Chris nods.

"I'm not actually a PR strategist, you'll eventually want one of those."

"...how does one identify a good 'PR strategist'."

"I don't know. The joke answer is, of course, 'very carefully'. Reviewing their past work?"

"How does one do it when one is new to a language and culture and could not confidently distinguish things that were well-regarded from things that were spoken of under censorious regimes, or sarcastically, or damned with faint praise?"

"I still don't know. Tell the government you want one, you believe in their ability to do well and not just hire the lowest bidder or a personal favorite. Interview the candidates with a truth spell, ask them about themselves and their competitors, they probably have opinions about each other. This is pure speculation, I don't actually know. You want to remember any sane country should be happy to have you, but I don't know how often you really want to bring it up, if you mention it a lot people might assume it's just cheap talk."

"Understood. ...what will the actual procedure be for leaving the United States if some other country seems like it would be more hospitable after consideration?"

"For you, showing up at an embassy might be fine since you'll end up being incredibly famous and there are embassies in DC, but it might be more desirable to contact someone in their governments. …there's got to be intermediate options between showing up at an embassy and asking for an appointment and using the contact pages that are on their websites to send them a letter but I don't actually know what those options look like exactly. And then, presumably, whatever route you go with, they say yes and they give you documentation and you travel there probably by airplane. The US isn't generally supposed to stop you from leaving, if they do that and it's not because you've committed a serious crime the country you decided to go to will make a fuss."

"Interesting. All right. What else should I know?"

"I was going to suggest that for acculturation you should watch some videos of true stories set on Earth and then any time anything looks confusing we pause to answer questions. There's one about kids in a poorer area of a major American city on a chess team from a few years back, you might like that."

"That sounds like a good idea. Does it have the words at the bottom of the rectangle, they help me get used to the spelling."

"It has an option for that that we can turn on."

Then he will happily watch the movie.

Brooklyn Castle is set in a region with notably taller buildings than Scott-Amundsen Station.

The school being focused on is, apparently, number 318. It's co-educational but has a fairly narrow age range of children. The players live with their families, who tend to encourage them to do well in school and at chess, sometimes fairly strongly.

There's what might be computers in the classrooms, but notably bulkier. The chess players sometimes have devices with numbers of some kind by the boards. There are buses and trains and rolling suitcases.

People are often concerned with finances. It's possible to get scholarships from chess which pay for higher education, and people want those. The school receives a budget that has been relevant to the chess program but is facing budget cuts.

The children in the movie often dress in similar styles to many of the adults at the base, but the ratios of ethnicities differ. There is some discussion of how, as chess lacks subjective components, bias on the basis of ethnicity and gender will not prevent a skilled player from winning. One of the players wants to be the first 'chess master' of her ethnicity and gender.

He wants to know if this implies at least 317 other schools in this jurisdiction or if the numbers are not assigned consecutively. Are these parents all implied to be married, is that a representative proportion? What should he be inferring about the socioeconomics of the families from their houses and apparel? Are the bigger computers better at things? Are the devices like hourglasses or stopwatches? What should he be inferring about people's socioeconomics from their use of trains and buses? Who puts money into chess scholarships? How are budgets for the schools allocated and what benefits to the budget allocators or their employers are expected to accrue from education of this kind? Are there similarly-situated competitive endeavors that suffer from subjective judgments disadvantaging the foreign-born children or the girls?

He's not sure if they're numbered consecutively but it would not be shocking if there were at least 317 other schools in the city, it's a big city.

Chris has some reasonable speculation on the marital status of parents based on having seen the movie and not just trailers and reviews.

The families are mostly not that wealthy (for people in the US) and home size and furnishings are more suggestive of this than clothing is, at least to his eyes, someone with a better sense of fashion would reach more conclusions based on the clothing but he does not have that strong a sense of it.

The bigger computers are not better at things, they are older. Space does allow for more parts that do computer tasks but the actual reason these are larger is because they are from an era where doing the same task required larger parts.

Scholarships are, uh, probably funded by organizations which receive funding from rich people who particularly want to offer scholarships to some particular type of child.

School budgets come from tax revenue. Usually some of this is taxes on property in the school district, and some of this is from more general taxes like income tax, and that gets split up more broadly. The federal government spends some money on schools, and so does the state government and the city government. Usually this gets resolved by people's elected officials but sometimes there are direct ballot measures that everyone votes on about it.

The government expects to benefit from children being educated because people who are educated often make better decisions and do better work and thus produce more tax revenue and require less support. Also, most people have been to public school and would prefer that it keeps existing for their kids, though of course many people who don't have school-age kids or who send them to private school or homeschool them would like to pay lower taxes since they personally aren't directly benefiting from the system right this moment.

Many of the children who look different from Chris are not actually foreign-born. The people who were historically native to the land which became the US are a small minority these days and plausibly do not appear in the movie. People who look like Chris had ancestors come over from one continent, plausibly a few centuries ago. People who look like the kid running for class president had ancestors come over from a different continent, plausibly also a few centuries ago, but… this is a difficult subject. The US used to practice slavery and the slaves were generally people kidnapped from that continent. They abolished it over a century ago but there was still formal legal discrimination for a while after, and they got rid of that too but there's still wealth differences and biases and such.

There are definitely competitive endeavors in which those biases show up. Arts, for instance. He's heard there used to be cases where people would suddenly start thinking women's musical performances were better when all the performers auditioned behind opaque barriers.

Enslaving humans is not very economical on Golarion because there are halflings who eat less than half as much and can given adequate tools do most of the same work, and there are orcs who eat what a human does but are a lot stronger for it. He supposes part-orcs are somewhat discriminated against in a lot of situations though they seem like basically normal people in the context of being Worldwound soldiers. ...is "there are still wealth differences" meant to be a mark of shame, Blai is not sure how you could possibly change that, people pass on wealth to their children.

Well, see, it's kind of embarrassing because the US is supposed to be a place where anyone could rise to greatness and your personal qualities matter more than whom your parents are. The ideal version is that parents do some amount of passing on wealth but whether you end up getting opportunities to earn a huge amount of money is based more around how good at things you personally are, and the wealth difference from historic stuff becomes smaller over time and would ideally be negligible by now.

Huh. He's used to, like, ancient noble families with lots of accumulated wealth in magic items and stuff, but it is different here.

Accumulated wealth looks more like investments and businesses, and wealthy kids get sent to expensive private schools and offered various opportunities to pursue their interests while poorer kids sometimes spend time after school looking after siblings or doing paid work. Inheriting a business is a very large advantage but it is perhaps not the same as inheriting a magic sword in a world where you need to get into swordfights.

Most people don't get into swordfights, most people are farmers, but a magic sword is a leg up if you are going into a sword-oriented profession. Since nobody here is learning to be a wizard what are they learning at their expensive schools or by pursuing their interests that is so remunerative?

"Medicine, law, engineering, that sort of thing."

Huh.

Anyway he learns a lot from the movie including a couple of things from pausing to stare at various board states.

That's great. They can do it again with several other chess movies in the future.

(Back on the mainland, someone is buying a bunch of DVDs. It's perfectly reasonable to have compressed backup versions of your own DVDs and now there is a DVD collection belonging to the Antarctic program in case the very principled alien ever asks.)

"Also, I'm not sure how helpful this would actually be, but if you want to tour the warehouses or the power plant or see the kitchen in use we can make that happen."