Yeah, okay, the relentless horrors of the multiverse can wait a while. He doesn't know nearly enough to give Ulami compliments that would be meaningfully different if Ulami were less good at this but he compliments Ulami's flying enthusiastically anyway.

"Thanks!" says Ulami.

They bus back into town. Ulami gets off the bus first and is promptly barrelled into by someone who might be a relative of his, jabbering at a million miles an hour about how she came to visit and he wasn't there and when he can teleport he has to come visit every day and he should show her the art museum etcetera etcetera. He's drawn away, laughing.

An orc tries to get on the bus before Valan's disembarked, and steps on his foot. "Watch where you're going, asshole," snaps the orc.

Valan faux-casually fidgets with his knife in a way designed to draw attention to it while maintaining the thinnest possible veneer of plausible deniability about it being a threat. Could he slip past this guy without a fight? "Sorry, I didn't catch that," he says in a tone that is not quite plausibly confused or apologetic. "I assume it was an apology, though."

The orc laughs at him and hipchecks him out of the way. "You got a rich imagination, pipsqueak."

Fine, he'll get out of the bus through the orc, or at least try to. The only thing that goes through his mind is that he needs to get away from this fight that a bigger opponent who might have magic powers thought was a good idea to pick right now right here. There's definitely no time to think about how to not kill the orc.

The orc sighs. Blood spurts out onto Valan's hand but he doesn't seem to be causing any pain.

The wound heals, the knife is caught up in a glow of silver magic, so is Valan.

The orc floats Valan off the bus, pockets the knife, and brings him into the class instructor's office.

"I'd have more fun being bait if I wasn't so good at it," the orc remarks, dropping Valan in a chair opposite the instructor. "You want me to stay or go, Jio?"

"If you'd stay a moment while we see if he's going to double down or not that would be great, thank you, Magalt." Jio looks at Valan. The magic fades. Magalt puts the knife on Jio's desk.

What the fuck did he even do? It almost makes sense that someone would pick on him because he's visibly from a poor world that everyone hates where he couldn't realistically have picked up any magic. He didn't really think that was the sort of thing that would be official policy here, though, and this, whatever it was, is definitely some kind of official something. Maybe a test? Only it's not clear what it could possibly be a test of.

This does not seem like a situation that would be improved by saying anything.

"Why'd you stab him, Valan?"

He is not going to think about all of the people who are going to die, and maybe slowly, because he didn't figure out whatever impenetrable social cues he was supposed to use to infer that this specific asshole was important enough to get away with all that. Only he seems to be thinking about not thinking about it, to the exclusion of other thoughts about, say, useful plans that have any chance of working.

"Because I didn't have a teleport," he deadpans.

Jio snorts; Magalt actually chuckles. "Did you think you wouldn't be able to get off the bus without stabbing him?" Jio asks.

What is happening here. What is happening here. He takes a breath and digs his nails into his other hand and drags his mind away from unproductive panic. They're asking questions. The answers might matter. There might be some point here.

Also they might have truth magic, so there's really only one strategy he can try.

"I wasn't sure. I could have tried to make it to the other exit, which I wasn't sure how to open, and I might have had to turn my back on him, and anyway it'd be a cowardly thing to try - I might get out once but it'd happen again and again if I kept running. Or not, if it was some kind of test, I guess. I did try to slip by, which didn't work. Strictly speaking I'm not sure I can say that I stopped to think about exactly how likely it was that I'd get out alive if I tried the second or third best approaches but if I'd been unarmed I'd have tried anyway, but partly because I'd rather die on my feet. And then again if I'd stopped to think about how likely I was to get out if I did stab him I probably would have thought I had pretty bad odds, since he could have pretty much any magic and he clearly thought it was a good fight to pick and had his choice of time and place. This is all just backfilling, to be perfectly honest I'm not in the habit of coming up with multiple sentences of explicit reasoning when attacked and if that's what you were testing then I admit I was just planning to drill some safe locations for common species in range of anywhere I might run into trouble."

"So if you'd had a teleport, and a safe location for orcs, you would have teleported him to it?"

