Well, good thing Vanda Nossëo is here.

Nelen Utopia (jobname selected as one of the more pronounceable foreign language renderings of the concept) has only been a municipal level integration director before; this is his first time heading up a state-level effort. He's nervous, but these people are reductionist and no-magic and anyway if people like him didn't agree to take on responsibilities everything would be going at Elf pace and that would be worse for almost everyone alive on this planet today.

He calls an all-hands aboard the giant Elf-spec lightleaper the planetary team has parked in orbit, goes over the plan and the contingencies and the emergency procedures, and takes his subteam of five down to the capital. There's him, Nelen Utopia - shorter than the locals, long vermilion hair with one streak of gold dyed in at the temple and kept back in a ponytail. There's an angel, Cassiel, ex-human but with quartz-pink feathers and a rose-gold halo. There's an orc, Zanro, a bit of a weirdo who is trying a stint as a VN ambassador for personal development reasons. There's an Earthling from Cube who took the wizardry course in Elendil, Natsuko. There's a Space Elf, Tarwë, who recently joined up as his youngest daughter's grown and moved away. (He has the augmented reality thing that makes Zanro look okay to him.)

Nelen makes them all confirm out loud that they're ready, and he teleports them down into the capital of his assigned state.

The capital is... a solid effort for a dense preindustrial civilization with no magic and lots of distractions, mostly planned in advance to be relatively less difficult to keep clean-ish and parts of it designed with aesthetics in mind. It only smells a little. Within the walled city there are some statues, a small park, a medium-size palace, and some people who are shocked and afraid to see people teleporting in. Within a minute they're being quizzed by soldiers on who they are and what they're doing here.

"Hello!" says Nelen, shaking only a little bit. "We're peaceful ambassadors from a polity based around another star far away, Vanda Nossëo!"

The soldiers relax very slightly.

"Well, then," says one of them, almost entirely succeeding at sounding like this is a normal and unremarkable occurrence, "Sesat welcomes you - someone send word to the Star-of-Stars while I handle this - Sesat welcomes you and would like to know what brings you all the way from your faraway star."

"Vanda Nossëo's mission is to explore the inhabited worlds, establish trade and free movement and the flow of information between them, and improve the standard of living for all sapient beings," says Nelen.

"That sounds like a worthwhile project that Sesat would be happy to help with under better circumstances. I don't speak for our Star-of-Stars but I expect His Beneficence would be delighted to host you for a while, and discuss what we can do for one another, and unfortunately I expect Sesat won't be able to commit resources to anything else until we've dealt with a situation on our border."

"That's okay, we come with our own resources and don't want to take any of yours," Nelen assures them. "Can you tell us more about the situation on the border?"

"To my understanding - which may not be accurate but since you're asking me, sirs, and His Excellency hasn't sent anyone yet, I'll do my best - a serf ran away and tried to hide in the area around the border where people don't live, and people went looking, and all of them ended up over the border. Azan, our neighbor, construed it as an act of war and can't be talked down from that."

"I'm sorry to hear that. Vanda Nossëo membership comes with defensive support, if that's the sort of thing that might help."

"I expect we can handle it on our own, but it's likely to delay us in working with you on your project if we have to. What can you tell me about Vanda Nossëo membership?"

"It has to be voted on - a strict majority of your population has to vote to join, with everyone entitled to a vote, we can automatically detect duplicates if that's a concern. You can negotiate for different joining bonuses, people have different needs, but defensive support comes standard."

"I see. I - don't see, actually, I have several questions about that. First of all, what are the obligations of member states?"

"Member states have to allow emigration - you can restrict immigration, if you want, but letting people leave is required - and there are minimum laws against murder, rape, and torture. Uh, I should also mention that if anyone gets murdered, raped, or tortured as a result of our presence we claim a limited jurisdiction over that if your handling doesn't seem to cover the case. Sometimes Vanda Nossëo has broader standards of "everyone" than other cultures."

"We already have laws against all three of those, and depending on the details of the case the perpetrators may be enslaved, which is our highest penalty."

"Enslavement is covered by the emigration clause," says Nelen delicately. "And is not functionally possible for member states without very unusual circumstances."

"Well, it wouldn't be up to me to decide what to do about that," but if they have to deal with two of Azan, one of which can teleport, that's going to really suck. "I admire that you came all the way from a star to ask us this, but I'm not confident our Star-of-Stars will want to seek membership."

"That's understandable. You should be aware that there are similar Vanda Nossëo teams visiting the other states on this planet."

Oh for fuck's sake. Of fucking course there are. Well, in a couple of minutes, the Star-of-Stars will send someone to make it not his problem anymore, except insofar as there's going to be another war and his cousin's going to lose all her slaves and probably have to sell all the family land, so, maybe slightly still his problem.

"Of course. Most people do want to be on good terms with all their neighbors, not just one."

"Is this a good place for us to wait for whoever you sent to fetch a representative for us to talk to?"

"We might as well get out of the street and take a seat in the park, don't worry about admission this time, I'll deal with that." He gestures for them to follow him through the park gate, a few feet away. "By the way, I'm very curious about the reasoning behind your, uh, goals here."

"Ours as individuals or Vanda Nossëo's as an organization?"

"I meant the second but either's fine."

"Vanda Nossëo is rich and has magic and technology that is phenomenally advanced. I'd bet you can't think of anything that Vanda Nossëo doesn't have in some form, although you might surprise me. What do you think Sesat would do if it suddenly got that way?"

"Accept immigrants from everywhere in the world until we ran out of space, then use our phenomenal wealth and the fact that everywhere else was getting less dense to see if there was any price at which our neighbors could be convinced to peacefully transfer sovereignty over some of their land, then accept more immigrants. Probably plant more flowers. Give some of it to the poor, maybe, if it wasn't their fault they got that way - is that what you're doing here?"

"Sort of. But with a really broad concept of fault. It's not anyone's fault that they belong to a species that isn't innately good with money - some are - or that they had a childhood that didn't prepare them well for being productive adults, or that they have disabilities, even disabilities that look kind of like personality traits. Vanda Nossëo is kind of going: okay, let's skip trying to figure out whose fault any of this poverty is. Let's just get so rich we can fix it all."

...Okay, don't tell the nice diplomats they're appalling.

"So you figure - some slave I heard about had kept a victim alive for almost a month, you figure that's - not a real personality trait because no real person could do that, it's, what, missing a personality like some people are missing fingers?"

"- no, I - I'm not sure what I said sounded like that. Sometimes our translation magic has small problems, can you tell me what it sounded like I said in case it was one of those?"

"You said 'disabilities that look like personality traits.'"

"So, we were talking about why people might be poor. Some people are poor because they don't have a job, at least where I'm from, and sometimes it looks like someone is choosing not to get a job because they're lazy, but sometimes it turns out they have a disability that looks like being lazy, instead. That's the kind of thing I was thinking of."

"Oh! I'm sorry, that makes much more sense - you mean like how some people are sickly and can't work very hard or very long hours?"

"Right. To be clear, Vanda Nossëo is also rich enough to provide for people who are actually lazy. That just wasn't what I was thinking of at the time."

"Oh, that'd be good. But - the reason I jumped to the conclusion I did was that you'd been telling me you object to torture and murder and rape but you don't want people who do them punished as harshly as we do...?"

"Right. Uh, to be clear most places will not let murderers or torturers or rapists immigrate to them by default. The version of free migration we have for criminals is that they can move between prisons. But a Vanda Nossëo prison is going to be much preferable to enslavement for, I think most people."

"...Why is it a good thing that it's preferable?"

"Vanda Nossëo doesn't - on an institutional level, individual opinions vary - believe in punishment for punishment's sake. The prisons are secure, the people in them can't hurt anybody - beyond that it's considered a good thing, not a bad one, if they have access to the sorts of things that make one situation preferable to another."

"Does Vanda Nossëo not believe in it being better for better people to have better things or does it just have so much wealth that after making rapists comfortable it's trivial to make everyone else many times more comfortable than that?"

"The second thing. The rapists aren't uncomfortable, but they're not free - can't go most places, can't live at home with their loved ones, can't learn any sensitive kind of magic that might help them reoffend. It's better to be a Vanda Nossëo prisoner than a slave, but it's much better to be a free citizen."

He nods. "You should lead with that, when you're trying to pitch our Star-of-Stars on it. That you want everything to be so good for everyone that the lowest of the low who are despised and outcast live comfortably. Otherwise - well, you scared me, for a moment I was wondering if you were aiming to steal most of my family's wealth."

"One of the things states with slavery often negotiate for is having their slaves purchased rather than just taken! It's not something we can offer to non-members - it makes it more attractive to enslave extra people to sell them - but as a one-time thing we can do it."

"We wouldn't do that! There's no way you're going to affect how many people - or do you also care about the ones born into it, it's possible we'd have more of those, I guess."

The person who went to pass the information on to the Star-of-Stars comes and lurks near the park gate, not interrupting in case this ought to be allowed to finish.

"Yes, abolishing slavery includes all the slaves, not just the ones who are enslaved as a punishment for a crime," says Nelen.

"Makes sense, I guess. Are there - " He glances at the gate. " - other common sticking points you'd rather air first with someone other than the Star-of-Stars?"

"If there are categories of people who are likely to want to leave en masse given the chance to do so those might also be a sticking point. I'm from a group like that myself," says Nelen. "Sometimes people have religious issues with Vanda Nossëo, but I don't know you to be likely to."

He makes a face. It is the face of a man deciding very quickly that his top priority is making this conversation someone else's problem.

"Right, well, if you pay everyone twenty times their current wealth I'm sure you'll be able to smooth it over somehow. That person will be taking you to the palace and can brief you on our etiquette on the way."

"Great, thank you." Nelen and his teammates all nod to him and go meet the etiquette-and-escort person.

Etiquette-and-escort person introduces herself as Elu and inquires after the visitors' names and titles.

Tarwë blinks a touch at "Elu" but doesn't comment.

"My name is Nelen Utopia," says Nelen. "In formal work related contexts it'd be Ambassador Utopia."

"Cassiel Jones," says Cassiel, "or Envoy Jones if you prefer."

"Tanaka Natsuko," says Natsuko, "Tanaka-san."

"Zanro," says the orc, "Agent Zanro."

"Envoy Tarwë," says Tarwë.

She repeats them perfectly.

"In general in Sesat the titles to know are 'sir' and 'ma'am' for, how do I put this, men and women who are worthy of someone's deference but not yours necessarily, 'my lord' you won't have much call to use if I've understood you correctly but people will use it for you, and the king's time is in great demand so it's expected to address our Star-of-Stars by a different title every time, unless His Excellency tells you not to, which he probably will. The idea is that if you're running out of ideas, you should speak more concisely or excuse yourself - this obviously doesn't apply if you're invited in for the sort of meeting that takes all afternoon, then repetition is fine. You - seem like you 'sir' and 'ma'am' people normally but they do that in Azan too and you otherwise sound a bit Azani so I thought it might be better to go over the rest just in case something was unfamiliar - all that make sense?"

They look at each other a bit. "We're using translation magic," says Nelen after a short silence. "We can adjust it, if it's systematically doing something wrong - normally it adjusts to the hearer's strongest language, so it's actually very weird that we would sound Azani. That being understood we can remember to say 'sir' and 'ma'am' and to cycle through titles till told otherwise if we know what they are."

"Oh, just normal titles like Your Majesty or Your Grace or Your Wisdom or make something up along the same lines - not 'my lord', that'd be an insult if you said it to the Star-of-Stars - I think letting everyone know you're using magical translation will do a lot in itself to smooth over any mistakes. Are there things you expect - please don't hesitate to say obvious things as if I'm very stupid - things you expect from anyone treating you with courtesy and respect?"

"We don't stand much on formality of that kind," says Nelen. "But - well -"

"We've been trained," says Cassiel, "to tolerate people from cultures very different from ours, but someone aiming for courtesy might wish to avoid using slave labor around us."

"I will let people know about that and see how far we can get on it - it'll be easy to have no slaves personally serve you during your stay but I don't believe we can get certainty about anyone's already-made clothing having no components made by slave labor..."

"A good-faith effort to avoid making it obtrusive will be fine," Nelen assures him.

They can manage to keep the slaves out of view, at least as long as the delegates are in known locations and not moving around much.

Elu shows them to the palace and passes on this information and announces them and their titles-they-don't-care-much-about to an emergency meeting of the Star-of-Stars and those officials that happened to be on hand and not busy with something more urgent or important than a teleporting diplomatic party.

"Hello!" Nelen says.

"Hello indeed," says Sesat's Star-of-Stars. "I have heard that you have come from the stars to speak with us about a project of mutual cooperation and prosperity, as well as, ah, freedom of movement. I extend to you an invitation to make yourselves comfortable - " he gestures at the council table his other officials are sitting at " - and speak with us at length about your mission here."

