In walks someone... oddly minmaxed-looking, a skinny young man with a neat goatee who looks like what you might get if you applied gene editing and plastic surgery to the problem of producing a magazine cover model in real life, and then the resulting person did no maintenance whatsoever.

Milliways again! And another human! Hard to guess if she's going to be from a culture where interrupting strangers is rude or one where you run up to people and hug them by surprise.

He stops several feet from her booth. "I'd pay for a drink rec."

"- would you? Why?"

"You wondering why I'd pay for that kind of service, ever, or why I'd pay to get one from a human when Bar's right here and will do it for free?"

"Mostly the second thing."

"Trade you for that rec?"

"...sure, have you tried pineapple juice?"

"Not yet! And I like - learning to be a human, from humans, because human-majority societies just do things differently - and Bar's fine and her next rec will probably be better than pineapple juice, but letting her guess what I'll like doesn't tell me what ingredients I ought to be trying to import for the ten thousand other humans whose tastes I care about, or what humans have invented on their own, or..." He trails off with a shrug.

"You come from someplace with lots of non-humans?"

"Yeah, lots, although these days the state I'm governor of is majority human. Relatedly, if you need to evacuate your entire planet for some reason, I have relevant experience."

"I don't think we especially need to do that."

"Better than the alternative."

This doesn't seem to be going well and that kind of sounded like a dismissal so he'll just go ask Bar for supplies to make himself a new sign. And pineapple juice.

Pineapple juice! Cardboard and marker!

Huh. He doesn't like pineapple juice. This is useful information to have and he has no regrets.

He puts up his sign eventually.

DEFENSE MAGE FOR HIRE
I make objects indestructible, guard people against burns and command magic, etc.

I accept payment in multiple currencies, barter, and information about morality in governance.

At the bottom of the sign is a list of prices in seven different currencies.

"...you can make objects indestructible?"

"I can! Subject to limitations like, if you want a candle that will never be consumed by fire, your candle will also be useless."

"But a weapon would be fine?"

"Typically, if it's a weapon like a staff, it's easy, although I've seen some really complicated weapons that I had to get creative with."

"Mine's a swordstaff." She has it laid across the seats of the booth she's in, and pulls it out.

"Oh, cool. If it functions the way it looks like it does, that shouldn't be hard. What're you hoping to pay in?"

"I'm curious what you want to know about morality in governance? I don't know if I know much that you don't but I'd give it a whirl and if I don't have enough of it no harm done."

"So, in the world I grew up in, people cooperate because - ultimately because they want things from each other and like living in a peaceful society, and proximately because if they go around killing people or stealing things the government kills or enslaves them. And it's - great, but also, there's no protections for slaves, there didn't used to be charity, there didn't used to be people going around wanting other people to be happy as an end goal. So our precedents are all... brutal... and even given that I have the power now to make laws, I don't know what laws make people educate their children, or not torture anyone, or - my immigrants want to end slavery completely and I don't know how to replace it, that kind of thing."

"- oh. Uh. What do you think would happen if you ended slavery?"

"Well. Technically if I tried the next higher level of government would overrule me - there's only the one level above me but there is still that - but assuming they were fine with me using my isolated island to test that out, I think the first thing I'd worry about is that a criminal who'd been sold for having committed three murders would commit a fourth, but I'd also expect a handful of people to get revenge, which might also be murder in some cases. Some people wouldn't have good impulse control, and they'd probably do things like heckle passersby or take things that don't belong to them, and I guess also no one would have any incentive to keep them alive - not sure it makes them better off if anyone does, but no one would, and the... club my immigrants have that gives things to poor people would probably try to help but it's pretty small and it'd get too overwhelmed to keep doing the thing it's currently doing, where it helps, say, people who are temporarily sick and will be fine if someone helps them afford treatment and make rent for the month. Then I think some of them wouldn't be able to earn money, or - I don't know if there are any currently living experiments in raising people without language, there might not be, but there are people too stupid to learn. And then there'd just be - a bunch of kids doing things they'd regret in a couple years, like, someone with magic for making people stop doing things gets annoyed at the sound of someone else's breathing, or else things they wouldn't regret because they'd die. And the government would lose the funding it currently gets from selling slaves, which would mean cutting back on public works, and anything currently being done with slave labor might have to stop."

"...does having somebody as a slave actually stop them from doing things like murder or dangerous magic, or does it just make someone else responsible for stopping them?"

"We have magic for making people stop doing things, it's just, uh, I don't think anyone would think it was better if you were allowed to use it on random people who weren't slaves."

