragile and rare. Ceramics usually can't be glazed, and most will pick up the inks too much otherwise.]

[Well, maybe some materials scientist has an exotic ceramic designed for spaceships or something that will work. Or there's a way to do a printer that doesn't require anything to both touch the ink and be particularly sturdy against non-ink forces. Mass-producible magic would be a pretty big deal even if we had to import all the ink.]

[You'd still need someone trained in chakra use to charge them, either when they're made or when they're activated, but we're trying to train more of our population now, and the most common seals can be charged by students...]

[...Actually, how good is your world's agricultural technology, we had nine tenths of our population as farmers before the war and we're struggling even more now to get enough food, if your world's even a bit more efficient that'd - help, a lot. We could train more people, if nothing else.]

[...far, far fewer than ninety percent of the world population is farmers, we can absolutely export combine harvesters and stuff if there's a way to get them across.]

[If we can send people we can send items, and nonliving material is cheap to transport. Food, seeds, and agricultural technology alone would be enough motivation for us to throw significant effort at establishing trade...]

[Those are all doable! I will start trying to figure out who to talk to about that.]

[I do still need to figure out transit, so we have time... But trade can take a very long time to even really prepare for.]

[I'm not a farmer or botanist or anything but I know the strategic overviews and what the biomes are, so I might be able to answer some questions if any technology or whatever is picky about local conditions.]

[The combine harvesters don't care, I think, but similar questions - how long are your years and what are your seasons like, is your population likely to be gluten-intolerant or allergic to peanuts or suspicious of potatoes or anything, what kinds of food preservation technology do you have?]

[Might have to think about some of those, but it could give me something to do on the plane if I get tired of math.]

[Sure. I'm sure Jackson or his dom can spot you some notepaper if you need it.]

[I carry some with me, but, thanks.]

[Anything else we should cover before your flight? It's later here than there.]

[I'm not thinking of anything... Oh, should I avoid using my magic in public?]

[Uh, it's probably fine as long as it can pass in context for something a psion or mage could do, what do you have in mind?]

[Mostly taking stuff in and out of storage seals. I'd touch an inked symbol on a piece of paper and then would be holding something. Or vice versa.]

[If not I can just shift stuff into a bag I'll carry, or out of my pockets and into storage ahead of time. Also, is there anything I can't take on planes, Jackson seems - unlikely to think of everything, and I know a lot of places in my world do ban some weapons.]

[So, neither mages nor psions can make persistently magical objects. Mages can create matter but the rigmarole surrounding it would look very strange so it would be better to have a bag. You can't have weapons on planes, or anything explosive, or anything that might handle a change in air pressure badly.]

[Hm... I'll sort things then, yeah. Thanks.]

[No problem. Do you have lots of weapons and explosives?]

[...Not a lot for what most people in my world would assume from 'shinobi' or even just 'uses magic,' but probably a lot compared to most civilians.]

[Uh-huh. Please do not get into any violent altercations. I mean, self-defense is fine, if somebody tries to mug you you can beat them up. Though you should not kill them.]

[Soldier, not thug. I know how to restrain civilians without hurting them.]

[Oh good. Also, uh, if you make up your mind to telepathy me about it should you run into a problem, that will sometimes, if I'm precogging, let me see it coming in advance so I can warn you, but this only works if you'd actually do it even in cases where it from your perspective has already failed.]

[...Oh that is very useful. I can do that.]

[Oh good. I'll leave it open so you can pick up a connection whenever, please don't abuse it.]

[I won't.]

[Anything else not best left till later?]

[Don't think so.]

[Cool. I'll pay back Jackson and Brian for anything you wind up needing, so don't worry about that.]

[Alright. Thank you.]

The flight time arrives the following morning and Brian drives Sakura there without particular incident. She can't read the major signage in the airport, but she can read some of the fine print translations on the smaller signs that offer more languages.

She notes which language that is and continues on, following directions - she's pretty aggressively sealed away everything but her pens and most innocuous notebook, including her armor and headband, leaving her in just her civilian clothes. Might as well treat it as undercover work.

She analyzes the technology on display - on the ride over, the speed and apparent inertia of the car, the things they pass - in the airport, the ways they scan people getting on, their procedures for screening identity - gets surreptitious glances at assorted identity documents... Implied population density...

Sakura isn't precisely getting a measure of this world's military and economic capabilities, at least not in a way that'll show up as that to mind readers. She's just observing, and, well. She wants to make allies, and her information will help any alliances.

