"Hey, can I ask you a thing?"

"Sure, what is it?"

"You said people're racist against you and I was wondering if it's because you look too awesome." She doesn't look or sound sarcastic.

Magalt looks at her for a second and then laughs, hard. "No. No, that's not why."

"Oh. Well, I hope it's a better reason." She waves goodbye and greets her ride home.

The next morning Valan spends longer than usual hiding in bed pretending not to be awake yet, trying to miss everyone at breakfast but not quite willing to cut it so close that he can't do anything before class, since he does still need to find a computer and look up some stuff from last night.

There are a few spare netbooks in the office supply cupboard next to the spare pens.

Great.

He can't seem to turn up anything useful about circumstances in which people tend to get stabbed - just a lot of murder statistics for different countries, which is admittedly a very cool thing to collect and publish but useless without information about why each event happened.

The better search term turns out to be de-escalation. He finds himself on a tangent reading about stand-your-ground laws and duty to retreat - yep, that's a concept that could only exist at all if the world is how Jio said it is, even if not everywhere is actually like that it gets talked about too neutrally and he manages to pick up on the unstated assumption that revenge that's disproportionately vengeful is worse than failing to respond in kind at all - and eventually finds something directly applicable about dealing with customers that seem like they're liable to start something, which he reads three times and tries to memorize.

And if not interrupted he'll get to class after that.

They have some pro teleporters in today to talk about their jobs! This one's a float for Vanda Nossëo, this one's a Mîr vanguard rock who works with Lúthien who is also a teleporter, this one is a zhop with emergency services on an orc planet, this one works for Dwarves doing courier and passenger one-off and contract work for anyone who doesn't have an in-house teleporter, this one drives a bus.

Can the emergency services teleporter who works on a planet full of people who must have much more fucked up habits than any Sesati perhaps be convinced to tell stories (true or otherwise) about what they've done when people have tried to start shit with them?

"Well, I'm not just a teleporter, I'm a full-on zhop," says the orc; she's short and greenish and wearing a bow in her sparse hair. "So if someone's drunk or high or delirious or just really freaking out I can just," she makes a little glowball of pink light, "like so, but my co-workers who only teleport sometimes put their happiness song on speaker if they're nervous, that's illegal most planets but legal on ours, it tends to chill people out, and they sometimes just," she pops around the room a bit, "do this, so nobody can hit them, or teleport out the bystanders first before they try to bring in whoever's being trouble."

He puts all that down in his notes. It's starting to seem like avoiding violence is the kind of thing a person could possibly do, and that he specifically could do. He still needs a better idea of what exactly he's avoiding here, if it doesn't include anything Magalt did -

- no he doesn't, that's what Jio was on about, it's easy for some shoving to come across as a different amount of escalation but harder for backing away and talking calmly to come across as escalation at all. That also goes in his notes. Tentatively. With question marks.

Mostly his other questions are things other people think of to ask first anyway.

The class breaks for lunch!

There is no actual reason to expect that to go badly.

...There is no actual reason to have a stronger expectation that it will go badly than he had yesterday.

...Maybe there is, but there's really nothing more productive to do about it than have lunch and wait for the next terrible thing.

He gets lunch. He doesn't try to start any conversations.

Ulami and his omelette sit next to him!

Well, that's not terrible. He smiles at Ulami and mostly stops obviously radiating misery.

"Didn't see you at breakfast, are you okay?"

"Had a stupid adventure last night on the way back here but yeah."

"Oh no! I'm sorry I ditched you, my sister has been threatening to visit but I didn't know she'd come then in particular."

"Apparently she was always going to show up when our benevolent overlords wanted to catch me alone."

"Oh, why didn't you do the mindreading version? It's less nerve-wracking if you ask me."

That might be a secret test. What's he supposed to say. Oh no.

"I'm getting that impression, yeah. I guess it's... I don't know, I don't want to share everything, I've been trying to pick up that thing for blocking osanwe..."

"I think it's illegal most places to read unshielded people but that's legit. It makes me self-conscious to even try."

"To try which, shielding?"

"Yeah, where you have to sort all your thoughts. I don't want to have to think that much about what my thoughts are, I just want to think them!"