"Maybe. I mean, I'm pretty sure some people were very excited about not starving, but it was like they thought it was embarrassing? To be hungry and not want to be? I saw this guy who looked like he hadn't had a square meal in months trying to come off like he was really picky and wanted the best cut of beef I had in the store, which, that's a matter of personal taste, I told him my favorite was the filet mignon but the top sirloin's been more popular and then he demanded both of them like he thought he was running some kind of scam. It was weird."

"It's not very intuitive that stories we'd tell for free would really be worth that much to you. I follow the logic but it honestly still doesn't really make sense, sometimes it seems almost like it'd make more sense if you could somehow pay to have our stories be forgotten."

"What? That would be ridiculous, it's important to understand what's going on!"

"Can you tell me more about that?"

"I don't handle the data once it's collected, really, it all gets kicked to historians and linguists and anthropologists and, I don't know, filmmakers who like doing adaptations of new folktales, stuff like that. But it's useful for knowing how a society thinks about itself, what kinds of people it thinks exist, what kinds of people it thinks don't exist but would be interesting if they did..."

"I can see how it'd teach you that. I guess it's just that - well, you were just telling me it was giving you moral injury to listen to it."

"- yeah? The true stuff, anyway. That doesn't mean it isn't - part of what we're there for."

"How so?"

"Well, like - imagine if it was all Elves, trying to do this, all by themselves. Elves are great but they don't get lot of things about humans. So they wouldn't be as good at it, they'd be so disappointed in everyone they met all the time, they wouldn't know whether to prioritize, oh, people having sex outside of marriage versus people burgling each other's houses, if it was just Elves and this was the first time they'd met people who weren't Elves. So, it makes a difference, if you understand what's going on. And it's too late for us to have always understood Sesat, I still don't know what's going on with it, but we can get closer, and have more examples, and know more about all the ways there are for people to be, and guess better next time. And people from Sesat will know where they came from, if they decide that they want to be historians or anthropologists or whatever one day."

"I was going to ask why the Elves don't just kill us all to try to be alone in the universe but now that I put it in so many words it sort of answers itself. Anyway, so you said you're really, really confident that making contact was a good idea, and I'm curious why."

"I'm actually not sure why they picked your planet. It's not obviously a top priority compared to most places they wind up hitting. And as far as I know there wasn't a reason like somebody finding an alt on it, either. Might have just been that they were really excited about advance intel on Azan, I guess. But relative to ignoring your planet, rather than just contacting a different one? Yeah, I'm confident of that. Powerful people make a lot of noise, and they weren't usually hungry. But there aren't as many of them as there are serfs and slaves and just plain struggling people who would have died if we didn't show up. We won't know which ones they were, to be clear! It's not going to be obvious which farms would have failed and which diseases would have spread. But people die so much, such awful deaths, in bronze age human societies. We can resurrect them eventually, but - we haven't gotten as far back as the Bronze Age in Wish, let alone some unremarkable planet with no magic and nobody specifically agitating to bring back any of you as individuals? If we got around to you one day you'd have come back, but it wouldn't have been to anything even sort of like Sesat. They go backwards, see, you'd have gotten resurrected by your granddaughter or your nephew after they'd already spent enough time in Vanda Nossëo to save up for it, resurrected by their grandson or their sister who'd done the same. Would you have preferred that?"

"Yes."

"Huh. Well. Sorry to hear that, I suppose. But the way I'd bet is that a poll would come out the other way, for the majority. Maybe not in Sesat. You guys are a little weird. But across the whole planet, I bet."

"Cool. I probably can't get everyone to respond but I'll try. Does it hinge on that, if the poll comes out that people would rather have been resurrected later doesn't that still leave some generation holding the bag?"

"I guess you could word it like if your planet annihilated intelligent life on its surface in a nuclear war later on, and then a generation would be holding the bag but didn't have an alternative that involved being alive? I don't know, I'm not a poll designer and it seems like it should be easy but it seems like it's not actually."

"Maybe I will hire a professional poll designer. Anyway, what about from your perspective, do you like - talking to Sesatis instead of whoever else, knowing it's my planet that's the newest influence on multiversal culture, knowing we're out there getting access to magic...?"

"Maybe I'd be making more friends in Azan. But I don't know, I haven't heard any of my coworkers set up in Azan talking about how they're taking their new friend from Azan to the roller coaster park." He smiles. "The subtext thing gets a little old but any month now there'll be a talking-to-oblivious-foreigners register and you'll be able to code-switch. I'm pretty happy with my placement and I'm glad we found you even though I'm sorry you didn't, uh, get to be dead and wait for your nephew or whoever to fetch you."

"I'm not actually sure it is about subtext, when I try to be very explicit it barely works at all and I suspect it's at least partly... the kind of problem you'd have if you met me two months ago and said 'you can get omelettes from a vending machine in the teleportation class dorm.'"

"...not knowing what a vending machine is?" hazards Artorian.

"Not knowing what a vending machine is, not having context for what to expect a teleportation class to be, not thinking teleportation was a thing mortals could learn to do, and having a really underspecified idea of what a class dorm would be. And having no reason to think 'oh, okay, once I know what a vending machine is then I'll understand something important' - I'd be more likely to think 'absolutely none of that makes any sense' and write it off without ever getting specific about my confusion, but if I did that and forgot I did that then I could even learn what a vending machine is and not necessarily make a connection. And if I did think it meant something it'd be like, 'okay, so in your people's lore, gods need to learn how to teleport, and maybe you're telling me this to explain why you sacrifice omelettes?' but maybe I wouldn't say all of that, maybe I'd say 'oh, does that mean you're looking to buy some eggs? I know where you can buy some eggs. What kind of offering plate is acceptable for your sacrificial omelettes?' And afterward I might not even quite realize that you never said the teleportation class was for gods."

"Oh no," says Artorian, not quite suppressing a smile. "Yeah, the context problem is big, there's endless internet arguments about how much new stuff to dump on folks in what order."

"And I bet 'in bite-size self-contained narrative chunks as they occur to us and you don't paraphrase to check understanding or anything' is so obviously terrible as to not even make it into those arguments."

"If this is about the stories we collect, they do also try to hire some locals for help interpreting what we grab."

"I didn't know that, are you the right person to ask about that project or is there someone else?"

"I'm not at all but I know who to email!" He will write down the relevant email.