She lands outside of a structure - actually, a row of them. They're... chirping? An extremely ugly woman - her face looks like it was made of gray clay and then someone squeezed it; her eyes are bugging out and her jaw barely has any definition despite the teeth sticking out from between her lips - is pushing a wheelbarrow toward one of the structures and doesn't notice Thorn immediately. She has an ugly baby strapped to her back.

Sentients come in all shapes and sizes. If these are the natives, though, she's going to stick out a bit. Nothing for it, though. 

She approaches the woman. "Excuse me," she says. Her translation suite should convey her meaning.

"- hi, what can I do for ya?" says the woman, seeming surprised but in a rather mundane way by Thorn's presence and not much at all by her appearance. "Didn't think humans liked crickets."

"Is that what these are? I've never seen one before. I'm afraid I'm very lost. Can you tell me where I am?"

"Yeah, this is a cricket farm. It's near Randkokan, that way." She points. "Planet's Laga. ...world's Patalon."

Thorn is a trained professional and just barely manages to keep her shock off her face. "Thank you," she says. "Uh, do you know the way to the nearest transit station?"

"Randkokan has a bus stop. We're on the Porandaum line, if you want to get to a big hub take that to Ened."

"Thanks again, you've been a tremendous help."

She starts walking in the direction the woman pointed.

Randkokan is a town! It's surrounded by farms that rather suddenly give way to buildings in the five to fifteen story range. There's awnings over the streets, and orcs everywhere, arguing about who is at fault for a bicycle crash and playing ball in the street and selling stuff in stalls and breakdancing. There are clothing stores and a school for little orcs and a gigantic amazing playground right in the middle of town as well as smaller but also amazing playgrounds in every individual neighborhood.

Lively and industrialized, and the streets are wide enough for cars, but she hasn't seen a single car yet. Either this is a backwater or there's other transport technology in use - quite possibly both, given the magic readings on this place and the woman from earlier's comments on a "big hub."

She looks around for something that looks like a bus stop.

There is a sign that says BUS STATION over there! It's a substantial building with no visible way for a bus to drive up to it.

She'll walk into the bus station, then.

Inside there are buses! It's laid out sort of like a subway station with platforms, but there are no tracks. Just buses, big ones, with people - mostly but not all orcs - piling on and filing off. If she waits a moment she will see one teleport out of existence, and another one pop into place behind it. The platforms are labeled with what route they go to, and there's a big chart on a screen in the middle of the main room.

She gravitates towards the big chart on the screen. Hopefully it will be conveniently labelled.

It's a little arcane, but with some squinting she can figure out where to go for a bus on the Porandum line that will terminate at Ened.

It's not too easy to judge scale, but nonetheless at this point she should call home. 

She stands off to the side, fishes in her pack for her beacon, and punches in a code. Interplanar civilization, scale unknown. 

She doesn't have the technology with her to make further transit without help, and they're not going to bring a D-folder into another interplanar civilization's territory. She could ride the busses which are presumably interplanar, but that risks stranding her, and in any case they may cost something and she has no currency this world is likely to accept. Given the givens... 

She keys in another code. Requesting formal envoy.

Then she sets the beacon down on the floor and takes a step back.

A door appears in midair, and an androgynous woman in a crisply tailored business suit steps through. The door vanishes behind her.

She nods to Thorn.

Thorn retrieves the beacon, and puts it back in her pack. Then she steps towards the Porandum line.

The envoy trails along behind her.

The orcs are kind of surprised by the doorway. Apparently that's not a normal way for teleportation to work. But nobody's going to confront them about it.

They do not have bus tokens, which will stop them at the turnstile.

Morning-glory looks at Thorn amusedly. "Any bright ideas?"

"When in doubt, accost a local." 

She looks over at a concentration of surprised orcs, and calls out to them. "Excuse me! We're from offworld and we need to reach an embassy, could any of you help us out?"

"- yeah, do you especially want to take the bus or do you just need the mail label for the imperial office?"

"Mail would work, but I'll need instructions for sending it."

"Yeah, you write, uh -" There's a sign on the wall, actually, with mail labels for various emergency situations. "I guess for this one you want 'Mir Imperial office miscellaneous/other rabbit sparkle fork'? Write it down just like on the sign, don't translate it."

"Thank you." 

She shares a glance with her envoy, not quite saying what comes to her mind given the apparent magic in play and the use of the word "Imperial."

"You have paper on you, right?"

Thorn fishes in her backpack and pulls out a blank journal and a ballpoint pen.

The envoy takes them, and looks around for a seat - they must have benches at this bus station, right?