They take seats! "We appreciate your hospitality, your grace," says Nelen brightly. "My understanding is that you're currently looking at a likely war brewing with your neighbor Azan, which is complicated because our counterparts are talking to them too; is there anything else going on here that might benefit more straightforwardly from a goodwill gesture from Vanda Nossëo? Disease outbreaks, famines, natural disasters, that kind of thing we can often solve as a goodwill gesture without making any demands of you."

"Sesat has not seen famine or plague for several years now, but there are always those with minor ailments and I would not dream of forbidding any who come here in peace from offering them healing. Do you have a summary of what Vanda Nossëo might want to consider offering, or some examples of prior agreements with recently contacted polities?"

"Vanda Nossëo's powers that are limited or gatekept enough to prevent them from being freely distributed include immortality, resurrection, terraforming new planets to spec for people to move onto - these are all available on the free market but they're very expensive if you just buy them, it's more common to arrange a deal as part of membership that you get some number allotted per year. The planet I come from wanted planets, and lots of them -" He looks at the others.

"My species actually mostly wanted the prison system," says Cassiel, "we're really hard to keep contained within our own magic system and were tolerating a fair number of nuisances that couldn't meaningfully be stopped."

"My species isn't joined up with Vanda Nossëo at all," says Zanro, "we're folded in under an allied polity, Mîr, or at least most of us are, I joined up as an individual."

"My planet's mostly taking medical assistance, we have a really high cancer rate as a result of a war that occurred not long before contact," says Natsuko.

"I can see the appeal of many of those things. I'm curious about your polities' ends of the arrangements, as well; what did Vanda Nossëo want for these things?"

"Vanda Nossëo wanted to give all the people who lived there access to free migration and trade and communication with the rest of Vanda Nossëo, Partly because the more people who are participating, the wealthier and more robust the whole thing can be, and partly out of humanitarian motives," says Nelen.

"Ah, humanitarianism. Locally, at least, that concept was invented by one of my predecessors, and is how Sesat brought the wild folk of the countryside into the fold."

Well, the local concept in question is bribing people to move in and work for you, undermining your neighbors' economies by stealing their human capital, and is the incredibly fraught cause of the current war, but it's close enough for a smooth natural-sounding translation. Sesat can't very well win a humanitarian war over who owns which people, and it also can't win a conventional war. Unfortunately, it also isn't in a good position to gently suggest to Vanda Nossëo that they stop escalating what they offer people and save their own government and a lot of other governments a lot of expense in a tug-of-war that just ends with the common people richer and distributed the same way as before, because in fact if they can truly offer people immortality it probably won't end any way short of Sesat's utter annihilation.

And Azan's going to accept their help, because Azan's current king likes humanitarianism, prefers it even to the power and wealth it's supposed to be for.

The Star-of-Stars does not make a face like he's just bitten a lemon because, most importantly, he has better self-control than that, and secondarily, he's one of those people who like biting lemons.

"I'm glad it's not a completely foreign concept, your... starriness," says Nelen politely.

He snorts. "That's a new one, I like it. So - I was curious about Mîr, and its relationship to all of this."

"There are three larger polities making up the broad category sometimes called 'the peal' for obscure pun reasons," says Zanro.

"If you want I can explain the pun, I speak the language," says Cassiel.

Zanro continues, "They're Vanda Nossëo, Mîr, and Elendil. All three are operated by some combination of Elves -" Tarwë raises a hand - "and a particular personality type that is frequently repeated throughout various universes, called 'Bells'. The distinctions between them are mostly bureaucratic, they exchange personnel and assistance all the time, all their leaders are personal friends, but Elendil is local to a particular universe which has many more inhabited planets than most of them, Mîr is local to a particular neighborhood of universes in which a particular magic system they depend on works well, and Vanda Nossëo is more of a catchall; there are also smaller setups that maintain strong relationships with those three but for one reason or another find it more expedient to keep their governing structure smaller. That said, if enough people on this planet preferred Mîr or Elendil to Vanda Nossëo for some reason and really wanted to belong to them instead, we can in fact just move your entire solar system, that's not very difficult."

One of the officials in the meeting slightly less selected for ability to keep a straight face than the Star-of-Stars reacts visibly to that last incredibly threatening claim.

"What sort of personality is required to be a Bell?" asks the Star-of-Stars, pondering how to become one.

"I think Tarwë's the only one of us who's met one in person -" says Nelen.

"Well, sort of in person, sort of met," Tarwë says. "One of them helped my people with a war against an evil god. They're generally - brilliant, skilled at whatever high-leverage occupations made sense in their environments, ruthlessly altruistic and committed. For some reason they're all unusually clumsy, till they get magic help for it. Most of them have matching parents too, but Loki doesn't, or Kib, presumably because they're respectively adopted and from a world where humans don't conventionally reproduce. I hear they're sarcastic, though the one I met wasn't exactly cracking jokes at the time."

...That is a scarily good description of Azan he, other than the brilliance, which, well, it's hard to say.

If they're going to maybe recognize the king of Azan as a good Bell candidate, he'll have to throw some of his own brilliant people in high-leverage occupations at them. People who can plausibly act ruthlessly altruistic and committed, and can be sarcastic to save their lives and their country.

"That sounds like a sort of person I might be able to find around here."

"- oh, you don't have one on this planet," says Nelen. "We check that sort of thing before we make contact - if you had a Bell, we would have noticed with magic, and we'd be talking to them about how to approach things here, instead of this more generic strategy."

"...How do you check that?"

"There's a species called 'demons' - uh, our translation magic often translates that in a way that makes it sound like they're malicious, they're not especially, we can tweak the translation if it's inopportune here - related to Cassiel's species, 'angels'. Demons can conjure arbitrary material objects, and they can do it according to specific criteria, like a particular book title by a particular author. Or a particular 'template' - like 'Bells' - in a particular world."

"So, what, all of our sarcastic altruists are magically confirmed to be stupid or uncommitted or not in high-leverage careers?"

"- no, not at all. Bells have the traits listed," says Nelen, "but having those traits doesn't make someone a Bell. It's okay, you don't need any for anything in particular, it's just a shortcut to us having a local contact we can trust immediately to be both broadly values-aligned and have an eye on the right subjects."

"Suppose I still take it as a set of criteria for people to introduce you to, since it sounds like you do want to meet locals who have those traits?"

"If you have bright altruists who want to talk to us, of course we'd be happy to meet them, but we'll meet anyone who would like to see us. One thing we often do at this stage of a contact is we set up one or more little booths where we sell things from the wider multiverse, often in exchange for stories, true or not, from the locals."

"You may do so, provided none of what you sell is meant to kidnap or ensorcel anyone or facilitate any kind of crime. No poisons, no - it should all be very commonsense and as humanitarians I do believe you wouldn't. Oh, and check in with city governance after this meeting about where you can put your booths that isn't spoken for, there'll be convenient places but I don't know where they all are off the top of my head."

"Usually on planets like this it's things like rocks enchanted to be warm, or heal people near them, or advanced lights that last for decades," says Nelen. "Clothes, food, things that play music, translation enchantments like ours..."

"Those all sound like fine things to sell, and you may do so. In general merchants pay a fraction of their goods or of their proceeds in tax, but doctors and apothecaries don't. I'm inclined to treat magic healing as the same kind of thing as a doctor or an apothecary, but the rest of it as miscellaneous goods taxed at one part in twenty; I will entertain arguments otherwise."

"- well, we'd be taking payment in stories, fictional ones or personal anecdotes. As an effort to make sure things are affordable and to get a snapshot of your culture in its current state. How would you normally handle taxing that?"

"Barter of goods for services is generally taxed as a fraction of the goods in question; services for services is not but providers thereof are sometimes commanded to provide their services for the good of Sesat. - What I'd do with five percent of your magic items is give them to people to test and let the results of the tests be known in all of Sesat, by the way, if it grieves you to think of them unused in a treasury." And if instead that makes them more averse to paying, well, that would be good to know.

"Oh, so for every twenty healing rocks we gave out you'd want one? That sounds fine," says Nelen.

"Yes, quite. If we don't come to some broader agreement, do you plan to stay here and sell these items indefinitely?"

"Us personally, probably not, but the booths can be staffed indefinitely."

"Hmm. Are you also offering to teach our people to make these kinds of things?"

"Most of the magic you can enroll in classes for has a screening process, but individuals can enter Vanda Nossëo even if their home states don't sign up and look for classes to join. If you want a more targeted program aimed at specific interests and needs of the Sesati people you'd need to be a member state."

"And - entering any of these classes requires that the student join Vanda Nossëo and leave their home behind?"

"Not necessarily on a permanent basis but the class would not be located here."

"Would there be any problem if someone went abroad to take a class, then came here and taught the rest of the country?"

"Someone who intended to do that with one of the more sensitive kinds of magic probably wouldn't pass a screen."

Ah, so the tactic they'll be using is to fatten Sesat up a bit, let the population grow beyond what the land can support, and then threaten to leave and let all their unrepairable magic items wear out and cause the greatest famine in history if Sesat doesn't acquiesce to whatever they feel like demanding next. That's even worse than he was expecting. Option one, he can bow now, hope to pass their screens - unlikely, everyone knows he wasn't an altruist yesterday - or, option two, he can stand up to them while leaving an opening for some actual altruist with a scrap of loyalty to Sesat to appear to side with them - or, option three, he can take the same actions as in option two and not end up with any support and simply die with honor.

"I'm afraid that training myself and my people in your magic is a necessary condition for a long-term peaceful trade agreement between us, let alone - " (becoming a vassal state, but if he doesn't say it he has an out to pretend he didn't notice, later, if he absolutely has to) " - seeking membership in Vanda Nossëo."

"There are some kinds of magic that aren't transmissible in a way that we'd worry about," says Nelen. "For example, the empress of Mîr can add somewhat customized magical powers to people that they then can't teach to others who haven't had the same process done. I say somewhat customized because it's most efficient to do it in batches of a few hundred, so there are some popular standards and it's a little tricker to find people to go in together on anything more unusual. But many kinds of magic are extremely dangerous. The teleportation magic I have is mostly just used to move us around from place to place, but it does not have any discovered limit on the size of what I can bring along. Our most powerful healing spell is part of the same magic system, unfortunately, so the screen to get that one is the same."

...There might not be a thing that it would mean, to lose valiantly in a fight with these people. It might be that no one in Sesat is worth anything, with these people around; it might be that all he can do is keep that from becoming common knowledge, maybe long enough to make it false or maybe not. It might be that he should fuck off to Vanda Nossëo by himself and become the world's most pampered slave.

"Magic we cannot pass on to our children will not suffice," since leaves them open to the exact same tactic, "but if you have a list of common batched-magic types oriented toward protection or food security I'd look at it, at least."

"I can get you one of those, yes. There are lots of things we can share that aren't magic at all. The technology level here isn't high, compared to many Vanda Nossëo planets when we first find them, let alone afterwards. Lights, for example, and heat - the enchanted rocks are easier to use, but they're not what most Vanda Nossëo citizens have in our homes. Better construction and farming techniques. My home planet had a little less land area than this one and we have comparable needs to humans in most ways, and by the time our constituent countries joined Vanda Nossëo there were over thirteen billion of us on it."

"...Ah. And what would you like for that knowledge?"

"One thing we're trying some places is dropping off magical automata that can give science and math lectures; if you'd like some of those it's free, we'd just want to be able to take data on how it goes. We'd also be happy to put in a 'bus stop', a site where large batches of people can teleport in and out between Sesat and other places in the multiverse, and then could find classes on those topics on their own. If you want a local popup school staffed with sapient teachers we can do that in exchange for some consideration - probably it would be most straightforward to send Vanda Nossëo some of the slaves, provided we could be sure that the slavetaking and slave-breeding rate wouldn't increase as a result, but we could work something else out, especially if there's a reason it might be particularly appealing for a teacher to live and work in Sesat."

"I think the automata sound promising; what sort of data would you be interested in?"

"Oh, we'd just visit the automata occasionally and ask them how many people had been by and what they'd wanted to learn about."

"I think - not within a city, they're cramped and it'd be disruptive - I think you should find a suitable area an hour or two out from a city, and I think you should buy it yourselves, rather than me, because you're likely to be buying from someone who owns a farm that unfree labor works on, and by decreasing that person's land you'd be decreasing the use that person has for labor, so they likely wouldn't replace the slaves. But it wouldn't be a deal Sesatis in general could make arbitrarily many of, it'd be obviously a one-time thing - or two or three, if you want better coverage, but a small fixed number which you could announce in advance."