"Oh, no, I didn't mean that, it's just we don't have that so slavery doesn't... work... for a lot of things. It seems like it might be harder to stop if it worked. Is there a reason you can't stop people from doing murders and not stop them from doing anything else?"

"So, it's hard to escape or work around, but getting one command like 'don't do violence to any living person' is easier to work around than... that and someone who can adjust things on the fly and has an incentive to do that and can come up with commands that are really overkill without being accountable for your well-being and having everyone who sees you know what you are."

"Having everyone who sees you know what you are?"

"There's jewelry. You can't take it off. It's useful, because someone who can't bind you themself can get enchanted bracelets that'll do it, but they also generally look really similar."

"I wish I knew more about - this sort of thing. We don't have slavery where I'm from but we also have different magic and didn't recently have slavery."

"Well, on the bright side, you haven't had slavery recently. What do you do?"

"Can you be more specific? I don't even know what public works you have in mind."

"Uh - currently the imperial government is wholly providing or in some way contributing to the provision of free language lessons, medical care for contagious diseases, the peace and security of the empire, the certification of a general curriculum and teachers thereof, the rehabilitation of first-time offenders, the conservation of public forests and parks, a fiat currency, force transit, and the news. But even aside from how you'd fund it off of just taxes and fines, I don't have models to draw on from societies with... extremely dangerous magic and really low tolerance for interaction with society, but that also have morality."

"We do have dangerous magic, but - maybe not as much of it as you? Orders of paladins like me keep it in check all right. What do you mean low tolerance for interaction with society?"

"Some people prefer to have an island made and hide it from all outside perception and every decade or so have a potentially violent confrontation with someone stopping by to check if the island is uninhabited yet. Some people instead make it impossible for anyone to stop by to check, and no one knows how many of the people who've done that are still alive, and the islands are lost forever, and we try to discourage going that far. I don't know anyone like that, obviously, but it's a smooth spectrum and the average is somewhere between them and an employee of mine who sometimes allows people to tell him what to do if we pay him handsomely enough and who I think might have a friend. Or at least that's the average for their species, but they're the most common species by a large margin, not that you'd ever guess that based on the people you meet."

"...do those people even want slaves? Slaves are... people."

"I have never interviewed anyone who didn't want to interact with anyone ever and my information is obviously not very complete but it has happened that someone disappeared with their slaves and I think between not tolerating anyone at all and liking society there's a window somewhere in there where it makes the difference that they don't have to... appease them?"

"Mm. Well, we don't have any of those, we just have humans and dark things and dark things we don't really try to integrate into society on account of they are evil."

"Evil like they want nothing but the worst for everyone or evil like they don't care about anyone?"

"The first one, I guess? I think some of them might be slightly more complicated than that but every time someone's trying to do diplomacy with a lich or an imp or something it turns out to just be a trick of some kind."

"That's terrible."

"Yeah. We keep up with them for the most part."

"Can we do better than 'keep up with' with more magic?"

"Maybe? Sometimes it's people making them one way or another, but imps might just keep coming."

"What exactly are those?"

"Little and black, shaped somewhat like a human but with wings and tails and horns."

"Do they do magic it'd be useful to be protected from?"

"They can, yes."

"Well, what kind of magic is it? I might be able to ward you."

"In addition to being poisonous they can do some of the same magic mages do. I don't know very much about it, honestly, we have to learn a lot of things and magic is only relevant in terms of how to fight it with the tools we have, not with the tools we might meet in Milliways."

"Recently I've been working on intent-triggered wards and I could maybe do one that'd make you immune to all magic except when you chose not to be. It'd be kind of complicated, besides not having been tested against imps, and the choosing to turn it on and off might not work well, and it's very likely not to actually work if their magic is much like magic I'm familiar with because it wouldn't protect you from, say, someone magically lighting everything around you on fire or magically accelerating a rock toward you."

"Would it affect my paladin powers?"

"I do not know what paladin powers are."

"We get various blessings from - in my case - the Winter Light, like the ability to heal ourselves and our mounts, strength and endurance, the ability to speak to anyone, the ability to bless our weapons and armor..."

"Okay, first of all, that's the kind of thing that matters to making your weapon more durable, I don't want to interfere with your blessings. Second, I maybe want to hire you to come visit my world and do your healing there, if the Winter Light wouldn't mind and depending on what kind of healing it is."

"It's just ourselves and our mounts. I have basic field medicine training for other people but can't heal them any faster than that."

"Well, no sense in hiring you, then. I - could do it so it wouldn't affect that, if I knew enough about the Winter Light to distinguish them from anyone else. Or I could do less comprehensive things."

