each of them one more reason to wonder

"Yeah, you can just... be in the same room with someone who also feels kind of upset and freaked out, if you want, I feel like that makes things slightly better."

"I think I'm going to go up to the ship again now actually," mumbles the fairy. "Since my interviewer is dead." And he vanishes.

Welp. The illusion mage stays put and tries to think whether it'd improve on this situation to go get hugs from her actual loved ones. On the one hand, yes, it would. On the other hand, she's not going to go tell them and watch them react.

Malar also leaves to go let some people know what's happening.

The representative talking to the government says that they have discovered something that appears to be locally infohazardous, is there a local policy on that?

Infohazards have historically usually turned out to be hoaxes or bad news or excessively bright lights. But they're learning a lot of new things today. "We could arrange a more private communication channel and you could speak to a member of a different species than the one it's known to be hazardous to."

"The only species we know it to not normally be infohazardous to is humans, because all the other species here are new to us, and it seems likely that humans here are more vulnerable than most, maybe for cultural reasons. We have reason to believe it may be especially dangerous to agerah but the person who killed themself on exposure was a caralendar."

The imperial representative thinks about those species and what they have in common. "Maybe a belul or an erel would be a good choice, then. Several of both work for the imperial government."

"No humans? We'd really like to avoid more casualties, we don't think this is something people ought reasonably be killing themselves over or at least haven't yet been brought to an understanding of why it would be. We can explain to a volunteer belul or erel if that seems best from your perspective."

"My reasoning is - if it varies between our humans and yours, it's likely culturally influenced; caralendri are one of the more social species, so that also makes me think it's culturally influenced; agerah really aren't, to the extent that the agerah that you meet are selected very heavily for being unusually social, so anyone's idea of what they're like will skew social; humans, caralendri and agerah are all large, all mammals, all specifically form long-term relationships with the same individuals. The non-mammals are essi, who won't have good enough models of other people's concerns to help, ereli, who might, and thwilit, who are more social than any other species; beluli don't usually prefer to form stable long-term relationships, and if you're concerned what you have to say is alarming, there are some who won't be alarmed by anything at all."

"Okay. Difficult to alarm sounds good. Though if I had to bet on it I'd think thwilit might actually be fine."

"All right. If you want to send someone down we can offer you privacy and a fearless belul in the employ of the imperial government; I'm not sure how to get privacy over this phone, but we could also send you one of ours."

"We'll send someone down."

The someone is a demon herself, this time, in case demos are required.

The belul is smaller than a human and fluffy with a babyish face. She carries herself as if totally unaware of these facts. She looks like she's wearing a spiked collar and part of a skull for a hat. She perches up where she can be vaguely around eye level for most humanoids, and makes herself comfortable, ignoring the ostensible spikes clipping through her.

"Hey there. What rends the minds of other beings?"

"Anti-scrying wards don't work on every possible spying attempt," she says. "We think it's vanishingly unlikely that any given person would be spied on, but it's possible. There may be a way to prevent it going forward but probably not retroactively except for written material that all copies of ever made still exist."

"...Yep, people'll kill themselves. Not sure what I can say about that besides 'cool, being part of a peaceful global empire was kinda boring.' What's the vulnerability?"

"My species can conjure arbitrary material objects, including to specifications like how things were at a particular place at a time, or around a particular person. It does have to be material, we can't copy illusions. There's a way to record information such that we can't retrieve it and the author can still access it, but it requires a brain implant, and we don't have them figured out for all the kinds of brains here."

"...And, also, you were telling us about nonreductionist souls, but we don't have those, so you can copy the brain itself."

"We actually can't do that in a way that wakes up; if we try we get a biologically alive but not sensate or responsive copy. Good for medical research but not for kidnapping. Resurrecting people without nonreductionist souls requires that and then also a second step from a different magic system."

"I'm not thrilled that you can get every piece of information it's possible to have about me even if, if you want to actually kidnap me, you have to get another kind of mage to help."

"- I can't, the other kind of mage can only wake up an empty body if there's not an extant version of the person around."

"So you have to murder me first. That's another tricky step but it's not impossible. It's not what people are going to kill themselves over, though, that's the part where they have no privacy and never did."

"Right. So, one thing we could try to do is get the planet and everything and everyone on it to be sufficiently magical that we can't conjure it. We could try to classify the existence of this planet, so the only demons who'd know about it are the ones on this crew - me and there's two others - and it'd be much easier to enforce rules against us spying on you than against all the demons in the multiverse doing so. We could move the entire planet to Mîr, a world where one of Vanda Nossëo's friends and allies has the ability to grant wishes, and have some people wish everyone and their stuff unconjurable; we could then put the planet back or leave it in Mîr as you preferred. We could move the planet to a new world, that demons don't know to quantify over when they're looking for things, and handle all communications by multi-hop crystal ball relay, which could be limited to one non-demon knowing how to emplace everything - could be someone who'd forget it after the installation was performed, although then maintenance would be impossible. None of these plans is perfect but the Mîr one is probably the best if you want my recommendation. Or there might be things we haven't thought of yet."

"Mîr sounds like a fine plan to me, I guess if you don't want everyone to die you should lead with that. But if it's not retroactive some people are still going to hate it."

"Might be able to get it retroactive with enough wishes. Mîr wishes run on strength of emotion, so the fact that people here feel so strongly about it is an asset if we can keep them from committing suicide about it long enough to make the wish. Uh, one complication is that if things are unconjurable retroactively then we can't resurrect even people who would like to be alive again, lacking the ability to conjure a body for them. So ideally there'd be an exception for that."