"That sounds like a good plan, thank you, your illustriousness."

"I know, that's why I suggested it. And about that 'bus stop' - can you tell me more about how that would work?"

"Sure. A bus is sort of like an ambulatory building, and it's there to make it clearer to people when they're successfully signed up for the next ride out, and to make it easier for the teleporter to get who's in their batch and no one else. It appears, same way we did, and whoever wants to gets on and sits down, and when everybody who wants to be aboard is aboard, it teleports to the next stop on the route. If you have preferences about who Sesati bus-riders should find it simplest to visit you can let us know, but by default I'd leave it up to the transportation department; at any rate after a few hops like that they'd be in a big transit hub and could get on a different line to go anywhere else within the service area, and then back again by the same process."

"Are you at all interested in cooperating with - I am going to go ahead and assume that if I say this as 'are you at all interested in denying slaves service?' you'll say no, but are you at all interested in denying patricides, torturers, or even non-slaves who are in debt here?"

"If you have safety concerns, or if it's really important to you that the departure of slaves from Sesat happen in some particular orderly way, we can work with you on that. But we normally don't require background checks for a bus ticket. If someone here were in debt to me, I think I'd want them to be able to travel the multiverse where they could make some money more easily and pay me back. As for people who've committed murders, the kind of person you have on this planet can be resurrected pretty easily. We don't condone murder, but a lot of murderers cut it out when they have more places to go and more things to do and the murder won't stick anyway."

"Do you have infrastructure in place already that would help force someone who went away to seek their fortune in the stars to pay their debts back home?"

"If they otherwise didn't seem inclined to do so? No, we don't have a way to force them - our financial instruments don't include the force of criminal law to require repayment - but they'd find that a lot of multiversal banks and such wouldn't deal with them till they'd discharged their outstanding debts or made some kind of repayment agreement. I think if they were having real trouble they could probably get some kind of debt relief organization to cover the amount, though, once we have a settled-out currency exchange rate with Sesat."

"Hmm. How much of a problem is it for people when multiversal banks refuse to do business with them?"

"It's inconvenient but if they aren't trying to do complicated financial transactions it's possible to operate with other means of payment for services."

"Will you object if we put a perimeter around the bus stop and screen people for outstanding debts before they get to you?"

"We wouldn't encourage it but we wouldn't interfere."

"That would be fine. And for murderers - I think for uncomplicated murders, it's simple to reverse the crime and you may resurrect any of those we executed for murder after you resurrect their victims and ideally provide those victims with something to live on now that their own belongings will have passed to others; those who were enslaved solely for patricide or matricide, I suppose we could consider some kind of deal where they're given to you to do with as you will, including taking them out of Sesat, after you return their victims to life and give the victims and those who kept them contained some additional compensation for all the time elapsed, if that wouldn't fall afoul of your objections to buying them?"

"I think we could see our way clear to an arrangement where a murderer may be removed from Sesat on the condition that their victim is resurrected first, although resurrections are among the things that are still expensive - there's a lot of people who've died, in all the worlds - and it would mean you would have less leverage to negotiate for other things you might want in a bid for membership, including resurrections for people who did not happen specifically to be murdered by still-living slaves. We're rich, but not literally infinitely rich, and we can't let would-be member states hold out for everything they think we have to offer just to see if we hand it over."

"I confess to having somewhat lost track of what you want to offer out of the goodness of your hearts, what you want to sell, and what you want from us; things haven't at all fallen into the categories I normally expect."

"Of course," says Nelen. "The things we will offer you if you're willing to host them, regardless of your participation in any other scheme of ours, are bus stations, automata that deliver lessons in science and math, and booths selling the things we mentioned, among others. The things we want to sell are - well - the stuff that goes in the booths, though as aforementioned we'll take payment in anecdotes, and some services more labor-intensive or less subsidized than the above, like local schools. The things we want to sell as membership signup perks are things like resurrections, immortality, colony planets, anything we're really limited on our ability to hand out. The things we want from you are emigration rights for all the people within Sesat and help transitioning Sesat into a wealthier, better-educated, more humane place to live, smoothly and in a way that preserves what's special about it to its people."

"I think many of us would say that what's special about Sesat is how proud and stubborn its people are, and that, if faced with someone offering to train us to eat out of their hands in exchange for us bowing to their desires, we stand ready to walk away even from paradise - Mayor Zatar, General Tana, you're not random but you're here; what do you think?"

"Oh, I'd put that second to our ambition. Given the, ah, entire annual holiday about it," says Tana.

"It's just harder to have a holiday about stubbornness. I agree with His Glory, Sesat is proud above all," says the one who seemed threatened earlier.

"I see," says Nelen. "Well, there are worse things to hang your patriotism on. Are there any things we have to offer that do interest you?"

"Oh, yes. I would like very much to make this work. I just couldn't face my people and tell them we all must appease foreign conquerors - but as you come here out of the goodness of your hearts, for peaceful trade and to spread prosperity to the corners of the earth, your task here is very simple: only do not appear to be something you are not. You come here asking us to give up our slaves, and you sound hostile; but you can't mean it like that, and I see you aren't tempted to want them yourselves, so speak to me instead of why you aren't tempted. You come here asking us to let our debtors run off and cheat us; but you don't worry about that yourself, so speak to me of why you don't, and perhaps then I won't either."

"Of course," says Nelen, slightly relieved. "What we find is that slave labor is generally inferior in quality to free labor - a free employee you have to pay, but a slave you have to feed, and supervise, and worry about rebellions from, and the cost savings is pretty negligible when you price that in. That's even if you don't value the freedom of the slave directly, which we do. You're using slavery partially as an alternative to prisons, which makes more sense, but to the extent you're trying to save money on prisons we're happy to take on that expense ourselves and to the extent you're trying to deter crime - people still don't want to be prisoners in Vanda Nossëo, even if their living conditions look very cushy."

"There was that one time when some people just kind of kept having kids in that one prison," says Zanro.

"Right, but then someone terraformed a moon for them and they moved there and they didn't cost much in further supervisory labor," says Nelen, "and their sentences expired and the moon joined up in its own right - I'm not claiming that nothing weird ever happens, it's a big multiverse, but by and large people prefer to be free, and prefer to follow the law provided the law isn't terribly unjust in some way. As for the debt part - my team doesn't have a Dwarf, they're very good with finance and commerce, but I'll give it a shake. Whenever you loan someone money, you have to assume there is some risk they won't pay it back - they'll die, for example, or be kidnapped by bandits or have all their money or their tools stolen before they can pay you back, even if they intended all along as sincerely as you might want to make things square. The way loans work with us is that the risk of nonrepayment is just something the lender has to price in, regardless of why it might occur. They can guess the risk with each loan, and adjust the rates of interest they charge accordingly - do you have interest here -"

"In practice," says Cassiel, "Vanda Nossëo citizens get a payment periodically just for being citizens, and it's enough to live on and then some, and in most remotely normal situations a lender can get some of that money diverted to them until the loan's paid off."

"Yes, also that," says Nelen.

"Aha. Let me see if I have this right. There's no need to interact with your debtor at all, because Vanda Nossëo will handle repayment; there may not even be a need for the debtor to remember to pay. Vanda Nossëo uses monetary payments to recognize the basic dignity of all those who have done nothing wrong; another effect of this is that there's no need to raise a hand against those that are worthless, because they can simply also be paid what they're worth. The rest is a purely practical question of keeping the ones that are dangerous away from people and - ah - how did you ensure that the people on that moon weren't themselves worthless?"

"- we don't have a practice of considering people worthless," says Nelen, with somewhat more deliberate patience than he's manifested before.

"Prisoners actually get the universal payments too but usually some of it gets diverted to prison costs," says Tarwë. "So they have some incentive to pick prisons that are efficient instead of the ones that spend the most lavishly."

"...Hm. I find this startling enough to be suggestive of a deeper gulf in understanding than I imagined. If possible, Ambassador Utopia, Envoy Tarwë, I would like to table further discussion of justice and migration for now and ask you to instead find me a book on political philosophy to present to one of Sesat's philosophers. I can do likewise for you, and we can then return to the topic later; and right now, I would have you speak further with General Tana and Mayor Zatar about the implementation of your plans to provide education and sell enchanted things, both of which you have my permission to proceed with, and about anything else that occurs to any of you as immediately urgent."

"That sounds like a good next step, your splendidness," says Nelen. "The specific magic we're using for translation will let us read and write, but the solution we have for translating books quickly is less good; we can have one of us on hand to consult the original as necessary, or we can offer your philosopher a copy of the same translation we use, or both, as you prefer. Where should Tarwë meet the philosopher? Should we continue the meeting with the general and mayor here or somewhere else?"

"You may remain here - I'll have to send for a philosopher but Envoy Tarwë may have someone show him around my library now. I extend to you also my hospitality; you may have beds made for you here, for when you tire, or elsewhere in this city."

"Thank you, we might take you up on that," says Nelen cheerily. (Zanro smiles.) Tarwë gets up to be shown to the library.

Tarwë can be introduced to a cheerful librarian who points out the political philosophy - a few old books titled Kings And Cities, If Gela Smiles, The Use of Kindness in the Retention of a Population, and Musings of Azan volumes one and two - and speculates that the most sensible philosopher for the Star-of-Stars to send for would be Feris, who lives in Leopard Hill and wrote these two books over here, On Minds and On Meaning.

Sounds good. Tarwë can start reading the books in the meanwhile.

The Use of Kindness in the Retention of a Population turns out to be mostly the invention of the concept of making people want to live in your country rather than having societies consisting entirely of a royal court and slaves. There are surprisingly relevant digressions into tax policy and farming techniques and how they contribute to the technical ability to have something that could very generously be called a middle class. A later scribe has added margin notes about how this relates to the very recent invention of an idea that best translates as body autonomy but is mostly weaker than and slightly skew to the Earth idea.

Feris of Leopard Hill's books go into a lot of detail about decisionmaking. When do people want to try to do something and when do they want to look like they're trying? What happens when people aren't clear on which they want to do? To what extent does it even matter? Feris metaphorically paints a picture of a society wherein people almost always want to look like they're trying and almost never care about any of the things they want to be seen trying to accomplish - want to be seen to be someone who gets revenge, when they don't care, when sometimes no one cares; or want not to be seen as backing down, when they don't care at all about any of someone's specific demands; or want to be seen as brave, when what they'd be risking themselves for isn't worth anything to them. Feris is interested in whether people can know all this about themselves, whether honor is about more than reputation, how anyone knows anything, whether all questions have true answers.

Tarwë is mostly left alone to read, but at one point when he's between books, the librarian comments that Azan's royal library is understaffed right now because they ran out of slaves and that's one reason they want to go to war.

"Do you think it might be useful for my team and the team sent to Azan to talk about what we've found sooner than later?" inquires Tarwë.

"I don't make the choices, I just chronicle them. What's it trade off against if you do?"

"Sometimes people from states that have tense relationships with their neighbors prefer not to have the sense that we're talking behind their backs. We'll send reports to the same central coordinator, but usually we wouldn't meet directly unless our host states wanted that."

"Well, I don't see why that'd be a problem, but I already said I don't make the choices around here."

Tarwë nods and sends Nelen a message to that effect. (This is invisible.) (Nelen's inquiry to the mayor and general is not.)

The mayor admits he thought they were already going to do that, and the general says he thought the same but since they're asking permission and giving Sesat the chance to set conditions he'd like it to happen on the condition that Vanda Nossëo share with Sesat what they figure out about what Azan he is thinking, because Azan was until recently very isolationist and it's hard to do diplomacy with them and Sesat at this point genuinely does not know what the war is about.

"I can't actually agree to that condition without the coordinator's go-ahead, which would only come after the other team asks Azan he about it; it's possible Azan he has already asked that our counterparts keep something confidential," apologizes Nelen. "And we wouldn't know that until we talked to them."

"Suppose you talk to them and tell us anything you can pass on - I'm not asking for the number of people in their army, here, I know that, I want to know what they want from us. Seems very unlikely that was meant to be a secret."

"I'm happy to agree that anything we can tell you that wouldn't violate a security or a confidence we'll pass along."

"Good. Talk with them, then. You'll like Azan's rhetoric better than ours but I don't think you'll like what's beneath it very well."

"Sometimes good rhetoric yields to good values, once there's more of everything to go around. But we don't count on it," says Nelen. "I'll mention in my report that we'd like to rendezvous up on the ship we have in orbit."

Azan, meanwhile, has received its own delegation.