"Distinguish them like how? Would reading the Precepts do it?"

"I also do not know what the Precepts are - the last time I met someone with powers from a god, I stepped into her world and prayed and had a conversation with the god in question, and it wasn't for that reason but that'd do it - I can go by genetic relation or physical form if that's... applicable... and separately I'd love to read the Precepts, what are those?"

"The Precepts are the holy book of the worshipers of the Winter Light. - there are a lot of Lights and they're not opposed, Light is Light, but different ones are favored by and favor different peoples and my order is blessed by the Winter Light. There's no physical form or - relation."

"I just need - something other than a name, because, I mean, I could decide that I want to be called the Winter Light from now on and that wouldn't affect whether anyone wants me doing magic to them. An example spell or an enchanted object would do fine, or the Precepts might do it if they contain the right kinds of information or if I had a copy the Winter Light had personally written."

"My swordstaff is blessed by the Winter Light."

"Already? Then yeah, that'll do."

She pats it. "It doesn't take very long to bless a weapon, it would be silly to send anyone out with one that hadn't had it done."

"I had the idea it was something you'd have to redo regularly. Anyway, does it have any other things about it that aren't obvious at a glance, like if it needs to be able to change shape or come apart or anything?"

"Well, if it breaks I have to repair it, but it doesn't detach or change shape."

"Well, it won't do that anymore. - And if it somehow did, any spell I cast on it would also break, that's true of all magic where I'm from."

"The blessing would too, we need to re-bless weapons that have gotten seriously damaged."

"Makes sense. I ran into a world once where broken magical things could be harvested to make magic things but I don't get the impression that's the norm."

And he'll make the swordstaff indestructible. It wasn't that useful a conversation but he at least articulated his problems in ways that might be clarifying and got a book rec.

"Thank you! Are there more things you wanted to know?"

"A lot but I'm not sure what to ask - maybe the Precepts will make it clear but I don't even know what a paladin is..."

"Paladins are people sworn to the service of a Light. We have some powers and we keep them as long as we keep our vows. Obedience, chastity, piety, and service, in mine, though different orders have slightly different sets."

"...Chastity? Is that something that will make sense to me if I just read the Precepts?"

"Possibly? Do you not know what the word means or why we'd do it?"

"The second one, I think."

"Not every paladin order does that, but a lot of people make extremely foolish decisions about sex that make it harder for them to clearly handle their other obligations, so we avoid getting into those situations with plenty of safety margin. It also means that we have plenty of spare childcare capacity for orphans - like me, I was raised by inactive paladins."

"That makes sense. Uh, would the decisions happen to be foolish because you can't detect and end a pregnancy fast enough?"

"Uh, we're also not allowed to kill human beings. That one's actually not a vow, we just lose our powers if we do it, but it's understood that sometimes if you're getting into enough fights with enough dark things and their human allies someone might die and you just need to be aware that that's a very grave outcome and will lose you your paladin status."

"...That sounds like a bad situation."

"Really? It's always made sense to me."

"...Well, I am an alien, and lack whatever context makes it make sense to you. What sense does it make?"

"We should always be fighting to subdue, not kill. If we're tempted to fight to kill, that's often going to be just because - we aren't thinking, fully, about our place in the situation, which is fundamentally to protect people and make the world safer for them. Because we're in a hurry, or scared, or kind of sleepwalking through the fight instead of keeping our mission in mind. It's very rare that there's a battle so close that you can win it if you're willing to kill and will lose it if you aren't. Most of the time we aren't fighting humans at all, and humans aren't very dangerous to us directly. So the Winter Light - simplifies things, for us, doesn't let it be strategic to kill either. If you kill somebody the field is down a paladin, even if you walk away from it. Sometimes that's the right choice, or risking it is since people don't always consistently die only of certain levels of force, which is why we don't make a vow about it. Some ex-paladins like that still live with us and take care of kids or chores. But if it's never wise to deliberately kill a person we won't go around deliberately killing people and we'll be judicious about risks."

"...I can see how that would make sense if your world's tactical situation is a certain way but is that really worth having to be celibate, and having to specifically recruit people who are okay with that, and having no backup plan if it's not your choice for some reason?"

"- what do you mean no backup plan?"

"...In my universe sometimes people have sex without asking permission, or with permission they got under highly coercive circumstances, and then sometimes that results in pregnancies, which are not any easier to deal with than if they were intentional."

"Pregnancy isn't really the main thing we're avoiding, but if someone did overpower a paladin that wouldn't break their vow."

"...Do you not have the ability to treat infectious diseases in general?"

