do you recall when the war was just a game?

"If you want a very private conversation I could ask him to take you to our ship in orbit?"

"...Wow. Sure, why not, might as well see it, if he'll also take me back here. One question first, though. What is orbit?"

"Up in the sky, going around the planet, like a moon."

He smiles. "I'd love to see that."

"Okay, I've sent him a message," says Tarwë, "asking him to come by earliest convenience."

No one else particularly needs to keep monopolizing him right now.

Feris is visibly relieved to see him.

"Hello, I'm Nelen Utopia," says Nelen. "Tarwë says you'd like to come up on the ship and have a private conversation?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Is anyone else coming along or just us?"

"Just us, unless Tarwë is."

"I'm planning to read more books," says Tarwë.

"All right," says Nelen, "ready?" And upon being signaled with readiness:

they are on an observation deck of a ship. It looks like - a vast room made of white metal, furnished with lavish perfectly matching upholstery-clad couches and chairs and cut-glass tables, hung with resplendent stained-glass chandeliers, and supplemented with carpets - the fibers on the carpet are fine and soft and flawless, blue and green and white shapes fading into dark gold-speckled sections that look almost like the continents on

the planet below, visible out the window that looks down on, not Sesat, but a patch of land on the other side of the world, where it's currently night, and on this planet there are no gold speckles.

There are a few people on the deck; there's some oversized chairs, large enough to contain people such as the frost giant currently reclining in one sitting opposite her friend she's playing a board game with, who is another Elf like Tarwë; over there there's somebody with purple hair, watching text scroll by on a computer like Nelen's; over there there's an ice-white man with golden eyes, holding unnaturally still and moving from position to position unnaturally quickly; over there there's a human, watching the planet -

"This is the lounge," says Nelen, "but we try to teleport through either here or a cargo bay when feasible rather than have a lot of unremarked teleporting into and out of quarters - I can take you to my berth for privacy."

Feris nods. It's - disorienting and he's going to be very glad he came, later, so he does try to take it all in. The only sense he can get out of it right now is the map, and that they've been here long enough to make one like that, and that they must be very informed.

He'll follow Nelen wherever.

Nelen's quarters are up an elevator and along a hallway! His name is on the door but it's in Anitami so Feris can't read it. Inside there's an entire apartment, with a sitting room sufficient for inviting six people over to hang out, and adjoining dining room also with plenty of chairs for guests and a door that way with plumbing and one that way with a bed and one over there that appears to be his closet, containing more clothes in the style he's wearing. He's done it mostly in shades of red with gold, like his hair. It's got another window but this one doesn't show the planet, just stars, since it's pointing the wrong direction.

A hovering ebony orb, carved abstractly, drifts out of the bathroom, and bumps itself against the door Nelen closed behind him, and lets itself out into the hallway.

"Enchanted cleaning object," he explains. "There's no reason it has to look like that, but Elves like things to be unique and pretty so they'll pick up souvenirs whenever they find something nice and send it to be enchanted."

The door swings closed again and Nelen drops into an armchair.

Feris gives up on trying to parse any of the social implications of any of this except that yes, in fact, the mysterious visitors from the stars are incredibly rich. It's... nice? He will almost certainly think it's nice later.

He takes a seat. "I heard about your planet. I am hoping, desperately at this point, that I am not wrong to guess that there were people there, maybe a lot of them, who didn't particularly care one way or the other if they were clean, only whether they seemed like they cared enough about it."

"- oh, uh, probably some hyposensitives feel that way? That's a condition where someone has less sensitivity to cleanliness - most reds like me have it, but some of the other castes too."

"Well. But you at least understand the concept; Tarwë didn't seem able to notice it, although it might just have been the ordinary problem of trying to communicate with foreigners in subtext."

"...it could have been either, honestly."

"People who don't want to might end up pressured to die over this, and at the very least they're going to be pressured to make things harder for you, because they're supposed to believe it's right to treat some people better than others and wrong to bow, and you're going to end up taking their slaves without their buy-in, and that'll be unambiguously aggressive and wreck the pretense that you can't or at least definitely won't try to coerce us. I can't speak for everyone else, not for certain, but I think your fantastical bribery is enough that people will want what you're offering. I know I do. But as I tried to convey to Tarwë, we need an excuse to say we aren't just abandoning our principles because you have an impressive enough carrot and stick. We can say you have an intensely convincing argument for why you're right about what we ought to value, although I think that'll be difficult to pull off. We can say you're very sure your fantastical prisons can rehabilitate even slaves. We can wave a hand and claim we magically replaced their entire personalities, if we can be very sure they're not going to cause the statistically expected amount of problems. We can give people meaningless honors, bar slaves from things with functional equivalents, anything that sounds very unequal and people won't look too hard at..."

"- would it help to exile the slaves from Sesat? We can most likely do exiling them from Sesat, at least the ones who were enslaved as opposed to being born into it, I'd need to make a more complicated case for the latter. Meaningless honors are also doable. Complete with pretty medals or something if they like."

"If you can manage to make exile sound bad at the same time as you offer people the opportunity to go visit all the glorious delights of the stars, I will be in awe. We, ah, also have a lower population than some of your worlds, and struggle to maintain it, I think you think of exile more readily than we do. What exactly are the concrete effects you want to justify, and how much actual flex is there in them?"

"We do actually take exile pretty seriously, a lot of people strongly value being able to go back where they came from even if they don't want to live there all the time, but I acknowledge it might be a difficult balance to strike. The effects need to be - anyone in Sesat who wants to leave is able to, even if they're a slave - or a child, or a breadwinner, or a criminal whose only other options are prisons, anyone. That's the rule that we use to avoid needing to have a lot of complicated other rules - we don't have a specific rule against slavery, there's a species in Hazel that likes slavery, they just have to be allowed to leave. And Vanda Nossëo doesn't lie in official communications, which really ties our hands in asserting that we think the slaves are inferior. Other than that we can be fairly creative."

"I did notice your commitment to honesty and I am sure I'll be grateful for it when it's not threatening the lives of everyone I've ever loved. Can we assert something that sounds like 'slaves are inferior' - for that matter, why can't you? It's straightforwardly true that if I pick a slave and a person the slave'll know less or be crueler or less able or less willing to act civilized. Even if I preferred that the slave be happy and free and safe and rich."

"Well," says Nelen, "it's... also true that the slave is unlikely to have a history of... slaveowning. I could maybe clear a weasel wording like 'these slaves do not show Sesat off at its best', but it would be really hard to take questions after that point."

He laughs, and it's more a sudden release of tension than actual humor. "What about, without reference to us and our problems, 'these slaves are clearly beyond Sesat's ability to rehabilitate, we'd like to purchase them and try it ourselves and get an agreement to deliver future slaves to us immediately in exchange for something that makes Sesat too rich to care about their labor and some kind of consideration for the victims' and then, some other time, without reference to slaves and their good points, 'the people of Sesat are justly proud and have more than earned our respect and we would be overjoyed to welcome them into our starry community as our equals'?"