"I guess so. I really should've gone through all your state laws before visiting, I skimmed but I kind of thought - you know, you can usually step over the border to get lunch and you'd be at fault if you managed to fuck it up but you won't actually usually fuck it up. Here, anyway."

"That's true with us too! I think even if you followed the Hari laws and didn't specifically try to have sex with anyone that would cover you most places for short jaunts. It's just that since we don't forbid casual touch, and don't have people legally understood as property, and are focused on preventing harm, sex is a particularly weird collection of issues."

"Makes sense. What's the legal definition of sex in Vanda Nossëo?"

"Varies - has to, for Elves petting each other's hair is sex and for humans it's completely normal to pet a kid's hair - but it's generally going to be something like, stimulation or witnessing of stimulation of an erogenous zone on oneself or another with the intent or understood effect to create, sustain, or relieve arousal in either party? You'll probably want to have really wide margins around this, though, till you have more extensional familiarity."

"Witnessing. I think I understand that definition, though. Hm. Well, I'm not qualified to figure out how this should affect immigration policy, I'm just supposed to write up a report on how alternatives to slavery work in practice, and I think I've learned a lot about that."

"What'd you learn?"

"That it involves extra cognitive overhead for everyone else. That it can involve giving people different parts of what we consider freedom piecemeal. That it makes things less standardized. That it relies on deeper knowledge of other people than our system."

"That all seems true."

"Glad we're on the same page about it, I guess. Think I left anything important out, or is it just... those things in exchange for the happiness of people who would in Har be slaves?"

"I'm not sure I'd put it as specifically 'happiness', but basically, yeah. I do think the cognitive overhead isn't much for most people who are native to the system or spend long enough acclimating. It becomes second nature."

"How long does it take to acclimate?"

"Depends on a lot of things - including original culture and species, so I don't even have a good ballpark guess for you."

"Well, I guess that also makes sense."

"Elves are slow because they're slow at everything but they have a few specific recurring points of tension that we can mostly address in a formulaic way, humans who are actually trying to integrate seldom need more than a few years, shorefolk - that's the Beach people - they adapt in a couple weeks, that's probably to do with how fast they grow..."

"That makes sense. I'm curious about the recurring points of tension."

"Elves tend to feel very strongly that people should not have sex except with a monogamous heterosexual spouse, that virtually everything is of lesser importance than children occurring exclusively when desired by parents in a marriage like that who are prepared to spend the next fifty years with no competing obligations, that it's reasonable for it to take a few years to make a major decision even if people are waiting on you..."

"They might get along with agerah. I think. 'Marriage' is an awkward translation of something, is it one word of jargon for you or something?"

"It's a popular social institution among many species where it's customary to arrange sex and romance and primary companionship and coparenting and cohabitation and merged finances and certain legal responsibilities to each other in a long term committed package deal, usually pairwise. Not everybody does it - Dwarves for example don't routinely get all those things in the same place."

"Oh, like caralendri, except not in pairs. And a little like agerah, too."

"What are agerah like?"

"Introverted. Grouchy about people. They hate spending time around people they aren't close to and like not being completely alone - except when they'd rather be completely alone - so their ideal is to stay friends with their mothers, find one mate, stay with that mate and not have to filter any new partners, and maybe stay friends with their children when they're grown."

"Huh. Elves aren't particularly introverted like that, just very monogamous."

"And social like humans, and not social like thwilit, am I right?"

"More or less, yes. Plus being telepathic."

All around the not-too-introverted states of Har, various mostly-Dwarves - carefully read up on local law and exquisitely thorough with their compliance and documentation thereof - move to rent storefront space in highly trafficked areas, where they set up currency exchange and bank branches (rings, unlike most currencies, are actually uncounterfeitable, and Har has some unique magic, so the rings retain some value next to multiversal fiat), and, often right next to or on top of the financial side, travel and job agencies to help anyone who is interested in exploring the multiverse find things to do there for a reasonable price. They sell bus passes, too, and have a side business in the sorts of things that envoy shops normally do but are not on this particular planet.