"...we can't heal them in other people? We can heal ourselves and our mounts."

"But you might, for example, want to import someone with the ability to cause there to not be any of the infectious agent that causes rabies anywhere within a mile of them. Or possibly an artifact, since the person wouldn't be immortal."

"That would be useful, yes!"

"You can get one for - probably cheap, other worlds tend to have more expensive magic than ours - if we open my door, which is in friendly territory and not keeping an ongoing cataclysm paused but will start the countdown on me being late for work and the imperial government getting antsy about the door, so. How about if I read the Precepts or something, and recommend you a book from my world, and we reconvene when we can put together a list of all the things we'd want from my world and get that done efficiently?"

"Sounds good to me!"

He reads the Precepts. He's... starting to get a feel for what different kinds of moral claims imply about different worlds, but he's not great at it yet.

The book he recommends is actually a pamphlet put together in a hurry by some people considering whether to move to his world, for the benefit of some other people also considering that. Upsides: sometimes his world has temperatures above freezing. Also, it has magic, of twelve types, that can do plant growth, telekinesis, heat, death, chemistry, nuclear fusion, illusions, scrying, the creation of vacuum, wards that prevent arbitrary changes, alteration of heritable traits, and some kind of creepy slavery-enforcing thing. Cons: lacks the concept of morality entirely, relies liberally on slavery as essential social tech for all sorts of things, and has very unrestrained sexual practices which the Victorian Anglicans who wrote the pamphlet were a bit uncomfortable with. There is also a summary of the laws and etiquette of the Hari Empire.

Kaja doesn't know what nuclear fusion or vacuum or genetics are but is fairly interested in the laws and etiquette you get when you have no concept of morality.

In this case, apparently, laws against battery, murder, theft, failure to take responsibility for dependents (purely out of concern for what they might do to other people, not out of concern for the wellbeing of the dependents in question), breach of contract, vandalism, trespassing, perjury, fraud, failure to pay taxes as described in an appendix to the laws, and harassing people out of public places. The etiquette is intensely transactional and tends to come across to outsiders as unfriendly; it's typical to pay for the answers to simple questions, acceptable to suggest just about any transaction explicitly in words, unusual to make smalltalk, and rude to make eye contact.

Valanda'll be here taking notes on Kaja's world whenever she's done.

"Your world sounds... harsh."

"Yeah. But it doesn't have an entire species of omnimalevolent people and relevantly for you it does have a lot of magic."

"It does sound that way. No dark things but no Lights, and not our magic but lots of yours."

"Yeah. I'm - interested in comparisons, if you have more to say about that."

"I think you're putting a lot more effort into legal enforcement than we are - or can, since we don't have the magic that lets you find out what happened for sure."

"Huh. That seems like it'd be a feedback loop for you - if you're less effective at stopping people from making more dark things, then you're stretched thinner...?"

"I don't think we have a lot of repeat offenders, actually, but sometimes it does take a while to track them down."

"...Why don't you?"

"- don't have a lot of repeat offenders? Uh, I'm not sure, do you have a lot?"

"As a fraction of the total population, not really, most people never commit any crimes, but as a fraction of criminals - for most combinations of species and index offense, more than a quarter of people go on to commit another crime, uh, over I forget what followup period but I remember the title of the study so if you really care we can get it from Bar."

"I guess I have no idea what it is for... theft or something, I only contact that whole end of things when it's something to do with dark things. Usually that is a bad experience and they stop after being caught if not before. - to be clear a lot of the time they stop before being caught because dark magic gets them killed."

"Oh. Well, that's convenient."

"In a way, I suppose."

"I'm sure it's not convenient to have to deal with the dark things afterward. Maybe that was an insensitive thing to say."

"- I mean, ideally they'd stop before that point both for their own sakes and for everyone else's."

"Ideally, yeah."

"And sometimes a reformed mage who knows things about the dark arts can help us."

"That's the term for making dark things or is it broader than that?"

"Making them, turning into them, consorting with them, all the steps useful toward those."

"Turning into... they wouldn't happen to be related to vampires, would they?"

"Liches, are the ones people can turn into."

"Not translating as anything I already know a word for. I'm guessing from context and prior experience that it comes with tremendous power and some kind of horrible drawback possibly involving something similar to command magic or actual mind control."

"They have roughly the same powers as a normal mage except that they're also kind of dead and this means they don't have to rest or eat or anything."

"A power I can imagine killing for. I wonder if I could make you an artifact that'd just make it impossible for dark things to start existing anywhere near it, is that the sort of thing you'd be able to use if I could?"

