"That makes sense. I think you might be... more open about things in general than I'm used to."

"Yeah, you're a little hard to get to know. It's okay, you don't make a salad with nothing but leaves."

"I'm not trying to be - I mean, I am relative to people here, but I think I'm succeeding more than people here by more than I'm trying more. I dunno, want to know anything?"

"Sure, what's it like where you're from, what did you do before you enrolled here?"

"Sesat's okay sometimes. We have a lot of flowers - people say it's because they're sacred to one of our gods but really the gods are falling out of favor lately and I think people really just like flowers because they're nice, lots of things are sacred that we don't bother with as much. We couldn't agree with one of our neighbors about where exactly our border should be, and our other neighbor wanted to conquer us and enslave the whole army to make sure we could never raise a hand against them again, and so I've been in Sesat's army for a while dealing with that, till Vanda Nossëo showed up and distracted Azan - the country that wanted to conquer us - offering them all this fantastic wealth if they'd quit it with the conquering countries and enslaving armies thing, so now I get to do something different."

"They're nice like that assuming you weren't excited about the conquest."

"...Do you want the long and fucked up answer to that or do you want to just move on?"

"Oh, go ahead."

"I was considering betraying Sesat for Azan before everything happened. Hadn't decided yet. They - I could tell you a bunch of individual rumors but our people were constantly trying to run away to live there and their people weren't trying to move to Sesat. But the rumors they didn't enslave civilians were only probably true and anyone who didn't believe them might rather die, and anyone who did believe them might still be killed, and anyway I wasn't a civilian. On the other hand Vanda Nossëo's been - they hate us, they think we're all evil, and they don't respect any of us, but they put a smile over it and they have magic that stops fights so you can't even have the dignity of throwing yourself at them and making them kill you. So I wouldn't call myself excited about any of it, really."

"You'd... rather they killed you?"

"It's twistier than that, it's not exactly about a thing they did. I take it it didn't go like that for you guys, though?"

"Oh, I mean, I was so high when they sailed in for us," he gestures, "it wasn't even Vanda Nossëo proper, it was an Elf getting her Bell girlfriend a present, which, I guess you could argue it either way but I think that's a little more condescending than a huge organization doing it because they're humanitarians. I don't know that they ever hated either of us, though."

"Almost sounds like it'd be a relief to have something as - open and clean, as one very powerful person conquering you to give you to someone else. I wouldn't like that at all but I'd know what to think of it."

"Well, it's Vanda Nossëo now though there are pretty active movements agitating to get us folded into Mîr or Elendil instead for this or that obscure reason."

Shrug. "I'm glad it worked out well for you."

"You sound depressed. I hear that's a thing humans get is depressed and there's medicine for it."

"I've never heard of that but maybe this would be a more fun conversation if we hadn't gotten onto the topic of our countries being conquered."

"I don't know much about it, we don't get depressed as far as I know. Would you rather talk about... let's see... what was it you were going to do after you get your teleport, again?"

Amazing. His hostage-rescue plans are practically the only topic more depressing than the one they were on. "Gonna work with this company that handles temp gigs for teleporters. Probably doing all sorts of random stuff. At least assuming I get to the point of actually working for them. You?"

"Float work in Elendil. It's funny, Elendil's all one world but it's got more inhabited planets than any other."

"Do we know why that is?"

"Nope. Some worlds are crowded and some aren't and it's a mystery. Cube's crowded too, and Edda, but Warp you can't go a parsec without somersaulting over three planetary civilizations and a civil war on a moon."

"There's so much stuff out there. It's weird."

"Isn't it just? You finally narrow down a question to ask and then the answer is just fifty more questions waiting to happen."

"A little bit, yeah."