She does get a window seat on the plane, alternating over the flight between gazing out the window as they pass over the countryside - definite agricultural richness - and working on estimating how long a preliminary transport seal will take her whenever they're in the clouds.

She's alert as they deplane, looking for anyone who might be Isabella or someone sent by her. Sakura herself stands out a little bit. Pink hair will do that.

Isabella spots her. [Hey, Sakura, if that's you, look left.]

Left it is! She waves.

Isabella waves back. She has a cane.

She heads over! "Hello!" she says once she's close enough she won't be shouting. "It's nice to meet you properly."

"You too, how was your flight?"

"Interesting! I've never been that far off the ground."

"I'm getting a really patchwork impression of your tech level... This way," she adds, beckoning and setting off with the aid of her cane through the airport.

She follows.

"From what I've seen... Way worse infrastructure, way higher reliance on magic, with major knock-on effects with industry. Also possibly way more political fragmentation and weaker or more inconsistent governments; we meaningfully started having states again within living memory - not in my life, but people old enough to be my great-grandparents would've been kids through young adults during the end of the Warring States Period. Which is only named like that because the daimyo like to pretend they have a firmer claim to their territories than 'warlorded better than anyone else,' there weren't that many states involved - but we had an empire that collapsed a bit after the start of our surviving records. We actually lost a ton of technology when that happened and it's left weird patchwork gaps. Some stuff just broke and then we lost how to make it, some stuff got replaced by cottage industries, sometimes with magic, some stuff got blueprints successfully passed down and we've been trying to remake it..." She shrugs. She's never had to summarize the history of the Elemental Nations before, and while she's extremely widely read, she isn't a historian.

"Huh. What sorts of things do you rely on magic for?"

"Weapons, most centrally, though that had been fading a little. Medicine and mining are almost entirely anchored around magic. Transport and freight over large distances rely on it, too. Irrigation, sometimes, and cheating with where we can establish power generation points. Some manufacturing. Some construction - buildings taller than a few stories are either imperial remnant structures or made with magic." She hums. "Probably some more things on the margins, too..."

"Well, this is going to be an exciting new frontier, then, isn't it, we have totally nonmagical industry in all those and only use magic where we can't do it any other way and it's worth a lot of money - eclipsed are rare and expensive."

"Shinobi are... Rare but in the way artisans are rare, and the other magic traditions are rare in the way nobility or priesthoods are. A lot of the traits that make you learn magic easily are inheritable, and not being able to do magic exterior to your body is considered a disability within a shinobi community - though we've never successfully educated more than a tiny swath of the population, so magical inability might actually be more common than we're estimating."

"Shinobi end up doing a lot of the magical economy stuff, we were originally mercenaries and before the cataclysm usually continued to be... A weird sort of state within the state, where we primarily contracted with citizens of our allied nation, and only served as the military for that nation. Whereas the other two major traditions seem to take pride in doing nothing productive whatsoever. ...Though we also haven't liked them historically, that might be a biased filter on my part."

"What are the other magic traditions?"

"Main ones were samurai and monks. The monks are a religious order and mostly pacifists, they're kind of... They used to be people you had to listen to for politics but they've basically vanished now. The samurai were the ones who did the successful warlording, the daimyo all rose from their ranks, and they controlled the state. They're better at fighting than shinobi and worse at a lot of other things, and they'd been aggressive about trying to limit how many magic users the world had, because nothing threatens the nobility like peasants with fireballs."

"The samurai were basically wiped out in the cataclysm, though, and all the daimyo died. We absorbed the survivors into the Allied Forces, under shinobi command. We suffered some really heavy hits too, of course, everyone did - but the samurai mostly died at the start of the conflict, and we... Sort of stole an alien power that let us resurrect people, but it had a time limit a lot of the samurai ended up outside of, and our remaining leadership decided to triage civilians and shinobi to be resurrected first anyways. And then two of the people who were able to use it died from... Overload, possibly, and couldn't be resurrected, so we had the third stop because we really didn't want to lose him too, partially since he's now our only person able to consistently use any alien powers - I say 'we' but I was in a coma during that decision; I'd been part of the teams healing the wounded and retrieving anyone resurrected into a dangerous situation, and I overstretched myself."

She's... A bit shaken about that mess, still. It's hard to explain it coherently, especially to someone who can't feel the gaping screaming hole in the fabric of their world and society. Even children born after the war sort of just... Are aware of it.

"Wow, you've really been having a... time."

"Yeah, it sucked. But we won, so, sucked worse for our enemy."

"Congratulations."

"I think I'll like it better when we get enough shinobi and enough economic stability to open a university. That sounds more like a thing to congratulate."

