"That's what I think too." She pats Nelen on the head. "I think he'll feel better in a few weeks, if he doesn't find someone to settle down with first. But he needed the vacation anyhow."

"Good."

And eventually Nelen departs for his date and shows Fere and Valan out before he goes.

And they vanish.

Nelen's back at work after a few weeks off. He emails Feris to the effect that if they don't foresee joining any time in the next decade or so then he'll hand them off to Foreign Relations (counterpart to Integration) soon, but for the time being he is back at work. Earths have this tradition called the Olympics, and they've gone various different ways about it upon learning that there are more Earths and more Olympic committees, and the Warp Earth - part of the Federation, not Elendil - has chosen as its niche "nonmagical and aggressively international". Sesat is eligible to send teams for any of the 88 recognized Olympic sports, though probably it has never heard of most of them and would rather stick to a smaller subset if any. Here are the specs they should provide, if participating, for flag/anthem/etc., and here are the customs for uniforms and such.

He emails back to the effect that he doubts they'll join Vanda Nossëo in that time and that he's glad to hear that Nelen is alive and well.

Well, they're not sending figure skaters or curlers or alpine skiers... Feris thinks he can send someone to compete in weightlifting, at least, which means he also needs to commission an anthem and a flag.

He looks up the specifics of the Olympic archery contests and the contests just to qualify to compete at the Olympics. He does measurement conversions and compares the archery range outside of Leopard Hill. He emails Valan and a couple of other people from his work email:

If it doesn't conflict with anything else important that you're doing and you haven't already done this, familiarize yourselves with Olympic-style bows and let me know how accurate you are with them at 70 meters with both you and your target stationary.

As they practice it in the multiverse archery is a very different thing, in a lot of ways, but maybe the skills carry over enough. Maybe even if they do it doesn't matter because no one in Sesat is a one in a trillion talent at anything, but...

...well, if he'd known about the fact that there are highly prestigious competitions in things even sort of similar to things some Sesatis are good at, he'd have put something about that in the book.

The envoy shops don't sell weapons, even Olympic ones, but if they go a bit farther or email-order something to be couriered in from a joined-up neighbor like Azan there's no trouble about getting the fancy bows they use at the Olympics.

They can just go to any archery store they can find on Google Street View anyway.

Stationary targets they can take their time aiming at don't show any of them off to their best effect, though. They can consistently land their arrows somewhere on a 122 centimeter target from 70 meters... about three times a second and they could do it if the target were trying to run away, too.

Feris still has someone to send even without them. Valan lets him know they probably can't send any archers to the Olympics but then starts looking into differently-structured competitions.

Archery competitions in the multiverse include:

- Most Dangerous Game, a Limbo LARP wherein volunteer Limboites attempt to evade archers trying to shoot as many of them as possible and bag more targets than anyone else while the Limboites try to take them out of the competition; the contest is held every six months in a different course every time, and the next one is in a jungle and the Limboites are expected to make lots of booby traps (nonlethal, out of consideration for their non-indestructible pursuers); the prize is an indestructibility hex for the winner or a beneficiary of their choice.

- Drone Hunt, paid audition-only televised series; available in many variants, several of which focus on bow use, including Steeplechase Drone Hunt (on horseback in an obstacle course) and Freefall Drone Hunt (participants are dropped with squirrelsuits and their weapons a million miles above Fairyland and fall for the duration of the hunt) and Jurassic Park Drone Hunt (you're not supposed to shoot the dinosaurs or the dragons, they're just there to make things more interesting).

- Humanity Fuck Yeah, unassisted-human-only contests of various skills including hitting archery targets under assorted handicaps (on horses, in the rain, targets shoot back, etc.)

- Traversal, a Dreamward-originated survivalism contest permitting only preindustrial weapons where you attempt to get from point A to point B as fast as possible while demons try to eat you(r soul); entry is expensive because they need to have precog insurance but the prize is big.

They talk it over.

"They give out indestructibility for winning archery contests? Really?" says Sava. He's from near the Azani border and he's been keeping up with Vanda Nossëo enough that he has a specific enough model of them to be surprised. "I know you had that test of character," he says, turning to Valan, "but doesn't this seem different to you somehow?"

"Yeah. That was character, this is strength, it's weird - I mean, it's not weird - it's weird how weird it isn't."

"Yeah, exactly. I want to do it, though, it looks fun," Sava says. Valan makes a face.

"I bet everyone thinks that, though. Supposing we don't happen to already have practiced with these new-style bows enough to win, though," says Taro, "wouldn't it be better to do the one where we audition first - they probably won't bother to publicize it much if we don't make it, and we get paid..."

"No sense in all of us competing against each other anyway, that just means only one of us can come in first," says Sava. "You audition for Drone Hunt if you think you should, and I'll win the indestructibility."

"We might have better odds with the one that only allows preindustrial weaponry, we're more used to that," Valan says, "only that's pretty expensive even if we'd totally earn it all back after, and it looks fun so I'm not sure I'm being totally reasonable about it..."

"Huh, you struck me as more the Humanity Fuck Yeah type," Sava says.