They do! The nearest one is being used as a jungle gym by some orc children who apparently aren't discerning enough to use the better ones outside but there's an empty one a bit farther along.

The envoy sits down on the bench and sets the book in her lap. She writes, carefully matching what's on the sign: 

Mir Imperial office miscellaneous/other rabbit sparkle fork

I, Planetary Envoy Morning-Glory, am a diplomat representing a transplanar polity, the Origin Trade Consortium, which has just come in contact with Patalon. I would like to exchange basic information about our respective polities and discuss the possibility of trade. At present I am at the Randkokan bus station along with the scout who first made contact. Please advise on local procedure at this point.

There is a delay of 38 seconds.

Then there appears a short, hairy person with a beard. "Planetary Envoy Morning-Glory?" he says.

She smiles, stands, and bows formally. "That would be me, yes. And this is Thorn," she gestures to her, "of the Exploratory Branch."

Thorn also bows.

"Good to meet you. Do you mind if I teleport you from here to the Imperial office in an adjacent world?"

"Not at all."

They pop into a lovely office, very Art Deco. The Dwarf gestures at them to have a seat. "Welcome to Mîr," he says. "It's one of three sister transdimensional polities that collectively span a couple hundred worlds. What brought you to Patalon today?"

"I was sent on a routine exploratory mission to assess a potential world; when I discovered that there was an interdimensional polity here, I identified it as such to the OTC and asked for an official envoy. That would be Morning-Glory, here."

"OTC maintains an exploratory corps to contact alien worlds, establish trade, and in some cases - primarily those of widespread slavery, torture, or unlivable local conditions - defend the welfare of their inhabitants or ensure evacuation to a safer world. Most worlds receive an official envoy or envoys within the first month; in this case, because there is an interdimensional polity being contacted, I was brought in almost immediately. The OTC consists of a densely-settled central plane - Origin - surrounded by a broad halo of around a hundred Trade worlds, which have local governments but are also considered full members of the Consortium for purposes of travel - a single passport allows access to anywhere in the core - and then around that there are a thousand or so affiliated worlds, either Half-Tamed or Refugee, which are not administrated by the OTC but have some degree of regular contact and accept Origin Trade Credit. Last census estimated our population at around 10 trillion in our core worlds, and around 100 trillion including all affiliates."

"Do you mind repeating that under a truth effect so I can be sure of the next step in inviting you to meet Empress Isabella?"

"I do not mind repeating that under a truth effect."

The Dwarf turns on some soft music. "There it is now."

Morning-Glory repeats herself precisely to the word.

"Thank you. I'll put in for a priority appointment with Empress Isabella." He taps his computer. "Do you have any very short-term questions or needs I can address for you?"

"I am a Persona mage and have various abilities to detect truth and help others express themselves honestly, whether physically or mentally. Naturally I would not use any of my abilities without consent, but I don't know what security precautions are taken regarding your Empress. Is it acceptable for me to meet with her in person?"

"She'll make the final determination, but I expect her to want to see you. This doesn't happen every day."

"In that case, I have only one other request. Thorn is unlikely to participate in the negotiations, but I know for a fact that she loves to explore alien worlds and interact with new cultures. Would it be possible for her to spend some time getting to know Mir on the street level, so to speak? She would likely need a diplomatic visa and some form of stipend in local currency - we'd be happy to repay it if trade is established."

"Yes, I can do that." He does some more computer tasks and a peripheral spits out a card-sized device. "That's got some spending money, a bus pass, and the kind of visa we normally give visiting Federation folks... anything else we can do for you?"

"Do you have local internet? If you do, can I have an internet-capable device to browse on while I wait?"

Thorn takes her card and tucks it into her belt pouch.

The Dwarf dials up a couple of small tablets on the replicator in the wall and offers them each one.

Morning-Glory takes her tablet and leans against the wall.

"No need for you to stick around, Thorn," she says. "Go have fun."

She googles "political organization of Mîr" and looks for a Wikipedia-equivalent page.

Thorn takes her tablet and the hint, and bows once more to the Dwarf. "Which way to the exit?"

Mîr was founded in [click here to set your time display preferences] by Empresses Isabella "Gem" Swan and Lúthien "Joy" following their collaboration on averting the destruction of Wish Earth. De jure, while they wield effectively unlimited power within the Wish neighborhood, they have promised to under all foreseeable circumstances abide by or by lawful processes amend the Mîr Constitution, and in practice many of the daily affairs of Mîr other than wish-granting are delegated to bodies such as...

The local equivalents of Aura or Sunaira, then. 

Morning-Glory skims quickly through the article and a few others linked from it to get a general sense. Then she continues to the articles on slavery and torture, particularly their history sections, and follows that up by quickly checking to see if she can find porn (not any particular kind) through the search engine, since that correlates with a few things.

