Worth a try if he can't find anything else. One quick check first, does anything besides that and wizardry come up if he asks the internet about teleportation methods?

Some people can teleport because they are magic rocks, or had teleporting specifically wished on in the magic-rock-creating-magic-system. Shorefolk can do it but it seems specific to them and most of them don't. Eclipsed mages can learn to teleport and there are programs for getting a chance at being one of those but the next opportunity is in eight months and it's a very low success rate. Hazel wizards can learn to teleport and you can't become one of them either. There's at least one vampire who can teleport. There also exist FTL ship engines, a few methods of interworld transit that don't also work as teleportation, a hex for it for people from Hex, and getting Loki to use the Space Stone.

...Okay, getting it wished on seems like the easiest option, and has the added bonus of apparently not even involving Vanda Nossëo which will make it so much easier for Vanda Nossëo to avoid taking responsibility when he pisses off the Sesati government. What does he have to pass to do that?

There's classes he can sit in on, with tests including surprise tests of character, in Mîr.

He can do that but if they're going to test his character by surprise instead of just asking him with their truth magic whether he promises to never do whatever they most hate then he needs a much deeper understanding of their ethics. Which he might misunderstand, if he reads about it, since Allspeak doesn't even work that well, but if he spot-checks the definitions of ordinary words he might be able to catch more errors.

Can the internet explain to him what is good about universal flourishing?

The internet can supply a multitude of essays on things like expanding circles of concern and the biases that make people more inclined to help folks they're personally acquainted with or who are right nearby and how ludicrously cheap it is to totally transform the life of a random peasant farmer on a new planet and how silly everybody's prejudices seem to everyone else when you throw lots of people together in a big melting pot.

Also, the contact information he gave the Allspeak glitch form is asking if he can meet a staff linguist in person to chase down the necessary shades of meaning.

Well, that all makes sense of why you'd give to the poor, but frankly he was already sold on that.

He would love to meet with a linguist. ...Can he schedule that for far enough in the future that he can google, say, "interviews with former slaves" or "reasons to show mercy to criminals" first, they could track down a transcript of his interview and he could potentially come across as evil in that transcript even if in theory this isn't going to be a conversation about what he thinks of slaves.

Yeah, it's at his convenience.

Profiles of redeemed criminals who went on to do good things? Studies on deterrent effects showing that for most species the swiftness and surety of punishment matters way more than the severity? Blogful of profiles of Azani people, some of whom are ex-Sesati slaves?

They've written about ex-Sesati slaves? Already? Yeah, that sounds relevant and so do the redeemed criminals.

There's a street cleaner in the Azani capital who was born into slavery in Sesat which people are apparently calling Zatar now.

When I asked him about the facial tattoos that mark him as a former slave from Azan's neighbor Sesat, his whole demeanor changed. "Yeah, I'm from Sesat. You want to hear about Sesat? They treat you like you're nothing," Zatar said. "I tolerated it for a while because of what they'd do to me if I tried to escape but then... a thing happened that I don't really want to say very much about, to someone I loved, and I kept thinking 'no matter what she did she can't deserve that.' And I tried to think of something I could do, anything I could do, to protect her, to protect someone else, to make it better, to get revenge, and I couldn't think of anything that would work. I could stay and punch the person responsible in the face and be tortured to death for it. Or I could stay and do nothing and it'd eat me alive - they're right about that much, it makes you less of a person every time you stand by and do nothing. It hollows you out inside. Or, third option, I could run away, and maybe get caught and tortured to death then too but..."

Zatar preferred not to dwell on his past any further. Instead, we talked about his poetry. He told me he recited several of his own compositions for the envoy shops and now has a book coming out...

He reads the whole thing, and several profiles of people from Earths who help reform petty thieves or teach children for free or other vaguely nice things. It's...

...well, it's not something he has time to think through the implications of. He has that meeting with the linguist.

The linguist can meet in his office in Ambaróna or come to Valan, whichever Valan prefers!

Well, it's not like he has a convenient office of his own, so he'll just have to visit Ambaróna.

Ambaróna is gorgeous. It's an Elf city, and it's also not doing the rustic low tech thing a lot of Elf cities do - it's got glittering skyscrapers in achingly gorgeous colors, shining tiled streets, crystalline shelters over the escalators down to the subway, public art on every trash receptacle and street lamp and utility box, florally radiant parks every couple of blocks, and all the Elves about the place singing together in wordless nine-part harmony, shifting over time as someone on one part varies the theme and then their partmates change to match and then another part alters itself to support the new whole, on and on.

The linguist's office is in that building there!

He's incredibly underdressed for this; it's sort of on purpose, they thought appearing in work clothes would be less embarrassing than showing up as fancy as he could possibly make himself and still being underdressed. He's very tempted to stare at everything in awe but manages to instead at least act matter-of-fact on the way to that building there and its associated office.

The offices are numbered in pearlescent sculpted little numerals, and he has Allspeak now so that's even actually helpful! The door is unlocked; there are two Elves and a human in there, with a screen one of them is scribbling notes on while another replays, over and over, the same half-second snippet of someone saying "strawberries", listening intently.

"Hello! Valan?" says the third person.

"Yes, hello. Are you the linguist I'm here to see?"

"Yes! Over here - they'll be at this all day -" He waves Valan into a second room of the office suite, which has chairs and three desks and a bookshelf and a view of the city. "Okay, do you remember where you heard the word that glitched on you, so we have a hope of figuring out its source language?"

"It's persistent - I saw it in a, I think it's called a blog post, that I found in the computer at a library in, hm, the physical location I was in then doesn't actually matter, does it - but I've heard secondhand that it also happened in a conversation with Envoy Tarwë and several other times I know less about."

"Well, an Envoy Tarwë was presumably speaking Quenya, that's a Quenya name, so let's start with that -" Person, the linguist writes on a handheld screen-thing. "What does that look like to you in Sesati?"

"That is a noun that means a type of entity that, with some success but not necessarily perfectly, tries to practice things like courage or honor, and can consequently be given a certain amount of trust and responsibility that you wouldn't give to, say, a goat. Differs from 'human' in that sufficiently senile humans aren't that anymore and in that to the best of my knowledge the creatures who showed up speaking presumably Quenya seem to be. Or do you want me to show you how I'd write it?"

"No, this is fine -" Write write write. "Okay, so this is a category limited to - mentally competent - adults, or can children be 'people'? starting at what age? - who have particular values, or is it tendencies, or is it track records -"

"Well, that's multiple questions but - second one's easier, tendencies with track records as evidence, just saying 'I think honor is great' doesn't mean anything and conversely if you always keep your word while working to convince people that that's a fundamentally unimportant thing to do then you're a person - with children and competence you don't normally worry that much about checking in that carefully and when you do need to be precise and legalistic about it there's an element of giving them enough rope to hang themselves and seeing what they do with it. Actually, I'm not sure 'mentally competent' is the concept you want, a random serf might be too stupid to run their own life but still have honor."

Linguist circles "tendencies" and underlines "track record" and draws an arrow between them. "Can you give some standard examples of individuals exhibiting non-person behavior, or behavior that is evidence of non-personhood?"

"Perfidy. Child molestation. Do I need to describe specific incidents in detail or is naming examples like that enough?"

"Examples like that is plenty! Perfidy would be a deficit of - honor? And molestation a deficit of...?"

"You could say mercy, or love, or generosity. Some people don't count mercy as a virtue but I always have. Perfidy's dishonorable, yeah."