Valan shrugs. "I might be better at that. We're splitting up, then? You're hunting people, Taro's trying out for the show, I'm doing trick shots in the rain or something?"

There's unanimous agreement that that's what they're doing.

Most Dangerous Game knocks Sava out with a cunning deadfall early, but this then permits hanging out with the "dead" limboites watching everything through the cameras and having snacks, so it's not all bad. (The deadfall is very light, but it was made that way magically as a safety precaution after being constructed in its heavy form, to make sure it would definitely be doable in a live fire situation.) Humanity Fuck Yeah is full of hardcore hobbyists who can do Robin Hoods and shoot through the middle of a bagel that has been flung into the air, but the Sesati style is at least new and of interest to the kinds of people who sponsor those contests and Valan can get a look in. Drone Hunt accepts Taro's audition but he doesn't manage to shoot many drones while falling from the sky and is rescued after enough time has gone by without hitting any or making televisably irritated faces about missing; he still gets paid though.

They don't, most importantly, cause the predominant association foreigners have with Sesat to be their sheer awesomeness. They don't give up, exactly, but it's not obvious what to do next.

Eventually the workings of Vanda Nossëo's bureaucracy do come around to agreeing with Feris that their planet should be compensated for having been used as a training exercise, and not long after that a couple thousand of the bitterest Sesatis disappear off the map. Niazon joins, and its people talk to their friends and relatives over the river in Sesat, and eventually popular opinion converges on the idea that Vanda Nossëo is mostly fine and Nelen Utopia in particular is incompetent, power-mad and hateful. Feris sends him a vaguely apologetic gift basket.

It takes a few years for Sesat's government to design, let alone implement, new containment solutions for even a few types of magic criminals. Fully general solutions don't readily present themselves.

Feris resigns as soon as he has an acceptable successor, someone from the capital who was fourteen at first contact and spent the next few years collecting types of magic and taking classes in history and economics.

Fere visits dozens of planets and takes up skiing and fencing and plots elaborate revenge that she puts on hold for years because of the collateral damage she doesn't want to cause and maybe a little bit because she's enjoying not being considered a criminal.

Fere gets an email, one day, from the institutional email of a "Hereafter Reunions". It says that she has a relative signed in to the system and forensics confidentially identifed her as related to them. If she permits them they can disclose more about her relative to her and she can authorize them to disclose more about her to said relative. The email signature says that Hereafter Reunions is a private genealogy and relative-finding service using forensic, genetic, and historiographical techniques to put disconnected families back in touch.

...Oh.

She's pretty sure she knows who that is but then again maybe not. At any rate, sure, she'd love to be put in touch with the mystery person.

Once she has provided this authorization she can see a photo of a teenage boy and the minimal profile he's made on the Hereafter Reunion site. His name's Vira. He looks healthy, hair in a Sesati style but what's visible of his clothes in the photo probably came from a multiversal shop. It has an email address visible to her.

Yep, that's what she thought.

What is she even supposed to say? "Hi, I've been postponing my revenge on your father to avoid inconveniencing you"? "Am I actually the person you're looking for or do you want to know if you have a granddad somewhere?" "Was I right that you'd be better off if I never got in touch or was that just a pointless waste?"

She settles on:

Hey, I'm Fere of Zovis. Hereafter Reunions sent me an email saying you were related to me. Did you want to talk?

(She uses the name of the city she was resurrected in as a byname now. Doesn't seem as true to imply she belongs anywhere in Sesat.)

yeah I asked them to check if my mom was my biological mom and it turns out she isn't and you are so I was

curious, let's go with curious

Fere takes a while to come up with anything to say to that, too. It should be good. It should be good, and simple, and not leave her thinking why would you talk to me, I'm nobody for the first time in years. Fortunately it's email and she doesn't have to worry about staying presentable or anything. 

Have things changed enough that you'll be proud to hear I used to work for Termite? Not directly, we never met face to face till after it was over.

Termite was a secret rebel leader. Fere can if asked produce references to vouch for her connection to the resistance, but that would be getting ahead of herself a bit when she's not even totally sure Vira's not just going to be too ashamed of her to keep talking.

my teacher knows fuckall about Sesati history and the name is kind of ungoogleable? but maybe?

It's named that because it ate away at the walls of Sesati society. (I'm not being disrespectful, it doesn't like being talked about as a person.)

Do you know enough history to know what it means if you have a secret biomom you've never heard of or do I have to spell that out?

I figured that part out. I didn't know there was anything to figure out till Mom went to Cube for morph to be able to have more kids but once that happened one of my friends was like "hey wait a second" and yeah then I signed up for the reunion thing. I can't actually remember ever interacting with a slave, though, it's been a long time.

For what it's worth, the fact that it would inconvenience you is why I neither tried to get custody nor tortured your father to death.

What were you hoping would happen if you signed up?

Closure, I guess. I don't know.

Are you doing okay these days?

Yeah. I missed you but for me personally everything just gets better and better.

Want to hang out some time? I'd get more specific but I don't know what you like.

I like skateboarding and movies. My best class in school is chemistry.

We could hang out. I hang out at my friends' places all the time so I wouldn't have to tell my folks.