"I hope we can help! I'm probably not going to go to the presses until we have transit, since you'll do that faster than a mage, but after that it'll be pretty easy to prove."

"Hopefully! And - we'd like to help back. Not just receive help."

"Yeah, and you can! Magic items we don't have cracked at all."

She laughs. "It'll take some work to make them broadly usable and mass produce-able, but, well. I don't think anyone will mind sending a lot of genin - apprentice shinobi - to sit and poke seals in between lessons. Could probably have a seal master as their teacher, even, we're trying to also train up more seal masters now... And that's something it's easy to track civilian-born kids for, since you don't need good chakra control or capacity, but farmers are already plenty good at math and analysis."

"...okay, what economic conditions lead to you having ninety percent farmers and also the farmers get math educations?"

" - It's not handled by education systems? Girls learn from their mothers. How to calculate ideal plot sizes for each quality, layouts of plants and the like, fertilizer and seed requirements, harvest times, yields, how much food your family needs and how long until the next harvest, if you're short how much can you reduce each person's rations without sending your household into collapse. That's just for farming, and then textiles are even more math - a bit closer to everyday seal math, actually - and farming households are also weaving households, and the larger ones are also the basis of a lot of industries - you contract out to farmers during the winter if you want people to produce something."

"Oh, okay, so not like calculus."

"I mean you can use practical calculus for some of those, but, yeah, theoretical maths don't come up much - but farmers and weavers aren't stupid, and they'll learn theoretical maths just fine if needed. And for every trade most people become apprentices at twelve, anyways, so - by the time they'd be really even able to learn the advanced math, they're shinobi with civilian parents."

"Cool. Okay, you want industrialization in basically full generality and we want magic items, anything else popping out?"

She hums.

"New technologies can cause wage crashes if they're rolled out - poorly, I guess, and you can end up with a lot of people in a desperate situation... We'd want to avoid that, but that'll mostly be - really robust ways to transition people to 'not being subsistence farmers and weavers' without disrupting existing communities more than the cataclysm already did. Teachers would help, upfront load of supplies would help - even if we can just use food to bribe parents to send their children to school instead of to - factories or whatever, that'll change the dynamic of the shift. Not disrupting communities could also mean very decentralized schools right now, so, more teachers... And we'll want an idea of what everyone's doing instead of subsistence production, since I'm assuming your world can't catapult us straight to post-scarcity. Also, broad history knowledge - your world industrialized, right, so we'll want to look at how it's gone here, to at least estimate where pitfalls we can avoid are."

"Adults are harder to retrain in general - but what we're retraining them too is also going to depend on what we import, and how trade affects our economy, and the like. Probably our ideal is going to be training as many kids as we can as shinobi, but that'll also mean at least a short period of intergenerational instability, since no one's going to have the same career as their parents..."

"We're not post-scarcity ourselves, but we do have an industrialization example to go by. Is people having the same career as their parents normally very important?"

"It is culturally, which ends up meaning 'it is psychologically.' But kids raised by parents in their trade do also learn the relevant skills earlier - that makes a big difference with chakra training, actually, especially since really young kids need to be supervised if they're learning magic more than teachers can manage, and civilian parents don't tend to be able to treat or even always spot 'kid is sending themselves into chakra exhaustion.' But that's something we're going to have to solve on a generational scale, we're not taking kids from their families."

"I'm glad to hear that. Chakra exhaustion is -"

"Chakra is an energy. Our bodies produce it, though we're not entirely sure how - producing chakra burns calories, so there's something biological happening there at least."

"It's less important if you've never used chakra, but our bodies get steadily more reliant on it as we use it, and as we use up chakra there's less in our bodies to use - which can cause medical problems. If you run so low you can't use magic without injuring yourself, that's chakra exhaustion. Most of the medical problems are stuff like hypothermia, weakness, dizziness, low blood pressure, full body pain, which all get worse the lower you get on chakra, but you can get other things happening."

"Chakra exhaustion can be deadly, too - usually only 'without medical care,' but if you drop low enough it can get seriously dicey, and some people manage to give themselves heart attacks by dropping too low too fast."

"Usually, chakra exhaustion isn't a problem for most shinobi, but children have small reserves, so run a thinner margin, don't always recognize the feeling of getting low on chakra, and don't have a good sense yet of how reckless they can afford to be. But there's tradeoffs - it's less effective and sometimes more dangerous to learn to access chakra for the first time when you're older, since your ability to sense and manipulate your own chakra goes down over time if you never use those skills."

