"The government workers put some illusions explaining laws with pictures in my book but otherwise I don't think so. You can ask me weird-sounding questions about biology if you want, I used to work in medicine."

"People haven't - I mean - replicating a physical brain is possible, in theory, but it's really slow and the parts you made first will die while you're making the rest of it, and lots of people hide theirs just in case. And making a magic item with flexible general intelligence is one of the hardest problems in spell design, but if there's an example right there for everyone to see..."

"I haven't seen copied people. That said, in the absence of" Griffie glares, though not at Valanda "certain entities I will be discussing with your government, it is possible to make people stop aging, or have damage from aging healed. There are documented cases. I'm one of them, though I think you would really like a methodology that's less associated with near-total amnesia. …this is all about aging of the soul, making empty replacement bodies is a known process, just an expensive one especially if you're picky."

"Well, uh, don't let people know how to stop aging or heal it unless you're sure you don't mind there being fifty of you who belong to people who thought 'oh hey, I want to own an alien plant' and will live forever."

"Uh!" Griffie frowns and thinks.

"I don't want that outcome. I don't want other people who like being alive to die either. I … think it should ultimately be possible for something mutually beneficial to happen here that improves on the 'I just don't tell people any useful information and they die' outcome, I guess I just need to figure it out."

"Thank you very much for telling me this. I appreciate it a lot. Do you want foreign currency that's only really interesting due to being made of locally-unstable matter or anything? You're a defense mage, you might be able to stabilize it."

"I might be able to do that, yeah. If nothing else it'd be interesting to try it. And I don't think anyone here who wants to be alive is dying of being a magical construct with planned obsolescence, they mostly die of - actually that's a detailed thing that I know a lot about and have forgotten what kind of summary laypeople would use."

"It's not like my creator did planned obsolescence, normally creations like me aren't as intelligent as I am and aren't nearly as repairable either. She actually got … I'm not sure whether you'd call it 'arrested' or 'kidnapped' … for making us too repairable. And I do know about the thing where body parts get worse as the body gets older, there's … I have healing magic that automates some of the detail work, I could look into applying it that way. Anyway."

Griffie gets out and shows Valanda an embossed disc that looks superficially like it's made of copper. There's a crude figure of what might be a caralendar man, surrounded by unreadable text, on the front, and some more abstract-looking symbol surrounded by equally unreadable text on the back. "If you can stabilize this you can have it."

Hm. Will a spell that just makes it stay exactly the way it is work? He tries about the same thing he'd try if he wanted to turn someone into a statue.

Griffie sets the coin down and sloooowly takes eir hand away from it, preferring not to dissolve the whole thing if the spell fails. It doesn't.

"Alright! Good spellwork, enjoy your, er, embossed kuprin sample."

"I will, I guess. Why did that work, anyway, I thought you said it was currency."

"We don't have cheap sun-mage-like magic. This is just a standard weight of a kind of kuprin, which is like metal, and one of the rarer ones."

"So it's not a - it's currency because the government says it's currency, it's just valuable and the government, uh, put a stamp on it for some reason?"

"So, I don't fully understand this, because I'm not an economist, and I can't get you reference material either."

"But, to begin, whoever made this coin … probably a Temda-region coin, but even if it hadn't been that this would still be true … whoever made this coin may have been a government, but they sure-as-Static weren't the government. They may have done this with the approval of Axis, which is kind of the closest thing we have to a group that could be called 'the government' but, uh, they aren't a sole power like the Hari Empire is on the planet. But the people who made this coin also might not have gotten the approval of Axis!"

"I think the principle here is that they're staking their reputation on it being a specific weight of the right metal, and not some other metal or some other weight, as long as it doesn't look messed-up, and maybe they also hurt counterfeiters or maybe they outsource it but probably somebody does? But replicating the stamp is supposed to be hard. …and by the point you can do it you probably have better things to do, this isn't worth very much. There are tests people can do to see if they have genuine coins or not but I don't remember them right now and I don't think it really matters."

"The other currencies I've interacted much with are different kinds of metal-likes, some crystals that are useful for a lot of magic and hard to come by, and the Axis Currency Unit. The way that last one works is that they make a record for you with a number stored in a central location, Axis, and you can make the number go up by selling Axis stuff, and you can get stuff from Axis and some other groups in exchange for transferring some amount of number to them in an information system. Probably there's more to it, I never got my own record, my friend just used eir number for all of us."

"Interesting. I guess I can see why they'd do that. So. Anyway."