Azan stands out, to anyone comparing reports from the region, as having the unchallenged best human rights record of this century and general area. The idea of spreading their relatively merciful system more broadly is popular both with the people and with the government; for broadly humanitarian reasons, they were hoping to conquer Sesat and enslave and maim its entire defeated army to prevent them from taking up arms again. The team Vanda Nossëo sent them did not find it hard to convince Azan he to step aside and let them handle the humanitarian outreach instead; word of this has already reached the border and is still making its way to the Sesati capital.

The story Azan tells about the war is that Azan has absolutely open borders, a Sesati chose to immigrate, and when Sesati pursuers chased her across the border they thus crossed the border specifically to attack and kidnap an Azani citizen. But reading between the lines a bit, most of Azan is tired of the refugees they take in being in the shape Sesat leaves them in, tired of taking in scarred scared immigrants who won't talk about their pasts, and even angrier about the ones who don't make it across the border. Some of Azan's key decisionmakers are intensely aware that every day they don't conquer Sesat is a day people are tortured. In the complete absence of any record of any other polity even having concepts like the fundamental equality of humanity, there hasn't been any prior example to look to to learn what happens when one polity decides to conquer another to spread ideas like that.

They told Sesat it was about the immigrant. The correspondence about it was... confusing. They did not choose to make sure they had come to a mutual understanding before they attacked.

Azan's probably not going to be as thorny as Sesat. Its king insisted that they keep their magic healing easily avoidable - not gatekept at all, just avoidable - and needed the concept of voting on membership explained to him, sure. But the human sacrifice is all consensual and they're not very attached to the idea of staffing their library with blind former soldiers and so far they're mostly taking Vanda Nossëo's diplomatic overtures as an opportunity to get paid to stop doing things they didn't like doing anyway. Kind of a lot of things they didn't like doing anyway, but.

Azan's diplomatic team are really not thrilled about the maiming (though they are thrilled to have arrived in time to prevent it!) There will be no trouble at all about making magic healing avoidable; they can have a few hundred medical alert bracelets sent in about it by tomorrow to be distributed to anyone who wants one.

Assuming none of this is sensitive information they okay the coordinator sending the Sesat team a copy of their report. Nelen reads it and then does his best to explain the story they're telling, at least to Vanda Nossëo, about whence the war.

(Well, mostly prevent. They took one prisoner in the first battle - well, two, but one killed himself - but the vast majority of Sesat's army will be fine now.)

Tana frowns thoughtfully. "I'm curious if that's how you see us, too."

"We have - more exposure to a wide variety of examples to learn from," says Nelen. "Almost everybody goes through a historical period where they have to learn by doing - and in particular have to learn ethics by doing atrocities, it's really common. You're doing what you can with what you have. But you do seem to be in the historical period with atrocities in it, if that's what you're wondering."

"Which things are the atrocities and what do people learn about ethics that makes them stop?"

"Slavery, torture - Azan maiming prisoners counts too - on my own planet there's a caste system, since retrofitted to be less abusive and restrictive. Believe me, I understand that these things are solutions to problems that are very real and serious in a scarcity economy without good luck and good examples - if a lot of societies got through their development without having to resort to anything we'd call an atrocity it might be another story when we found one with slaves, but as it is Sesat doesn't stand out for the tech level. As I said, you're doing what you can with what you have. We're here to see if you can have more and then use that to develop into a state that doesn't maltreat people. - Tarwë says he likes your book about kindness in retention of a population. That's basically what we're doing, on a larger scale."

"I've noticed," Tana says dryly. "So - worlds get richer and then decide they don't need slavery, and since they don't need it they don't bother to have it?"

"That's often the way it goes, yes. On my planet we had slavery for a while, but for species-specific psychological reasons the slaves were normally not allowed to have children, so once the practices that added new slaves slowed down and then stopped it didn't self-sustain. But that's not to our particular credit - there was an ongoing oppressive situation that Vanda Nossëo had to dismantle, it just wasn't specifically construing people as property. And we were much farther along the technology advancement sequence then than you are now."

Tana pulls his mouth to the side and thinks about that.

"It doesn't sound like an improvement," says Zatar. "If - what's the worst kind of crime, to your people?"

"Putting someone in a hallucinatory torture simulation for millions of subjective years while also forcing them to have children who will be cannon fodder in the army of an evil god," says Nelen. "- it comes up surprisingly often."

Zatar makes a face. And then another face. "Right, well, so. I haven't done that. And so I imagine if someone treated me and that creature equally, that'd be insulting. Not to say that the insult would be the worst part or that you should take it into account before you've stopped them, but afterward, what's a society for if not acknowledging that - hm - I suppose I don't really even know how I, personally, not being able to trap anyone in a that thing for millions of years, could get any worse than the worst we already do to slaves, and now I want to, and now I understand why you'd want to leave room at the bottom to get worse. But you see my point, right?"

"I'm not sure I do. - if it matters, we just kill that particular brand of evil god whenever we turn one up, that's our stated policy."

"I'm sure I don't know enough yet to say what your policy should be. I just mean - I'm obviously better than them, so I should be treated better, otherwise it's insulting - and whenever someone is better than anyone else, it's better to treat them better, right, otherwise it's like saying they're equal, which is an insult to the one that's better."

"A lot of people felt that way on my home planet too," says Nelen evenly.

"Huh. What changed your mind?'

"Mine? Nothing. They thought they were better than people with red hair."

"I see why you'd be soured on the idea, if they were that silly about it."

Nelen smiles a little. "It's more complicated than I'm making it sound. They had a lot of reasons. Vanda Nossëo worked really hard to accommodate them and get them a setup they could live with when I'm sure it was enormously tempting to everyone involved to just throw up their hands and say they'd enforce laws against violence and to hell with their stupid taboos. But to everybody else, I'm told it really does look like - they think they're better than people with red hair. Anyway. I think we might differ in - how important a priority it seems to us to avoid insulting people just by being generous to other people around them. Not even more generous."

"I think if you want me to have an opinion about it that I bother to put weight on I should also talk to someone with a different hair color and if you don't - well, I've told you where you can put a new business, the only war-related decisionmaking I've been doing is making sure we can shelter enough people within the walls, and I'll be around if you think of anything else..."

"There's a purple on the shipboard team," says Nelen agreeably, "if you'd like to arrange a meeting. Can you give us advice on how to buy the land for our shop booths and prospective bus stations?"

"Oh, I was just going to lend you space for a shop, rent-free for the time being because you don't even have any local currency and any rent I might want I can also collect by coming by to reminisce about my childhood. But normally when you need more land..." Zatar can explain how that works.

Okay! Natsuko will go put up a shop in the lent space and Zanro will peel off to see about buying Charpitorium land and bus stop land.

Meanwhile, Feris the philosopher travels faster than he ever has before, at a gallop the whole way and changing horses several times on the road. He comes running into the library in the palace and stops and says, "Uh, excuse me, I was told it's extremely urgent and a matter of national security for me to speak to a tall foreigner with braids..."

"Hello," says the tall foreigner with braids. "I'm not sure it was quite that urgent. My party and I have come from Vanda Nossëo -" Standard "what the fuck is Vanda Nossëo" spiel.

"Well, that does sound... very important. It's delightful to meet you. I am Feris, one of Sesat's soldiers and in better times one of its philosophers."

"My name is Tarwë. Thank you for coming to meet me. It was suggested that some of the potential rough spots between Sesat and Vanda Nossëo come down to philosophical differences of opinion."

"I can help with that. What've you already identified as possible differences of opinion?"

"Vanda Nossëo operates in significant part on a principle similar to the one outlined here," Tarwë says, holding up the book on kindness's role in retaining a population, "but our particular implementation forbids slavery, and in general issues much gentler sentences for crimes."

"That... is an odd claim to make, I think - if what you want to do is steal our slaves, why did you come here and speak to our government?"

"We're happy to buy them," says Tarwë, "as a one-time deal, assuming we can find a way to prevent more from being enslaved."

" - Sir, I think you should back up and explain your goals here without reference to local schools of thought you've only just learned exist, and go as deep as you can, not goals at the level of 'I want to buy a sword' or even at the level of 'I don't want to be attacked' but at the level of 'I don't want to be injured'."

"We want everyone to be free and safe and rich and happy," says Tarwë. "That extends to everyone, including slaves. We don't want to achieve this through conquest or theft. That would work in the short term, but it gets worse long-term results than coming to an agreement with the people who live in a state and own slaves. We're effectively hoping to bribe you."

"And if everyone else here is free and safe and rich, they'll try to keep the slaves from also being those things, and they won't be happy if the slaves are happy, so you have a conundrum, and you're hoping for a stabler resolution than that some people greet you as saviors from the stars while everyone else plots revenge - would you say that's true?"

"That's ideal, yes."

"Can you tell me some stories about times you've done diplomacy this difficult before?" The thing he mostly wants to figure out from this is whether they want people safe and free and rich and happy, or want to go home with a few new happy citizens and say they tried. He can work with either, or at least he hopes he can, or at least he knows if he can't he'll disappoint the Star-of-Stars... but anyway he has to know which it is.

"Sure - do you want things I was there for, or stuff they cover in our training?"

"Either."

So Tarwë can tell him the story of Amenta, which he wasn't there for but Nelen was, as one of the natives being contacted, if he wants more details; they wound up putting some sixty-five million reds through a process that replaced all the matter of their body completely new, just so they wouldn't have to tell the other thirteen billion Amentans that their pollution taboo was too stupid to accommodate. It was very time-consuming and expensive and probably cost them some goodwill with some of the reds but it got them the Amentans on board, and now they form a big chunk of Vanda Nossëo personnel in various capacities, and they're happily raising more who'll grow up free and safe with all the opportunities of the multiverse at their feet.

Oh, good. He can work with this.

"It's not precisely the same sort of thing, it's obviously more concrete and provable, but people here are generally concerned that slaves are - how do I put this - criminally inclined, honorless, lacking the traits that separate people from animals - and in addition to that there'll be individual people who will have been personally harmed, to whom it can be very important that all of society has taken the very strong stance that what happened to them was utterly beyond the bounds of civilized behavior - and in addition to that, there are additional practical problems you'll have to deal with, but, if you have the power to remake bodies and travel to the stars, perhaps what seems insoluble to me will be easy for you."

"If there's some serious chance that slaves lack personhood here that seems like it makes it all the more important to stop enslaving new people," says Tarwë. "Would it help to have someone with psychic powers by to check?"

"...You know, it might. I sort of expect the slaves to say 'oh but I would be uncomfortable with that' and the person with psychic powers to respect that," or pretend to respect it but at any rate not pass any information on, "or that if they do look it'll be inconclusive because sometimes people aren't being brave or honorable or thinking about what is more important to them than food and drink, so it'd be easy to say 'well, maybe they have those things sometimes and we just looked at the wrong time'..."

"We don't really consider bravery or honor or having any particular kind of priority in life to be a criterion of personhood," Tarwë says.

"Then you're going to have much broader problems with Sesat than this."

"Where else is it likely to come up?"

"If our criteria for personhood are narrower than yours? I have no idea how many of those you call - something your magic translates as 'people' - aren't. And if you don't seek justice, if you don't seek to recognize and acknowledge any of those things that make some people better than others, in Sesat's eyes, then you likely sometimes promote the lesser over the greater, as Sesatis will see it, and you likely think we do too, and you likely think half the sacrifices we've made have been pointless - you likely think our Star-of-Stars makes bad choices and is cruel - you likely hope we'll come to see things your way, which is to say, that we'll abandon our own values - I don't see this going well unless I've badly misunderstood. I, of course, don't have psychic powers, so I may well have misunderstood you in some way. Do you think I have?"

...If the psychic powers are real and not just made up to tell Sesat a convenient story then there's no way Vanda Nossëo has the concept of everyone lying to each other and knowing they're being lied to and cooperating because it's convenient. Nelen in particular might, though, it sounded like that happened on Amenta...

"It's not how I'd put it, but - no, there's not an obvious fundamental misunderstanding there. I'm sorry to disappoint you about how the broader multiverse tends to do ethical reasoning. My people had to make some adjustments too, for all that they tell you that Elves pop out of our worlds ready to join Vanda Nossëo on no notice."

"Hm. I think it might be more productive if I spoke to Ambassador Utopia privately, but I am also interested in hearing about the adjustments you made."

"Elves are naturally immortal and naturally resurrectable by our god of the dead, and accordingly put little weight on life per se - everyone will be all right again in the long run - and a lot on childhood, of childhoods being unburdened and abundantly happy and supported by adults with nothing else to do but raise children. It would have been considered not unreasonable for, say, a family losing a grandfather to the one and only war in our history while the grandchild was any younger than fifty, to all jointly commit suicide so they could meet again some hundreds or thousands of years later none the worse for wear, when that weighed against the grandfather missing a childhood and the child growing up without the grandfather. So it was difficult for us to understand the casualness with which humans and many other species handle adoption, and divorce - we also don't divorce - and deciding, or not deciding, to have children - we also don't conceive by accident -

There's also a historical enmity between my species and Zanro's, and also we were a little thrown by so many people - including some Elves! - preferring romance with members of their same gender or non-monogamously or both, but for me the children thing was the big one."

