"Thank you! Anyway," he glances at his list of questions, "I just have a couple more things to ask. You mentioned still not understanding Sesat - I know it's kind of a fool's errand to ask what you don't know, but is there a broad category that you're pretty sure the things you don't know fall into?"

"Probably all tied up in the honor culture stuff? I have not literally zero understanding of honor cultures, but everything I know is - filtered through pop culture about fancy Classical-age aristocrats dueling each other over petty shit. Sesat is not doing quite that thing exactly, and I don't have a good handle on what it's doing instead."

"That's so specific, that'll be really useful. And - I kind of expect this to also be hard to answer but - what've you found Sesatis have the most trouble noticing or understanding about Vanda Nossëo?"

"I think it's actually really common for underdeveloped places not to know what being rich - means? Like, they think it means you have more of the same stuff they have. But at this level of gap it's just a totally different beast, unfathomably more options and abundance, everything in the shops costs more to identify as something good to have in the shops than to actually put there, and they're looking for traps, Sesatis but also just kind of everyone who's used to being poor, traps that they would know weren't going to be there if they knew what our budget actually looked like."

"...Yeah, you're not wrong. Well, thank you for talking with me, I think it was very helpful, and it was good to meet you."

"Good to meet you too, glad I could help with your book thing!"

And in between everything else they're both doing, he and Feris look up blog posts, that apparently being how getting a feel for popular sentiment works in the multiverse.

Did you know that you, YES YOU, are already a citizen of Azan? It's true - sort of. They have an ideological open immigration commitment, and there's a bus stop there open today on the Penguin line, more coming soon on the Seashell, Bamboo, Scalene, and Apteryx lines. (Local lines come later, when they join, but they're just about guaranteed to - if you imagine Vanda Nossëo only it's Bronze Age humans with, if you'll pardon the pun, a couple of blind spots, that's Azan.) Show up and move in and as far as they're concerned that's that.

Restraining orders aren't fully public in a deanonymized form, but sources close to the department said that there seemed to be a systematic attempt to use them to deny slaves teleportation licenses. Some slaves responded in kind, such as Amos - that's not a Sesati name, he'd been denied a name as part of the dehumanization customs in Sesat and invited Abolitionists Without Borders workers to supply him with a name.

Sinner's Prayer Soldiers reports startling amounts of success in their missionary work in an undisclosed portion of Sesat. (The work of SPS falls into a legal gray area - please do not make it easy to locate their operational locations casually!) The culture of Sesat, resistant to generalized liberalism, apparently responds much more naturally to explanations of the might and mercy of Almighty God. An interview with Soldier Lesnya Nikolaevna is available to stream on Cast Pearls.

Feris spends a while trying to research Christianity, streams the interview on Cast Pearls, and looks for an email address for Sinner's Prayer Soldiers. Book or no book, he would very much like to get in touch with people who are on the outs with Vanda Nossëo, have the ability to sneak around behind the peal's backs, have some idea of justice even if it's a thoroughly bizarre one, and have apparently gotten a response from his people other than anxious hostility.

Soldier Lesnya Nikolaevna says that the Sesati were awed and humbled to learn that there is a being so far above them that to that being the difference between them and slaves was negligible but that this being is infinitely merciful about sparing people the fires of Hell!

The Sinner's Prayer Soldiers are a private religious organization doing missionary work in tricky locations; they don't have teleporters of their own but once there are bus stops they show up, go on long hikes to less-visited areas, and start trying to win souls. The peal apparently doesn't consider them dangerous enough to try to keep them out.

They have publicly listed contact information for some of the organization's officers, and a general inquiry email too.

The general inquiry email receives a general inquiry.

Hello. I am a Sesati writing a book about first contact. I have a few questions I was hoping you could answer for me. Why can't you just operate openly? How did you pick Sesat? Are you hiding from Sesat's government or only from the peal? Do you expect joining you in honoring your god will cause problems for Sesatis?

While Soldiering isn't illegal, it does sometimes inspire people to try to set up interfering counternarratives and we find we work best without them. We have operations in a lot of areas but Soldier Lesnya had a good feeling about this one. Sesat's government is pagan and neither to be confronted nor courted; if the people are converted the state will follow. We cannot predict the future, but spreading the true faith is worth any trial.

He thanks them. He does nothing to interfere with them for now.

