Saira, not important enough for a clan name, opens a door and finds some illusory nonsense on the other side of it.

It's illusory nonsense, right? She taps a table... okay, the table is not illusory. As the door swings shut she just notices something odd out of the corner of her eye and looks down to see that her rings look like plain steel now.

This is all in her building. It shouldn't even be possible to interfere with - with the appearance of the building without permission, with the rings at all, or with anything in such a way that things are tangibly different. And then there's... that... person...?

"Excuse me. I'd offer a ring for an explanation but in fact I think the terms of my lease just entitle me to one for free. What's going on?"

"This is Milliways, operated by Bar! She's an intelligent item and she's very friendly. If you want more details she might be better at explaining them directly to you than I would be. I don't know about your lease situation, but this is the kind of information I'd give for free anyway."

Okay, that... is not an explanation.

"What is Milliways doing in this hallway? How do I ask Bar that?"

To answer both of Saira's questions, a napkin appears on the counter with writing.

"Milliways is the Restaurant at the End of the Universe. Milliways occasionally temporarily redirects doors to point to itself instead of their usual destinations. Exiting the Milliways main door will return you to your original location, and your door to its usual behavior. And you can ask me questions by talking, or writing me notes, as well as other communication modes. Additionally, I'm authorized to serve each new visitor one free drink."

"That... okay. I don't know whether I want a free drink yet. Maybe I'll get back to you on that. ...Why do you speak Ilan?"

"I speak more languages than I remember, and knowing myself I would assume I learned or was made with them in order to be a good host. Additionally, the bar has a translation effect, which is why you are able to understand Griffith despite em speaking Sylvan."

Griffie gestures with eir tea. "Bar's good at drinks but you don't need to hurry to decide, as long as you're planning to go home eventually time within your universe is paused while you're here."

"Creepy. Possibly useful if this is the kind of thing I can get rich off of."

"The bar's not that interested in directly facilitating trade but occasionally people will come in to trade and you can get some neat stuff that way? I made someone some non-medically-necessary extra bodies for a ring that doesn't use my ringwearing capacity and lets me manipulate sound and flow in a gaseous medium pretty precisely, ah, in the two-inch-radius sphere the ring's at the center of. Why do you think the temporal effect is creepy?"

"Because if it weren't me, everything could change in an instant with no warning." She figures at this moment it is probably acceptable to go ahead and examine Griffie's hands to see how many fingers Griffie has and whether they are all covered in rings. It's the kind of situation where anyone would understand, really, and hands are one of the least rude body parts to look at.

"That's fair. I guess in my case I know I'm the one who's going to be making drastic changes, so it doesn't creep me out, but if you'd like to talk about what would make sudden changes like that less unpleasant for people like you I'd be interested in your advice."

Griffie does not seem to react negatively to being looked at at all! Ey has five fingers per hand. On one hand, ey wears a silver ring with a shield-cut sapphire, and on the other, ey wears a gold ring with tiny, off-color diamonds, and a gold-titanium alloy ring with very fine engraving. Each hand thus has several ringless fingers.

Hard to tell whether Griffie was being unclear about the rings on purpose or just through a lack of context.

"I mean, if I woke up to a military coup having taken over the government and somebody I'd never heard of now getting rich off of making people immortal, I wouldn't know who to worry about sucking up to or where to go if I wanted to be left alone. In any case it's not very convenient if you make plans thinking the world's one way and then suddenly it's another way. What's your goal with making less unpleasant changes?"

Griffie thinks about how to phrase eir response.

"In cases where I can afford to cheaply make things less scary and more pleasant for people who aren't actively trying to do things I don't like, I usually want to do so? Also, my intentions in fact aren't hostile and people don't need to suck up to me to be safe from me, and I want people to model me correctly there? Also, more broadly, my goal is to cause overwhelming victory for the Celestials, and that's supposed to make everything better, so if it would instead make something worse I would like to know how to mitigate that."

"Well, I have never heard of the Celestials and I don't know what you consider 'better' so I can't get very specific, but - what are you doing that people don't have to suck up to you, is it going to be really legible bureaucracy or what?"

