He waits a second while she does that. "Cool! - Is this useful to you or have we gotten sidetracked?"

"It's useful! Doesn't tell me how good you'll be at envoying to non-Har cultures, but it's useful. How'd you pick the envoy option?"

"Well, the way I picked it as opposed to failure analysis is that failure analysis is probably adversarial and therefore probably a lot more competitive, and the way I picked it as opposed to accounting is that accounting sounds boring, and the way I picked it as opposed to going to the last glass vendor I worked for and asking if they wanted me to ward all their glass forever is because I wanted to consider something more stimulating, and the way I picked it as opposed to putting an ad online offering to ward random stuff is that I was going to try that next, and the way I picked it as opposed to just living off the UBI is that I expected to get bored quickly and start inventing things for myself to do so I might as well make someone else invent things for me to do and then pay me for them, and the reason I was picking something at all is because I was fired from my previous job in senescence research at about the time when aliens contacted us and informed us that immortality and resurrection were for sale now. Although maybe I would have been fired anyway, who knows."

"Ooh, senescence research - that's still useful, incidentally, immortality magic doesn't scale very well and not everyone can be resurrected straightforwardly with the state of the art and not everyone can travel to the Cube neighborhood and morph off a few years, so if that's what you most wanted to be doing with your life..."

Shrug. "It's a good thing to do but I'm not great at it and it's not especially fun and universal flourishing is also a nice goal."

"Okay! What do you know about how we currently have the ambassadorial department structured?"

"You teleport people to a new universe in an airtight container designed to orbit a world for a while. Then they wait a while and gather information before saying hi, unless the society they'd be contacting notices them immediately and changes the schedule. They feel out the possibility of - something like conquest but less bloody than ours ever got even at the end - where instead of violence there's a vote on whether to become part of Vanda Nossëo. If people are poor and illiterate, they start stores that solicit payment in kind, specifically in stories, and have a diverse staff of various kinds of aliens. Otherwise they still start stores, but they send Dwarves and solicit payment in cash. The goods are basic quality-of-life things, like fabric and minor heat enchantments, and things that'll get people connected to the multiverse, like bus tickets. All of the goods for sale are supposed to take at least six seconds of thought to figure out how to use them to kill someone, and they're mostly worse for it than Hari magic but I assume there's a tradeoff involved on other planets where someone could be meaningfully made more deadly by handing them a knife. Regardless of any of those details, people answer questions for free and are aggressive about making it possible to ask them questions, including by delivering technological phones to random kids who happen to interrupt them to ask. Contact is supposed to be peaceful, and not make people worse off if possible, or at least that's the impression I got."

"That's a pretty good rundown! Do you have an idea where in that process you'd want to be?"

"I think it'd be cool to talk to random people and hear stories but maybe I'm wrong about what that'd be like in practice. Stories makes me think of social species like caralendri and maybe if it's a parade of 1728 essi saying 'I ate an alien rat last week' it would get tedious, but probably not more tedious than some things I've done. I - hm. When I do mage work, a thing that makes it nice for me is that there are different people with different goals, and I get this tiny picture of their lives, and I help them figure out how to turn my abilities into a solution to their problems, and afterward I know there's this concrete way the world is different. I suspect selling people things might be the same kind of thing."

"Great! Okay, you sound like a good temperamental fit. If you're up for it I'd like to ask a battery of screening questions under a truth effect, retail-level envoying doesn't involve a lot of dangerous clearances but it's good to have answers on the books anyway and since we don't yet have lots of experience with Hari expats it might turn up surprise cultural quibbles."

"Sure!"

She puts on some nice Elf music on softly in the background, asks some test questions like his name and world of origin and favorite color, asks him to make up a fake ID number, asks him to lie outright about his hair color, and once she's confirmed that it's working as it should, proceeds. Lots of extremely thoroughly-redundantly-worded questions about what he thinks he'd do in various situations and whether he has done bad things ever and how difficult it would be to coerce or social engineer him into doing bad things in the future.

He has previously gone behind his owner's back to solicit tips from clients and has used trickery to make it look like he did what he was ordered to while not actually doing that. He does not anticipate behaving like this in a job he is enthusiastic about when he could just quit instead. He has previously threatened to kill someone, but that was not a crime at the time and he backed off as soon as it became illegal; he can go into more detail about it if it's important.

He has not previously been in a position to need to check someone's credentials, or be racist against other humans; he holds a vaguely negative opinion of essi, which has ever led him to go so far as to answer that he doesn't particularly like them if asked about it straight out and paid for his answer. He'd never deal with them unfairly, though, and he doesn't even mind void mages - you know, those people whose magic is for destruction, he honestly doesn't mind them that much and mostly thinks it sucks to be them - it's not true that they're nobodies, they do have magic -

"Nobodies?" inquires Maranji.

"It's a rude thing that people call void mages, because their magic's historically been less useful which is sort of like not being mages at all."

"And what's your opinion on people who are not mages at all?"

"...What do you mean by that phrase?"

"Oh dear," says Maranji. "It's actually very unusual for there to be a planet where every member of all sapient species present has magic, were you aware?"

"That's horrible - I assume that's one of the things you fix, I mean, with the wishes."

"...many people do choose to learn magic or have it wished on but it's not mandatory."

"I, uh, I mean, I guess if for some reason they want to go on being animals I'm not going to stop them? I intend to follow Vanda Nossëo's laws as long as I'm here and if those laws mean that, uh, that they count as people, then I have no intention of kidnapping them or doing oddly gerrymandered subsets of battery to them. How are they people, did you definitely check that - that - that they know other people have thoughts, that they have thoughts?"

"Yes, nonmagical people register normally to telepaths and are capable of understanding theory of mind."

"That must be awful for them - maybe I'm not imagining it right but I'm imagining that they don't know anything but what they can smell and they're never sure if they have privacy and they get sick constantly and can't be around each other and their teeth rot out of their heads and if they want to fly they have to flap their wings the whole time."

"How would being a void mage solve any of those problems?"

"I did just say people don't like them because their magic's not as useful. Although apparently now it's useful. That - I mean, maybe if a species only had void magic they'd never become people? But it's random, at least where I come from, their parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and so on all had to model the world and make decisions and so on, so they model the world and make decisions and so on."