"Huh, our magic costs calories too but if we overdo it we pass out and wake up hungry is usually the worst it gets."

"Convenient."

"Yeah, I mean it's more complicated if there's any preexisting issue but it's not that dangerous as long as there's food around. So the ideal case would probably be having kids practice with supervision but this has historically been hard to scale for farmer reasons?"

"Also for 'kids are dumb' reasons. You basically need to be constantly supervising very small kids to make sure they aren't getting overexcited about magic, and not every family can do that - or recognize if a kid is even using magic."

"The norm in my state, Konoha, was that children could test into the Academy, from any family - the kids were told the entrance exams were about things like reading and math and physical ability, but those were more placement tests with some medical evaluation mixed in, and instead we'd be put into situations that let the teachers evaluate things like our impulse control, caution, self awareness, and ability to follow directions while we didn't know we were being watched. That system isn't perfect - subjective judgement introduces chances for bias, if nothing else - but it mostly works, and then you also educate the parents about chakra exhaustion. We did also though require all families with students in the Academy to live within the village walls, where most shinobi lived, which patches some stuff too - Konoha has a really pro-family culture, and shinobi especially tend to not mind parenting random kids."

"It doesn't scale perfectly, though, especially the parts leaning on just having ambient adult shinobi around. Still, most Academy kids hit the cut offs between six and nine - but we're finding now that kids who aren't raised around shinobi can hit those milestones later than we'd like, and tend to be a lot more likely to experiment on their own, and the drop off in potential gets pretty bad from six to about fourteen."

"Also Konoha shinobi are apparently really, really unusually inclined to parent random children, we're having - culture issues, with everyone else, and there's a wider gap between civilian and shinobi cultures in most nations than there is in ours, which adds to parents being reluctant to have their kids trained."

"That sounds rough and not the sort of thing you can import along with a combine harvester, alas."

"Yeah."

"Some of the other nations think we should be starting residential schools, but unfortunately for them Konoha is the most populous shinobi nation and we are not child thieves and we're also the only ones who already had programs for civilian-born shinobi, so they can - "

She pauses and collects herself. "...Thing that is improper and undiplomatic to say, especially when I don't know your culture's opinion on vulgarity."

Not really pausing for comment: "But we can get decent effects teaching ten through fourteen year olds, and female civilian kids do better earlier on self control metrics and that's the only major point where you get long-term societal impacts from which age education started at. And we don't need everyone up to traditional standards, anyways, and then the next generation will have more shinobi parents."

"Right. Do you suppose people from here can learn?"

"No idea! You don't feel like you have chakra, but - that's not always conclusive..."

"Me in particular or anybody?"

"The other humans I've passed here haven't, either."

"And you won't have seen a wildly unrepresentative sample. That's not a guarantee though? What else would be going on?"

"Your world doesn't have chakra in general, as far as I can tell. I still do, and my chakra feels like it's replenishing, but that might be a world origin thing. Maybe anyone who visits my world will get the ability to use chakra if they try hard enough. Maybe you have to be born there."

"Something supporting that at least a little is that the kids of an active shinobi woman tend to have a much easier time reaching for and using chakra, as well as developing larger chakra reserves and the like, than the kids of civilian women. Which suggests that being around or interacting with chakra at critical development points can be in general fairly important... But early chakra exposure could just end up making the difference between 'can learn easily' and 'has to work hard,' rather than determining if you can learn at all."

"Maybe in addition to selling us magic items you'll have a... gestation tourism industry, too."

"Kids would have to stick around to get training; you really don't want to experiment with it on your own. But most places will probably be willing to set up at least some immigration... But at first probably not a lot, and probably favoring people who would be cultural fits. Especially not until we get our own population caught up."

"Would they actually have to stick around, or could some training move here?"

"Maybe in a few generations, but we don't have the spare people, and - "

"Chakra use is... Not exactly sacred but it's really hard to convince people to teach others from their own nation. And a lot of the older traditions were actually explicitly religious, and - you don't teach outsiders."

"Both as a cultural thing and as a security concern. Magic's a weapon; you can't have a trained chakra user who shouldn't be treated as constantly armed with high explosives, and people with high explosives are actually a lot easier to contain and can ever be meaningfully disarmed."

"This isn't a problem in a shinobi village - shinobi can defend against each other - but. Civilians can't really defend against us."

"Hrm. Well, here we have eclipsed, but I can see where a certain insularity would have come from."

"It might change with time, but I'd expect immigration to be allowed way, way sooner."

