"When you say 'good' and 'bad' parents - like, you like them more or less, or they're more or less convenient for society, or the kids like them more or less?"

"In context, a broad value judgment which has connotations of all three? But with the idea being that goodness of parenthood is an objective quality, and even if I were to approve of parents mistreating their children, and the parents are in a society where hurting children because they're annoying is socially normal, and the children think that this quality of parenting is the highest quality around, that kind of parenting can still be bad."

"And members of your species, if they have bad parents, universally grow up to not be able to hold a polite conversation with a surprise alien?"

"No, that happens fairly often. It's that people raised totally within slaver societies, with no exposure to other values, where it'd be unsurprising for parents to literally produce more kids just to threaten to hurt them … that is a cluster of people I'd expect to have trouble holding a polite conversation with a surprise alien."

"I'm not sure what you mean but I grew up around caralendri and beluli and essi and all of them like different things. I've... met people I'd be surprised to learn had had babies specifically to threaten them? I think most caralendri get along fine with their kids. I guess - a human raised without ever meeting anyone who wasn't also a human might be bad at surprise aliens? But I don't think that's what you're talking about."

"So, to oversimplify, my model here is that mistreating people makes them less happy and worse at things. But if people know that the way they are being treated is wrong, then they're less damaged by the mistreatment? And when I say 'wrong', I mean … like they don't deserve to be treated that way, like if everyone knew about the situation and they could afford to fix it they would, like if everyone knew about the situation people would be upset with their parents and sympathetic to them?"

"I don't expect anyone to like me just because my parents are hard to like but I do expect them to not want to be in a position where my parents have power over them if they believe me. Someone might say 'sucks to be you' and laugh about it or they might say 'sucks to be you' in a way where they were trying to be friendly. And possibly still laugh about it. Does that count?"

"So, sympathy isn't the same as liking, I could find someone really annoying to interact with and still think that they deserve better and that I wish I could help them? And, uh, the fact that some people were trying to be friendly is good, but if saying 'sucks to be you' and maybe laughing is the best script their culture offers them for it, that culture probably has a lot of problems? It counts any though?"

"I wouldn't think talking about my parents was a central example of a thing to do to be friendly anyway, I'd expect someone who wanted to be friends to tell me something useful for free or give me a small present, and I think if you could swing it 'I have compromising information that'll get them executed, want to go show it to the police together?' would be better for me but I don't think you'd think so and I don't think anyone does. I don't really see what you'd do differently even if your hobby was trying to make people happy for no reason."

"The idea if we were friends and you were still in their power wouldn't be that I'd start by asking a bunch of personal questions, the idea would be that you'd occasionally end up mentioning it and then I'd tell you that in a better world nobody's parents would treat them that way, or that I wished I could host you but I didn't have a good plan, or possibly that I also wished I could get away with hurting your parents, or similar. I mean, I would also tell you useful information for free if we were friends, or if I saw a vendor selling something affordable I thought you would like I might buy it and give it to you, or such."

"So, like, you'd pitch me on working for the Celestials and that would be friendly? Or you... do you have a thing where before you actually commit any resources to being friends with someone, you loudly lament how the least fixable parts of their life suck and how if it were really trivial to fix them you'd do that?"

"I think the idea would be is that, if you thought I was friendly, you might mention problems in a way that doesn't actually make me more able to hurt you or anything, and then if I responded sympathetically you'd know more about whether I was trying to act friendly or you had just gotten confused? And I do pitch people on working with the Celestials, but I'd do that even if I didn't like them so it isn't a very good signal. I meant that I heard about some more you-specific opportunity you might like I'd tell you about it if we were friends but be less likely to if we weren't."

"That... makes slightly more sense. Speaking of working for Celestials and such, have I mentioned I'm a professional inheritance mage and have mostly worked on improving people's health?"

"I don't think you have! The Celestials can't hire you unless my door is open, which it won't be for a while, but I'd be interested in the details and Bar might be interested in hiring you depending on them."

"I treat genetic diseases in mammals. Things like chromosomal disjunction disorders, obviously, but also stuff like polycystic kidney disease or this one mutation that leads to tail problems - like, potentially complete taillessness and nerve problems that make people walk sort of funny - I do also work with humans, I think the most interesting thing I do for humans specifically is make sure they're heterozygous for an allele where, if you're homozygous one way you're more vulnerable to disease, specifically this one parasitic fever, and if you're homozygous the other way you have different and worse problems."

"So, this mostly sounds like Bar wouldn't hire you directly to work infirmary shifts, because we get a lot of acute injuries there? But that's still really cool! Where I'm from we usually lean on Positive Energy for healing stuff and it does a lot of the detail work, but it sounds like you figured out how to handle the detail work yourself?"

"I have never heard of Positive Energy. Yeah, I do all my own detail work."

"It's a phenomenon local to my worldsheaf. It's sort of like life energy but not quite? If I use a spell to get an undifferentiated blob of it on someone with my worldsheaf's kind of soul it'll heal them, if I use a spell to bring in a blob of it and tell the blob to go fight diseases it will including to the point of gene-editing, and if I use a spell to get an undifferentiated blob of it on an outworlder it'll try to make them a second, redundant soul out of itself and heal them. Also, there's a whole much-larger-than-the-inhabited-part-of-the-world region that's just pure Positive Energy, denser the further you go into it, and if you go deep in there you'll eventually get so exposed to it that you explode? And you can injure yourself so that it gets expended healing you instead of exploding you, but if you go deep enough even that won't be sufficient."

"Well, that is very cool and very not how things work where I'm from. First of all what exactly is a soul?"

"A soul is the part of you that stores who you are, such that if it were different you wouldn't be you? A lot of people here have brainsouls, especially people confused by the concept of souls. If you have a brainsoul, then when your body grows a brain it grows a very complex brain capable of abstract cognition. But my brain isn't like that, I have a thing made of positive energy that's attached to my brain that does my cognition, and my brain just helps."

"Neat! How's it show up to scrying?"

Griffie reaches into eir bag for a glass-and-metal tablet, and presses a button causing it to illuminate. After poking the device further, ey shows a diagram to Saira.

The diagram depicts a simpler-than-human brain missing entire regions including the prefrontal cortex, drawn in green. Superimposed on it in blue is a diagram of another organ, with a stemlike feature directly overlapping the brainstem and other features of the blue organ showing no obvious overlap with the green organ. The blue organ's major parts are labeled as the soulstem, the sensories, the executive, memory storage, the affections and affective web.

"This is the kind of information you could get with good enough instruments."

"That is cool. And now I just have even more questions about the interface you've got for your magic items, it seems really complicated."

"This isn't a magic item, it's a very expensive purchase from Bar, and it would have been even more expensive if my adventuring companion hadn't invented something somewhat similar. There's this sort-of-metallish substance made of little kernels of 14 protons and 14 neutrons that in its pure form has interesting properties for electrical conductivity, and you can use it to make an electricity-powered device that does a lot of math very fast, and then this display is also nonmagical but I don't remember the details of it? Something about liquid crystals, Bar could get you a book on it. My universe doesn't natively have those particles but Bar says this won't fall apart when I take it home. If your world has them maybe you could figure out how to build these!"

The words Griffie says that translate into Ilan's words for "proton" and "neutron" seem to take much longer to say than they would in Ilan.

Saira's not sure whether to be delighted, because this is technological and yes her world does have silicon, or even more confused than before.

"How do you have - things - without those?"