"...I admit, that sounds bizarre. And - how did you deal with that, then?"

"Well, it took me some time. I'm new at this job because my youngest wasn't a hundred yet," says Tarwë. "Her birthday was about a year ago. But mostly I met people. People who had had accidental children, or divorced, or who were accidental children, or who'd been raised by single or adoptive parents. Most of the time everyone agrees that it's better if children come into existence with parents who want to raise them, and Vanda Nossëo does make distributing contraception a top priority, but it didn't seem to be a life-defining tragedy, for most people like that I've met."

"Did you think what you did before because you thought it would be, rather than because you care about it no matter what anyone involved thinks or feels about it?"

"For me it would absolutely be a life-defining tragedy if my wife divorced me or if I had a grandchild who I didn't get to watch grow up," says Tarwë. "But once some Elves found themselves counseling a newly created band of humans - adults, brought into existence that way - and might have accidentally driven them extinct if they hadn't had someone else present with more cosmopolitan perspectives to draw on, advising them to do as Elves would do - not marry till they were at least fifty, and then spend a decorous year not seeing each other during their engagement to make sure, and lying together only upon then being married - and obviously for humans this would have had the women all menopausal before they could have a baby, but better that than a child in an unready family..."

"I admit I'm a bit surprised you don't wish my ancestors had followed your rules and died out so you could take the land."

"We don't need your land. Some people who work for Vanda Nossëo can make an entire new planet in a few weeks. It takes them even less time if they start with one that already has the rock and just needs plants and air on top."

"...So you're all immortal, so your population does nothing but grow, and you have no need of foreign land - if you're not actually able to arrange the neat solution you prefer, will you leave?"

"Well," says Tarwë, "we're still talking to all the other countries on the planet. And there was some interest in non-membership contact with Vanda Nossëo. And we'd take emigrants. But if everyone wanted us to leave, yes. We'd figure that, for whatever reason, we weren't the right people to help you. Maybe try again in fifty years."

"I think you should make that known. It's extremely important that everyone be clear that you're not here to conquer. I expect given everything you've told me about your species that you won't guess why, so I'll tell you: most of Sesat would sooner die than submit to conquerors."

"That's not an unreasonable thing to do, it makes conquest less appealing to anyone who has it on their minds," says Tarwë. "What do you think we can do to make it clear, besides just repeating it whenever it comes up? Do you think it would help if some people got to watch a planet being made?"

"I think people will be concerned about, ah, the thing where you have strong preferences about our internal policies and would like to leverage your fabulous wealth and power to change them. It would be good if it were... clearer that you're trying to offer us something we want. Which I'm not yet convinced you aren't, I'd like myself and all my neighbors to be free and rich and safe and happy. It's only that the last people to say they wanted our people to be freer and richer and safer and happier want to cut off my hand and make me their slave on the theory that I'm less deserving of freedom than those who are slaves now, and the rhetoric they justify it with is about equality. And I'm not even saying that if it really came down to it, if someone really were genuinely offering something better than what we have to everyone else, that I'd necessarily fight that. Maybe I'd find it in myself to say, well, fine then, it's better for my people. But you haven't actually tried, so far as I'm aware, to convince me of that - and perhaps while I was on the road you were trying to convince someone else, but all I know of is that you offered material wealth, which will appeal to people in direct proportion to how much they are the sort of people to primarily care about their immediate comfort and ignore anything greater or more important than that. It looks aggressive; it looks like an attempt to win over the slaves and leave everyone else scrambling to take over their jobs. And I am holding out some hope, here, that you in fact have a better offer to make us than 'if you agree that there is no difference between people we'll make you rich' - maybe what you're trying not to say is that you're all so far beyond us that were you not the kind of people to look with compassion on slaves you wouldn't care about the rest of us, either, and if that's true I can help you figure out how to put it tactfully, or maybe it's something else, but - if you aren't thinking of any obvious things I haven't heard of I ought to speak with Ambassador Utopia because I have a feeling Amentan politics will have prepared him better for Sesati politics."

The longwindedness is maybe, slightly, a bit of a panic response.

"Oh, interesting. We definitely don't cut people's hands off or enslave them and I can see how it would really hurt our case that our nearest rhetorical neighbors do. From our perspective even the Star of Stars is - poor. Not in everything, presumably he can command a lot of labor, but poor in information and comfort and art and music and opportunity and novelty. The people who'd starve next time you had a few bad harvests in a row are poorer, certainly, but I don't know anyone who'd trade him, based strictly on lifestyle features.

At any rate, you can believe whatever you want. We aren't in the business of mind control or censorship, as far as Vanda Nossëo is concerned you can talk all day long about how inferior slaves and the sort of people you'd normally enslave are. We just want to protect the rights we think they, like everyone else, should have, and do that as gently as possible for everyone involved.

You're more than welcome to talk to Ambassador Utopia, of course."

"Yes, I think I ought to, I don't think you and I are successfully communicating."

Feris is, at this point, drawing on every mental trick he has ever used to keep from running away screaming from an actual battle. This conversation is going horribly. Also the psychics are probably real. The only bright side is that they almost certainly aren't psychically monitoring this conversation, which bespeaks a commitment to honesty that would be really reassuring if not for everything else about this situation.

"He's in the meeting room still, as far as I know," says Tarwë.

"I can wait for him, uh, I don't know where we can talk more privately than this library, I don't live around here..."

"If you want a very private conversation I could ask him to take you to our ship in orbit?"

"...Wow. Sure, why not, might as well see it, if he'll also take me back here. One question first, though. What is orbit?"

"Up in the sky, going around the planet, like a moon."

He smiles. "I'd love to see that."

"Okay, I've sent him a message," says Tarwë, "asking him to come by earliest convenience."

No one else particularly needs to keep monopolizing him right now.

Feris is visibly relieved to see him.

"Hello, I'm Nelen Utopia," says Nelen. "Tarwë says you'd like to come up on the ship and have a private conversation?"

"Yes, thank you."

"Is anyone else coming along or just us?"

"Just us, unless Tarwë is."

"I'm planning to read more books," says Tarwë.

"All right," says Nelen, "ready?" And upon being signaled with readiness:

they are on an observation deck of a ship. It looks like - a vast room made of white metal, furnished with lavish perfectly matching upholstery-clad couches and chairs and cut-glass tables, hung with resplendent stained-glass chandeliers, and supplemented with carpets - the fibers on the carpet are fine and soft and flawless, blue and green and white shapes fading into dark gold-speckled sections that look almost like the continents on

the planet below, visible out the window that looks down on, not Sesat, but a patch of land on the other side of the world, where it's currently night, and on this planet there are no gold speckles.

There are a few people on the deck; there's some oversized chairs, large enough to contain people such as the frost giant currently reclining in one sitting opposite her friend she's playing a board game with, who is another Elf like Tarwë; over there there's somebody with purple hair, watching text scroll by on a computer like Nelen's; over there there's an ice-white man with golden eyes, holding unnaturally still and moving from position to position unnaturally quickly; over there there's a human, watching the planet -

"This is the lounge," says Nelen, "but we try to teleport through either here or a cargo bay when feasible rather than have a lot of unremarked teleporting into and out of quarters - I can take you to my berth for privacy."

Feris nods. It's - disorienting and he's going to be very glad he came, later, so he does try to take it all in. The only sense he can get out of it right now is the map, and that they've been here long enough to make one like that, and that they must be very informed.

He'll follow Nelen wherever.

Nelen's quarters are up an elevator and along a hallway! His name is on the door but it's in Anitami so Feris can't read it. Inside there's an entire apartment, with a sitting room sufficient for inviting six people over to hang out, and adjoining dining room also with plenty of chairs for guests and a door that way with plumbing and one that way with a bed and one over there that appears to be his closet, containing more clothes in the style he's wearing. He's done it mostly in shades of red with gold, like his hair. It's got another window but this one doesn't show the planet, just stars, since it's pointing the wrong direction.

A hovering ebony orb, carved abstractly, drifts out of the bathroom, and bumps itself against the door Nelen closed behind him, and lets itself out into the hallway.

"Enchanted cleaning object," he explains. "There's no reason it has to look like that, but Elves like things to be unique and pretty so they'll pick up souvenirs whenever they find something nice and send it to be enchanted."

The door swings closed again and Nelen drops into an armchair.

Feris gives up on trying to parse any of the social implications of any of this except that yes, in fact, the mysterious visitors from the stars are incredibly rich. It's... nice? He will almost certainly think it's nice later.

He takes a seat. "I heard about your planet. I am hoping, desperately at this point, that I am not wrong to guess that there were people  there, maybe a lot of them, who didn't particularly care one way or the other if they were clean, only whether they seemed like they cared enough about it."

"- oh, uh, probably some hyposensitives feel that way? That's a condition where someone has less sensitivity to cleanliness - most reds like me have it, but some of the other castes too."

"Well. But you at least understand the concept; Tarwë didn't seem able to notice it, although it might just have been the ordinary problem of trying to communicate with foreigners in subtext."

"...it could have been either, honestly."

"People who don't want to might end up pressured to die over this, and at the very least they're going to be pressured to make things harder for you, because they're supposed to believe it's right to treat some people better than others and wrong to bow, and you're going to end up taking their slaves without their buy-in, and that'll be unambiguously aggressive and wreck the pretense that you can't or at least definitely won't try to coerce us. I can't speak for everyone else, not for certain, but I think your fantastical bribery is enough that people will want what you're offering. I know I do. But as I tried to convey to Tarwë, we need an excuse to say we aren't just abandoning our principles because you have an impressive enough carrot and stick. We can say you have an intensely convincing argument for why you're right about what we ought to value, although I think that'll be difficult to pull off. We can say you're very sure your fantastical prisons can rehabilitate even slaves. We can wave a hand and claim we magically replaced their entire personalities, if we can be very sure they're not going to cause the statistically expected amount of problems. We can give people meaningless honors, bar slaves from things with functional equivalents, anything that sounds very unequal and people won't look too hard at..."

"- would it help to exile the slaves from Sesat? We can most likely do exiling them from Sesat, at least the ones who were enslaved as opposed to being born into it, I'd need to make a more complicated case for the latter. Meaningless honors are also doable. Complete with pretty medals or something if they like."

"If you can manage to make exile sound bad at the same time as you offer people the opportunity to go visit all the glorious delights of the stars, I will be in awe. We, ah, also have a lower population than some of your worlds, and struggle to maintain it, I think you think of exile more readily than we do. What exactly are the concrete effects you want to justify, and how much actual flex is there in them?"

"We do actually take exile pretty seriously, a lot of people strongly value being able to go back where they came from even if they don't want to live there all the time, but I acknowledge it might be a difficult balance to strike. The effects need to be - anyone in Sesat who wants to leave is able to, even if they're a slave - or a child, or a breadwinner, or a criminal whose only other options are prisons, anyone. That's the rule that we use to avoid needing to have a lot of complicated other rules - we don't have a specific rule against slavery, there's a species in Hazel that likes slavery, they just have to be allowed to leave. And Vanda Nossëo doesn't lie in official communications, which really ties our hands in asserting that we think the slaves are inferior. Other than that we can be fairly creative."

"I did notice your commitment to honesty and I am sure I'll be grateful for it when it's not threatening the lives of everyone I've ever loved. Can we assert something that sounds like 'slaves are inferior' - for that matter, why can't you? It's straightforwardly true that if I pick a slave and a person the slave'll know less or be crueler or less able or less willing to act civilized. Even if I preferred that the slave be happy and free and safe and rich."

"Well," says Nelen, "it's... also true that the slave is unlikely to have a history of... slaveowning. I could maybe clear a weasel wording like 'these slaves do not show Sesat off at its best', but it would be really hard to take questions after that point."

He laughs, and it's more a sudden release of tension than actual humor. "What about, without reference to us and our problems, 'these slaves are clearly beyond Sesat's ability to rehabilitate, we'd like to purchase them and try it ourselves and get an agreement to deliver future slaves to us immediately in exchange for something that makes Sesat too rich to care about their labor and some kind of consideration for the victims' and then, some other time, without reference to slaves and their good points, 'the people of Sesat are justly proud and have more than earned our respect and we would be overjoyed to welcome them into our starry community as our equals'?"

"Buying slaves as an ongoing thing has an incentive problem, in that - not consciously, usually, but most kinds of people are pretty susceptible to doing things that they have financial reason to find prudent. If there are any even slightly marginal cases, such that someone becomes enslaved instead of getting off with a fine or something, we can't afford to make an ongoing habit of paying for slaves."