"Probably there will be some of that too. Uh, how would your world be at tolerating a refugee influx, there's occasionally issues where there's a hurricane or a civil war or whatever and people don't have any place that wants to take them?"

"Depends on what they need, but our entire population is currently basically refugees - we don't tend to have cultural issues about excess population or more people to trade with, though we might have logistics issues if people need more support than 'over there's some land no one's using, have at it'... But if we can get our land fertile again, we'll very suddenly have way more land and food than we have population or ability to fill it."

" - Oh, and, another thing that'll encourage leaders to support less restrictive immigration - chakra-use training reduces fertility kind of a lot, and shinobi women miscarry more than civilian women reproducing with civilian men - but less than civilian women with shinobi men. It's not a problem for population stability when you get infant and maternal mortality low and have good prenatal care, but without aggressive pro-natalist policies plus folding in civilians, shinobi populations don't really grow on their own. A flow of immigrants will allow us to get a lot more of the overall population trained without risking demographic collapse than we could otherwise."

"My - somewhat hopeful, mostly objective, projection is that there'll be some pilot immigration programs with people who are very good cultural fits and want to assimilate, which'll also serve as a 'does anything go horrifically wrong if aliens try to live on our planet' experiment, and by the time the first wave's kids have been getting training for a year or two, the younger leaders will be pushing to open borders more, making a counter-force politically against people who'd prefer cultural stability."

"Just... For all we know, moving to our planet if you were born elsewhere gives you cancer, or pregnancy on our planet if you were born elsewhere has an even higher maternal and fetal mortality rate than couples with a civilian mother and a shinobi father, and we'd rather find that out before importing massive numbers of people. And we'd rather import people who won't object to our entire way of life, or who won't decide we need to be changed and do what they do instead."

"That going well will also depend on diplomatic relations remaining stable, but - people on our side will be pretty motivated."

"It would be pretty weird if you looked exactly like the same species as us but also didn't get cancer from something that gave us cancer, but I suppose we could be looking at something like an infectious disease issue, that's a fair reason not to go full bore right away."

"...Oh, yeah. Diseases might be weird. Shinobi don't get sick unless we're constantly running on low chakra, but there's stuff that sometimes flares up in the civilian population. Mostly just things that're fixed by improved infrastructure for clean water, but it's not nothing."

"It could also be that all our subpopulations who respond to 'sudden chakra influx' with autoimmune issues or whatever died out before recorded history, though. You can get major differences in susceptibility to disease without full species divergence."

"Yeah, that's true, maybe we are all the celiacs of chakra."

"Especially since foreign chakra can cause autoimmune or related issues - that's why the issues with pregnancy. Developing fetal chakra can interact violently with maternal chakra, especially since fetal chakra is inherently unbalanced. Women with very good chakra control can manage this, but not untrained women, though purely civilian-born kids don't develop a detectable chakra capacity until after birth and so civilian-civilian pregnancies don't trigger the same problems."

"...Probably. It just occurred to me we might have significantly different miscarriage and maternal mortality rates from your world."

"Fifteen to twenty percent miscarriages, defined as any loss in the first twenty weeks, and very rare death in childbirth, less than twenty per ten thousand."

"Shinobi women in Konoha medical systems tend to miscarry around thirty percent in the first trimester, thirty to fifty percent in most other shinobi medical systems, forty to sixty percent in non-shinobi systems or without medical care. Chakra incompatibility issues don't hit until the second trimester usually, and very rarely hit shinobi women - they actually hit shinobi women in better medical systems more often, we think first trimester miscarriages might be mostly due to incompatibility. Shinobi women who make it to the second trimester with no medical care usually don't have a problem, and first trimester miscarriages don't tend to be associated with maternal death - a couple of patchier medical systems don't bother with prenatal care because of that. Generally you'll lose about another five to ten percent in the second trimester."

"Civilian women miscarry around twenty five to forty percent depending on medical care and nutrition - that might be complicated by our nutrition levels, though, the twenty five percent mark is for women in Konoha which can actually keep its population fed. Civilian women whose children had shinobi fathers miscarry at about the same rates until the second trimester - probably we could get 'ability to keep preterm infants alive' down to meet the usual onset of major problems. We're nearly at that in Konoha - we're down to twenty one weeks as usual cutoff for viability, problems usually start hitting from sixteen to twenty three weeks - but everywhere else struggles significantly with preemies before twenty five to twenty seven weeks."

"Problems usually worsen over the second trimester - overall about a fourth of pregnancies between civilian women and shinobi men that weren't intentionally terminated make it close enough to term for the infant to usually survive. That rises to half in Konoha, with we think lower abortion rates - though we don't have anyone else's concrete data on those."

