Can I talk you around on violent teleporters? I specifically want more teleporters and your idea of a violent disposition is probably my idea of a slightly nicer person than average.

Actually, I'm pretty surprised you don't have more infrastructure for keeping teleporters out of places. I understand why most wizards can't cast dimension lock and it being only a day is awfully inconvenient but why isn't there a wished-on power for it? Especially as it would be much more useful defensively than offensively, it'd both actually achieve the goal of making crime harder and give the impression of wanting your citizens able to meaningfully defend themselves, if you were giving that out widely.

Wished on powers aren't particularly good at granting powers to affect locations; sometimes it can mimic something like servant-waking, but if there's someone who feels strongly enough about people being able to generate dimensionlocks they haven't presented themselves to Gem yet. Plus, wishes don't scale infinitely well. The time dilation helps, Gem handing off the wish-granter to Joy or another trusted person when she needs a break helps, but there is only one wish-granting device thus far. We can't give that many people any given power even assuming unlimited availability of efficient wishers.

A violently inclined teleporter who moved to Sesat before committing violence wouldn't be a pursuit priority; that would display some relevant impulse control if they went there first. Someone who commits violent crimes within Vanda Nossëo and then wants to go to Sesat may be planning to turn right around and resume what they were doing and if we can't be sure that's not what they have in mind we can't remand them to you.

Email makes it so much easier not to actually say I really think you're stunningly precious about the slightest chance you could possibly ever be attacked and acting like any high-on-power king trying to drive home to his subjects that they aren't his equals. Even though it intuitively feels like if they expect it to work to come here and tell everyone they just don't know better than to commit atrocities, that ought to be because it would work to tell them how evil they're being.

I really do expect going into exile forever in fear that returning home would lead to you being maimed is the sort of thing that prompts people to rethink their life choices and perhaps shape up. Have you not observed that to be the case or do you just feel that it's not good enough if it's not at least 89% likely?

What is the optimal form factor for anti-teleportation? Amulets? Radius centered on the person with the power? I feel very strongly that you need a better solution and that I need a better solution to your teleporters taking issue with my country's laws than trusting your enforcement but it's possible no realistic options achieve that well enough for me to want them strongly enough.

I don't think it's typical to think of it as maiming, even though I acknowledge the logic of the interpretation. It'd have to be something local to them that they couldn't remove or get a friend to remove for them.

This isn't not maiming but have you at least tried making them unable to teleport specifically into Vanda Nossëo? Is that the sort of thing the wish-granter can do?

I am not asking how to obtrusively alter specific individual teleporters who have already committed crimes. I am asking if it's possible to proactively protect people. I don't mean to shackle anyone to a magical dimension lock item, I want them sold on the open market. Is that possible? And if it's possible but too expensive, can we increase production enough to cover specifically our world and Edda? It seems to me that at that point it's no longer trivial for them to get back into your territory. Still possible, but again requiring some level of planning ahead that you for some reason feel reassured by. (I confess to not having followed your reasoning there.)

Sorry for misunderstanding! An area effect amulet that prevented teleportation nearby would be a great product to have available. It seems like the sort of thing that flat Arda magic, like some of your citizens are already learning, might be able to accomplish with enough development. I don't believe them to already exist.

There are an estimated two hundred trillion inhabited planets in Edda, for reference.

We don't want to be a source of criminals who go on to harm victims we haven't reached yet.

I will make it known that I will pay for the development of such artifacts. You don't think there's a useful wish to be made here?

That is certainly a daunting number but at least Edda isn't one of the worlds where you deliberately start new colonies, right? If it doesn't get worse, we can eventually solve this problem. How many of those planets belong to Vanda Nossëo? How many are frequently visited by people from Vanda Nossëo?

I have previously thought you were being absurdly spoiled in wanting to be safer than anyone can reasonably be without seriously harming others. But if it's not just your people you worry about, I think that read was wrong. I think your concerns are misplaced, though. Anyone who passes your screening to get teleportation at all is likely more merciful than some large fraction of Sesatis, perhaps a third, perhaps half. It's not my understanding that we're unusually cruel for a human society outside specific unusual material circumstances, and it is my understanding that humans seem to be one of the more multiversally common species. So it's probably at all informative to imagine what would have happened if someone with a wished-on teleportation power and some of your scientific knowledge who was fundamentally incompatible with Vanda Nossëo had come to Sesat alone. I think the results would mostly have depended on how well that person could understand and use subtext, frankly, but could have been better than what actually happened in the sense that our people would now be happier, and would likely have been no worse than leaving us alone.

That's not true of all possible powers. If Nelen Utopia in particular showed up I expect it'd go horribly, whether he had inexplicably decided to hurt people or not. But we are not Elves, and we are more like what you expect to find more of out there than Elves, and one criminal immigrant wouldn't find a civilization of innocents who would otherwise suffer no crime. I am not convinced they wouldn't decrease violence and cruelty on net, if only by telling us to stop using pewter tableware, even if they personally kept a slave or two. Likely they'd buy the slaves, that being the easiest way to get them if you have a highly marketable skill like teleportation (and don't have another world to kidnap them to or a vast organization like Vanda Nossëo backing you, which an individual fugitive would not), and buying a slave probably doesn't always cause one more slave to exist, they're unlike swords and pots that way. The risks I see from a fugitive coming to a society like mine are all either lesser versions of the risks of Vanda Nossëo making contact, or lesser versions of the costs of things continuing on as before.