"As a one-time thing I think, economically, we absolutely need something to replace the labor. As an ongoing thing - a medal's the wrong genre of meaningless thing... there aren't marginal cases between slavery and fines, they'd be between slavery and execution. I don't know. I had a thought that slaves were probably cheap for you because you're astonishingly rich and if you paid in something you have more of than us and pegged the amount to last year's prices you'd never have to say you were going to stop paying but it'd stop meaning anything."

"We can handle replacing the labor. Same way we'd do the math and science lessons." Nelen presses a button on his tablet. "Charp please," he tells his tablet, and it beeps in acknowledgement. A moment later his door opens and there enters a metal construct. "This is a Charp," Nelen explains. "They're nonsapient, but they can take verbal instructions and give verbal reports, they have perfect memories, and they're stronger than a human without needing to eat, sleep, breathe, use light to work by... They won't do the trick if people are currently using slaves for sex or, uh, massages or something, but you can put one to work on a farm or something."

"I expect they'll probably do well enough. You're right that they won't cover everything but we'll be able to handle the rest of their practical use without anything you wouldn't do anyway. And - do you normally compensate victims of crimes, anywhere else in Vanda Nossëo?"

"Under standard circumstances, yes. I'm a little worried that we'd find a lot of nonstandard circumstances and quibble over those - I noticed an emphasis on patricide, which might or might not correspond to it being particularly common in Sesat for what we'd consider child abuse victims to turn on their parents?"

"Assuming, which we should not in fact assume, that I understand what you mean by 'child abuse', it's illegal and sometimes itself punishable by enslavement."

"We don't have a single legal definition of child abuse because it's so terribly cultural and dependent on individual people's values and children themselves vary enormously, we just cover it all with the freedom of emigration, but I'm curious what you define it as."

"Well, it sounds like you mean things like rape or torture, done to one's own children, but I don't think emigration would be at all good enough for it; so much can happen so quickly, for one thing, and for another no one's born old enough to go to the stars alone. So I think you mean something else - maybe something like any violation of a guardian and trustee's duties to a ward."

"Rape and torture are separately illegal, yes, we just cover - emotional abuse and such with the emigration rule."

"That sounds paradoxical, I don't think it translated usefully."

"Emotional abuse? Uh, it covers things like - making someone doubt their sanity, belittling them, threatening them, withholding support and affection in whatever degree is healthy for the species, killing their pets, sabotaging their opportunities to do things the abuser disapproves of..."

"So, generally behaving like an annoying boor, but to children in particular? Patricide is still illegal if your father is strict and rude to you."

"In Vanda Nossëo too," Nelen agrees, "it would just tend to make a court less sympathetic to a petition for compensation."

"...In Sesat you're understood to owe your father a great deal of respect if you're so lucky as to have one. Even if he's a boor. So much so that I can't imagine a court being sympathetic - patricide gets you enslaved by default, in general murder doesn't do that if there wasn't something worse about it, and I can tell that that's not straightforwardly what you do but harsher, but I don't know how not."

"The usual understanding is that if you murder someone you know, you probably had some kind of reason - seldom to never a good reason for murder, but a reason - and murdering a stranger is likely to be a violent impulse. And if you murder, specifically, a parent or guardian, someone who had authority over you while you were vulnerable, the presumption is often that you may have had a very good reason, that it's easy to seriously damage people by mistreating them in their childhoods especially if they can't trivially walk away from the situation and that kind of damage is both the sort of thing that makes you a more murdery sort of person and that makes you have an understandable grudge against the abuser."

" - It'd be a defense, in Sesat, if you could prove your supposed father was... but that's not the most interesting thing. What do you know, about how people being damaged in their childhoods works?"

"I haven't made a particular study of it but the broad understanding is that - kids are still learning how to be people, learning what kind of person they're supposed to be in their situation, and if the example they have is of a - boorish, as you put it, or violent, or cruel person, then that's a form of education whether it was intended as such or not, and they're less equipped to be peaceful productive citizens. I do want to be careful here to draw the distinction that someone having a background that might predispose them to any particular vice doesn't reduce their worth as a person or their rights under Vanda Nossëo, they can learn better and deserve the opportunity to - it's just one of the many reasons not to abuse people."

"An argument I think you might want to make here is that children seeming to take after their parents is an illusion, and the appearance of children born to no free person being worthless is because that's what they're taught, not inherent to what they are."

"- unfortunately children do also tend to take after their parents. That is, I'd expect a child born to Sesati slaves and adopted by some nice random people on, oh, Casentar, to grow up to be a fairly normal citizen of Casentar, but that's mostly because I think it's unlikely that you've filtered strongly enough for the traits that would make someone growing up on Casentar to be an incorrigible criminal, not because I don't think that might be possible in principle."

Feris makes a face. "Sesat isn't filtering strongly enough because half the most important men in any town have kids without mothers - that, ah, that usually means with slaves, kids without fathers doesn't usually - sometimes it does, though - and it's not as if all of them get claimed and raised, either. But it's one of those things you can't bring up, because no individual person wants to admit their absent mother didn't just die giving birth, and there's no accurate recordkeeping about it, so - I don't even know that I'm right, that that's what it usually is. Maybe it's rare. But you see how, if you suggest you've noticed it's common, it'll unbalance something."

"I admit it's - odd to me that you're having trouble maintaining your population and substantial amounts of the birth rate are driven by factors like that. That's unusual in human societies at your tech level, usually there's a tremendous amount of child mortality and plenty of adult mortality to boot but that aside people don't have this much systematic trouble forming and raising children in two-parent households outside some marginal sub-populations, as I understand it."

"Just going by the numbers there are a lot of serfs and free farmers and artisans who mostly don't have slaves and do have wives who can't afford enough silphium to really have much choice in the matter, and don't have anything better to do with themselves if they could. You won't've heard much about them because they're not very important as individuals and I don't imagine you'll've spoken to any."

"Oh, silphium being in heavy use could explain it. Anyway, if it will help to assert that I believe that a child of two slaves could grow up to be a normal productive citizen on Casentar and leave the notion that only environment affects personality implicit, I can do that."

"It might help. And - I don't know what you can possibly say that'd be honest, given..." Feris glances around at all of the incomprehensible grandeur. "...everything, but if there were a thing you could say that was honest and at all plausible and sounded like 'we're very glad Sesat freely chose to deal with us, because it would have been totally infeasible to force the issue and we're much better off with Sesat's alliance than we would have been otherwise' that would also matter. A lot."

"- is 'infeasible' important compared to, say, 'illegal', or 'unconscionable' -"

"Yes. Not that the other two aren't good news."

"- totally infeasible to make it a member state by force?" suggests Nelen. "- though one time a country did have an internal coup specifically aimed at putting through a vote..."

"Really? It seems as if you could annex Sesat without much trouble, the only problems are that you don't want to and people'd kill themselves or throw themselves at you to make you kill them." And kill their families but he'd rather Vanda Nossëo not be tipped off to worry about that.

"I mean, we could occupy the territory but what we'd have after that would be at most one of 'Sesat' or 'a member state'."

"Well, by that logic, if there's anything you want that it'd be unconscionable to achieve by force, then it's infeasible to achieve your goals here without our willing cooperation."

"It's infeasible to achieve all of them, definitely."

Meanwhile, the shops draw attention. A woman investigates one in Sesat's capital and asks if they have anything that makes spinning easier.

"Sure," says Zanro, "but do you want spinning only easier, or do you just want thread, or even fabric?"

"Begging your pardon, sir, I am sure your fabric is finer than any I've ever made, and I may want it as well, if the price for both is two stories. How long must the stories be, and must they be true?"

"You can tell me a fictional story!" says Zanro cheerily, pulling down a bolt of chambray and grabbing a spinning wheel out of the back room.

"There was once a young woman who married a young man, and at their wedding she fainted, and she became deathly ill. Her husband feared she was dying, and did not touch her, only ordered his maidservants to take her to her room and let her rest and bring her anything she needed. Then he went to ask a wise old woman what was to be done, and she said, 'it is pointless even to try. Only wait and see.'

"The young man was not pleased. He had heard of a beast in a palace several days journey away who had studied healing, who knew all there was to know about the flesh of any creature. So the young man set off to find the beast. He crossed the distance in a great haste, and came to the palace, and begged to speak to its master.

"The beast let him in, and greeted him, and asked what brought him so urgently. 'My wife is deathly ill,' said the young man, 'and I must save her.'

"And the beast said, 'I will trade you. I have in my garden a certain tree, whose fruit is unlike that of any other tree in the world. You may take one fruit from it and bring it home to your wife for her to eat. In exchange, when you reach the gates of your home, whatever creature you see first - be it one of your sheep, or one of your goats, or anything else that lives and walks on the earth and has red blood - you must bring here and give to me to devour.'

"The man agreed, and took the fruit, and set off in haste to reach his wife in time.

"When he got there, he discovered she had recovered, and had waited by the gate to greet him.

"Is that story to your liking, sir?"

"It'll buy you a spinning wheel!" said Zanro, pushing it toward her. "Do you want me to show you how it works now?"

"I might. Will it cost me another story?"

"Nah, comes with the wheel, but if you want the fabric that will and I can demo while you tell it."

"...Sure, I'd like that. Hm. For my next story... once, long ago, humans built a city. This was very long ago, and no one knew yet how to care about anything but whether they were hungry and whether they were tired. A god, Gela, had promised abundant harvests if they would make offerings, so they did, so Gela blessed the city and protected it. But the city was ugly, and the countryside had been beautiful before, and so another god, Laen, hated it and wanted to destroy it.

"So Gela and Laen appointed mortal champions to do battle, Gela a man of the city and Laen a savage wild man of the distant countryside.

"And Laen said, 'Gela, you fool, my champion is far stronger than yours. You can never win supporting those people.'

"Gela only smiled, and whispered secret instructions to his people. And the day came, and the battle was fought, and Laen's champion defeated Gela's. But when Laen looked at the city he meant to destroy, he saw that it had been decorated with flowers, and paintings of flowers, and things that made him no longer hate it. He had said he would destroy it, so he had to destroy it; but he told the people he was going to do that, and that they should take their things away first, and make their cities more beautiful than this one.

"So the people left, some to the south and some to the west, and began to build more cities, and made the buildings beautiful to look upon, and laid the streets out neatly, and planted flowers around them, and moved everything they valued from the old city into the new, until they had more cities, and greater, and were unafraid of anything that might happen to their first home, because it no longer held anything they needed. And thus did Laen destroy the first city of men."

"Aw, my co-worker will like that one." He's demonstrated the spinning wheel's mechanism by now. A bolt of chambray and the wheel are now hers!

Oh, good, she's pleased one of the fairies. She takes her chambray and her spinning wheel home and gets to work - they'll likely both be gone in the morning, that being how fairies work, but perhaps it'll be worth it if the evening's spinning goes well.

A couple of men come by the same shop next. One of them looks around to see what's for sale, while the other asks if there's anything that can be done for the couple of fingers he lost in an accident a few years ago.

"Yup! Let me call in a float healer - okay, two minute wait, you want to tell me a story while we wait?" says Zanro.

There's fruit and meat and spices, lamps and shoes and space heaters and wireless kettles and contraceptive rings and air filters, a sign saying you can get the same kind of translation enchantment the staff use...

"I'm no good at stories, but, um, what kind do you like?"

The other man meanwhile looks lingeringly at the shoes as he palms some spices.

Zanro glances at him buuuut doesn't say anything about it.

"A personal anecdote or a song'll do!" he says. "Doesn't matter if it's good."

He sings a catchy, repetitive, upbeat song about a historical battle and how heroic Sesat's army was.

Zanro nods along. A moment after the song's over, a healer - short, incredibly beardy, lots of chunky metal accessories - appears. "You're the one needs healing?" he asks the man with missing fingers.

"I'm the one that wants healing," he says.

Boop!

"Hey," says Zanro to the healer, "before you go?"

"Yeah?"

"Can you pop that fellow over a foot to the left less what he's filched?"

"Ah, yeah, no problem."

Dwarf and thief both teleport a foot to the left. The spices, left behind, fall in their packets to the floor. Zanro scoops them up and puts them back.

"I was going to pay for those! I know stories!"

"Oh, cool," says Zanro, retrieving the spices he'd chosen and holding them as a batch. "Let's hear 'em."

"Um. Well."

(The guy who was healed slips out, not taking anything else.)

