"…right, you technically … is that really the … I didn't realize this could be that simple. How much do you want for a brief explanation of the ways in which you think your world could be strategically relevant to me? I sort of figured you wouldn't want to help me even for money if you thought I was lying or doing some massive scheme, but in retrospect you never actually said that."

"Admittedly, I hadn't considered you could be doing a massive scheme to prevent anyone anywhere from ever becoming immortal. But I'm not, like, in the habit of turning people down just because they're obviously doing something that hurts other people who aren't me. I want - your word that if you are lying about the other things you're not going to try to stop me in particular from living as long as I want and won't make it harder than it already is for me personally to achieve a comfortable standard of living for myself and my single currently-extant younger sibling in particular - you are just not stupid enough to promise me that as part of a trade and then break that promise, I've met people who don't really get why you shouldn't do that and you're nothing like them - and, hm, I haven't thought it through all the way so my price depends a little on how long this runs but on the order of a few rings unless I realize there's actually a lot I hadn't thought of when setting my price, so, like. What would you say to twenty four rings if I can get through it in two minutes or less, or just one if it turns out what I actually say is 'haha, I can't think of anything, fooled you'?"

If Griffie were a daemon cultist ey'd totally just lie here, even if ey were brilliant. Charon's not Asmodeus. Charon is even mentioned to have made deals and then sneakily gone back on them, though ey doesn't remember if that was in the report Saira saw or not. But maybe Saira's conflating lawfulness and intelligence or noticing a lawful thread to Griffie's or something. Ey's helped Saira enough, ey in fact won't hurt her, ey can discuss this mistake(?) once ey gets the information ey wants.

"On my honor, I promise that I will not stop you from living as long as you want, nor will I prevent you and your current younger sibling from achieving a comfortable standard of living. Should my actions somehow inadvertently have such effects, despite my intention to avoid them, I will compensate you if possible."

Griffie exchanges notes with Bar about currency conversions. "And sure, twenty-four rings for the first up-to-two-minutes of useful content, or one ring conditional on you scamming me, with renegotiation should I want to hire you to talk longer, is a deal I will accept."

"So. Spell resistance. I've never heard of anyone getting through ours, but I don't know what's up with your situation and we might want to test mine some more. In general, defense magic - magic that makes things stay as they are - is going to play about as nicely with your weird physics as any of the types of magic I know of do. I should list the types - there's a mnemonic for them that goes, 'someone used structure magic to paint a picture of an orchard and a command mage wanted to destroy it but used knowledge magic to learn it was warded and...' actually, I forgot this was getting translated and there's no reason to expect it to sound catchy to you. The types of magic are structure, illusion, green, command, void, knowledge, defense, force, heat, sun, death, and inheritance. Of these, I think structure is the most unlikely to work normally for you, it's all about the rearrangement of the kinds of atoms we have. - Scratch that, no, sun is going to be worse. Illusion is what it sounds like, and does sounds too. Green encourages plant growth - I don't know if it could directly make you in particular healthier but it wouldn't shock me. And it could be done as an area of effect on an artifact that would make a place friendly to you in particular... seems small-scale for anything you'd need to do once you got through here, though. And I'm not completely sure it would recognize you as a real plant and I'm also not totally sure it wouldn't give you cancer. Which is something I treat! But not in aliens. Anyway.

"Command magic doesn't actually do positive commands, just negative, and it doesn't affect your thoughts directly. Except insofar as 'stop breathing' will keep you from thinking about things and 'don't breathe unless you're doing what I want' might convince some people to do some things. It's useful for criminals and addicts. I don't know if it's something you need or could use. Knowledge magic is for learning things. You could use it to look at the past, including thirty thousand years ago, assuming you could even get a knowledge mage into your universe - I don't think it works across universes or it wouldn't be common knowledge that there are no aliens anywhere. It can't get through illusions but it can reliably distinguish illusions from real things.

"Defense keeps things from changing. Including along axes like 'does it have any spells acting on it right now?' or 'is it within two inches of this other thing?' I think it might be useful for you and I don't know how because I don't know what you might want to protect. Force is... what it sounds like. You move things. With your mind. If you don't already have cheap mass transit, we solve that with this one.

"Heat is... temperature control, and now that I'm thinking about how temperature works I don't know if this one will work for you... Sun, no, skipping that one, it won't work either... Death magic is for killing things. Where I come from, diseases are caused by small living organisms that sort of eat people from the inside, so we use death magic to protect ourselves from that. And inheritance is my kind and I've already told you about it.

"Beyond that, we have - specific physical knowledge that won't help you - we have math that might - we have a system of government I don't know if you have in your world, called a republic, that turns out to be almost immune to civil wars and famines and is comfortable for people who can't defend themselves on their own to live in alongside people who could kill them."