"Maternal mortality with pure civilian couples is a bit under ten per one thousand live births in areas with worse medical care, something like a thousandth that in Konoha. Civilian women with shinobi men tends to increase maternal mortality by a factor of ten. So, we strongly discourage it but don't ban it in Konoha, since our usual rate is effectively a rounding error. Other places have different policies. For shinobi - I actually don't know of any shinobi who died in childbirth who didn't have seals collecting or storing dangerous foreign chakra in their bodies that ruptured due to the pregnancy. Sealing dangerous foreign chakra into your own body is dumb, by the way, don't ever do that. Rates for dying in childbirth due to making dumb decisions about seals are 'of the five people we know who tried this, three definitely died of this and one was severely ill but then was murdered before she could get medical care.' Last one we think would have been fine without the murder. Which is a reason to not do that, but otherwise not really conclusive."

"I'm impressed you have all that memorized."

"I'm a doctor. Not centrally trained as a gynecologist, but I testify before the council of nations a lot and advise the leader of Konoha, so I've been cross-specializing in - basically everything policy relevant, at least to the point where I can tell them which experts they need to bring in instead. And those experts then usually want me presenting alongside them or at least helping them with their arguments; there are very few medics fully comfortable with politics."

"Oh, neat. Council of nations?"

"International organization, kind of, though it hasn't been formalized as a permanent thing yet. Grew out of the combined military command for the war, and continues coordinating any international efforts, especially for stuff like famine and disease relief. It also coordinates people in areas without a surviving government or with multiple possible claims - which is a lot of areas, and there's increasing calls to just go ahead and unify into one state, so there's been some... Weird creep back and forth in terms of powers."

"Sounds complicated. How's it structured?" They are on the subway by this point, even with Isabella keeping their walking pace slow.

"Man our ground level political system is currently a stupidly overcomplicated mess that broke and is being held together with duct tape."

"So, backing up for history lesson - about... Eighty years ago, the Warring States era began to really properly close. The transition period began before that, and consolidation took another two decades to really fully settle in, but eighty years ago is when things tipped over into more or less stable governments becoming the norm."

"During the Warring States era, the samurai - the nobility - were the largest and most powerful group of magic users, and were basically the ones doing all the warring. They'd raise civilian armies - back then, armies mostly just had magic users as generals - and they'd hire mercenary shinobi groups to do their dirty work or back up an army. Everything sucked."

"Eighty years ago, the two biggest shinobi clans in what ended up becoming the Land of Fire decided to unite into one political body, and over the next few years other major clans joined them. Initially - kind of like a union for mercenaries. Collective bargaining meant less shitty jobs, meant better survival. They could pool their resources. Train each other's kids, cover each other's weak points. This was Konoha."

"Around that time, the micro-states were colliding and settling into bigger states, and other shinobi groups formed other unions - those ended up being called the Hidden Villages."

"The shinobi coallescing caused a lot of political tension, because now each territory had a core class of nobles and a large group of mercenaries all able to use magic and all very leery of each other at best. The shinobi style of magic use is less good for war, though, and we were still outnumbered and more culturally fragmented, so the system settled into a state within a state - the larger state was feudal, and the Hidden Villages got very awkwardly slotted into that. Answerable to the daimyo, but not to other nobles - which let the daimyo use us as cludgels against uppity noble houses."

"This wasn't really stable, though, because of the fertility issues I mentioned earlier - and the nobility were way worse about letting in civilians. Most nations ended up with laws legally barring shinobi villages from growing our populations too much, but - those could be gotten around, and it didn't really matter with the nobles sliding rapidly into demographic collapse. By twenty five years ago, wars were being fought with mostly shinobi, almost no civilians. By twenty years ago, the shinobi conclusively had military advantages within their own states - but the nations were all watching each other for a moment of weakness, so we couldn't break ranks."

"And then the cataclysm happened, and the nobles were all wiped out, and suddenly the Hidden Villages were the only political group with any ability to govern more than like. Ten thousand people."

"But most of the Hidden Villages also had hits to our system - of the five great villages, three lost their leader, and the other two had already gone through major political upheaval within the previous five years. And ability to respond to the cataclysm wasn't evenly spread, but we were all very, very sure that if we turned on each other to fight over what was left we'd all die - the same thing that kept us in alliance with the nobles, but now targetted at aliens who may or may not show back up and would almost certainly attack us again. Both of the villages whose leaders survived are fully in favor of unification - both leaders have proposed someone other than them rule, even, they're being very insistent that this isn't a power grab."