"So one of them is about this, um, drop of water. One day it fell from heaven. And, um, it was very afraid, so it went slinking off downhill, and found other drops of water, and then it was less afraid, and they told it they could all travel together to meet a bunch of other drops of water, and then they all lived in a great country of just drops of water, and they ate fish and seaweed, and then one day the little drop of water was called back home to heaven, but by then it liked the ocean so much it was sad to leave.

"And, um, I know another story about... yesterday... when the sun rose. And then I saw that I had a knife needing its last pass or two of sharpening, so I sharpened it, and then I sent it to the person who wanted it, and then I got paid. And then I looked at my list of commissions I'm doing and thought about what I'd do next. And then, uh, my wife made lunch, and we had bread and butter and lentils and radishes, and, you know, I thought the lentils were very bland and the radishes weren't bland enough but somehow there wasn't a good way to make it even out. And then I started on another project. And then I got frustrated with it and went off and played ur and got a bit drunk and then I went home and spent some time with my wife and then we ate again and we'd run out of lentils but we had more bread and butter and some cheese and finished the radishes, good riddance. And. Uh. Hm."

He looks around, as if maybe he'll get an idea from something in the store. Just one more to go. "Anyway, for my next story, today I decided to buy some spices by telling you stories. Does that count as a story or an anecdote."

"I'll count it as an anecdote." Zanro counts out the three spice packets and hands them over. "I hope they make your next batch of lentils more interesting!"

"I hope so too."

In another town near the border with Iral, meanwhile, a pair of siblings walk into a magic shop. Not that they announce themselves as such, but they look even more closely related than most pairs of random people in Sesat.

"Hi!" chirps the purple-haired lady who's pulling dozens of vacuum-packed lambchops out of a bag that does not seem like it should be able to hold even like three of them. "What can I do for you two today?"

"Hi! We were wondering how people go about becoming purple-haired starfarers with the ability to construct buildings by magic."

"Oh, I was born with purple hair, though I can sell you some dye if you're keen." She fills up the lamb chop bin and starts pulling out chicken. This turns her around enough to reveal that there is an equally purple baby sleeping slung to her back. "To learn magic, if you're in a hurry, you'll want a bus off the planet."

"The hair was metonymy, though it's stunning. Will you tell me more about magic, and buses off the planet, and what those things would cost us?"

Her brother, meanwhile, looks at the goods for sale (and does not try to shoplift).

"There's bus stops going up as they get the land for them bought. A big old thing like a long building with a lot of windows - sometimes just one big window - will pop into place, every five or ten minutes depending on how much people are taking the bus to and from here, and you can get into it and have a seat and it'll pop to Shiund Hub, in Edda, that's where all the buses from this planet are going. Then it depends where you want to go - you specifically want the popping buildings into place one?"

"There are multiple types? I don't know what the types are."

"You can take an aptitude test if you're not picky! They probably have an aptitude test center less than a mile from Shiund but I don't know exactly where, you can ask at an information booth. Anyway, bus tickets between this planet and Shiund are free for now, and if you want to go farther you can use these tokens," she picks up a bin of them and rattles it, "which you can buy for stories and songs same as anything else in the shop. One token'll get you anywhere in the map and home again."

It doesn't... feel right, make narrative sense... it doesn't fit into a story where fairies sell goods that vanish within a day, if they sell promises to take you somewhere later. That's not the kind of thing that should vanish. But neither are the other goods, if the shop is going to stay, if the fairies are going to stay.

"You should get the meat," she tells her brother.

"You're sure?"

"I think so. How long are the bus tokens good for?"

"Oh, forever, even after we stop selling the tokens the ones you have will work till you spend them. And when we stop selling them you buy tickets, and we don't phase that in till we expect most people can afford them and figure out how to buy them."

"Yeah, get the meat, if they came from a story it's a story where they stay." And if they didn't come from a story the meat isn't going to vanish just because it would in some other story that isn't even this one. It could be poisoned. It would be slightly insane to imagine these people would need to poison the meat. "Can I get multiple tokens if my story is interesting enough?"

"Sure, why not."

"This is a story that isn't true as far as I know, but I might be wrong. There was a young widow. She had been married for a year, and had no children, and she lived near a town but not within its walls. Her cousin had children, three of them, and the widow sometimes watched the children, and told them stories.

"One of those was the story of a brave hero who roamed far and wide, seeking out monsters and defeating them, and giving food to orphans. The hero's name was Tena, and he came from somewhere to the north - not Iral, farther than that - and didn't tell people what he had done, lest he never learn whether they treated strangers poorly.

"Eventually, the widow's cousin died, and she sold her husband's empty house and moved in with the children. Then one day a stranger calling himself Tena came traveling from the north and stayed with them. The children were extremely excited and said they knew all about him. The widow said nothing. She also knew something about him; she had watched him come in through town, heard how he spoke, been around him, even smelled how he smelled, and she knew well the signs that he was..." Why did she wedge herself into this, the stories contradict each other about what euphemisms go over well and which are insulting, and now she has to finish this sentence in front of a fairy. "...a traveler from farther than north, and no mere human. So she was kind to him, of course, but said nothing of where she thought he had come from, only told the children how to be polite to their guest.

"Then, a ravenous beast attacked. The children insisted Tena could and would and should defeat it and save the town. Tena, for his part, did not think so. He ran. He was afraid and he did not know these people or have any reason to love them; he would have fought if the beast had attacked his own people, of course; he was no coward. He simply did not care.

"Or so he thought.

"When he had stopped running, he found himself weeping with grief that he had never guessed he might feel. He began to pray to Laen for mercy, for something to have been different, for them not to have died. This wasn't such a stupid thing for him to do as it sounds like, because...

"Once, long before this, Laen boasted that there was nothing he could not destroy. All those who heard his challenge and understood it were welcome to try to bring before him a counterexample. Many men tried. They brought him the hardest stones they could find. Their greatest champions challenged him. They brought him to see a river and a mountain. And Laen crumbled their stones, cursed their champions with weakness or killed them outright, and so on. So it seemed Laen boasted truly. Until one day someone who might have been Tena's grandfather, or great-grandfather, or father, or mother, or could have been any of Tena's people, really, went to challenge Laen.

"And this person told Laen a story. It was a story greater than this one, and one I could not tell you, though some have tried to reconstruct it. It was a story about Laen himself, and it made him laugh, and it made him weep, and it woke in him anger and awe. And then it ended.

"'The moment has already passed,' said Laen. 'I don't see how you even imagined that your story could outlast a mountain.'

"And Tena's kinsman answered, 'you remember it.'

"'I could forget,' said Laen.

"And Tena's kinsman answered, 'I know all there is to know about you, and I could tell you every story you've ever lived. Will you destroy them all? Your recollection and mine and everyone else who has ever known you? Would you be nothing, just to prove me wrong? I'll start with the story of your boast, and then how will you remember you even want to forget?'

"And Laen admitted he was beaten. Which is why he's so much more willing to answer Tena and his kinsfolk's prayers than those of me and my kinsfolk. So Tena, in his grief and confusion, prayed to Laen. And then, when he had run too far to run any further, and wept too much to weep any more, and prayed the most desperate prayer he had ever prayed, he rested, and fell asleep."

Her voice grows quieter now, at least for a while. "He dreamed of the widow. He dreamed of his home. He dreamed that the widow had come to stay with him. In the dream, they were all attacked by a monster, and she told all the children around her to run, and stood to distract the monster.

"Tena woke, then, uneasy and ashamed, and went along on his way. He passed human towns but did not visit them. Eventually, he saw a palace, where there lived a beast, not so different from the beast he had run away from, but a beast capable of speech and intelligent thought. It invited Tena in, and offered him food, and saw that Tena's heart was very heavy, and asked what troubled him.

"'I am troubled because I wish I had protected the people who sheltered me,' said Tena. 'They believed I was a great hero who would do what they needed. They were wrong. I don't know what to do now. Laen has not answered my prayer.'

"And the beast said, 'I have a riddle for you, if you will keep a secret.' And Tena agreed to keep the secret, so the beast said: 'I am a beast and not a man, and so I bow to threats; yet rarely am I threatened, for I am strong; and none know this about me, save you, because you would not tell. No one else knows, because it has never come to pass that someone told me "stop or I will kill you" and I stopped. Neither has anyone gotten revenge on me, for no one I have ever hunted has had a friend who could avenge them. So tell me now: how did you save the people who sheltered you?'

"And Tena thought on this, and then he asked if the beast had weapons of any kind to trade him. And the beast said: 'you could try the maze in my courtyard, and see what you find there.'

"And Tena, whose people are wise in these things, said: 'and if I do that, will I be pleased with the results?'

"And the beast said, 'yes, because you asked, I have already placed a bow and a quiver of arrows in the maze.'

"And Tena asked more questions, then explored the maze, then left, and let it be known that the great hero Tena come out of the north had simply run to find his weapons and would avenge any who had been slain while he was gone.

"The beast Tena had spoken to had the power of understanding, but the one that had attacked the town had not, and all its people were dead. Tena avenged them, and went forth, the hero they had spoken of."

"Ooh, I like that one," says the shopkeeper. She hands over two tokens.

"Well, now I'm tempted to find out if I can get three at once. Probably not without thinking it over first. So, these are for traveling the stars, only I don't know the etiquette in the stars and I don't want to offend anyone."

"Well, what is it you want to do up there?"

"Learn magic and find out what other things I want to do and maybe do more than that."

"Well, you'll probably want an information booth or something, and the information booth people are used to confused travelers. To leave a nice big margin around what'll offend people, don't touch people with yourself or objects, and if you need to ask directions or something try to find someone who isn't busy, and if a door is locked that means you shouldn't go through it, and if there's a queue and you want what they're queuing for, go to the end of it and wait."

"I think I can do that. May I ask why you're collecting stories, by the way?"

"When Vanda Nossëo shows up in a new place, things start changing, really really quickly. In a culture without a really high literacy rate and tendency to write everything down, that can make it quickly really hard to get undistorted information on what the culture's like before we show up. So on low tech places like this one we trade stuff for stories, and then our historians are happier about the situation. It also helps people feel like it's a trade and not charity, some people hate getting charity, and also seems to help with people thinking we're booby trapping the stuff. Plus it gets people talking more and that helps them get used to us more than if we just had, like, a shelf you could take stuff off of."

"We have a really high literacy rate. Even one of our housekeeper's kids can take notes on which houses they clean when."

"Yeah, that's unusual for this tech level. But it doesn't hurt to have more copies of stories, even if they're all also written down somewhere. Historians love that kind of thing."

"I think most of the stories about Laen have been written down but I was putting that one together on the fly out of pieces I'd heard before. I bet someone's written down a story about the beast in the palace before at some point. I don't know, maybe not."

"I'll add that as an annotation!" She taps her computer, which she wears strapped to her arm.

"I ought to head out. It was good meeting you."

She leaves. Her brother doesn't.

"Can I help you with anything?"

"I expect you can! I was wondering what the, uh, minimum story you'd accept is, because I can't follow that and I'm not going to try."

"If you just want to tell me about what you had for breakfast I can take that."

"I ate food today, it's true. And I thought about how stupid the war is. And I noticed that the sky was a nice color. - What about you?"

"Closed up shop on a place called Beach and came to man this booth here! It doesn't have a super good safety rating, since we're new here and don't have great stats on how likely locals are to attack us, but I figured it would be fine. How come you think the war's stupid?"

"Do I get more stuff if I answer? I can also tip you off about when people are likely to get violent."

"That'd be useful, my husband would be real annoyed if we had to clear out the savings account to get a resurrection for the baby."

"No one is going to get offended by the baby unless you do something on the scale of going out and finding someone else's baby and killing it slowly. Or - this is a lot of terrible things that you probably won't do, but I want to list them exhaustively so you can know there's nothing else on the list - if you did something sexual to a child, or committed rape, or kidnapped a bunch of young women and tortured them, or maybe even if it were a bunch of young men, under the circumstances. Or if you went to war and pretended to surrender and then that was a trick and you killed the people you pretended to surrender to. Or otherwise attacked them. Or if you killed your father or your mother. Or I guess if someone conquered Vanda Nossëo and you stood aside and let it happen, but I don't think Sesat would concern ourselves with the baby in that case, I think everyone would have other things to worry about. And even in those cases, your husband could come take the baby and we'd hand it over, if he didn't drag his heels about it or start off saying he wasn't going to. - Obviously that's only the subset of ways you could offend people that would be bad enough for something to happen to your child because of it, but if you don't do any of that, they're safe. I mean, other than diseases and accidents and... I was trying to reassure you but I'm not sure listing awful things that could hurt your baby is as good a strategy for that as I was thinking it might be when I started on it."

"I'm not mostly worried someone'll attack him, but if someone stabbed me and I fell over I could land on him," she explains.

