Vanda Nosseo lands on a world that fights a lot of wars.
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"Do... you have a ballpark estimate of how much popular support in their respective regions the rebels have?" asks Nelen.

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Oh no, the aliens are republicans.

"I do not," he says. "Truthfully, it has not been my main concern." Another rueful smile. "Do your people have the concept of a sworn oath?"

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"My people specifically, not really. Tarwë's and Zanro's have, though they're... out of fashion."

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Oh no.

"Righteousness is never in fashion," he says, slightly self-depreciatingly. "Not that I can say I'm very righteous myself - I'm hardly fit for my own duty, outside of entertaining guests - but, well, they are what our world is founded on. All of our ancestors swore that they would accept this world as our own and the angels' cause as our own and fight under the Admiral's command whenever demons threaten, and every one of us swears the same oath every year. Our honor rests on it, what we have of it." He shrugs. "We've liberated some lands that cried out to us for rescue, but I won't claim that every village in the world loves us. Only that whether they do or no, they all swore to follow His Holiness into battle, and now they're deserting where lives depend on them." He pauses. "His Holiness says it better, of course."

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"...I think maybe you should ask Zanro to tell you about his people's experience of oaths," says Nelen. "To get an idea of the - standard Vanda Nossëo perspective on that sort of thing. At any rate, you can't join Vanda Nossëo unless a majority of your population votes yes; we aren't in the business of conquest. If a region has a majority vote that they want to be part of Vanda Nossëo with or without you, they'd qualify for the defense agreement."

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AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH

"I see," he says. He'll let his face pale, loosen his grip on his expression to make it clear that he has just been given an absolutely mortal insult, which he cannot directly respond to but which he is nonetheless grievously offended by -

- and he will change the topic to lighter, more inconsequential topics, such as about Vanda Nosseo's technology and methods of government and interesting experiences with other member states.

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Yup, Nelen is willing to be diverted to those topics! Would Radiant Ciparnu like to hear about Yeerks? They're sort of like how he describes demons, what with wanting to enslave everybody else, but some of them were good and now most of the species is proving rehabilitable with their power structure broken and their war over!

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Yes, he would love to hear about Yeerks! (Well, not really, but he'll take the diplomatic point for Just How Completely And Hopelessly Outgunned his entire civilization is.) What did Vanda Nosseo's contact with them look like?

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Vanda Nossëo actually didn't show up until most of the action was over! The Yeerks were trying to take over a planet of humans - humans are really common, and that specific planet is a repeat, too - and there were other aliens, Andalites, at war with Yeerks in the broader field of space battle. Some Andalites showed up on Earth prepared to, if necessary, kill all the humans on it to prevent the Yeerks from gaining billions of hosts, but with the help of some local humans and also a defecting Yeerk and its faction they were able to prevail by merely multiplying the planetary cancer rate a lot, though the Yeerks did obliterate an area the size of - can he see a map - about yea much, before things settled down. Vanda Nossëo showed up after that and then won the war against the Yeerks, though not on the Andalites' behalf, they have some values differences with Andalites (though the Andalites haven't as a polity joined Vanda Nossëo, that's mostly as a statement to the effect that they're not on board with all this sharing technology, rather than a practical matter - they do have tourism going every which way, they especially love turning into species with mouths and eating food). Defeating the Yeerks involved reconfiguring some suns and chasing a few holdouts to other dimensions and some Elf volunteers, Tarwë's same species, allowing Yeerks to enter their heads as a strong hard-to-fake signal of the reality of the situation.

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aaaaah

... So, what does the Vanda Nosseo leadership look like? Who actually is in charge over there?

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"Tarwë's species, Elves, is usually very prosocial and hardworking compared to, say, my species, or humans," says Nelen. "So a lot of the top folks are Elves. But also, there's - remember I mentioned planets repeating? People can repeat, too, often on planet matches but sometimes without. There's a specific person-repetition, or 'template', that's usually human but heavily involved in Vanda Nossëo management and that of the similar polities we're allied with, Mîr and Elendil."

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So there's one person duplicated enough times who's become immortal and is now exploiting the entire rest of the universe under an occasional sham of republicanism. Right. Good for them. Shame he's on the wrong side.

"Oh? Fascinating!" His eyes shine. "Please, tell me about this template."

