"How would being nonmagical result in not having to model the world and make decisions?"

"Well, magic is where you have a model of the world, and then you think about how you want it to be different, and then you make it different."

"Okay. That's not the model anyone elsewhere in the multiverse I've ever heard of uses for determining personhood. And since most worlds aren't like Har, it would be very likely that if you were an envoy you would mostly encounter people who were not magical."

"It doesn't seem like avoiding that situation would improve it from anyone's point of view, at least not on net, because they presumably mostly want to get magic and stop living like animals, and I am suddenly much more emotionally invested in universal flourishing now that it's been made clear that that's the alternative."

"...I don't think I can recommend you for a public-facing role, but if you'd like to be considered for shipboard roles or referred to Infrastructure or something I can do that."

"I guess, if you think that'd be a good idea. You're not actually implying that you run all this on people not having negative emotions about newly contacted peoples, are you?"

"A lot of negative emotions can be managed practically! People manage more distance about preindustrial hygiene if they can keep themselves clean, that one comes up a lot, and are better at coping with some risk of violence if they have lots of options to protect themselves without fighting back. But ultimately whatever attitude you bring to the situation is going to come through if you meet someone perceptive enough, and we really don't want to be projecting a vibe of barely concealed contempt. Thinking they're basically animals and expecting all their faculties to rely on magic they don't have and might not want and might even feel negatively about, that I doubt can be smoothed over well with a good customer service voice."

...He had kind of thought for no particular reason that they felt the same way about slavery but in hindsight no one ever actually said that it wasn't just mildly annoying to them.

"I suppose," he says, even though he does not in fact suppose. "Although in that case I don't think I ought to take another role, because even if you could pass things I did off as nonmagical to sufficiently uneducated people it seems dishonest to do that if they feel negatively about magic."

"Envoy teams go down by default with magic; it's practical," Maranji says. "We don't know in advance what we're going to find, so we make calls about what exposes everyone to the least risk. The thing I'm more worried about would be if you met people who did not themselves want magic."

"...Okay." That does not remotely make the slightest shred of sense. "I suppose we're done here then?"

"Well, I'm also qualified to interview for shipboard but if that doesn't interest you, yeah. You can try again later."

...He is not going to try again later, there is not going to be a time by which he'll have stopped being viscerally horrified that there are people out there with probably no material culture and terrible sanitation, getting sick all the time and never knowing why, never knowing anything other than, perhaps, their neighbors' private business...

"Doesn't particularly seem any better than any other options."

...and probably they eat each other - he's just going to spend the whole trip back to Icefalls dwelling on that, actually, that they probably eat each other because why wouldn't they, it's not like people in Har never eat each other and Har is extremely civilized...

Icefalls continues to be itself. There's kids flying kites not too far from where he's pitched his tent.

There are probably kids somewhere else who can't fly kites because they have no fabric because they don't have anyone on their planet with hands or force magic. ...This is ceasing to be a productive thing to dwell on, if it ever was.

He could ward the kites if anyone was particularly attached. There are probably kids somewhere who can't have anyone ward the kites they don't even have because - anyway, moving on.

The kites are nice. He picks a spot where he can watch them while reading the internet and tries looking up how to put an ad on the internet.

If he runs a search for it he will get an ad for an ad-serving company!

How meta. And demonstrably capable of showing ads to people who are looking for the products they advertise! Can he get an ad saying that anyone who wants to contact him should - 

- he needs an email address, doesn't he, does the first email provider he can find have "valanda_human_defense_mage" available? (It's shorter in Hari.)

He can have valanda_human_defense_mage! In Hari, even, the alphabet's supported now (it's technically an alias of a longass number in a universal character encoding).

Great!

So, an ad saying anyone who wants to contact him should email him there, and that he... they won't've heard of defense magic, he's never studied architecture, toothpicks are not an efficient use of it... that he makes things shatterproof or rip-proof or immune to fire. Which they should try to advertise to... what would be most efficient? Probably people who sell glass and fabric, maybe. He'll pay to run it for a little while, not very long because if it takes very long to connect him and his suddenly extraordinarily rare magic with any of the 35831808s of people in the multiverse with material possessions then something has gone wrong. How much for that?

They charge by the thousand impressions and assert that they will try as hard as possible to make ads relevant because that makes fewer people block them. He can get a thousand impressions for not very much.

A thousand is more than a gross and less than 1728, and that's the range he's mentally anchored on as probably reasonable, so he'll take it. ...Oh, hey, it's ten to the third, isn't it, that's cool.

He googles the Hari Empire next. Maybe he should have done that first, it'll tell him what they find notable and that'll tell him something important about them.

The Hari Empire is a political unit claiming jurisdiction over the entirety of the world of Har. Contact was made in [click here to set your time display preferences]. Notable distinguishing features of the Empire (as opposed to the world) are:

- presumption of enslavement from birth
- collective legal personhood of groups of Thwilit
- minimal imperial-level code of laws supplemented by state-level laws
- multiple states with a population of 1
- a democratic political system characterized by "naked coalitional self-interest"[1]

Demographic statistics:

...They named the universe Har? Who decided the Hars should be nested four deep - that's completely unsurprising but he's judging them anyway.

Okay, one obvious way to get a point of comparison is to check what this site says about Everhome. And wherever that [1] leads is probably worth glancing at, if nothing else maybe he can figure out what the alternative to naked coalitional self-interest is.

He can check both of these things. Everhome first, what's this site say about it?

Everhome is a colony planet settled principally by the humans from Elentári, who spent their second Arda War semi-itinerant between various residences under the protection of better-equipped groups local to Elentári. Loki located and edited Everhome with the use of the Tesseract and brought the humans who wished to settle their own planet there (compare Urukheim), with the first colonists arriving in [click here to set your time display preferences]. The capital of Everhome is Icefalls. Everhome is notable for having the largest population of spontaneous adult humans of anywhere in Vanda Nossëo.

Oh, that sounds awesome, being a spontaneous adult would be such a good way to start existing! He opens whatever "spontaneous adult" links to and then considers that he probably also wants to know about the second Arda War and opens that in a new tab too and then goes and reads the citation from the other article.

^ "A First Look at Har", International Dateline

"Honestly," said Reyes, "in a way it was refreshing, all these people totting up how many of them would benefit from this or that use of tax money and pulling together to screw over the other folks. Not a speck of rationalizing about how their way is good for everyone, just naked coalitional self-interest. I also didn't see any attack ads. It left me sort of optimistic about how they'll evolve over time with less scarcity - I mean, the slavery thing they don't have any internal mechanism to fix, but everything else that's bothering them should more or less clear up as it becomes possible for more people to get what they want more compatibly."

A spontaneous adult is a person who began to exist without a childhood. Importantly distinct from forks in e.g. Space Elves and spontaneous appearance as in e.g. Stork natives. Spontaneous adults occur routinely in Ardas, forming the first generations of humans, Elves, and Dwarves. Naturally occurring daeva (but not ex-summoner daeva) are spontaneous adults.

The Second Arda War is the period of warfare that typically occurs in an Arda after the Valar parole Melkor, following the Melkor's imprisonment at the conclusion of the First Arda War. In standard timelines it is staged principally on Beleriand between the Noldorin Elves and their allies against Melkor, Sauron [this word is locked - why?], others of Melkor's Maiar, and the enslaved orcs they command (see Participants in the Second Arda War for more detail). See also Angband. A majority of discovered Ardas have been interrupted by an interdimensional visitor during or before the Second Arda War, but Millennia was not.