"Honestly, I'd have teleported myself out of the bus first - I mean, I wouldn't, because why would I have been on a bus, but I'd have teleported myself out of an enclosed space where someone was trying to trap me. I would have expected teleporting him to be an abuse of authority but I'd need to review my notes to be sure about that - but, I mean, because I could get away. You'd want me to just get away. My first thought was 'and then I'd be out of arm's reach and I could have some breathing room to try to get him to back down' but I wouldn't really need that, either, now that I think about it, that's a bunch of unnecessary hassle when I wasn't even anywhere I wanted to be in the first place. Maybe I'd have done something different if I'd been home at the time. Or if I thought he was likely to go after Ulami, I - I mean the actual motive is some kind of test but my guess about the fake motive might also apply, I'm not sure."

"What was your guess about the fake motive?"

"My home world sucks and I haven't had long to get cool magic and everything I have ever owned or done or learned in my life is worthless except being literate, which I am not even better than average at. I'm an easy target with all the pride of someone who's never been an easy target in my life, all the fun of picking on someone important and none of the risk. Thought maybe if I kept on my toes that wouldn't be true but it clearly is."

"So, I have a lot of students, and I haven't been able to read up on everybody's culture of origin personally, at least not in depth," says Jio. "But my sense from the brief I got is that Sesat is very much about everyone tracking and signaling and defending their status on an axis of inherent worth that takes as inputs things like not letting insults slide and preferring suicide to slavery and things like that. Is that about right?"

"Yeah."

"Fundamentally, the ability to teleport is about the ability to travel. Also the ability to get out of situations, yes, but we aren't handing it out as a defensive tool, it's got too many applications to hand it out like emergency call buttons and first aid kits. It's the ability to go places and then, most likely, meet the people there.

"And no one else in the entire multiverse is doing Sesati culture. They might be doing something similar, it's not that weird, but they're definitely, definitely not doing any specific recognizable thing you are familiar with, how could they?"

"Are there by any chance five thousand and twelve ways people can mean it when they try to trap someone smaller and weaker than them in an enclosed space such that I need to be prepared to tell if it's a death threat, a job offer, an invitation to a threesome, or a compliment on my hairstyle." He sounds extremely tired.

"So the script I was doing," says Magalt, "I would've let you off the bus no further problem if you'd let me sit down without sniping at me about it any more. Maybe that sounds weird to you but it's not that weird, for that to be all somebody touchy is looking for."

"The thing you need to be able to do, if you're going to teleport," says Jio, "isn't to memorize thousands of etiquette scripts and learn to identify every species, nationality, linguistic group, subculture, religion, artistic movement, and gender presentation in the entire universe. You need to be able to not escalate. You need to be able to take your own cultural baggage and recognize that it is not in charge of every interaction you have, if you don't want to stay home. You want to work for Dwarves, according to your records? Dwarves are pretty easygoing but they aren't doing the Sesat thing. And Dwarves trade with everybody. If you want to be a teleporter on their payroll, you can't offend their customers, even if their customers want to treat you like an autonomous vehicle and snarl at you because they're in a bad mood about their breakup that morning, or whatever."

...Well, it couldn't all be good news, and being expected to tolerate insults is not actually the worst thing they could possibly ask of him.

"...I - that can't be the normal thing, though, because no one else has picked a fight with me. At all. - I'm not saying I'm not willing to let things slide, but I've been here for a while and people aren't randomly assholes all the time as if no one will ever call them on it."

"Most people aren't assholes, and most people who are assholes have no reason to go after you in particular," Jio says. "There are worse neighborhoods, to be sure, but this one isn't actually unusually lovely for a pealed world. - that being a world that's in one of the big three. Do you want to try it? Go out somewhere and call people assholes? I wouldn't bet my house on it but I'd bet you dinner that nobody injures you about it."

"I might if I wasn't specifically expecting to be presented with opportunities to do things you don't like as a trap but honestly it'd answer a different question than the one I have. I'm not calling you a liar, I've even noticed something's up, but - you're not safe because people who fuck with you regret it, or because you can get away, so why are you safe?"

"Safe from what?" asks Magalt.

"Well. You weren't going to escalate. And you thought it was pretty unusual that you got knifed - I'd apologize but you seem like you were having fun so you're welcome - and you don't quite - you could be trying to tell me I'm just not important enough anymore to defend myself but it doesn't quite hang together, there's something about this that's not how power works - I think you expect that if I let insults slide all the time nothing more than being insulted will happen to me because of it, and - wait but if that's the case then what would you make of a city of people showing off their phenomenal otherworldly wealth who wouldn't even look at you, because I thought I was pretty sure what was up with that - that last thing is a tangent and it doesn't really matter."