"Nothing like I saw Griffie radiating."

"Unfortunate."

"It wouldn't even necessarily clarify things, Jim could have had different quintessence for some other reason that doesn't have to do with not being very nice. It'd be more useful to see how yours correlates with your behavior."

"So what you really want isn't just a sample of evil quintessence created by me figuring out how to use an evil spell in a way I feel comfortable with, you want me to actually do something immoral."

"Well. Actually, now that you say that, that implies you have the ability to just make evil quintessence in ways that don't involve - the opposite of doing people favors - which makes me think I have my answer for whether you can make goodness quintessence in ways that don't involve doing people favors. Right?"

"Ah. Yes, you have your answer. There are also spells specifically for pretending to be good or such, you can't just use quintessence detection as a reliable path to trusting someone. And there's a non-fake process of removing various residues on your soul including quintessence, but that one requires sincere regret of the action that produced those residues."

"Annoying. Well, if we're at all lucky, at least I can probably go have one poison-free cost-free drink."

"I have some documentation on me from the Celestials, you could ask Bar for information on verifying that? Still leans on trusting her, though. And for your free drink you should ask for her recommendation, she's good at it and it's not like it's easier to poison a recommendation than something you pick."

"Yeah. I'll have whatever Bar recommends, once I know it's not poison."

A large glass of an opaque green drink with a large straw appears on the counter, along with a napkin. "I understand your wish to verify, but I promise, I would never poison a customer."

Cinlirina inspects the beverage. It's a blend of known human-safe produce, in a safe glass cup, with a safe metal straw. He reports this.

She tries it. It's awesome. Is that kale? That tastes like it has some kale in it.

"Hey, this is really good. Do you get a lot of human customers?"

"I am very good at my job, including with the additional constraint of keeping to substances your employee would recognize as non-poisonous. Humans are actually the most common species to visit my bar, though some of them are entirely chemically incompatible with you despite their identical appearance and cognition."

"Not sure I'd call chemically incompatible organisms human. Certainly not for the purpose of practicing preparing human foods."

"The chemically incompatible humans actually tend to come with a lot of chemically incompatible analogues to substances you could safely ingest, expertise translates somewhat more than you might think."

"...Wow." She sips her smoothie some more. It's so weirdly creamy. "Do the humans you meet mostly come from worlds where they're minorities?"

"I meet a lot of humans from majority-human and all-human worlds, actually, humans who are a minority on their home planet and not just in their universe as a whole are quite rare."

"What's that like?"

"You'll have to be more specific."

"I don't know how to be more specific about it. Society must be different if, everywhere you go, every city has a restaurant designed for humans. But I don't know how it'd be different and I expect it's mostly things I wouldn't think to ask about. Like putting - is that avocado? - in a smoothie."

"Oh, you poor thing. I can sell you a language-independent cookbook, the one I'd suggest still assumes familiarity with some numerals and time and temperature units you don't have but that's easy to make a translation key for, I have to charge a higher fee for outside-context high technology but this isn't that. And yes, that was avocado in a smoothie, it's very popular. I'd have included animal-milk-derivatives but they'd be too foreign for your employee to recognize. And I can get you … hmm, would you like some anthropology texts about human societies written by nonhumans, or nonfictional books written by humans in human societies that may have a bit of a problem with taking things for granted?"

"Maybe both? How much would all that cost?"

"96 rings for the cookbook, and I can't sell you texts like that in your world's languages, so there's no point in you buying take-home copies."

"I can read them here. I might as well read something here besides... I don't know... I don't suppose there's a trustworthy guide to what to learn in Milliways so you can take over the world later."

"I can't get you that, but you are from a broad worldset with mostly-consistent physics, so I can recommend you books on technological development from a primitive baseline. They won't account for magic, though."