"Yes! Though I'd put it somewhere that seemed likely to throw zombies, liches are much rarer."

"I also offer bulk discounts if you want twenty thousand seven hundred thirty six."

"...why twenty thousand seven hundred thirty six?"

"That was round for me. What base do your numbers use?"

"...base?"

"In Ilan, which I'm speaking now, we use base twelve. What that means is that I count one, two, three..." and so on... "twelve, and some of them sound a little similar but they're just - different independent words, but when I say 'thirteen' that's derived from the words 'twelve' and 'one'. Some recent immigrants of ours use base ten, where they count to - what was it called - 'ten', with a new word for each number, and then if they want to count something like forty eight they break it down as four tens which they call 'forty' and then they say the word 'eight' afterward."

"Huh. We have different words up to fifteen and also a separate word for twenty but I guess sixteen through nineteen are composed like that?"

"Huh. We could go over math more at some point in case there's useful information about that that you could be taking home but Bar might give that to you for free. Anyway, I can sell large round numbers of magic things. Or large non-round numbers. If I can make them at all."

"What would you want for them?"

"For just one, value equal to ninety six Hari imperial rings in any currency Bar can accept if you provide the object to anchor it on, more if I have to buy some random thing for it to be. Depending on exactly how many you want, I offer small bulk discounts and larger humanitarian discounts given proof of the humanitarian crisis you're dealing with, and I still accept payment in political advice and sometimes art depending on how much I like the art. Or archery lessons or staff training."

"Oh, well, staff training I could do. I don't have a bow with me and was never as good with one though I do know the basics. You're going to run me out of political advice but you're welcome to what I have. How would you want me to prove that - what, zombies exist? -"

"Well, I will, for starters, need a specific enough definition of zombies, or possibly to see a dark thing or something, just to be able to design the spells, I wouldn't currently say I know what 'zombies exist' would look like. And then I will probably check if you have newsreels or something that Bar can get me that mention zombies doing whatever negative things zombies do, or obituaries of people killed by them, or things they've published that say things like 'we the dark things all want what's worst for everyone', or if your world is in a really bad way you can open your door and let me see it but I hope that wouldn't work."

"I don't know what an obituary or a newsreel is. My door leads to the inside of my order's compound, there aren't dark things in it."

"...I wonder if you also want blueprints for a printing press."

"Maybe? What's that?"

"It's a device you use to put more upfront effort in than writing normally, but not ten thousand three hundred sixty eight times more effort, and then quickly produce ten thousand three hundred sixty eight of the same book. Or some other number. I think maybe you do want to study engineering and math before you go home, there are a lot of things like that."

"- math? How does math come into it?"

"Um, I think it matters more when you're working with natural materials instead of just enchanting your buildings to stay in the shape you made them in, you have to - balance forces and get angles right and stuff - and there's another thing you can do, once you have a substrate for it, that I'm pretty sure involves math, where you have a tool that stores pictures and text and sounds and sends them to other people and it's slightly more convenient than just having the ability to scry what people have said in public and probably a lot more convenient than not having worldwide communications."

"Wow. I guess I have a lot to try to haul home with me."

"Doesn't have to be a lot of volume or weight, at least."

"I guess! Though I don't know who to get on the - manufacturing -"

"It's not completely impossible I know someone who'd be able to figure that out but probably not. Anyway, let's go back to: what exactly is a zombie?"

"A corpse that's come back to - motion, not life really - and they attack people."

"...So, if I do a thing that prevents corpses from being moved, you will need to cremate them on site, but there's probably a way to specify zombies more precisely than that..."

"They're also contagious?"

"That's promising. How does that work?"

"They bite. If they get a paladin and we heal it we're all right, but if they bite anyone else they turn into a zombie themselves."

"Is there a specific chemical in their saliva or is it magical?"

"...I have tended to assume magical but now that you ask I realize I don't know."

He turns to where there isn't a bartender and asks if there's a book on zombies or a book on dark things that also mentions zombies.

Bar can cough one up!

"Hopefully this won't take too long..."

Does it happen to have conveniently labeled chapters like Every Magically Distinguishing Trait Of Zombies or All The Immoral Things Zombies Do And Their Best Justifications or is that too much to hope for.

That is too much to hope for, but it does have an illustration of a zombie! It recommends running away and calling paladins but normal people can sometimes kill them if they're cornered, it's just that if you think you can and you can't now there's an extra zombie.

He eventually digs enough zombie-related information out of the book to be able to target a spell correctly and then asks Bar if there are any publications criticizing this one for inaccuracies or unfairness to zombies.