He asks Tarwë flat out whether Christian missionaries are insane and dangerous.

"- well, I don't think it's especially protective against being insane and dangerous. They have beliefs I don't think are true but that isn't the same thing as being insane for their species. I don't think they have an especially elevated violent crime rate."

"I think rather than whether their beliefs aren't true, what I want to know is whether their beliefs are widely considered absurd or evil."

"I believe Christianity is one of the ones with a lot of branches and the - popularity - of those branches varies very widely."

"I see. Thank you."

Oh no, it's complicated. He has a country to run and this rabbit hole seems unlikely to yield anything more interesting than it already has.

He has Mora check if there's anything public about how Vanda Nossëo assigns envoys, or about Nelen Utopia's previous work.

Vanda Nossëo takes applications and does interviews for envoy work; it's typical to start as a retail envoy, and then be a junior member of a team, and then be promoted for alignment and reliability. Nelen skipped the retail step, having apparently impressed his interviewer, and was a junior on a team headed by an Allantur, on a planet in Edda with some nonmagical nonhuman people on it. He got along well with the people in the town of Atuza and was promoted to head his own team after several people he'd met asked if they could be on his team, and his supervisor thought he'd done a good job.

Feris emails Nelen's former supervisor:

I am from the country to which Nelen Utopia was assigned after working for you. I am writing a book about first contact and was hoping you could tell me more about why you felt he had done well and ought to be promoted.

And Mora goes hunting down blogs from that planet, and blog posts about that planet by people elsewhere, and passes them to Valan to read and triage and maybe pass on to Feris if they end up being useful.

I cannot promise I will answer your questions if I feel they would compromise my ability to manage my staff but my office is here

The service at Frog Bowl is AWFUL. I had to wait for twenty entire minutes for my order, which would be bad enough, but on top of that, I got lost on the way to the bathroom and wandered into the kitchen, and what did I see? A REPLICATOR. They call themselves a restaurant? Who wants to eat frogboil that was replicated twenty minutes ago and spent that whole time sitting under a heat lamp? Fish them out of the water or don't waste my time! This user was arrested for dining and dashing.

SIGN THIS PETITION TO HALT THE GRAND VALLEY FERRIS WHEEL. It has been vandalized with malicious prayers! It must be completely cleaned, purified, and repainted before it can resume operation!

Must-see locations on Sarunu!
1. Amuchi Clockface
2. Gardens of Zanun
3. Ysodi Rift
4. Lightning aurorae (seasonal)
5. Festival of Ten Million Beetles

None of those blog posts are useful in themselves but they at least tip Valan off that maybe looking up what people say about frog welfare on Sarunu would be productive. He checks up on that.

And it's not a great idea for Feris to go visit Sarunu right now and it'd be nice to make it Mora's problem but Mora would be awful at talking to foreigners. Instead Mora looks up how they choose which planets to prioritize in general and what if anything they're saying about how they chose this one, and meanwhile Valan arranges to talk with Allantur.

>>>replicated frog is JUST AS GOOD as dead frog you CANNOT tell the difference
>>>is not tho
>>if you want to eat it alive so bad get a demonic one
>I can raise frogs in my backyard for basically nothing and paying a demon is way out of my price range for lunch
backyard frogs aren't a big welfare problem! go ahead! just don't break the boycott on Peat Farms Co

Another measure to ban live frog farming on Sarunu was defeated 15-12, with Representative Blarn among the nays - surprising many of his constituents, as he'd voted in favor of a similar bill in the spring session. "The spring bill was a well constructed piece of law," said Blarn. "The version before us now ignores considerable relevant legal precedent in my constituents' national history, neglects considerations of land ownership, and does not have a clear outline of an exit strategy for the existing farmers. I would be glad to put my support behind a version more like the one that came before us in the spring."

Allantur is out of the office when first visited but the sign on the door says he will be back after lunch.

He returns a few minutes later, singing. (He's an Elf.)

Lovely, a chance to see if he can impress an Elf when he's actually trying. He's caught on to there being something unacceptable about the floral hairstyle and today he's trying a bun impaled with miniature golden swords with the long thin straight blades that apparently eventually become popular with people who work with iron.

He smiles and waves and lets Allantur finish singing rather than interrupt.

Allantur smiles at him and concludes the verse and lets him into the office. "Good afternoon."