"Konoha... Isn't, really, and we're one of the two who did best in terms of keeping our structures and resources intact. Our current leader is fairly conservative about sudden political change - but he's indicated he doesn't actually want to lead very long, and his two probable picks for who he'd endorse to replace him are me and a friend of mine - and we're both in favor of unification."

"So currently the council is in an awkward and controversial middle place between 'government consolidating out of smaller states' and 'group of diplomats with a fancy name.'"

"Interesting. Why are the villages 'hidden', are they like actually magically hidden somehow -"

"When they formed their locations were secret. That grew out of the Warring States era, you kept your home base a secret and ideally moved it a lot. Keeping the locations secret eventually became impossible, but the naming system stuck."

"I'm at all worried that - hm - so this planet has a history of colonialist behavior between populations which is mostly not very good, and you have the advantage of being quicker to get transportation sorted out, and you probably want to lean on that to set the tone, early on, make sure you screen people before you send them whichever way, and mages will catch up but not for a few years."

"Yeah that sort of behavior is one of the reasons we'll want to limit movement."

"I'd also like to get an idea of expected diplomatic behavior, here, and how signaling works, and also who we'd even talk to for diplomacy and for making it very clear we're a sovereign land. Also ideally figure out how 'somebody violently objects to us being a sovereign land' would shake out."

"We're unlikely to do colonialism, at least in my lifetime. Not something we're geared towards culturally, not something that'd benefit us, and also not something we have the right infrastructure to even attempt. But we'll screen our outgoings pretty thoroughly, and probably rotate anyone stationed here a lot - if nothing else, we don't want criminals deciding to dodge extradition here, or people trying to defect."

"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."

"I mean if they're obtrusive they're probably also bad at their jobs..."

"People often think that the job of 'spying on your citizens' should not be a job at all."

"...Why not?"

"Pri...vacy?"

"...For what?"

"People just like not being spied on, so a country failing to provide this good for its citizens is conspicuously failing at an aspect of quality of life that may be salient to our people more than yours."

"Shinobi actually do dislike being spied on but for - like, I wouldn't say 'it's just a preference,' if a state's very good at spying on me then it has a military advantage over me, right, and also a lot of older shinobi are fairly traumatized and therefore also extremely paranoid even beyond normal 'I would like to be able to ever decide a leader should be doing Not That.'"

"I'm generally fine with being spied on, but I'm also fairly confident in my ability to spy back and in my ability to dodge spying when I want, and that any leader who's done things warranting removal has also pissed off people they don't have eyes on."

"Also shinobi tended historically to specialize in infiltration and assassination, so it is actually very important as a security concern to be able to pick up if someone's being impersonated or mind controlled, plus like normal 'if an enemy spy walks in your front gate you should know about them before they even get there.' Though that's often orthogonal to 'tracking dissidents,' which an annoying number of leaders decide to prioritize over external threats."

"Quality of life doesn't tend to come up in conversations about domestic spying, though. Just - what advantages who."

"Well, uh, that's a cultural difference you'll want to have an eye on."

She nods, thoughtfully.

"This is our stop, follow me," she says, and the train comes to a halt and she leads Sakura off of it and up to the street. New York City ensues around them.

Okay wow this city is so big.

Sakura is actually really interested in all the ensuing New York City is doing. It would probably wear off a lot faster if she couldn't filter her senses at will.

"...do you want to walk around the block or something before going up to my apartment?"

"If you don't mind!"

"I don't mind. We can stop and get food, even."

She makes an interested noise. "Food definitely sounds good."

"Weird vegan place, sushi, Italian, burgers, pizza?"

Hum. "Not sushi... Whichever of the others is most - New York-ish, I guess."

"Hm, gonna go with pizza, then. This way." She strikes off and they are presently sat at a pizza place. "- you can eat dairy, right?"

"Yup."

"Oh good." She orders them slices of pepperoni.

She waits for Bella to start eating before mimicking her manners, then, "This is good! Weird, though. Are all your foods this - greasy?"

"No, though lots are. You guys go lighter on the oil?"

"Yeah. And it's less - thick?"

"Thick?"

"Texture wise, though I think in general this is more saturated fat than what I'm used to - doesn't stay liquid at the same temperatures."

"Huh. Well, the other quintessentially New York food is bagels, and those are less greasy, though I like mine with a ton of smoked salmon on 'em and full-fat cream cheese."

She laughs. "What are they?"

