"Thanks."

There is something vaguely disorienting about being obliviously told he has the potential to be okay at menial labor. Well, but he's not sticking around long enough, he's off to learn to teleport.

He can move right into the dorm; it's four to a room, sleeping in bunk beds, but each bed has a rolltop-desk-style enclosure the occupant can apply for more privacy, with lights inside. The food is snazzy vending machines that will make hot sandwiches and pizzas and omelettes and sundaes to order as well as dispensing packaged snacks, without anyone having to involve themselves in cooking. They have a couple hours to get to know their classmates - there are ten roomsful in this batch, and two rooms with only three people in them, for a total of forty-six - before the class starts. Valan's roommates are a guy with purple hair, a very dark human, and a very pale human.

He introduces himself to his roommates and tries to get a feeling for what kinds of interactions other people are having or think are normal to have.

The purple-haired guy says he's called Sdor and is fielding requests to borrow his prestidigitator from people in other rooms, who also have weird hair colors. The humans introduce themselves as Ayo and Ilmari. And what is Valan's name, where's he from? Ayo is from Eclipse and Ilmari is from Hazel.

Oh no, time to massively overthink how grim to sound about Sesat. ...Better go with something fairly neutral just in case. He's Valan of Leopard Hill, which is Sesat, which is in a world they haven't given a name yet. Also that prestidigitator is the coolest thing, will it do him too since he's in the same room?

"Yeah, if you let it get close to you it'll clean you same as anything, but if you don't like how it tingles I can tell it to stay away from you," says Sdor. "It just chills me out about being around people who aren't Amentans."

"I would rather be tingly than wash my clothes by hand. Are Amentans the ones who have purple hair instead of gender?"

"Not all of us have purple hair, but most, yeah. We have, like, male and female Amentans, the bits are mostly the same at least on the outside, but we don't make a big deal about it and you can gloss that as not 'having gender'."

"Neat. So what brings you folks here?"

"I'm going to teleport a bus," says Sdor. "It's nice steady work. My girlfriend'll marry me when I've had a route for awhile."

"I'm applying to float."

"I'm doing a cargo gig for a grocery distribution company."

"Sounds like fun. I've got a job lined up but after I do that long enough they don't regret helping me I'll probably go for healing, if nothing gets in the way."

"Healing and teleporting is a good combo," says Ayo.

"Yeah, I got to see it in action and it was pretty impressive."

"Cool, I'm glad they got there in time for whoever," says Ayo.

The teacher swings through tossing syllabi onto every bed.

Time to read his!

They will be covering case studies of weird teleportation situations, and the law as regards teleportation in a whole heckuva lotta jurisdictions, and ethics. There will be tests! They can check these boxes on their syllabi if they want to opt in to mindreading to avoid the Surprise Secret Tests.

...He wonders if the option to check those boxes is a Surprise Secret Test but he's still much more confident he can consistently act like someone whose overriding goal is the universal flourishing of all námor than that he can seem that way to mindreading. He doesn't check the boxes.

Things get underway after everyone's had time to settle in and eat pizza.

Teleporting people is OK if they want to be teleported to where you are taking them, the place they are going to is willing to have them, you're not operating in your capacity as a member of an organization that didn't authorize you, and you aren't causing incidents that would make Mîr regret letting you have a teleport (anything Elendil or Vanda Nossëo regrets, Mîr does too, they're very much on the same page here). Questions, comments, weird hypothetical questions?

He has a question. "If you know that someone routinely keeps plausibly deniable hostages in conditions where they wouldn't have much choice about claiming to want to be where they are but could conceivably also actually want to be there, and there are specific people you know are not allowed to leave or mention wanting to leave, is it acceptable to just take them to a bus stop without asking first?"

"Oh, that's a good one. What kind of enforcement are we talking about on the mentioning side of things?"

"They might have one or more, uh, 'houseguests', or they might be together in a group where they expect other members to have some chance of being loyal, or they might think that someone offering them a chance to run was a secret test, or there might be multiple groups who care about each other and aren't sure if the other group would also want to leave, or they might feel like they couldn't live with themselves if they disobeyed their king on purpose but not necessarily want any of the plausible outcomes of successfully following orders. Or some combination."

"Well, that's certainly your work cut out for you if you find yourself in one of those situations and it's not nearly as cut and dried an answer as 'found a new Arda and want to rescue some still-oathed orcs'. So, let's talk about the difference between policy and discretion. In the case of policy, higher-ups make rules that will err on the side of caution. I don't know of any operating organizations that will officially and regularly do speculative teleport-nappings in any of those situations you listed. If you follow policy, you won't get in trouble; you don't have a positive obligation to collect ambiguously willing passengers just in case. In the case of discretion, where you just go off on your own downtime to do things because you think they're right - you're kind of betting on being right. If you teleport-nap somebody and they press charges, they'll probably win! After all, they didn't wanna go where you teleported them and then you did it anyway without asking! But if you're right, you won't get in hot water about it. If they go 'oh thank you so much, that was the right call' they're not going to press charges. You'll maybe have to talk to some people about your decisionmaking process, especially if it was additionally dangerous in some way. If you start causing diplomatic incidents someone's going to take away the teleport so they stop happening. But being right covers a fair bit of gray area."

He nods like this is intellectually interesting.

The teacher goes on about how teleporters can respond to safety incidents - here's a cute story about a bus driver teleporting away a mugger threatening passengers with a gun, he shouldn't have dropped them in the ocean, it's a good idea to have a known safe location both for you and for your teleport targets in mind from anywhere you are likely to be operating, but the mugger was okay, and stopped mugging people when he had enough money, and he and the bus driver have a house together on a colony planet now. Teleporters should carry insurance against various outcomes; at the end of the course some insurance people will come by to offer everybody rates. You have to be much much carefuller with anyone nonreductionist - that includes these species in this slideshow, but also some people who just look human and happen to be from e.g. Materia. An insurance payout won't bring them back if you teleport them in a way that turns out to be unsafe, and that can include weird things for different people - various species have different needs for temperature, atmosphere, gravity, and sometimes even weirder things. Stranding a normal human in a Lórien is usually pretty safe, as long as they aren't too paranoid to eat the fruit and drink the water, but not if they're a satyr, because satyrs need access to sex partners to live and will die within a couple days if you just leave them there and there doesn't happen to be anyone suitable in the Lórien or if they were already pushing it on their abstinence tolerance. This one Warp species can't live off their planet without elaborate accommodations, they need a particular ambient bioelectrical phenomenon on it. And so on and so forth. Even the ones that aren't native to whatever area you hope to operate in might prove relevant, since they may have decided to resettle!

He doesn't specifically have questions about this but he apparently has a lot of background reading to do. - He should pretend to be full of odd hypothetical questions as a character trait but he doesn't actually have any, maybe next time.