Griffie speaks to Bar and hands over 24 rings.

"Thank you for the summary. I do notice you left out uses of void magic, which I am curious about."

"As to the rest … the Celestial styles of governance all seem to work pretty well on the metrics of war and famine and murder, but I'll look up republics just in case they have cool stuff the Celestials might want to borrow. I have my own anti-disease magic. Force sounds … so, to be clear, none of my current plans involve bringing anyone from your world through my door unless they want to spend a very long time in this bar, because I am not opening my door until I'm ready to fight some gods. It would take less than a minute for hostile forces to show up, probably much less given the magnitude of the advantage that Bar gives, and I'm not giving hostile forces access to more worlds if I can help it. Given this, force isn't very useful for in-bar purposes that I can think of, same for command and knowledge. Green is … theoretically interesting, but yeah, probably the wrong power level and I can also cure cancer but would consider getting it inconvenient. I can boost plant growth myself. I would be interested in hiring a defense mage, and would like a price quote from you and your employee on facilitating that."

"Also, it'd be convenient for me to pay in stories because storytelling is fun and doesn't trade off against my other resources as much as coin does."

"I like stories but not a lot. And I suspect I can keep getting them from you for free since, you know, I already have. We are probably running out of time and shouldn't bring in a defense mage until we can make one more trip out for everything we will need before I open my door and maybe take over the world or something. - Probably not that, I like the legacy of legitimacy our government has. Maybe just arrive and revolutionize medicine and demonstrate that I know everything on a law school curriculum and run for office. Which. Ugh. Gets us right back to 'I want to verify things and one kind of payment I'd accept would be help with that' - assuming I can even trust the help."

"Okay. You have correctly discerned that I would totally tell stories for free, and you have a point regarding open-door errands."

"I can do planning help but I don't really do particularly amazing civilization-interfacing-y help. I might catch it if there's something you're not thinking of, but my background is … I grew up in a little village that was all my family and we basically got along, I interacted with small towns with weird problems but as an outsider who didn't, like, try to persistently live there or sell services or whatnot. The first time I went to a city, the government went against its own laws to kidnap me and there was a giant mess about that, and currently I live in a city which is also not necessarily the model you want for governance, there are areas with signs effectively communicating 'if you go past this point and get murdered, probably whoever you hire to defend you won't be able to arrest the murderer at any reasonable cost to them and thus won't try'. Well. Currently I live in Milliways. But I do own housing there."

"I guess I'd just like to know what you want out of taking over the world or running for public office or such. I'll probably just believe you if you tell me, I have a lot of practice trying to figure out whether human-shaped people are being honest or not."

"And if I want to offer you help, then I'll look into having any help I can offer be verifiable. Or if not I'll just pay you in coin."

"...I meant help figuring out what's up with Milliways but that sounds fascinating. - How do you tell if human-shaped people are being honest?"

"There's a lot of subtle cues in their posture and speech and such. It takes a while to build up an intuition and some people who try just conclude that everyone who they like is honest and everyone they don't like is lying, but if you try to avoid that and other failure modes and you have lots of practice eventually you can get fairly good?"

"Gotta admit, when I want to know if people are lying, I check whether, if it turned out later they'd tricked me, I could take them to court. Or I look for reviews of them. Or, uh, hire a knowledge mage and then worry that my knowledge mage has been kidnapped and replaced with an actor."

If Cinlirina has been replaced by an actor, it's a pretty knowledgeable one: He's currently reading up on lost history of the Sorota clan, which he's currently somewhat obsessed with.

"Well, yes, giving people incentives not to lie or looking at their reputations is the more reliable way, but sometimes you can't do it. If you want to try having my option as a backup I'd recommend observing people in contexts where they might lie, making predictions about whether they're lying or not and explaining why you think that, and then checking. But it's a lot of work and if you reliably have access to a functional government I can see why you might want to just skip it."

"Makes sense. And does not help with Milliways at all, so how am I supposed to verify that any cool discoveries I make reading things here aren't just - hmm. Anyway, you were wondering why I would want to run for office, and I guess just because it's the obvious thing to do, that or buy a private island."

"This sounds connected to republics. Given that I could borrow a book about republics from Bar for free, would you like to explain for the same price, or should I borrow a book?"

"Well, you'll get more from the book, but the quick rundown is, the empire is run by three imperial ministers with their own individual areas of power - metaphorical areas, like the justice system or tax collection - and periodically every free person gets a list of people to consider for each of those jobs. And for each person on the list, they say whether they'd be okay with that person getting that job. The person with the most yeses is the least objectionable candidate and the one who people would be least likely to bother going to war against if war were the way we did things, so there's not much a war would change, so we don't bother."