I can't find any of those, though on a planet with this literacy rate that may mean they were circulated privately and do not count as "published".

"Probably good enough. You don't have anything written by a zombie, do you, maybe titled Fifty Reasons People Unfairly Hunt Us?"

I don't know if any publish pseudonymously, but I do not know my library to contain anything written by zombies.

"Thanks. Sorry about the wait but I think I've got the information I need."

"It's a funny thing to check but if you really weren't sure I'm glad you checked it!"

"Yeah. Anyway, I know enough to target spells for you and I'm comfortable giving you a discount for your ongoing humanitarian crisis. How many areas of about a mile in diameter or so would you want to protect, ideally?"

"...I am not sure how big the... planet... is..."

"Okay, I can figure that out but if we're lucky it'll have been published. Bar?"

Apparently publications in Kaja's world also don't know how big the planet is.

"Gravity here feel normal to you?"

"I think so."

"That's good, it'd be harder to charge you in staff lessons otherwise. And - what can you tell me about - this is going to come out sounding like weird unrelated questions but do magnets exist, do volcanoes exist, does gold exist, and what are the price ratios between copper, silver, and gold?"

"I have heard of magnets and volcanoes but never seen either one - well, I saw a volcano but it was not volcano-ing at the time - gold exists, and - do you mean by weight -" She can approximate that.

"I am going to guess that your planet is around as big as mine - I can explain why if you want - which gives us an upper bound, although I don't know how much of it is ocean. Also I forgot how big my world is but I'm sure that's been published, Bar?"

(His planet is about the size of Earth.)

Bar can dig that up and tell him!

He does some mental math. "...Okay, covering your entire world would be incredibly tedious. At least I bet it's mostly ocean, which... might get us down to, I don't know, maybe 5,971,968," he estimates roundly. "Probably more because spheres would need to overlap."

"I'm not sure how we'd cover the whole world anyway, but if we did have enough to do it we could figure it out. Enough for towns and graveyards and extras to put on battlefields and so on as necessary might do most of the work, but if there's gaps people who want to be liches might just - find one - on a boat, even -"

"Is there a reason it's objectionable if someone goes away to be a lich on a private boat?"

"Becoming a lich does involve killing people, even if you don't find liches existing objectionable."

"That sounds pretty objectionable, assuming they're - people people, and not just infants or something. Do you have the ability to deal with it, in general, when people take other people away on boats and kill them, or is that not something your law enforcement can handle?"

"...infants are people. Uh, probably sometimes mages would get away with that? Maybe less often if paladins weren't stretched thin with all the other dark things."

"But you can handle people taking other people away onto boats and killing them in some way other than me personally making one possible motive for it unfeasible at your tech level. And I know infants are targetable by person-targeting spells and so on, I just meant I'm only talking about, uh," he fumbles for some foreign jargon from his fifth language and pronounces it very carefully, "'moral patients.'"

"Infants are moral patients!"

"...Huh, how does that work?"

"What do you mean, how does that work?"

"...Okay, I am going to back up several inferential steps here. People have experiences of the world where they - understand the things they see, and think about them, and then form plans about how they'll manipulate their environment to make themselves happier. Morality is when you cooperate with that when other people are doing it. Humans gain the ability to do things like - like reach for a thing they want, or do magic, that are the simplest possible realizations of 'observed the world, wanted to change it, did change it' - at different ages but always at some point well after birth. So if I wanted to help a newborn human achieve their goals, I don't know how I'd go about that."

"So maybe you'd be terrible at babysitting but that doesn't mean that it's okay to just, what, kill them if it's convenient -"

"Well, if you have reason to believe they have goals that seems important to know about, and if you have reason to believe I'm misunderstanding morality that also seems important."

"They get hungry and cold and tired like anyone else!"

"...I mean, so do animals."

"Animals don't learn to talk later."

"Crows do but I don't know if your world has them. And humans don't say 'oh, yeah, I remember when I was one month old and you said blah blah blah that I didn't understand at the time but do now.'"

"...I don't think crows learn to talk on my world? That I've ever heard of. Uh, I can't remember anything from before I was five, but I could talk by then."

"Yeah, I think a lot of humans don't remember not knowing how to talk. Crows in my world only learn if someone teaches them, they don't invent it, and they don't say things more sophisticated than 'I'm hungry.' People're keeping an eye on them because they're only barely too stupid for magic and they could get smarter and being only barely smart enough for magic is dangerous."

And if that happens, every last one will be enslaved or killed.

"Some animals are magic in my world. Like unicorns, some paladins ride them. But they're not smarter than griffins, like what I ride."

