Why did he move to a place where people try to do politics by blatantly lying and pretending they're going to help people they aren't going to help.

Huh, he clicks some relevant links to get a feel for what kinds of wars they've dealt with - OH NO, those are some bad wars, those wars have more torture than any of Har's wars have ever had. Should he kill himself now in case something like that comes along? No, no point in it, he's ever existed in public already and they could bring him back, and also, Vanda Nossëo might be able to handle the next thing like that. If there is a next thing like that. They'd probably protect him because of universal flourishing. Unless the universal flourishing is a lie they came up with to scam voters.

(How does it even work to scam voters, don't they just vote you out of office when they discover that you lied? ...Not if they've never heard of you before because they're immigrants, maybe it works fine if you're very expansionist.)

On the other hand, given the art and the sports and the falls and the extreme friendliness, it... doesn't seem like the flourishing is a lie.

New search term: fun clubs in Icefalls.

He can find a hiking club, a knitting club, a profusion of book clubs, a painting club, an ice hockey club, a language learning club, a board game club, a bunch of nightclubs and dance clubs, a bunch of clubs that are basically just low-key classes, and a cooking club.

Hiking sounds okay, he should really read more books and he can probably afford to now, languages sound okay - it might be a problem that he's using Allspeak and doesn't speak whatever the local language is, doesn't even actually know what the local language is - he'd have to learn the local board games and dances and he would really like to learn about cooking - is there any overlap in the schedules for those? Do any of them charge? How about the classes, his education was... very specialized and technical and not remotely well-rounded.

Some of the book clubs are on top of other things but if he chooses which one judiciously he can fit in whatever he wants. There are classes in lots of things, if he would like to learn to do his own electrical work or listen to a rotation of history buffs give presentations on their favorite topics or go to one of the book clubs that is only doing philosophy texts or view online botany lectures or audit Introduction to Agricultural Science at the Icefalls community college.

...Actually, he would love to view online botany lectures and audit Introduction to Agricultural Science... wait but what is electricity? What would he do if he knew how to use it? He googles that.

The internet is happy to explain him electricity.

That's really cool!

There aren't magic in any of those steps, so all you'd need is a handful of heat mages or some basically similar kind of magic to forge the metal in the first place - possibly? Maybe you need structure magic for mining. Do you? Well, there's approximately zero marginal cost to googling more questions.

Apparently electricity can and has been developed on planets with no magic at all.

...How?

...Maybe the kids on those planets have kites.

...And possibly also neighbors who torture large numbers of people for hundreds of years and deliberately damage their ability to tell reality from fiction.

...Would he know if he were currently in the custody of -

- anyway, cool about the electricity! That's probably really good! Why, when he specifically said he was envisioning nonmagical people having a standard of living inconsistent with this, did Marjani not say anything. Probably she was secretly actually not testing him on his attitudes at all, and instead testing him on whether he proactively googled details about planets Vanda Nossëo has contacted in the past.

Anyway, he'd love to study that too but possibly not immediately, there being only so many hours in a day. He'll study botany and join a hiking club and a book club that isn't solely focused on philosophy, and at least feel out the cooking club and language club and a dance club in case those are fun.

Meanwhile, R&D has fetched a variety of psychic type people over to see if Hari magic can block them.

And an assortment of Hari mages try spells of various kinds. Illusion magic that prevents knowledge magic and maybe other forms of magic from gaining information about anything inside someone's skull; defense magic that prevents a person from having other spells cast on them; defense magic that prevents new spells from being cast within an area; defense magic that prevents enchanted objects or people with active divinations from entering an area. What vulnerabilities are still left after all that?

Betazoids are not, strictly speaking, magic, and can still read people with all this going on. In an even stricter sense, subtle artistry isn't "magic" either.

They can block some aspects of subtle arts, and eventually conclude that what they can't block isn't fundamentally different from the theoretical ability of a structure mage to make an explosive out of thin air. If they have to, imperial police can figure out how to arrest subtle artists from a distance - now they want to check that command magic works normally on subtle artists and confirm that they can be killed normally.

Several states individually want to ban betazoids but don't control enough territory for that to help. An imperial representative inquires about Vanda Nossëo's protections.

Betazoids mostly live in Elendil, and many places do require them to wear range-limiters or psi-suppression gadgets to enter; this one is just on loan for testing. Har can make their solar system one of those places if they like.

They like, yes.

...What if one of them decides to live on a hidden private island and then take the gadget off? Perhaps they should also be required to submit to command magic about that. What an unaesthetic carveout, isn't there an area effect they could use instead that wouldn't place obligations on people? After all, if two betazoids had a child, this could require them or the child to take actions, and that would be at odds with what the imperial laws are intended to be.

They don't have precedent about someone living on a hidden prior island while a powerful telepath in a place unused to that possibility, so they can't help them there.

They'll have an unaesthetic law that (gasp) imposes unconditional positive obligations in place while they think of something better. They put a small bounty out for a more elegant solution.

Also, speaking of Hari law, they've recently noticed inklings that possibly individuals without magic are not considered "people" here? Does that affect their obligations and protections under the law?

The imperial representative they ask this of is confused. Yes, the definition of "mage" implies having magic. Does Vanda Nossëo have... crows as citizens, or something?

Not crows - though some places do protect crows just on animal welfare grounds - but people of species that could learn magic and instead do not, since a lot of Vanda Nossëo magic is learned instead of inborn.

Lots of people aren't working mages, they go to law school and never use magic more complicated or interesting than turning book pages. What exactly is the distinction they're making here between learned and inborn magic?

In the same way that someone can be unable to speak Hari, due to being a baby or having grown up a monolingual speaker of something else, a person can be unable to do magic, but then learn how. As far as they know everyone currently counted as a citizen is theoretically able to learn at least some kind of magic at some stage in their life cycle, but they don't actually have that as a citizenship requirement.

Well, yes, many Hari people aren't born able to do magic, either, and take up to a couple of years to pick it up. In some kind of absurd hypothetical where a species evolved without magic to be able to understand and follow laws, it might make sense to treat that species as if they were people, legally. After all, they treat void mages the same as other people.

A lot of people in Vanda Nossëo evolved (or were created) without the ability to do magic and went on that way, understanding and following laws for the most part, till contact opened up the option to learn magic.

In some sense all people descend from animals, so this particular imperial representative just thinks it's very neat that Vanda Nossëo is uplifting particularly smart animals. Is there some reason they'd need or want different laws for uplifts?