Meanwhile, Thorn heads out to the grand square and has a look around. 

Within the pealed worlds slavery is de facto impossible to practice coercively due to the shared free movement principle, but is not universally and specifically outlawed. One species from Hazel and two from Warp thus far catalogued appear as a species trait to sincerely prefer to be enslaved, and exceptional individuals in other species may also be covered by the same noninterference bias, meaning that so long as the enslaved person is aware of their options peal organizations will not take it upon themselves to forcibly remove them from the situation.

For kink practices that involve inflicting discomfort, see BDSM. For historical atrocities, see List of historical atrocities. For the Aurum 2021 film, see Torture (film)...

ELF GIRL SUMMONS DEMON AND GETS A *BIG* SURPRISE! --- PON FARR PART 16 --- CUBE HOUSEWIFE GETS FREAKY WITH MORPH

That says several things. A light hand, in general, and a policy of nonintervention and individual choice. The list of historical atrocities sure does have some things on it - particularly these "Melkors" have a tendency to instantiate Hells - but there's a general lack of direct Hell worlds mentioned. Their local area seems to be less hostile than the OTC's. They have a world with less limited shapeshifting than that possible under the OTC. They have demons, or at least mythology about demons - they might have contacted a Cthonia, but she hasn't found an instance of a slaveholding sadistic Name magic species in the list of atrocities. 

The page on the free movement principle gets a smile. She's starting to think she likes these people, assuming they're telling her the truth.

Thorn's going to go check out the craft fair.

The craft fair has crafts! It's majority humans and most of the rest Elves here, with a few other kinds of people scattered around but not much remarked on. Painted silk scarves! Gorgeously glazed stoneware! Rugs! Decorative fishbowls already enchanted with a song that will keep the water clean for you and your fish! Colorful candles! Earrings and bracelets and rings, oh my! Handmade stuffed animals! Socks! Macrame! Quilled paper! Temporary tattoos! Artisanal cases for computers and phones! Wooden serving utensils! Marzipan sculptures!

Thorn's a sucker for a good bracelet. 

"Excuse me, how much is it for this one with the inset amethyst?"

Meanwhile, Morning-glory is reading the page on Demons on wikipedia.

This article is about the daeva type. For the concept of "demons" as found in fiction and mythology, see Demons in popular culture. For the Materia-neighborhood species, see Demon (Materia). For the creatures in Dreamward, see Demon (Dreamward).

Demons (a type of daeva) are a sapient species native to Hell. Some are spontaneous adults while others are deceased humans, Dwarves, Amentans, or other reductionist mortal species who are born¹ in Revelation or Space Arda and later die. In addition to being indestructible like angels, fairies, and Limboites, demons have the power to create arbitrary matter at will with the exception of minds and magical objects, according to conjurable parameters. While they have a range limit and a volume per time rate limit it is seldom to never a limiting factor on anything short of astroengineering projects. Demons can be summoned from Revelation and Space Arda and frequently are for both business and recreational purposes. A Bell, Campbell Mark Swan, is a demon, as is the inventor of the chiplock computer.

She taps quickly through the disambiguation pages while her brain catches up with the implications. None of her species of Demon, according to this, but wow, arbitrary matter on the planetary scale at will? As a species trait? These people could well be richer than the OTC, to say nothing of the potential military applications. She is deliberately not aware of the full capabilities of Director Black's security forces, but it's already clear that if things go poorly it'll be worse than the Namer's War. 

She closes her eyes for a moment. Better not screw up, then. 

She clicks through to the article on conjurable parameters and the article on Campbell Mark Swan.

Thorn looks at the sign. "Sorry, I'm new to Mir - they gave me a payment card with a stipend - " she fishes it out of her pocket "- but I don't know how it works yet or how to check my balance. I assume I can find it online somewhere?"

"Oh, yeah, I can charge that, and you can connect the card to your device so you can use that too."

Campbell Mark Swan ("Cam") is a Bell originally from Revelation. After anonymously performing the Revelation event from which the world takes its name in [click here to set your time display preferences], he was murdered and became a demon in Dite, Hell. Constrained by summon bindings he was unable to accomplish much of note until his Arda drop into Space Arda in [click here to set your time display preferences], summoned by an Elf child in the departing Noldor host on the Valian moon Araman. He was a major participant in the Second Arda War, providing consulting, materiel support, and ultimately the destruction of Space Valinor that led to the cease-fire. He then focused on postwar reconstruction and resurrection until joining the test flight of the prototype worldleaper, which led to the Space Arda and Hex contact.