"I have heard of worlds like that before but in mine, to a first approximation, if you ask a creature a question like 'Ariu, who is not a knowledge mage, hides a ring in an opaque box and then leaves the room, and then Seihra takes the ring out of the box and hides it under the mattress, where will Ariu look when they come back?' and get the right answer, the creature can do magic, and if you don't get the right answer, either it can't do magic or you just asked a couple months too soon. So it gives information it wouldn't elsewhere."

"And do babies not have magic in your world?"

"You can tell which kind they'll have - they show up if you're searching for, say, knowledge mages nearby or something - starting when they're born, for viviparous species - but newborn humans never do spells. There have been a lot of humans and a lot of parents who've taken their time with binding arrangements and there's just no risk that there'll be a magic accident the day they're born. It's not that they don't have it, it's that they're not able to use it."

"Well. I'm not... sure how to explain to you that babies are moral patients... if you don't already know that. I've never had to do that before."

"I think usually good explanations involve detailed models of the claims you're making or lists of evidence that led you to believe them, but sometimes book recs can be good explanations, if only because the books contain better ones."

"I don't think I've read anything that is specifically about how babies are moral patients! How many authors do you have?"

"...I have no idea. You mean just of books or would you count the people who write scripts for - I think other places just have plays, in person, but we have illusions of plays with other illusions to make the actors look different sometimes - and then recently people have been publishing instructions for computers - we've had writing for, I don't know, maybe 1728 years, the population's risen and fallen - why am I calculating this? Bar, how many distinct authors does my world have?"

Kaja looks at the napkin. "...I don't think we have anywhere near that many in the world, let alone in languages I can read."

"Not in languages you can usually read, that is."

"Okay, true, but I still can't recommend you books I haven't read before."

"That makes sense. We'll have to put together a library for you take home."

"Will I be able to read them when I get home?"

"If you translate them while you're here or if I can arrange for one of my friends to learn your language and translate them for you. Or if it happens that you speak the same language, I have run into multiple worlds that had the same language although they were weirdly similar to each other in general so I'm not betting on it working out that way for you."

"Huh. Paladins have a translation power but it doesn't work on books."

"Like knowledge mages. We should figure out what you don't know yet - do you have germ theory?"

"No?"

"Some diseases, especially the ones that pass from person to person by being close to people, are caused by invisibly small animals that try to eat you from the inside out. You can get them off of your hands by washing with soap and you can kill them in your food by slightly burning it but I suspect you already do that because human-majority societies do a bunch of interesting things with their food."

"Do you just mean - cooking it?"

"Yeah! I bet you even know cool combinations of foods you can put together when you cook them to turn them into, like - do you have cake?"

"When we have something sweet to make it with, yes!"

"Thought you might. You almost definitely already treat your food the right way. - Water also needs to be boiled if you don't have magic for it."

"That would get very expensive."

"The last time I met someone whose world was having a humanitarian crisis, I brokered a deal where they got a bunch of eternally red-hot titanium finned cylinders with eternally chilly boxes to keep them in when they didn't want the heat."

"- that might be more important than the anti-darkthing stuff."

"My heat mage will be thrilled. And has a record of behaving herself in Milliways. What exactly are you hoping for here and how many?"

"...more of them than the anti-darkthing one, honestly, people would want to heat their homes with them."

"...That was the last people's use case, too, sort of. Except it made sense for them because their world had suddenly turned so cold that all their cities were completely covered in ice and most of their alcoholic beverages froze and one of my friends from there lost two of her limbs, and once we had a better place to put them, we evacuated their planet. If your winters are not severe enough to evacuate the planet, and you don't have a bunch of non-flammable steel infrastructure, you might want something other than large red hot finned cylinders. Which I can also get you, probably, we have a lot of options."

"It's not sudden, it's just that if there's a harsh winter people sometimes struggle to put by enough firewood and the smoke bothers a lot of people."

"I'm just thinking you might rather have general-purpose temperature-control boxes you can also use for staying cool in summer, or blankets that stay as warm as a summer day no matter what. If you don't think those sound better, you'd know better than I would."

"Oh, the summer blankets sound very luxurious."

"They are, yeah. But it's the blanket part that's expensive and if you're routinely surviving winters without magic you must have some way to make a lot of those."

"I... would be sort of surprised if there were anyone with blankets who had a worse way to do it than us? Spin wool, knit it?"

"I guess? I don't know that much. Anyway, as many as you have, it probably won't be especially hard to enchant that many."

"If I have to bring them into the bar that's much harder."

"You could hold your door for me to go round some up but I expect there would be problems with that."

