"Is our being outside their jurisdiction going to have important strategic implications such as people wanting to visit to make decisions, important strategic implications such as formal logic ceasing to usefully describe local reality, or both or neither?"

"You're probably going to want to ban time travel for, at the very least, everyone but you, probably everyone. If you don't, you, uh, will likely encounter problems. Directly, such as issues with local reality making less sense, or indirectly, like you getting sanctioned or invaded. There should be model legal codes regarding time manipulation, I don't happen to have any on me."

"Do you think we can enforce such a law?"

"None of the Har magics seem to do time manipulation. Nobody in Har, to my knowlege, has the materials necessary to perform it. I really doubt you want unregulated imports from Suaal. How do you usually enforce laws? What would you do if, say, someone went around leaving custom-engineered plague samples in illusions in a lot of places at once?"

"Kill them. The plague samples, that is. I am more concerned about our ability to enforce laws in general if, for example, Asmodeus visits."

"That's very reasonable, but choosing to not ban time travel isn't going to help much."

"It seems like a purely symbolic gesture, if the only entities who can do it are those we are already bending all our effort toward keeping out of our universe, but perhaps we will draft such a law."

"Oh. No, I suspect it would be possible for non-gods to do time travel if they had extensive opportunities for unimpeded research and access to cheap magic and such."

"Aha. I see. Can we infer anything about that from the fact that we haven't already been visited by time travelers unless perhaps you are one?"

"I'm not one, and … I don't think we can infer much? But I'm not an expert."

"I see. And speaking of things we haven't already seen, I don't believe we've previously encountered anyone from another universe. Why do you think that is?"

"I don't know. If I had to guess, maybe you're far away from things and don't look interesting from a distance?"

"What would it mean to look interesting from a distance?'

"Uh, give off obvious signs of having appealing resources of some kind? I don't know, I'm not an outer god and I wouldn't have expected this place to exist at all and thus have a poor model of what might exist."

"Returning to the topic of contacting the Upper Planes, I am concerned about whether there is any benefit to us from contact beyond that we would likely prefer them to the alternatives."

"As it stands they'd offer some services for free – information definitely, possibly medical if they can manage – and want to do a lot of trade with you of goods that don't appear to be sold here. I'm not sure what sorts of trade goods or services would appeal, but there's teleportation, very high-grade textiles, lots of stuff. In the long term if they won, they'd likely want to offer a lot of services for free – housing, food, medical care, various recreational opportunities, et cetera."

"Those things do sound potentially appealing, though none of them seem to solve any major problems currently plaguing us. Is Heaven going to seek to intrude on the solitude of those who have withdrawn from society, if we don't negotiate otherwise?"

“Have they withdrawn from society with slaves? That’s an obvious consideration.”

"Sometimes."

“They’re certainly going to want to intrude.”

"What do you think would be the best way to avoid that?"

“Tell them that abstaining from that and keeping Azatas out is a condition of constructive interactions. If it is in fact the case, describe to them informational channels they can non-intrusively send messages on. That’s just the obvious, I can consider the problem more if you’d like.”

"That's a very reassuring answer but yes, this is one of the most important things for us - few people do want to be hermits but most want the option. I would like to be very careful of anything that might remove the floor on how bad things can ever get for a free person. If you have further thoughts I would like to hear them."

"Oh, hmm. I suspect that they'd be interested in selling goods that make it easier to be a hermit without slaves if they could manage – rings like mine for tiring less and not really needing food, devices for cleaning and repairing one's nonmagical possessions, et cetera."

"That might have some impact. Ideally not just as rings for caralendroids - does the shape of the jewelry matter at all to your magic?"