"Hey, that's pretty good. Who's in charge there, do you know anything about them?"

(It is at this point that someone else walks in.)

"The provisional mayor till the first election scheduled four months from now is called Spanithe Kuoy," she says. "Good afternoon!" she adds to the someone else.

Would-be emigrant hangs around hoping he can get a better answer than that if he waits this out and tries again.

"Hey, I found a four leaf clover today right outside the wall, can I get a bus token for that?"

"Sure!" says the shopkeep, handing one over.

"So I can see all the stars in person now?"

"Wow, that'd take a really long time, there's hundreds of worlds and most of them have sextillions of stars in 'em, but if you wanna get started on that I recommend Warp, they've got the scenic kind of space travel popular there."

"Cool, thanks!" The person who found the clover turns to leave.

"What, you're not warning him about the island?" asks the would-be emigrant who is named Tana like the general.

"- well, he's allowed to go to the island," she says.

Clover person looks back over their shoulder. "Hm?"

Tana raises his eyebrows and looks vaguely displeased about this.

"Have a great day!" says the shopkeeper, waving at clover guy.

Clover guy leaves to go take a bus to the stars!

Tana sighs. "Okay, I'll bite. Who did this?"

"Who did - what, disinviting you from Mevan Island? Probably somebody has a restraining order, I can check... yeah, you have a restraining order from an 'Amos', who lives there. I can't actually look up what it's for, but you probably can if you want to buy a computer, as long as Omnivac is up, it usually is but it had an outage just last week - that's a supercomputer in Eclipse they use for a lot of records-correlating."

"I've never even met an Amos! How do I buy a computer?"

"I've got some right here, it's just another story. Maybe he changed his name? I have his Vanda Nossëo citizen ID but I bet you wouldn't recognize that either."

Fine, he can tell an anecdote about the weather a couple years ago for a computer.

Computer! It has a tutorial on it now, in tolerably localized Sesati.

Cool. He'll... sit around here using that to try to figure out who this "Amos" is. Fucking fair folk and their fucking capricious whims.

If he looks up "Amos" he gets a bunch of different people who have nothing obviously to do with the island of Mevan but if he looks up restraining orders against himself, yep, there it is, Amos has taken one out for the following acts which a reasonable person may construe as threatening or incompatible with comfort in a cordial coexistence.

What the fuck? He'd never do those things, he doesn't go around treating people like slaves.

...Oh, dear. There isn't anyone in Sesat whom no slave could get a restraining order against and he remembers they were rounding people up to testify against slaves because it'd keep them from getting magic. He was going to leave but he's not going to leave to be eternally inferior to everyone else while they get magic and laugh at how he deserves nothing of the sort because of some slave. All he's got left now is the hope that the Star-of-Stars can work miracles.

He thanks the shopkeeper for telling him this and runs off to go escalate it to someone who can do something useful about it.

(And eventually, yes, fine, sure, Feris can totally take time off from researching unusually clean countries' moral rhetoric to go research non-member-states with cool magic and also have yet another chat with the ambassadors on their shuttle, not like he has more important things to do or a lot of demands on his time or anything.)

Nelen is always happy to talk, or Tarwë if he's getting along better with Tarwë.

Whichever of them would like to entertain his arguments that Vanda Nossëo's restraining order apparatus is being grossly misused.

Tarwë'll take that one. "Misused how?"

"Well, for example, there's been a coordinated effort to get restraining orders against chattel slaves in an effort to communicate to them that Vanda Nossëo considers them inferior and to bar them from accessing powerful magic."

"Yes, we noticed that. Some of the chattel slaves in Sesat did actually commit horrific crimes and it's not considered part of the scope of a restraining order judge's warrant to determine the purity of applicants' motives but it wasn't hard to figure out that they didn't all have the idea by themselves. That's not exactly an intended use of the system but it's not really an abuse of it either."

"That seems... fundamentally at odds with your general stance that people here are just uneducated, untrained children who will improve over time."