He makes a slight and short-lived wry expression at Azan being very popular. "What were you doing before, same kind of thing elsewhere or something else?"

"Same thing elsewhere, I've been a retail envoy for about five standard years now."

"Cool! What was that like at the last place?"

"Last place was underwater! Community of merfolk in Hazel. Interesting people. They didn't have enough natively underwater types on staff so they tapped some extras, got us magic water-breathing things. I didn't actually like it that much, it was worth trying but it turns out I prefer to be surrounded by air most of the time. Sesat had that going for it."

"True, I have never needed to be able to breathe water to live there. Did you look into cultural factors at all or just the fact that it was on land?"

"Well, I did want to know why it was so unpopular. Bronze age humans with slavery, that we knew off the bat, I figured I should try it out same as I tried out being in the Pacific Ocean. Locals who weren't very good at making themselves clear to foreigners, well, no big deal, I don't have to understand the stories I get paid in, just record them for the anthropologists."

"Are you glad you did?"

"Sure, I'd have put in for a transfer by now if it were awful."

"That have anything to do with you pretty much immediately making a local friend?"

"She's not local there anymore, she lives a couple minutes away," Artorian smiles.

"That what you were hoping for when you had her resurrected?'

"Not specifically. Would've been fine if she'd decided to convert to a weird religion and join a convent and never talk to me again."

"Personally, I would be disappointed if she never talked to me again. I don't think that's quite what you mean, though."

"Oh, are you friends with her too? I mean, yeah, I value her as a friend, but that wasn't the point, the point was - she was hungry and they were going to kill her and take forever about it to boot and that just shouldn't be happening and most especially it shouldn't be happening in my store."

"That reminds me of the official rhetoric around the decision to come visit new worlds in the first place. Aside from the part about your store in particular."

"Well, it's not the official rhetoric for no reason. I grew up on Revelation, it was pretty much already post-scarcity by the time there was any inkling of a whole peal out there, and Cam, the guy who publicized summoning and made it all happen, once put it as - no one should starve while demons exist. Not like, any specific demon has to make stuff, but that huge difference in how much stuff a demon can make means that if there are demons, no one needs to starve. Everything else is detail work, getting things the last mile, that's my job."

"Is that why you wanted to work in an envoy shop in the first place?"

"Yeah. I mean, there are lots of ways to help, and I picked one I also happened to like as a job day to day, but yeah."

"What else do you like about it?"

"I like getting face time with all the interesting people and hearing what they have to say, and picking out stuff for them if they don't know quite what they want, and sometimes seeing them come back later looking happier."

"Has Sesat been satisfying on that front?"

"More or less? I think I'm taking, uh, some moral injury damage, they warn you about it but everybody has a different tolerance for it. But yeah, I think so."

"What does that mean?"

"Moral injury? Uh, it's like - psychological damage you take from doing or being around stuff that doesn't support your values. I really, really believe that it's better that we're there than not - no one should starve while demons exist - but the, like, political structure, around it, is limiting? I get why they do it this way, I don't think there's a way to approach stuff like this without moral injury without horrifically compromising efficiency - even if it would look very cinematic to go in as a band of no-compromise vigilante that's just a different way to be breaking stuff in the end. So I've seen people doing awful stuff, and heard them tell me stories about awful stuff, and I've pretty much stood back and handed them vacuum packs full of vat chicken and bolts of silk and stuff. I'll just take some vacation time and make sure I'm taking it easy on myself for a while if I get too freaked out."

"Yeah, that's... that's definitely how Sesat is. So it's - this kind of ties into a thing I've been wondering, about how - you keep talking about how no one should starve. And I don't know anyone who doesn't agree with that. But I notice that people from the peal polities don't always agree with Sesatis about what Sesat's problems are. Do you think that's related?"