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"They're called Bells, because though we still don't understand why, some templates have similarities in their names for no causal reason we can identify, and their names all have the syllable 'bel' in them! You don't have one here, we check before making contact, they're identifiable with a particular sort of magic. Vanda Nossëo has most Bells working under our umbrella. Some go by nicknames, since they have some outright name collisions - Loki, Cam, Golden, Miranda, Kib, Iobel, Butterfly, Cor. There's also Gem, Empress of Mîr, and Boots and T'Mir, who manage Elendil, and Sibyl, who divides her time as needed wherever her skills are called for."

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Oh my.

"Fascinating," he says. And then he'll try to politely poke at this description to get something resembling an org chart out of it!

(And probably fail.)

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If he wants an org chart he can get one, actually! Nelen is the manager of this envoy team and he reports to the planet coordinator and her assistants, who are in orbit right now, and the coordinator works for the Vanda Nossëo Department of Contact, and if this planet has a pretty normal process then gradually the personnel will rotate out in favor of members of, or if they're particularly fond of the place transfer into, the Department of Integration, which will do more of a holding-pattern of making sure booths are staffed and buses run and also manage any local interest groups and count votes and generally deliver services and serve as a line of communication between this planet and the greater body of Vanda Nossëo. The Department of Integration often hires lots of locals. All the departments report to whoever-you-can-get-ahold-first-of all the aforementioned Vanda Nossëo Bells and a bunch of Elves, lots of whom have identical names and come with parenthetical nicknames. They have subspecialties - you mostly want to get one of the ones named Maitimo for personnel or diplomatic issues, you call in Loki if you need something in a particular world-neighborhood spatially rearranged or time traveled or whatever, you get Cor if you want to kill a god, you get Golden if you're dealing with particularly heavy-duty psychic hostility...

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He really, really hopes these people are bluffing.

What does their system for handling regional secessions look like?

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On Nelen's home planet there was this country Yvalta divided into Houses, and this one House's leader wanted to join up and the rest of Yvalta didn't, so Vanda Nossëo dispatched a few people with superpowers to protect him and his borders and gave his House its own planet. (Planets are very important to Nelen's species.)

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He pauses.

"One of the traitor states, here, calls itself a Republic. Its western provinces are in constant turmoil, because some of the people in them want to secede and rejoin us as a nation under the Admiral, and others want to stay part of the Republic, and every village will say when the loyalist bands come through that it is for the Admiral and will say when the Republican legions march through that it is for the Senate. Whose land would you say it is?"

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"Huh. If you want to know about that specific case I can ask the coordinator how the team there is getting along, although I can't relay anything that was told to my counterparts in confidence."

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... He means more what is their general procedure for determining what people in an area want.

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"Vanda Nossëo votes are understood as requiring a majority of the population, not a majority of the respondents. We can do a quick census by conjuring miniatures of everyone in an area and counting the models, and then distribute ballots; we can count the ballots even if they are filled out in secret and then immediately burned. Making it clear to everyone in a far-flung rural area that there's a vote on is tricky but we have some pretty dedicated pollworkers when it comes time."

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"Fascinating!"

(At this point they've been talking a while. Would Nelen and his team like to come to dinner? He puts on an excellent table, and it will be a great opportunity to introduce Nelen to the finance minister.)

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Sure, they'll join them for dinner!

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Dinner is various dishes with bread and meat and fruit and some very limited vegetables as ingredients, some of them recognizable as Earthlike and others not very, all very showily arranged. Drinks include the ones offered - mildly alcoholic wines and beers and ciders, distilled liquors, - and the strange golden liquid, referred to as "ambrosia"; everyone has a cup as part of a ritual benediction, performed by Radiant Ciparnu with shrugging friendliness. The guests are a theological historian, an architect, two military officers, Radiant Ciparnu and two other admiralty officials. Nelen is seated next to the finance minister, one of the admiralty officials, who reacts with horror less well concealed than Ciparnu's at gold suddenly becoming valueless and the need to switch over to a fiat currency.

The main topic of conversation is the guests from Vanda Nosseo, and the attempts of the other guests to hear all of their amazing stories about their world and how it works.

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Cassiel and Natsuko and Tarwë all avoid the meat as discreetly as is feasible, but Nelen and Zanro take some; only Cassiel, Nelen, and Tarwë accept alcohol. They'd like to know what ambrosia is?

They have plenty of stories. And can demo their amazing powers, such as photography and - would anyone like healing magic done to them?

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