"Well, if the Celestials win then, yes, Heaven will have as much extremely legible bureaucracy as they want, which is a lot, but also … the goal would be to give people nice things even if they don't try very hard to do useful things for us? Ah, clarification, Heaven is the legible-bureaucracy-and-such-liking subset of the Celestials."

"You like giving people nice things, huh? I like it when people give me nice things, although I guess I don't know what your species thinks of as nice."

"Ehh, probably similar things to humans, I'm not actually as psychologically distant from them as you might think. I mostly like having systems for giving people nice things in a way which addresses the most pressing needs first, but I also like doing cheap-for-me favors for pleasant people who are near me, so I guess if you have some pressing problem that I might be able to solve feel free to let me know? But since you seem to, not be fleeing a warzone or starving to death or whatnot I'm not going to give you discounts on actually expensive things. Oh, and if you want medical care the bar hires people to offer some for free, and if you want medical care from me I'll be working a shift soonish."

"I do have a younger brother I worry about but I am not, personally, anything worse than a little poor." She says this with a straight face while her new-looking sky-blue clothing sparkles as if studded with very tiny diamonds.

Griffie doesn't put much weight on clothing as a measure of wealth after someone ooh'd and aah'd over eir "authentic hand-woven natural-fiber naturally-dyed" ribbons while wearing what looked like a dress of solid gold. The clean sparkly moderately-dyed clothing thus does not contradict its wearer.

"Do you want to talk about your younger brother? And if you want to profit from Milliways you can borrow books on profitable-seeming things from Bar for free and copy them into your language with the translation effect, it's a straightforward path."

"Thanks for the tip! My brother is still a kid and lives with our parents. I never really got along with them, they're hard to like. I hang around being visibly annoyed if they hurt him and willing and able to make their lives slightly better or worse if I see fit."

"That sounds like a difficult situation which I'd be willing to listen to you about but probably won't have amazing advice for, I assume you've already considered possibilities like seeing if you can take responsibility for your brother."

"It's not a lot more safety as long as I'm in Anavel Sani, which is the biggest cost for me, and I worry if I buy him off my parents they'll have another one to try to get me to buy that one too. Maybe still worth it but I want them to have fewer chances to fuck with people, not more. Honestly if I had a trivial and legal way to have them tortured to death I'd take it. Also I don't want a child, I have nothing I want to do with a child, I don't have room for a child in my apartment..."

Griffie looks increasingly concerned through this statement.

"You'd need to actually buy your brother? Such that if you did so your parents would be incentivized to produce more kids and threaten to treat them badly to get you to buy more of them? That's a more messed-up system than I'm used to seeing produce, like, people functional enough to behave the way you're behaving, unless this is all a scheme. Er, a more complicated, dishonest, and harmful-to-me scheme than getting me to do you a small favor."

"That said … no matter how awful your parents are, I'd encourage you to be less willing to have them tortured to death if you could somehow get away with it, torture is very bad."

"If it comes up that my fabulous Milliways wealth and power leave me capable of doing that I can offer you the chance to buy them off me or something, if it's that big a deal to you. Anyway, how are you used to seeing people raise kids?"

"So, this is actually a funny story, I'm mostly used to not seeing people raise kids, I'm from a village of people who reincarnate each other when we die and we come back as adults with extensive memory loss, we need retraining but not parenting? But in the more functional societies I'm most familiar with … parents work to provide for their children and when the children become capable of doing things they'll be trained in various work skills. Usually by the parents and usually agricultural and textile and household maintenance work, but sometimes they'll be educated outside the home instead, which is more common for wealthier parents. Bad parents will hurt their children a lot, with cases like 'they're in a bad mood and they want to hurt someone' being fairly typical, and often a relative of a child with bad parents will try to get the community to agree that they should raise the child instead, or the child will leave home at an early age. Better parents may sometimes physically hurt children, but mostly if the children are about to do something really stupid and they're too young to listen to yelling or an explanation? And good parents will do things like prioritize feeding the children if there's not enough food for everyone, tell the children they love them, try to be respectful of the children even when they're being silly, et cetera."