"It'd still only get us those within reasonable traveling range of the order whose owners would hand them over."

"Yeah. Probably not your best option. The people who used the finned cylinders had these systems that were designed for coal but that sort of - did hot water and steam and they use the steam to make all kinds of machines do things - I don't know if that's feasible for you, though."

"We do not have machines that want steam to do things."

"I don't know the immediate prerequisites, maybe you're almost there. At any rate it's not magic so you can probably have them eventually."

"If you say so, but that doesn't help figure out what's next right now..."

"I wonder if anyone's ever written - hey, Bar, has anyone from one of the worlds like my immigrants are from, or if that's not concrete enough a world with electric computers or steam-powered automata and morality and physics otherwise compatible with her world, written a book called something like 'Our Entire Tech Tree Explained For The Complete Novice With Milliways Access' or anything basically similar to that?"

There are novelty books for time travelers but I can't find any that assume Milliways access.

"...I would like one of those and if it doesn't explain the mechanics of time travel I'd also like a book that does."

Pardon me, the novelty books for time travelers are mostly intended for people who enjoy thinking about time traveling despite having no reason to expect they will ever do so. I don't have any time travel books that I would expect to generalize to your situation. But here's How To Invent Everything.

"Well, that seems useful, I think I want this once you've copied it," he says, offering it to Kaja. "Anyway, heaters are waiting on us being sure we know what we want from my world but anti-zombie wards are just waiting on you finding the objects you want me to anchor them on and paying me."

"What kind of objects work? I don't have a lot of stuff on me, it'll have to be something I can get in bulk from Bar - and what do you want to be paid for this, you mentioned a bunch of things but I don't know how many hours of staff lessons or whatever."

"Any objects, the constraints are all things like being able to find them and move them, them not moving themselves in ways you don't want, them continuing to exist as long as you want, that kind of thing. And I'll probably end up wanting to spend a few months in here which at least tells you about how many hours of staff lessons I'd be able to take payment in, but I actually haven't done that before and haven't worked out a conversion between that and my usual price, uh - " he turns to Bar " - how much do lessons like that cost if you buy them in cash rather than in anti-zombie things?"

I only sell objects, not lessons.

"Do you not have ads from her world - I guess they wouldn't be literate enough - do you have ads from Hyrule or from some other place where staff fighting lessons and literacy are both common enough for there to be ads?"

Yes, but the prices vary within an extremely wide range depending on instructor competence, competition in the field, demand, and other factors.

"Well, then. What do you think is fair?" he asks Kaja.

"I have no idea!"

"How about I create some items and stop when I get too bored, you give me some lessons and stop when you get too bored, and we decide if we want to go on like that."

"Sounds good to me."

He'll a break after the first gross of whatever objects Kaja can scare up for enchanting.

And they can go in the back to have enough room to swing staffs around!

Yes! Excellent!

He's not bad at it for an absolute beginner who has received a couple of lessons and relied entirely on his magic in actual fights, but that's a big caveat right there.

She's taught ten-year-olds. He's well within the range she knows how to present a lesson to. Her style does assume that you can put a heck of a lot of power behind your swings by the time you're old enough to be fighting a real zombie, but it still has blocking moves and suchlike.

...Probably a good thing the past year has involved so much adventuring and weapons practice and human-optimized food and also steroids. Even as it is he struggles a bit with just hitting hard enough.

His previous teacher's style didn't come about in an environment where zombies were the main threat so it is discernibly differently optimized insofar as it is possible to discern things about it from his very basic familiarity with it.

The style, to be clear, does not assume that ten-year-olds will be that strong. It just relies on moves that will not work in a real combat situation unless you are. The ten-year-olds aren't paladins yet.

Swing and step and reposition and strike! Pivot and repeat!

At any rate it's fun and not tedious, and that was really the goal.

The second batch goes faster - or rather it takes the same amount of time for him to want a break, but he gets more done in that time.

"How come you're speeding up?"

"I have to hold the spell design in my head and the more I practice it the more I find ways to put parts of it together in chunks. It gets faster per cast and I have more, sort of, room in my mind to think through spell anchor specifications at the same time. I'll be slower next time because I'll be starting to get worn out and have to be careful." (They've long since reached a level of informality where they're not tracking minute-to-minute changes of this magnitude in who owes whom how much, and most moral places just trade information for free. And he kind of wants to be friends.)

"Huh, like how you'll speed up if you sing the same song fifty times."

"I think you're not supposed to speed up songs just because you've sung them before but maybe so."

"Well, you're not supposed to but it happens if you don't have a way to keep time."