“I’m sort of curious about the currency here, now, but I get the feeling the government has an illusion about it and I just need to learn to read. I guess I should just explicitly confirm, you definitely feel like the Hari Empire … keeps its promises, holds itself to its laws, tries to be predictable and make people want to cooperate with it and sees this as important, and such?”

"Yeah, absolutely, all of that - and the currency is an illusion, but they make it impossible to copy it completely perfectly and promise to take payment in it."

"Huh, illusion currency. Neat. I feel like I've gotten all the information I really need to know before I try to go acquire money, do you want more information right now?"

"I want to know what your plans are and who the people you want us to ally with are."

"My short-term plans are to earn money legally, and then pay for something relevant to learning to read, defense mage services to substitute for my current means of not falling apart, illusion mage services for light source stuff, and maybe look into getting housing somewhere. My long-term plans are to get your government in touch with my world safely, to prompt them to ally with Axis which will probably be easy given what the Hari Empire and Axis are like, and to try to convince them to ally with Heaven, which will probably be harder."

"Axis calls themselves the … there isn't a word for it. The Region of Law, I guess I'll translate it as, but it's a kind of region you don't have a word for, presumably because it doesn't exist here, it's a region where you can only go to other regions by magic means, if you walked or flew however far you'd still be in the same region. The word in the language I probably want to teach your government is plane. Axis represents a very pure form of promise-keeping, order-maintaining, cooperation-encouraging, predictability, conflict-prevention, et cetera. So they're very reliable to work with but also they don't … care about making the Hari people happy, just about making them not regret cooperating. If someone else said 'we want to have a war to see if we can murder everyone in Har' and Har said 'well, if you try to do that we will fight you because we represent our free citizens' interests in not being murdered' Axis would offer to work out the chance of each side winning and then murder some fraction of the people in Har based on that. So nobody would have incentives to have a war."

"Heaven does Lawful, uh, in context I mean not 'person who doesn't break the law' but rather 'organization does promises and order and incentivizing cooperation and being predictable and preventing conflict' expression of … I don't have a word for it, and this one is important. The Celestial language word is goodness. Examples of goodness are … not being cruel, protecting people even if they can't pay you to protect them, making people happy, that sort of thing. I'm in favor of it. Their response to slavery would be 'we should help you find a better system in a way that doesn't involve you being unsafe', not 'it seems like a straightforward legal code so as long as the slaves can't fight back then it's fine', but they're also … the type of people who don't want your entire world to get murdered by someone who wants to kill everyone, and the type of people who think that bans on avoiding-death-research are bad, while Axis currently enforces those bans because they're part of a peace treaty with the very powerful person who wants to kill everyone."

He brightens up noticeably at "defense mage services" and then looks steadily more confused and concerned.

"I can't really see us agreeing to a deal like that with Axis but I hope things work out okay with Heaven. Uh, I am a defense mage, not medically certified but I've been working on immortality so you might decide I'm your best chance. And I think the Hari word for the type of region you're talking about is 'universe.'"

"So, the context for agreeing to that deal was approximately that people were pessimistic about avoiding-death research working and were really upset about things like 'this person running around aging cities to death in an instant' and couldn't stop the person, so they figured it would be better if people aged in predictable ways than if they fought a giant war about it, we have a lot of problems from the last war. …Heaven is an ally of Axis and they found some acceptable agreement, I think Har will too. I think the main way your government is going to get something they want here is by just being … probably the strongest and most lawful polity of our-kind-of-people I've seen, with magic like yours every little village can afford to have wards and disease prevention and fast communication with the imperial government and such, and that's a big deal."

"And the thing I want from defense magic is for the particles I'm made of to not fall apart without me being a statue, and maybe a bubble to prevent gas exchange, I don't think that's normal for medicine for people here anyway."

"I can definitely prevent gas exchange but we should have a conversation in public before I actually do any magic to you. What kind of people are you calling ours?"

"Preventing gas exchange is kind of pointless if you can't keep the particles the gas is made of from ceasing to exist, I still have to do the same generating-them-constantly magic either way. And … I'm not sure if this is a natural category, it probably isn't, but … people made out of the same sorts of things that their local kinds of plants or animals are made of, with people who are ribbons or have bodies made of gears or such kind of being an edge case. As opposed to people made out of concepts."

"Aren't you made out of different things from any kind of plants or animals or ribbons or gears?"

“I’m made of the same kinds of things as my world's plants, that’s why I said local.”