It isn't; he doesn't get any results about himself.

Cool. He'll just wait here till they're ready.

"Hey, do you have a toothpick on you by any chance? I can't get this bit of peach out of my teeth," says the other human after a bit.

"No but I could make one, hang on..." Valanda plucks what appears to be an invisible toothpick out of thin air and offers to sell it for probably a sensible amount.

"... Huh. I don't know if I want to, you know, buy one. I don't have cash on me and Cashify is a bit of a hassle for a toothpick."

"In that case I will trade it to you for an explanation of gift-giving customs in Vanda Nossëo."

"... Sure. If you're giving somebody a gift because you like them or something then you go a bit higher budget than a toothpick unless it's a joke, and if you're giving a stranger a tampon or a toothpick or the time or a hair tie or something, you don't charge for it, it's just, like, part of living in a world where you can get those things if you need them unexpectedly."

"I like that." He hands over the toothpick.

"Thanks." Pick pick. "What kinda magic is this?"

"Defense magic from the Hari Empire. Mostly useful for warding buildings. If you want an angel to get rid of your toothpick at some point they'll need to do something other than turn it into air, by the way."

"Huh. I would not have thought of a toothpick as a defensive sort of thing. What'll happen if an angel runs into it in the landfill?"

"Probably literally nothing - I can get rid of it now if you want, I just didn't want to snatch it away if you were going to have more use for it."

"I'm done with it, thank you."

It ceases to be a toothpick.

"Nifty. What kind of job are you interviewing for?"

"It turns out they have this entire bureaucratic apparatus about foreign relations and I thought it seemed kind of interesting. How about you?"

"I'm your interviewer. Come on in." She gets up and opens the door to the next room for him. "Valanda, right?"

"Yeah. I assume you also have a name?" He steps through the door.

"Marjani, pleasure to make your acquaintance." The next room is a hallway; she shows him into an office and sits behind the desk in it. "The sitting in the waiting room isn't standard practice but I like to have a feel for people's reactions to ordinary people. Pricing toothpicks customary in Har?"

"There aren't really things it's not customary to price - I picked up that there was something going on with free questions from talking to people in Icefalls - also if that's going to happen a lot I should stock up on wooden ones, that'll be a lot cheaper, except it seems like it might actually be sixty different things because if it were just toothpicks you'd have them yourself, so do you happen to have a list of things that are commonly given away for free like that and if you do is the list itself such a thing?"

"I wouldn't call it a list, more like, commonplace inexpensive disposable things such that even if you normally carry them on you, you might run out. If questions aren't free, how do you figure out how much they cost? Just announce you'll pay thus and such for being told the answer?"

"Yeah, a lot of questions go 'a ring if you'll tell me...' or you visibly get out a specific amount of cash as you ask, but you can haggle - usually questions like 'what does the thing you're trying to sell me right now cost?' are free, and sometimes people trade question for question, and you'd have a bulk rate if, say, you were hiring someone to spend three hours a week teaching you math for the next two years, or you talk it over if you're asking a question where the answer would be eight pages long or extremely hard to learn any other way. But questions where everyone knows the answer and it's a short answer go down to the smallest possible coin because if you don't go for it the next person will. - And some things are free because someone cares about other people knowing them, so you don't pay to read the imperial laws - I was really surprised that I had to pay to read the laws for Icefalls - and you don't pay to get advertised to."

"- you had to pay to read the laws for Icefalls?"

"Yes? They were offering hard copies for ten rings or electronic ones for one ring back in Har, maybe it's free in Icefalls but even if that were the case I'd've had to go to Icefalls not knowing the law to take advantage of it..."

"Oh, I see, I think it's mostly Dwarf companies operating in Har, it was outside the core competency of the envoys. I can tell the suggestion box that if we subsidize that down to free it won't be culturally weird." She glances at her chiplock.