And if we were Elves, I imagine we'd have Valar, and anyway every time someone has visited Elves it's improved things relative to the unaltered timeline so far as we know.

I think your concerns imply that you care deeply about others but they are fundamentally misplaced.

Anyway, why exactly do you feel so much safer about premeditated violence?

I'm not an expert on the details of wishing but I would not expect it to cover the scope you seem to have in mind.

There are interplanetary powers other than us in Edda, and some of those are actively expanding, but it is mostly not a preferred site for new colonization. Only a few hundred are Vanda Nossëo polities but hundreds more are sometimes visited.

It's not that we feel safer about premeditated violence in general, but if you've expressed that you are interested in harboring teleporters who occasionally commit violent crimes and then a violently inclined teleporter takes you up on that, I wouldn't consider that a strong risk factor for them choosing to go somewhere that is less willing to host violent criminals - not just back to Vanda Nossëo but also to other locations that haven't expressed that.

It seems like only those that belong to Vanda Nossëo or are sometimes visited are important to worry about here, at least with wish teleportation. Frankly if I can't get Loki's version and some criminal can I'm going to be very annoyed. I suppose moving to Revelation wouldn't help all that much, it's adjacent to Warp.

Setting aside questions of whether Loki would be willing, what if we got one area of effect and had Loki use the Infinity Stones to make it apply wheresoever anyone wanted to be protected?

Yes, that makes sense, thank you.

That might work, if the request managed to escalate all the way up to her.

Well, it won't be relevant till we can get one, but I'd appreciate anything you can tell me about how she decides which petitions to hear.

I've never tried to get one through, myself, but her time is spectacularly valuable and anything sent to her probably has to pass several layers of filtering and triage in urgency and public importance to make it to her eyes.

I'll look into the filters, I suppose. Thank you.

This is a euphemism for "figure out how to bribe them" because of course that must be how it works.

There is actually a publicly listed price to bypass one layer of filtration for expedited processing but it's astronomical.

Someday when his tax base has been full of resurrectionists for a while, maybe. It's not relevant yet.

Feris, in bits and pieces here and there, works on the book, which turns out to involve a lot of sending other people out to record interviews.

One day Artorian gets two emails. One is from Fere:

If someone from Sesat asks, I'm not pretending to be dead anymore, by the way. Stuff's calmed down over there.

And the other reads:

Hi! My friend is writing a book about diplomatic relations between Sesat and Vanda Nossëo and I'm doing interviews for him. I think it's probably critical of Vanda Nossëo but one of the diplomats seemed into it so who knows. I was wondering if you'd like to talk at some point about your involvement in that and perceptions of Sesat and how things have gone so far.

Anonymously, sure. If you want to put my name in it I need to talk to my wife.

So far as I know, no one's name has been included in the manuscript except the author's, but I can't really guarantee meaningful anonymity if identifying events come up, which they probably will given that I specifically contacted you because you were involved in getting Fere out.

It's not like I asked her to keep it a secret, I just don't want to volunteer to be trivially identified as opposed to annoyingly identifiable in a book.

It's not supposed to be trivial.

All right. You can come by my storefront when I'm on work or my house when I'm not.

He shows up at Artorian's house at an acceptable time. He's finally given up on pretending he can't be bothered to dress up for something so inconsequential as the multiverse; he's in his nice outfit, the one he wears rarely enough it's practically new though he's had it since he was sure he had his full height, green pants under a sky-blue tunic with a little goldwork around the neck and down the front, and his updo is decked out in plain but fragrant white flowers. It would be absurdly ostentatious in Sesat to the point of being inherently intimidating to some poor retail worker, but this is a magical starfaring retail worker who will probably be more insulted by an obvious lack of effort than intimidated by a show of what isn't, actually, more wealth than he could possibly aspire to. Probably isn't even more wealth than he gets every month. Valan is even good enough at all this multiversal fashion stuff to have noticed that most people keep their blades concealed, and has hidden his, too.

(He's paying a lot of attention to whether this seems to get a better response from the starfarers he runs into.)

Artorian answers the door in an aloha shirt and cargo shorts, and is slightly nonplussed by the flowers but doesn't even blink at the rest of the outfit. "Come in, come in! Keoni, the interviewer's here!"

"Have fun, I need to be at the lunch rush!"

Artorian laughs and leads Valan over to the conversation pit and hops down into it.

He joins Artorian in the conversation pit.

"Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. If you end up wanting to skip any questions, that's fine. To begin with, I'm wondering how you came to work in Sesat in the first place."

"A department message went around, saying, your pick of hours if you're one of the first to sign up for the new planet, especially if you go somewhere unpopular. And Azan right next door was very popular, but I had a schedule in mind, my wife works a lot and I wanted to be pulling about the same hours as her so we'd have weekends together, so I took a slot in Sesat."