"You are unlikely to get stabbed because you're a woman and it's not really the done thing to get women involved in violence, and you're not a serf or something - if you were a serf and you insulted me I'd hit you, but you're not, not that you should insult me but I'd have to respond to it differently - I guess if you said 'I only look like a human woman but actually where I come from lots of people who look like human women are in the army, and I also think you're trash and I deserve to own you' then I would attack you."

"My species doesn't really have gender," she says. "But I'd get fired if I said something like that."

"Okay, well, if you're not really a woman as I understand women and you don't want to get into a fight, then you shouldn't mortally insult anyone, or challenge anyone to a duel, or... work for Azan or something?"

"Yeah nah they don't have us float between booths in different polities on the same planet. If they decided to get rid of this one I'd wind up on another planet entirely probably."

"Yeah. You never did tell me if I'd get more stuff for telling you why the war is stupid."

"I can count it as a story."

But will she.

"Because it always is. There are so many things I'd rather be doing than dealing with the fact that people can't just agree that Sesat has the land and the people that it has and leave us alone. It never improves anything. And Azan is - ruthless and terrible, but I don't think they're cruel to their own people, and I want us to be able to leave them alone about it without that causing more problems."

She nods sympathetically. "Did you want tokens or something else?"

"I was thinking I'd get some meat, if you could explain how to open it and stuff, and, I don't know, what else do you recommend?"

"A knife'll do it, or grabbing it on either side of one of these notches and pulling hard. If you cook your food, or heat or light your house, with fire you might want a heater or one of these kettle-things you can cook stuff in or a lamp, or if you plan to keep using fire for that you might want an air filter, get some of the smoke out of your face."

"Are the heaters and kettle-things safer if there are kids or senile people around?"

"Safer than a fire, by a lot, except insofar as they might not already know to keep their hands off, but they do heat up. You can hang the heater from a ceiling and that works fine."

"I might want both but I also want the meat and I'm not sure what else I should say..."

"How many siblings do you have and what are your relationships like? What was your favorite toy as a kid? What do you usually do to earn money and how do you feel about that?" she suggests.

"How about instead I give you more advice on not getting punched. Asking about families and close friends is incredibly forward. People might tell you about their relationships with each other, and it's not that hard to figure some of them out if you live in the same town long enough, but don't pry, prying is very rude. And I didn't play with toys much, as a kid, I'd spend a lot of my free time counting flower petals and leaves and stuff."

"Huh. Okay. What kinds of questions would go over better when people can't think of anything to say, here?"

"I'm not sure, maybe ask about their favorite game or their favorite song or what they think of sky's night."

"Sky's night?"

"It's a holiday where people hang out on the roof and watch the stars and have a big meal and sometimes invite strangers to celebrate with them - it's for celebrating whatever you didn't get a chance to during the year, and thinking about what you want to achieve."

"Oh, that sounds nice! As long as there's enough roof to sit on for everybody."

"The roof is the most common thing that everyone thinks of but you're not banned from celebrating in a courtyard or a field. But I have personally never had too little roof to celebrate on and I don't know anyone else who's ever mentioned that either."

Nod nod. "What kind of meat do you want?" she asks.

"I was thinking maybe the lamb but I don't know, what do you recommend?"

"Lamb's good! My favorite's the chicken, though, it's sort of like a kind of poultry from my home planet except I never liked that one and I like humanbiospheretypical chicken and now i can make all those recipes and they're good." She fills up a nice little net bag for him. "I'm allowed to give you quite a lot of this, the meat handouts are subsidized by all the animal lovers who don't want any animals to be eaten and are hoping to displace some butchery."

"You are trying to prevent animals from being eaten by giving me meat."

"Yeah, this meat wasn't animals. They grow it in vats. Or possibly have demons conjure it, I'm not actually sure about this batch but if it's important I can check the box."

"Will it nourish me like meat would?"

"Yeah, exactly like! There's nothing different about it apart from it never having been an animal or they'd have a much harder time convincing people to switch."

"And they want people to switch. Why's that?"

"Because they care about the animals? And don't want animals to be brought up by people who don't care about them and then killed."

"...Ah." He bets he knows what they think of slavery. He kind of wants to ask but isn't sure if it's a good idea. He hesitates and looks around some more to cover for thinking through whether he should say anything.

"Since these are made without animal involvement and vacuum-sealed, they will keep without needing to be kept cold or anything for up to a year - frankly they keep longer than that, but they're specifically rated for a year - and are safe to eat raw, but I recommend cooking them anyway," she says, handing him the bag.

"That's convenient. And I don't eat the... vacuum seal? Right?"

"Right, that you just get rid of."

"Pleasure doing business with you."

Elsewhere someone restrains and manhandles a person with facial tattoos who was trying to get into one of the magic shops.

The proprietor - this one just looks like a human, though he's not ethnically unremarkable for the area - steps out. "Is something wrong? I haven't barred that fellow from my shop."

"Apologies, sir, it's not a fellow," says a bystander who is not too busy engaging in a physical altercation with the fellow to answer.

"I haven't barred that entity from my shop," replies the proprietor.

"'s busy," the person trying to drag them away grunts.

"Our apologies, sir, it was our understanding that you had asked that slaves be kept away from you," says the bystander.

"If somebody said that it was because they don't want to watch slaves being treated like slaves," says the shopkeeper. "So if you want to be polite, you'll lay off him. I have not barred that entity from my shop."

The person doing the manhandling freezes, unsure if it's a good idea to be impolite to the fair folk. The slave takes advantage of the opportunity to slip free and run for the shop.

"Welcome!" says the proprietor, waving him in.

"If I stay in your shop, are you going to protect me?" the slave asks.

Someone else in the shop gives them a dirty look but doesn't say anything yet.

"It's not really meant for long term guests but I certainly won't tolerate anyone attacking you in here," says the proprietor.

"Great! What's for dinner?"

"Gotta tell me a story first," he remarks, amused. "It doesn't have to be a good one. What you had for dinner yesterday'll do."

"I didn't!"

"You know what, I'm going to go ahead and count that," says the proprietory, and he unseals a hunk of salmon. "You want this raw? I bet you're in a hurry."

"Maybe you'll sell me something to cook it with if I tell you Elu who works at the palace has one kid with her husband and one with her tailor."

"Yup." Here is one of the little cookers. He drops the salmon in and demonstrates how to close it up and turn it on.

Awesome. She'll sit there and babysit the incredibly tempting magical thing while it cooks her food that she really kind of wants to eat right now. This is kind of hard. She takes her mind off it by telling the shopkeep more gossip about other people's close relationships.

That will net her spices for the salmon and a pair of shoes and a nice sweater and a ring that will prevent her from having babies!

"Anyone who'd have sex with me would also take the ring off me, you know. I don't suppose I could get it in a tattoo or something that wouldn't come off?"

"Hrm," he says. "Let's see what I've got." He digs around. "Under the skin good enough?"

"Sounds good. Hey, speaking of tattoos, can I stop having these ones?"

"I don't have that on hand. If you can get on a bus, for sure." He gets a birth control implant inserter loaded up. "What kind of bits am I rendering barren, here?"

"The attractive and popular kind - I'm a woman, I guess."

He adjusts the inserter, runs down a checklist to make sure he's done it all correctly, and says, "It'll sting. Where d'you want it?"

"Does it matter? I don't know, maybe somewhere people won't notice."

"Armpit?" he suggests.

"Sure." She raises an arm. "What about makeup, do you sell really good makeup?"

Implant goes in the armpit. It stings for a sec and then there's a weird buzzing feeling and it stops stinging; it doesn't bleed. "I don't think I have any makeup, no. This is for the tats?"

"Well, yeah."

"So the thing is we're trying to convince Sesat to let Vanda Nossëo buy you all up and free you, but before we can do that, we gotta convince them to stop making more people slaves. Elsewise they could, like, make money by saying 'that guy killed his dad' when his dad actually choked on a chicken bone or something, and make money that way. But they think it'll be loads harder to convince them about that if we just kind of let you escape on purpose all the time. ...who owns you?"

"Me, seeing as I'm where I want me and not where anyone else does."

"...huh. Who's going to be mad if I whisk you away? Anyone specific or just, like, the government?"

"Wanna whisk me away and find out?"

"I mean, I'm tempted, but I can't actually teleport, myself, I get picked up at the end of my shift. I don't wanna fuck over a hundred slaves who just didn't happen to come in."

"They mostly deserve it. Mostly everyone deserves it, or maybe that's just Sesat."

"Do you?"

"You gonna believe me if I say no? Because my answer's no but even I don't believe me about it."

"Well, what'd you do?"

She kind of goggles at him. "So how many goodies do I get if I draw all the slave marks for you and tell you what they mean?"

"One per," he says evenly.

"Gimme a thing to draw on?"

Yeah, he can find a pen and paper.

Unfamiliar and weird but she can figure it out. "So this one just means slave," she says of one of the ones she has, "so if you see it by itself it means born to it or taken in war. This one is, what's it called, uhhhhhh... perfidy. I think I drew it right but I don't see it a lot. This one's patricide," and it's her other one, "and this one's for the rest of your family, so, matricide, or anyone else if it was really bad." And a couple more, which she remembers and can explain.

"Quite a rap sheet," he remarks when she's gone through them all, piling more goodies on her pile. The salmon's done; the lid of the cooker can double as a plate and he digs up a fork for her.

Food! She has nothing to say that's so urgent she'd interrupt dinner for it. She can resume conversation afterward if he wants.

Poor lady. At least he can feed her.

"So have you got more high-minded philosophy about it than 'Sesat is full of awful people so probably they're all awful at telling who's even worse than the rest'?" she asks after she's eaten.

"That's a remarkably Sesati way of putting it, honestly," he remarks. "Look, what's your name? I'm Artorian."

"Do you not know slaves don't have names or do you just not give a fuck what Sesat has to say about what I get to call myself? Anyway, I'm Fere."

"It's the second one," he says, smiling a little. "Nice to meet you, Fere."

"Thanks. You too."

Another free person walks into the shop. He looks straight at Fere. "Come here," he says sharply, advancing on her.

Artorian glares at the newcomer but doesn't say anything.

Fere throws the cooker at him; he ducks.

The shop is filled, suddenly, with frenetically beautiful music, and everything is gluey dreamlike with slowness and the cooker drifts through the air like a Mylar balloon. Artorian collects it and sets it down; he doesn't seem impeded, though both his guests are. "Either of you want to rethink that interaction?" he asks.

"Not really," says Fere.

"Thank you for your help and I'm sorry it troubled you," says the man. "I came here to retrieve it and prevent that sort of thing."

"She didn't trouble me at all. We were having a nice chat and she was patronizing my shop," says Artorian. "No need to help me."

Fere smirks and makes a rude gesture, or at least begins the unpleasantly slow process of making a rude gesture.

"I'm glad to hear that," says the man, "but I'm afraid I can't let it keep skipping out on work."

"She belong to you?" inquires Artorian.

"Not personally."

"Then why can't you?"

"I work for its owner, off and on."

"How about you go get them. For all I know you could be a random thief," Artorian says.

He leaves.

Artorian turns off the music, turns to Fere. "I can't actually keep doing this forever," he says. "If we start whisking slaves off we lose all the - good faith negotiating position. You can't even just camp out in the store. But - I want you to know it won't last forever. Even if Sesat blocks us at every turn and you never manage to make it out of the country? We've got resurrection. If you grow old and die here you will wake up free.

You can run if you want to give them a hard time. I'm not going to kick you out, but I can't keep your owner off you when they show up."

"I'm not going to grow old, you idiot." Or maybe Fere's the idiot. Should've never imagined anyone else was going to help, and now her death is just going to be slower because she trusted a stupid garbled rumor about them wanting to help, when instead they want to "negotiate" in "good faith" with this shithole of a country, because no one actually cares.

She would kind of like, on some level, to be able to punch him for luring her here, which is stupid considering that first of all she should've known better and second of all it's not like she's punched all of Sesat yet.

She swallows hard and decides Artorian can go at the end of the list of people she needs revenge on.

"I'm really sorry," says Artorian, not quite meeting her eyes. "If you die here of anything, you will wake up free."

"I would appreciate the thing where you think that's a lie worth telling but the 'if' is really over the fucking top. If you really mean to do that, wait at least a month, they probably won't be done any faster if they can help it. - Sell me a weapon."

"I don't have any in st- I have a pair of scissors, actually, are they for you or them?"

"Which answer gets me scissors," Fere deadpans.

"First one. If you can answer it with the truth magic running."

"I would rather die fast than slow even if you're lying about coming back."

"You going to stab anyone but you with these? I can get away with it if you're not, pretty sure."

"Probably not," since she's hopelessly outmatched and unlikely to succeed at any particular thing she might try in a fight.