Ethics/culture would probably be the easiest to satisfactorily explain. Sida knows some of the things her civilization knows about technology and biology, but not most of it.

Sendra has taken time to carefully consider some of these questions; this is obvious from how she's reading directly from her notes. "Under what circumstances is killing another justified? What about stealing?" 

"At home, it would probably never come up, although if you had to kill someone in defense of yourself or another, I and most people would consider that acceptable. Stealing, I would condone basically never, although if you're confident that the person you're stealing from would consent to it, that could be alright. Like if for some reason you were starving in the wilderness and had to break into someone's unoccupied cabin and eat their food to survive—and of course you would later compensate them—they probably wouldn't even object, and if they did you wouldn't be in much trouble for it."

"But, uh, here it's probably different, and I don't think I'd trust the law to handle things. It is not even clear to me if this city has a uniform legal system. So I'd be willing to kill or steal in a broader set of circumstances to protect myself, or people I cared about, or to prevent knowledge from being destroyed. Like, one of the books I read mentioned that some gods are malevolent and definitely evil and worshiping them empowers them, so killing their worshipers might be a good idea. But regardless, I think to kill or steal you have to be reasonably confident that it will help you achieve a worthwhile end, I wouldn't kill someone just because they pissed me off."

"That seems like a very reasonable framework, and not a very surprising one, given the level of wealth you've implied for your world previously." Sendra says neutrally. "Next question then: If you fall sick, who is expected to take care of you?"  
 

"At home, if you weren't that sick, you'd convalesce at home and your friends or family would help out. If you were really badly sick, probably you'd go to a hospital and pay medical professionals to keep you alive. Here, I expect I would be taking care of myself, for now at least. Unless the Deep Gardeners help with that kind of thing? I've heard they do this 'dole' thing, but I'm not sure what that is."

"The dole of the deep gardeners is just food, unfortunately; they will give anyone who comes to one of their kitchens as much mushroom stew as they can eat. That's expensive enough on it's own. Magical healing is the province of those who can afford to pay, though some spellcasters try to be charitable, when they can. People mostly rely on whatever medical training local folks have; there's usually someone with a way with herbs in every community."  

"Well, I suppose I'll have to meet some people, because I have no knowledge whatsoever of herbal medicine."

"Meeting people with complimentary skillsets is traditionally considered a good idea, yes." 

"Next question: You know your friend has committed a crime you disapprove of. What do you do? Do you go to the authorities, do you warn your friends, do you remain silent?"  

"At home, I'd probably tell their insurer and maybe the victim of that crime, and probably stop being friends with that person, unless it was a really minor crime or we were really close friends. Although it also depends on the circumstances under which I learned this information—you don't want to make people regret telling you information you want to know. Here, I have no idea what to expect the authorities to do if I told them, so I'd probably only tell them if I thought it would make things better, in addition to the other considerations I described."

"Their insurer?"  

"This is relatively recent—a couple of decades old—but in the Union, everyone is required to purchase insurance against them breaking the law, for which the penalty is nearly always monetary. So insurers predict how likely someone is to break the law, and that determines how expensive your insurance is. And if you report to someone's insurer that they broke the law, their insurer probably won't tell anyone, but their insurance rates will go up. Which is sort of important to make sure people aren't, like, freeloading off of more law-abiding people."

"... How do people trust the insurers to get any of that right? They could ruin someone's life because of a bad gut feeling."

"To be clear, insurers are basically never individual people. They're large institutions with millions of employees and prediction methods a lot more sophisticated than gut feelings, although I guess sometimes some things like gut feelings are involved in the process. And if your insurer suddenly hiked your rates a lot, you could just get another insurer. It's a competitive market."

"... I can't imagine an institution with a million people producing remotely consistent results on a case-by-case basis. It'd be impossible to ensure that everyone involved was competent; we have enough problems with that here, and we have, like, less than a thousand employees even including all the guards and maintenance staff and teamsters. I guess if switching was easy, that'd help somewhat when you did encounter problems."  

"I think normally each insurance company has it's own complicated formula/flowchart thing that determines the final price, and some people are responsible for gathering information, some people are responsible for putting that information into the formula/flowchart thing and making sure it's calculated properly, some people are responsible for assessing the accuracy of the formula/flowchart thing and figuring out ways to improve it, and there are other jobs I don't know about. Large institutions rely a lot on processes to do things in a predictable organized way."

"Also, we didn't always have organizations that large, and we had centuries for things to get bigger and to learn how to make large institutions work properly."

"I think here that mostly institutions on a scale larger than a city or small state have lasted a few centuries and then exploded dramatically"

"Er, how exactly do they explode?"

"Some combination of losing functional control of their outlying areas, acquiring leadership that's wildly unsuited for the role, and a major threat that comes out of nowhere like a rising epic or a sleeping monster or something, usually."

"Oh. That... wouldn't really happen to the Union. I guess I think I haven't mentioned that the major difference between the Hadarite Union and the other civilizations of my world's history is the religion, called Hadar. Which, among other things, ensures that even when the central government is weak, regional governments remain loyal to the Union as a whole, and that the government system is pretty good at making sure leadership isn't wildly unsuited for the role. It probably also helps that we don't have epics or monsters, and there are a lot of things in place to prevent plagues or famines."

"Can you talk more about Hadar then? I don't think that strategy has worked here - the dwarves have something like it, their Old Law, but they're a mess of dis-unified kingdoms anyway."  

"'Hadar' is a derivative of an archaic word that roughly translates to 'the path' or 'the way'. It's centrally about valuing truth and beauty, beyond that there's a lot of variance. However, some things are sort of commonly accepted. For instance, there's a lot of political philosophy based on the writings of the first emperor, about how to work together and form a Union which is to the benefit of everyone. So it's generally regarded as desirable to have a unified government, which functions in a certain way, and that has been pretty stable."

"And, uh, this is all out of order, but I should also mention the priests. Hadar was first conceived about 1800 years ago—I don't know if years here are the same length—when the prophet, Irakas, arrived in the city of Gebal and began training his students. He and all his students swore an oath to pursue the truth and to deceive no one. Those students trained their own students, who trained their own students, and eventually this evolved into the priesthood, who all swear variations of that original oath. And of course there are monitoring and enforcement mechanisms to make sure they follow their oaths, but they pretty reliably do, which makes them trustworthy. So many of the most important parts of our society rely on priests to make judgements on things, and that allowed us to avoid some of the issues other civilizations had."

"Years here are 385 days, plus usually 5 intercalary days, but the number varies." Sandra mentions offhandly while considering. "I can see how that could be effective if everyone trusted the priests, but just to clarify, you don't have an actual god or anything running enforcement?"  

"Now and even moreso in the past there were a lot of people who thought there were gods, and we can’t conclusively rule it out. Although there isn't any compelling evidence to say gods exist, much less any specific god."

"... that must be weird. Here, everyone is quite certain which gods are and aren't real. I think the least active god everyone agrees is definitely in existence would be ... Murder, probably? They're only known from the commentary of other gods related to violence and the occasional theogonist; they don't answer prayers unless the prayers are related to reporting that something related to violence is failing metaphysically, and I haven't ever met or heard of anyone in that situation."  

"The world is a fundamentally confusing and difficult-to-understand place. We are everywhere beset by illusions and forgetfulness. It's something we're used to, I don't find it weird."

"Um, speaking of Hadar, I've gotten the feeling that the Order of Edification is the closest thing to a Hadarite priestly order that exists in this city. I was pleasantly surprised to find something so relatively familiar."