"And this works the way it does because … everyone thinks 'even though some people have magic with direct military usefulness and are good at fighting and some don't and aren't, we're going to ignore that and treat green mages' votes equally to death mages' votes', and this doesn't make people think that the elections are sufficiently non-representative of war results that they try to start wars?"

"If you make green mages angry, you will starve. You might not die immediately like if you make a defense mage angry, but you will starve. Or it might not even matter, because they might be a professional command designer and not the kind of person you'd ever voluntarily cross if you had any choice. - You're not wrong to wonder, but you should be wondering it about nobodies, and in practice there aren't enough of those to make a big difference and if there were they could just destroy the world. I think you're missing that wars are fought with tactics and logistics and most people aren't working mages."

"Wars are fought with tactics and logistics, but for one, if you're a subsistence farmer you don't have the ability to even study those because you can't get books and you don't have enough spare time anyway and if you get military training it's from someone who just wants to teach you how to defend your village from goblins or such. For two, in my world, stuff like 'who has the best tools for producing military equipment' and 'who's the best at tactics' and 'who is personally the best at self-defense' and such are all correlated, and the reason I haven't gone and taken over some villages or something is … well, there's a lot of reasons, but they look more like 'I don't want to and it'd be a waste of my time' than 'I would lose'. Well, a lot of places are being run by other people, who would say things like 'no, you can't conquer those villages and get them to give you some fraction of their crops, they're mine and I'm already doing that', and some of those people could in fact beat me in fights, but that'd be the blocker if I went to try it."

"And thank you for the explanation. Um, who are 'nobodies'?"

"...Uh, wow. Nobodies have magic that can't change or create or protect, only destroy. It's banned because if they keep destroying stuff we'll run out, but, also, people just don't like them. I think they mostly end up killed as babies, at least in the south. Less so up north where people don't mind as much if they get other jobs."

"If most people aren't working mages and thus magic isn't that big a deal, and most people follow the law, why do people dislike, er, I'm assuming from you not listing occupations 'void mages'? Enough to kill them as babies? That seems like a really strong dislike that doesn't make much sense."

"It just feels... unaesthetic? That... magic is what makes you a person, and their magic is useless and no one wants them to do it, and it feels like... I mean... I don't actually know that that happens with people too rich to be working mages, it's not like the clans ever tell other people what magic they have, but it'd make me shiver if it turns out they're keeping their void mages around. I wouldn't vote for one, if I knew that's what someone was. I think they know that. And they might get a shivery feeling about it too, I think that's something that's the same for caralendri and humans. Even my parents wouldn't just inflict a nobody on the world for the fun of it if it meant raising it themselves."

Griffie restrains emself enough to not openly sputter.

"So, there's a social norm of killing babies because they seem unaesthetic, to the point that it would feel like 'inflicting that sort of person on the world' to choose not to kill one, and the idea that powerful people aren't killing their babies of that type feels unpleasant. This … seems like a bad norm … which you should stop having? I know that's not how ideas this widespread work, I'm sorry … uh, there are whole planets with humans that don't natively have magic at all and the humans are still person-ish and some of them come here, would it help if you met one of them? …this isn't even your priority, is it, and if I was like 'well, let me go to your world and try to fix this' you would be concerned, and also the solution to problems in your world is not going to be, uh, find the person who's sitting around in a room going 'haha, once the ten thousanth baby is killed for having the wrong magic I will be invincible' and stop them, foes-beyond-fiends and all that, being able to turn into a smilodon or call down lightning isn't even helpful here. Uh. I find this situation very objectionable, what sort of evidence if any would convince you to want to try to fix it."

Halfway through that she starts making faces.

Eventually she manages to say, "...What the fuck?"

"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have just said 'foes beyond fiends' without explaining. It's the title of my friend's essay on how my world's … people who directly gain power every time someone kills a baby for being unaesthetic and thus actively work to cause more of that, to give an example … fundamentally are powered by the forces within the natures of normal people who aren't literal embodiments of pure evil, and how the latter constitutes the true enemy, which is much harder to deal with."

"...That sounds intensely interesting and is not any of the things I was startled to hear you say. Um. - Because I sort of consider you maybe on a potential friend trajectory I'm going to lead with 'they can't even do magic at the age when they die, it's not like they're people already or anything' - but, also, you cannot possibly have meant the thing I would usually understand 'humans that don't have magic at all' to mean - I don't really know what sorts of evidence would make me trust my senses at all at this point, let alone convince me to want different things..."