"Torus-shaped very dense bread, boiled and then baked, sliced in half and spread with stuff."

"Oh, that does sound interesting."

"New York has the best ones and they have lots of calories in them, I have one or two almost every morning."

"Yeah, that'd be convenient if they're dense - and you can make up the protein and such with toppings, it sounds like."

"Exactly. Eclipsed are crazy about food in general."

She snorts. "Shinobi, too. I don't burn as much chakra as some, so I'm not too bad, but one of my friends eats... Something like five times as much as I do, normally."

"Wow! But I bet you don't have to spend a couple years of early adolescence in virtual reality not eating anything you can taste."

"Ouch, yeah. Early adolescence is when shinobi usually eat the most - that's the biggest jump for chakra capacity, on top of puberty."

"Anyone going for extremely high chakra control might have to calorie restrict - I did at, like, eleven to fourteen, I wanted to smooth out my capacity jumps and not lose any of my fine control - but you can still eat normal civilian amounts."

"Huh. We eat normal person amounts if we're not doing any magic, but nobody goes through virtuality all the way only to not do any magic."

"Shinobi need to eat more, always, but once you get training you're subconsciously always using chakra - it's why we very rarely get sick, in part. Also improves our physical fitness, improves temperature regulation, helps alleviate tiredness - we usually sleep less than civilians. Provides a sort of background resistance to injury, so we don't get things like scrapes, papercuts, or scalds after starting training - at least not to normal causes of those. And some other things, though how much else depends a lot on your chakra control and if you have any medical or mental training."

"Oh, those sound like neat perks. - why is 'civilian' the antonym?"

"Because all of the major traditions of chakra-use grew out of or like merged themselves into various martial traditions. Samurai were a noble class by virtue of being way better than anyone else at murder and then successfully governing the people they didn't murder. They were the Empire's standing army, and when a larger army was needed, they would also provide the officers. Shinobi didn't really grow out of martial traditions - jack of all trades mercenaries don't tend to be the core of your army if you have other choices, and us ending up making up most recent armies is historically very weird - but we've gotten to be a more martial tradition as 'being able to survive combat' has gotten more necessary for 'being able to survive, at all.' That was mostly the Warring States period, but the Warring States period was very long and changed... Everything."

"Also 'civilian' is way more polite than 'peasant,' which is what the samurai often used - when in my hearing at least - and... 'Civilian' centers that the various classes and communities of people who don't use chakra are just - a different subculture, and usually along that specific line, and there's a lot more of those classes than 'tenant farmers.' And it centers that... Not all the shinobi are part of the standing army, though we are all subject to the draft, but non-chakra-users are always effectively non-combatants, and you need to remember that. - Plenty of them decide to join combat anyways, but... You shouldn't react to them like you would to a chakra user."

"All the Hidden Villages I know about are mixed shinobi and civilians, too, so - if you're attacking another Hidden Village, it's... Worse to go after civilians. People do it anyways, of course, but it worsens your negotiating position later and increases the typical retaliation."

"That makes sense. Rhymes with some historical warfare norms here."

"Yeah. Probably universal education is going to do extremely bizarre things to this norm but extremely bizarre things are happening to our culture kind of in general."

"It sounds like it. I hope someone has the spare time to write it all down as it happens."

"Some people are, but I don't know how - organized it all is."

"Later historians can try to piece it together as long as there's stuff to piece. That's what they pay them the small bucks for."

"Well as long as no one tries purging classified documents, we're definitely taking lots of various notes."

"Good." Isabella orders some more pizza of various types. One has corn on it.

She samples a bit of everything - doesn't recognize the corn, but doesn't really find this notable.

Together they can go through quite a lot of pizza. "Do you wanna walk around more or head in?"

"I'm really neutral either way, I think."

"Home it is. I have ice cream."

In they go to Isabella's apartment building, and up an elevator, and into a small apartment. Isabella digs out ice cream options for Sakura to pick from.

She's fortunately familiar with the concept! Though the texture and default flavors are a bit different from what she's used to.

"Thanks for all this," she says.

"No problem. Do you want to sleep on the couch or get a hotel room?"

"I'm fine with the couch, for now."

"Convenient. It folds out -" She demonstrates.

"Oh, nice." She pokes the hinges a bit. "So just that in reverse to fold it back in?"

"Just so. I'll get you sheets and stuff." She does this.

"Thanks!"

"No problem!" Isabella applies herself to her ice cream.

She sets up the bed exactly the way she likes - she's a little fussy about it.

"If you need an extra blanket I have a couple in the closet from when my Arizonan brother came over in winter."