Background reading is provided. Everyone read this textbook as far as you can in thirty minutes, ask questions as you think of them, then discussion time.

He gets through a decent amount of textbook but not as much as he would if he had spent his entire life reading every day. He finds something to ask but he has to try pretty hard to come up with something. Discussion seems easier, at least.

A couple of the students seem to find it especially fun to come up with weird hypotheticals, like "what if you are teleporting someone who can already teleport but they tell you they lost their license and can't any more, and you think they're lying" or "what if you teleport a Midgardian away from their soul animal because you didn't know they were a Midgardian" or "what if someone asks for a ride but there's a Gleet biofilter in the way and they could have an invasive snail egg on their shoe but also biofilters are against their religion".

It's easier to play off of them and come up with slight variations on their questions, like "what if the soul animal doesn't want to be teleported?"

The teacher says that you are allowed to separate a Midgardian and their soul animal by teleportation if they both seem super clear on wanting you to do that and they are adults who are generally mentally competent but it basically amounts to a very fast surgical intervention and it isn't reversible so you do need to make sure. Different jurisdictions have different rules about circumventing biofilters, this is what page they're on, here's the errata for things that have changed since this book was published. Your duty of care to a person you're teleporting doesn't change very much if you think they can teleport (such as to get out of wherever you drop them if they don't like it) and they say they can't, though this is one of those "if you're right you're right" situations. In particular it doesn't change things if they don't have a teleport location adjacent to the final destination and you don't stop long enough for them to pick one up, you can strand even a sorcery teleporter that way.

There are so many edge cases and weird things to remember. He starts trying to read all the rules about circumventing biofilters and eventually gives up and starts rearranging his notes into a list of which situations call for looking up which things.

The teacher reassures the overwhelmed-looking students that if you're just teleporting a bus and carrying insurance and sometimes teleporting your family to vacation destinations none of this will ever be relevant. Except maybe the soul animal one. If someone seems to have left their soul animal off the bus, you will have to be behind schedule by a tad addressing that.

That is conveniently actually reassuring.

The lessons last a couple of weeks but a lot of that is downtime, which other students spend reading or exploring the city they're in. It's on the titular Mîr planet but not the capital; its initial residents were mostly humans from Luster, one of the neighboring Ardas, who had recently come off worse in various Arda conflicts and wanted to start over. They like walnuts here a lot and there is lots of walnut-y food available. Who wants to go out and get smashed on nocino???

Reading and exploring about describes his downtime, too.

He keeps very early hours, more consistently so as he gets adjusted to the local time zone, and he's noticed how people treat the plumbing here and will drink plain water from any source he observes two people treating as safe and no one seeming suspicious of, and an opportunity to get smashed seems like the sort of thing that would be a secret test... but yeah actually, he'd love to spend some time hearing what other people say when they're drunk and nursing one cup of nocino the whole time.

Is he sure? This place has hundreds of different cocktails. They don't even all have nocino in them if he doesn't care for it.

Anyway, when drunk these people talk about people they want to have sex with and people they used to have sex with, about going on vacation to Cube and turning into a dolphin, about the vampire Olympics and various non-vampire Olympics, about the genderswapped Arda and what they'd all be like if they found their alts on a genderswapped Earth, efforts some of them have made to find their alts in case they have any, how they are considering trying to pick up second languages, how they want to commission this or that or the other artist to make something to decorate their house with.

The last people to try to get him drunk in public had fewer flavors to choose from, but also, they succeeded and it was deeply, deeply regrettable. He's very sure.

Turning into a dolphin sounds so fun. He doesn't comment at all on how weird it is that people who aspire to handle grocery delivery are commissioning artists; he's getting the idea that Vanda Nossëo's just - all people living like the Star-of-Stars, and if that means a few of them need to do grocery delivery, somehow they're still all extremely rich and important people just condescending to cover for the inadequacy of their golems now and then.

He does ask what the hell alts are if human ones can be different genders, he thought alts were the same people in different places but that doesn't make any sense.

"So there's - lots of Ardas, right -"

"Yeah, there's regular ones and a space one and two evil ones and also there's a genderswap one."

"Yeah it has all the same people in it but the guys are girls and vice versa."

"And there hasn't been an Earth like that. Even Eclipse!"

"My Eclipse alt is a girl. At least I think she's my alt. She could just be a different kid my parents had in that world instead of me. It's hard to tell if you're not important or anything. Especially since she's also got the whole Eclipse sitution."

"Yeah, and some Bells are boys even though most of them are girls, and some of all the Elves are humans even if most of them are Elves and also some of them are Andalites."

"But most people aren't important enough to get their alts found so if I have one who is a, a shorefolk or something, I wouldn't know, I just know to look at Earths since I'm from an Earth and can just like find them by name."

"...Uh-huh." That's even more confusing but it seems like Wikipedia might have better answers than these folks.

It most certainly does!

It doesn't have better answers to questions like "what do people in Vanda Nossëo get up to while in big groups making bad decisions?" and so far the answer to that seems... pretty tame? He'll hang with them till he's about ready to head to bed or till they're done, whichever comes first.

A couple of them apparently don't need to sleep for some reason, so it will definitely be the first thing.

In the morning the class is a little smaller.

...Is it perhaps specifically missing people who stayed out drinking later than he did.

Weird that so far as he knows they didn't send anyone to attack people. They have secret tests of some kind, it somehow ends up that a bunch of the people subject to those tests go get drunk, and there's no attack afterward? Narrows down what they were testing a lot - not reflexes or situational awareness, probably more like tendency to get up to... blackmailably embarrassing things? Unprovoked violence? Mortally insulting random people? Or maybe he just left too early for them to bother? He'll just have to see if he can find someone who was out later and is still around to tell stories.

It's actually also missing one of the people with purple hair, who went home earlier than him!

...That doesn't make sense. And, of course, the people who aren't still around aren't still around, so he can't ask the purple-haired person in question... Still probably no better options than seeing if anyone remembers anything.

When he was expecting an attack, on himself or on some "innocent" "bystander" with some unpopular trait like being an ex-slave, it was much less terrifyingly uncertain than expecting that anything could be a test and any action could be the wrong one. Especially with this being the highest-stakes thing he has ever done.

But it's not obvious till everyone left is all together in class, at which point there's nothing to do immediately besides try very hard to focus. He can talk to someone afterward. Right?

Yup! The class proceeds as normal and breaks for lunch.

He picks whichever of the remaining people who went out last night seems to most enjoy the sound of their own voice and says hello.

"Hi! Hey, I'm torn between getting one of the sandwiches or an omelette, I actually really like egg sandwiches but they don't have egg as an option in here. They cheaped out, replicators aren't that expensive. Hey, do you want to get an omelette and I'll get a sandwich and I'll give you some of the sandwich for some of the omelette?"

"Sure, sounds great. I don't really have any idea what half the foods they have here are yet, I'm having fun trying new things."

"Awesome." He orders up one of each and the machine puts them together behind the clear plastic. "I'm getting triple meat, hope you don't mind, it's for sure vat though if they cheaped on the machines."