"Good afternoon. I'm Valan of Leopard Hill. A person I know who's writing a book about first contact on our planet sent me here with questions about your work and about Ambassador Utopia. Is now a good time?"

"I have, let's see, twenty minutes, will that do?"

"Probably! Can you tell me what specifically you noticed that Ambassador Utopia was good at?"

"Do you know what 'Utopia' means - or what a job name is -"

"Sort of but maybe not so well that I wouldn't learn from hearing you explain."

"Job names are a custom some Amentans have, including the ones where Utopia is from. They take them when they pick a career, and they sometimes change them if they change jobs. They're supposed to be relevant, but they get a little creative, because they've got co-workers, so a bunch of Amentan nurses who work together aren't all going to go by a word for Nurse. So it's just as often what matters to them about the job as it is a term for the job itself. 'Utopia' means - well, literally it means 'noplace', it's from a novel written on Earth about an imaginary society that wasn't actually very pleasant at all, but it later came to describe a genre of fiction, where people tried to imagine what a perfect society that was good for everyone would be like. It's widely agreed to be impossible - you can do better than the original, but I don't think anyone's ever written one where no reader had an objection to something about how it was structured or implemented. But you can get closer, sand off the rough edges finer and finer till it feels smooth to the touch and then look for someone with more sensitive hands to find where there's still a flaw, and you can make that the work of your life if you want everyone to have that, have a perfect world to live in.

"He told me all that when he joined my team as a junior envoy, he'd just picked the name and he was very excited about it. He lives it. He wants everyone to live in a utopia and he wants to show up every day and work on it a little more and get a little closer. I don't know what brings you here about him exactly, but I can't imagine it's him having somehow failed at that."

Get a better imagination, he doesn't say.

"Seems sort of premature to focus on sanding down all the rough edges when there are undiscovered worlds out there that might have Melkors - that's not actually what brought me here but I'm curious what you have to say to it."

"Disappear magic works fine on Melkors. If you mean it in a general sense, a healthier utopia is more robust against all kinds of discoveries."

"How so?"

"The economy matters, a lot, and the exchange of ideas helps us anticipate possible future challenges."

"That makes sense. So, when you noticed Ambassador Utopia working toward utopia, what specific behaviors did that cash out to?"

"Probably the most representative anecdote was when he did all the legwork to convince all the stakeholders that there should be a bus stop, not because he knew specifically where anyone needed to go but out of an abundance of confidence that people exploring will find ways to use what they discover to address their own problems. He gave out some gratis bus tokens, he argued it to me as a way to get more locals looking into what the multiverse had to offer even if they didn't buy in to what we were offering enough to pay us in their time and stories, and some of the people he picked found things that were good for them out there. One moved to Beach, started a restaurant, they like frogs in Beach too. The import of the idea of the prayer wheel, that was somebody he gave a token to."

"I think hearing that story in isolation it would make me think of someone who had a lot of respect for the people he worked with - that they just needed more tools and they'd solve their own problems."

"That's how I tend to think about it."

"He's right about bus stops, anyway, they're very useful. So I'm also wondering - what did you notice he wasn't as good at?"

"I recommended him Zanro, I think Nelen's tendency to identify with whoever's worst off in a society can make him forget some of the nuance he usually tries to bring to bear and Zanro has more of that. Have you met Zanro?"

"I haven't."

"Well, he's on Nelen's team, he must be around somewhere unless he's taken leave, which I wouldn't know about."

"Probably, I just haven't been taking point on talking to the envoys. Anyway, how were you hoping he'd help with that?"

"Just another perspective to consult - for Nelen, and for anyone picking an envoy to talk to."

"I see. How were people supposed to realize that they could talk to Zanro instead, and that Zanro had that different perspective?"

"It's customary for all the envoys to be introduced when they first show up, did Nelen - forget or something?"

"Not to my knowledge. I think what I mean is - knowing there exists another envoy and he's called Zanro doesn't seem like it's enough to know what he'd be a good person to talk to about."

"That's... true, yes, but overloading introductions isn't helpful either, if it happens that the first thing a newly contacted place wants to know is whether we can save their dying children or whether we were sent by the gods or why we're talking to their enemies across the river then it doesn't serve anyone to insist on first making them sit through a summary of orc history to have an idea of where Zanro's opinions are likely to be coming from. The approach has to be adaptive, not exhaustive."

"Yeah, that's pretty reasonable. And I've taken a class that involved learning some orc history, and I still wouldn't actually have gotten 'more nuanced and less inclined to identify with the worst-off' from 'orc envoy', I'm not actually sure what you could do that would make it obvious."