[Of course, lots of human interactions can be understood in an economical context even if there aren't explicit financial transfers going on.]

[You didn't want to be explained more things so I'm just going to note that you have a deep misunderstanding here and move on. How many people are there on your planet? Is it just the one planet?]

[Nine hundred ninety-eight million, four hundred sixty-something thousand as of yesterday afternoon!  Just the one planet, do you have MORE??]

[Not at this time, but in some ways magic's a young field and some people are working on terraforming-relevant powers - if you ask me questions I'm going to answer them, incidentally.]

[So noted!  Hearing about a Civilization that's scaling up to terraforming sounds like something that might make me feel a bit more cheerful about - all the strangeness of this place being for something, ultimately - and I think it might do me good to hear it.  I'll stop you if you say anything that starts overloading my brain again.]

[If you say so. Uh, so, since uncontrolled magic is dangerous the state of the art is for magic kids who don't want their powers locked down to spend their time in virtual reality till they have it figured out. But virtual reality is new, I'm about the same age as Jackson and we weren't the first cohort to go through virtual control training but we were close. So before that there weren't many magic people, but now there are lots, it's just we're mostly young and don't have any really complicated powers that take decades to develop. But there are several organizations that hire mages to work on things like teleporting interplanetary distances, adding atmosphere, probably fiddling with the magnetosphere - there's a good candidate planet, we're the third one and the fourth one is about the right size and stuff.]

[Reddish-colored, extremely light but not nonexistent atmosphere, 1/10th your planet's mass and 38% of the gravity?  Because if so it sounds like we come from analogous Solar Systems!  That's really interesting, we always thought our own first colony would be at the poles of the first planet, but maybe the fourth planet is easier if you've got magic people!]

[You've got it, yep. I'm not sure what the advantage of Mercury is supposed to be but we can probably do that too with enough magic if people wanna live there.]

[There's permanent ice deposits at the poles!  A colony built in underground tunnels near the poles of Mercury wouldn't bake in the Sun and would have very easy access to solar power and water.]

[Cool, I guess that's a good reason. You mentioned you were lower-tech?]

[We do not have the handheld blinky-flashy things!  I'm guessing those are computers with wireless Network connections?  It's been predicted our society will get there but not for another thirty years - computing progress slowed down a lot after the first years when everything seemed so easy.  Mages would change everything though!  I'm guessing that interdimensional trade is not really possible because the trade networks would be all over both our planets already, but if we could actually open a portal between your planet and my planet, everybody involved would be very very very rich.  Do you have the concept of Comparative Advantage where even if your planet has an absolute advantage in every sector of manufacturing, we can still both become richer by trading with each other because our relative costs to produce different goods are different?]  Thellim's mental voice sounds more cheerful now.

[Good guess. Uh, why did computing progress slow down? I don't think mages are actually heavily involved there and computers had to be decent first before we could do VR anyway. Interdimensional travel might totally be possible but nobody has invested years in trying it because there was no proof of concept about there being other dimensions to travel to, if you tell a lie detector and it gets decent press someone'll probably be able to take you home before you have to pull together the cash for immortality. We have comparative advantage.]

[I don't know in that much detail why computing progress wasn't faster?  I have a general impression that it's hard to make the features smaller because you need higher and higher frequencies of light to carve smaller and smaller features into silicon.  Which seems like the sort of thing where one mage could help build the machine you need to build all the computer chips, instead of needing a mage to make every chip.  You might not even notice every time your society jumps a hurdle where it only takes one mage and our society is just stuck in that spot for another thirty years.  And... I guess it's possible that there are natural events that connect two universes and then they know how to reach back to each other?  But dath ilan seemed to occupy a universe that was very - mathematically simple, at its core, so far as we could ever tell - and there was no room in the character of reality for things like eclipsed-produced psions and mages.  Your world seems like the sort where the rules allow for people like me to materialize; I don't think dath ilan's rules allow for me to go back.  Maybe you could materialize more dath ilan people here, if they're about to otherwise die and have their brains not suspended.  I'm curious about what your world does for immortality - we're just putting cryoprotectant into people and vitrifying their heads, so we can bring them back later when we have the tech - but feel free not to answer if it's liable to take a lot of thinking on my end, I shouldn't be trying to absorb everything at all at once.]

[Mages can do de-aging, on top of healing in general. The vitrifying thing isn't popular. Are you saying you don't want to be brought home, if someone susses it out?]

[I'm not that much of a wuss!  I'm moderately upset and overwhelmed, that's not the same as traveling to an entire new world and having no thoughts on my mind except running back home without looking at anything or trying to help with anything!  I don't think you can get me home.  And if you can open two-way communications then at least my Civilization - of which I am part - will consider that there's much higher priorities than my going back home.  But if at some point there's cheap-enough travel without every transport costing millions, I'll decide then which Civilization suits me best, and in time of course there'll just be one Civilization with two worlds.]

[Well, I guess you could tell me about some people from back home and I can try to stretch my telepathy that way, might be faster than a teleporter doing it.]

This thought had just straight-up not occurred to Thellim at all.  You can't have brainvoices suddenly appearing in dath ilan.  Dath ilan is normal.  Dath ilan is real.  The Brainvoice's suggestion sounds as unlikely as taking a pamphlet describing something really heavy, and heaving it through a reinforced-glass window.

Naturally, this impossible suggestion should be tested immediately.

[Let's try for my mother!  Her name is Helorm, she raised three children of whom I was second, and when my little sister was full-time-employed and career-ascendant, she mostly-retired and changed her primary-civil-allegiance to the Grandmother Faction, though my older sister didn't have her first children until a few years after.  She's definitely on the More-Chaos side of the Law-Versus-Chaos-Tradeoff in Civilization and always encouraged me to defy parental authority more often, especially my father's.  Helorm's taste in fiction runs to romance-entrepreneurial novels where a female venture capitalist gets simultaneously courted for romance and capital by three glamorous inventors but the incentives are obviously terrible and only one of them is really being honest.  Actually hold on, I should ask you what information you actually need instead of babbling at you.]

[If you can draw a picture would be ideal, that's what Jackson did so I could talk to you, but information that is more like her name and less like her romance novel preferences is good - do you only do one name to a customer over there?]

[I mean, some people have pseudonyms and that's fine so long as they're not using them for criminal activities, but I don't think that's what you mean?  Helorm is the 3,813,004,102nd person born since they started counting births, and that number is unique to her.  Did you just give people additional names so that the combined string of names became unique, instead of them having one unique name that would be way too long?  That's... actually quite clever, I don't know if it's better but I think I like it.]

[The combinations of names actually aren't all unique either, but we have family names and most people who speak English have middle names. - I haven't introduced myself, I'm Isabella. Isabella Marie Swan, while we're on the topic of multiple names.]

[Are there a lot of Isabella Marie Swans out there?]

[I don't know but there are other Isabella Swans. I'm the one that comes up if you search online though.]

Huh.  Thellim isn't quite sure what this system is meant to do or even if Isabella's Civilization is the sort where the systems do things but she doesn't want to inquire right now, that seems like the more tiring sort of conversation.  [What else can I potentially tell you about my mother, if her birth number isn't enough?]

[What does she look like, how old is she...]

Thellim is not an artist and not a deeply visual person, but she will hesitantly attempt to describe her mother, along with her mother's corresponding age.