Thellim exactly imitates Alex's order!  She hasn't tried that combination before, and imitating other people's food orders is a good way to get out of your own culinary ruts and find interesting parts of the space that other people found before you.

(She makes a mental note to ensure adequate protein and fat later in the day, though.)

Om nom. "Isabella says you do professional book recommendations as a service."

"I used to!  But I don't know any books here.  And unless you have some unexpectedly high-impact opportunities in the book recommendation space that only dath ilani can perceive, my comparative advantage here is probably in interdimensional relations instead."

"I don't think people would pay for book recommendations here anyway, honestly."

Thellim's first impulse is to remark that she bets that this non-willingness to pay is not because Earth people are already reading a stream of excellent books which are about the best books they could possibly be reading.  She can't do that.  It is still Saturday.

Earth's refusal to pay for nicer things would be more understandable if there were any reasonable project that she could understand Earth as prioritizing instead.  This whole place is full of high tech, higher than her own in some ways, why don't the people here have more nice things when this civilization clearly has the basic productive capacity to do that?  Where does it all go?  Even if their evil governments are stealing all the wealth, where are they stealing it to, and shouldn't enough people be visibly working on it that the population would have to notice?

Can't say that either.  Still Saturday.

"I expect you're right," Thellim settles on.

"D'you have a favorite book from back home?"

"Choose a dimension!  Books relatively excel along different dimensions in a much more stable way than they have comparable absolute goodnesses - my favorite book can vary from hour to hour, depending on what I'm in the mood for.  Which book stands out as having the best humor, the best characterization, or having taught me the most about how to live, is a much more stable quantity."

"Let's go with best humor."

"Humor is among the dimensions where the goodness is most incommunicable without actually reading the book!  But my favorite work there is My Footprints Dance With Yours, a tertiary work featuring three protagonists from three different famous secondary works of a primary literature, who've all gone back in time to try to change their secondary worlds' destinies, but they end up in the primary world's past simultaneously.  The high context puts up a strong barrier to entry, but the author was good enough to master the different voices for all the alts plus the primary work's characters, at least up to my own ability to tell the difference; and their different origins allow for so many different layers of mistaken expectations going on that the book can pull off something like one grand collision per chapter.  I was laughing so hard I cried on a sustained basis, not just occasionally."

"Sounds exhausting! What is a tertiary work?"

"I'm not sure how things are done on Earth so I'll go back to basics?  Authors usually start out by using better authors' worlds and characters and running variations on their storylines, in return for paying onward a small share of the gratuities; one-twentieth is standard for a lesser work that sells cheaply.  As authors ascend their career path, the prices of their books rise and the fees they'd have to pay go up, which encourages them to create their own worlds and characters and sell stories set there.  When an author exalts, it's usually with some particular variation of their original world and characters which turned out to be really good, good enough to become famous.  Which obviously raises the sales of other alts' adventures as well, and young authors will start to copy that world and pay gratuity fractions to it.  Some works are so legendary that ascended authors write secondary works of them, and then relatively more artistic writers have been known to write tertiary works varying on those, though that is less of something a young author would try to do.  And then that's as far as it ever goes, of course, because human beings can't track more than three layers of recursion."

"Fanfiction."

"Oh!"

"Fanfiction of three different fanfictions, colliding inside the primary work.  You do not need to laugh at the premise; the humor was in the execution."

"Mostly people can't get paid for fanfic here."

"And if this were any other planet that would be higher on my list of worries."

"I mean, the original authors don't like it, it infringes on their copyright."

"Our strange, alien civilization has invented the notion that the secondary authors can pay the primary authors a small percentage of gratuities to use their worlds, leaving both authors better off than if this arrangement did not exist.  This is not meant to say that you could do any such thing on Earth; I can guess that it would not be possible to you and that I am not able to understand the exact reasons why."

"I'm not sure they'd like it even if you paid them to!"

"Well, a lot of Earth fanfiction is porn, so maybe it's more palatable on dath ilan where porn is illegal."

"Isabella exaggerates in several different dimensions.  Our books have sex scenes.  I expect other material could be found in the Forbidden Stores that sell Ill-Advised Consumer Goods, which I have yet to find any reason to patronize myself.  I do not in any case understand what that would have to do with all of your authors deciding in unison that none of them would like additional revenue from secondary literature."

"...Forbidden Stores that sell Ill-Advised Consumer Goods?"

"Stuff that might kill you, but not destroy your brain or kill other people around you.  Or do less damage than that, of course, but the point is you don't know without further research.  I usually expect, when I buy food in a store, that it's not going to kill me, even if I haven't done any detailed research on who recommended it and checked their panel for conflicts of interest.  A sandwich being sold at a Shop of Ill-Advised Food would come with no such justified expectation, and presumably contains addictive drugs or something else that makes it an Ill-Advised Consumer Good."

"...why would a drugged sandwich even exist?"