"I'm gonna assume a single bracelet won't break my bank?" She pulls out her tablet and googles "Link payment card to computer."

There are simple instructions that she will have no trouble following for how to do that.

"It shouldn't? I mean, I don't know your budget, and if you're new maybe you've just spent all your basic on moving in, how should I know," says the seller.

She quickly links her card and presents it. "Should be fine, then. I'll take it." 

Bracelet! "Enjoy!"

She puts on the bracelet and heads over to the museum.

It's a Museum of Arda History featuring artifacts and dioramas from all known Ardas at various points in their timelines.

She goes in, paying if need be, and spends some time looking around and browsing the exhibits, just kind of getting a general impression. She stops briefly at each exhibit, but for some of them she moves on barely after having gotten a decent look at them. No need to waste time. 

After doing a tour of the museum, she heads back outside and taps at her tablet for a local map. She wants a computer store, a cafe, and a bus stop. Any of the three nearby?

The nearest of those is the bus stop - it's an actual bus with wheels and stuff, though it seems to be self-driving - but there's a café right around the corner from that, and a store with computers among other things a couple blocks beyond.

She'll walk to the computer store, googling a download of the local Wikipedia along the way, and look for a memory stick or flash card or whatever they use here of sufficient size to put it on. If it's within her budget she'll buy it and put Wikipedia on it. Then she'll go to the café, have a coffee with her remaining money, and eavesdrop a bit.

She can get a computer shard sufficient to hold Integrated Wikipedia!

At the café:

"- after I'd already put her in the queue!"

"Well, I mean, if he forgave her -"

"He ought to have queued her himself, then, hadn't he -"

...

"All that Art Deco shit."

"No, Elves are more Art Nouveau. Dwarves are Art Deco."

"What are orcs, then?"

"Uh - modern, I guess? That's such a dumb name for an art movement..."

"Ultimately those are all human art movements and it doesn't make sense to categorize the hugely varied -"

"It's shorthand, give it a rest."

...

"Then he found out we're not a democracy on the federal level."

"I mean, we're not."

"Yeah but imagine if somebody elected, I don't know, Miriam Flag -"

"Miriam Flag, why, just because she plays Bells in movies -"

"Shut up, but like, imagine, the wish granter, and then Miriam Flag says something idiotic on Shortform, and then she gets voted out but has the wish granter - I don't know, I just think it's more honest like this? And most countries are democracies."

She sips at her coffee, getting it down to half, then leaves the café with her coffee in one hand and her tablet tucked under her arm. Over to the bus station, where she'll wait for a bus while sipping her coffee. Anyone else waiting with her?

Two little girls. One has a tiny dragon robot perched on her shoulder. They are arguing about who should get to be pink-color-scheme Ultimate Zelda in Smash when they get home.

Some things are constant across all Earths. Smash seems particularly resilient. 

She looks up a transit map on her phone and looks to see if this bus route goes to a transit station offworld. To anywhere, she's not particularly picky.

The route will eventually take her to Ened, which has the teleporting buses. She can get on a line that goes between planets within Mîr or one that goes between worlds through and outside of Mîr.

She googles major tourist destinations within Mîr while she waits for the bus to Ened. From there she'll take the interworld line. She wants to see more places in the wider world. (She particularly loves seeing different stars, for reasons both practical and personal.)

Major tourist destinations in Mîr include an orc history museum, the imperial palace, various Lóriens, a big zoo, a bunch of standard Earth landmarks on Wish's Earth, the ruins of the wishmaker civilization, the touristier parts of the tentacle alien civilization, a garden grown by the plant natives of Patalon, a Luster concert hall, a replica of Rivendell that humans are allowed to visit, a theme park oriented around Kyubey-era magical girls as a concept/aesthetic with some excellent roller coasters, an entire dwarf planet that was, as something of a joke, colonized specifically by and for Dallas Cowboys fans who were able to get critical mass on qualifying for the necessary wishes, a gallery of digital and illusion art in constant motion across screens and empty air, some Elf architecture tours, and the Millennia Dwarf stock exchange.

She googles what a Lórien is. Why is it represented multiple times here?

Lórien is a feature of Valinors; a Vala, Irmo (also sometimes called Lórien himself) has them as his domain. They're a magical responsive garden/forest/park sort of situation, where everything will (usually subtly) bend toward whatever you would find most comfortable or blissful or relaxing or charming or whatever. They're the gold standard for certain kinds of trauma recovery and there are several wished up so populations of traumatized residents don't run into each other (though usually that wouldn't be very relaxing and can be expected not to happen most of the time) and so the Vala in question is not the final arbiter of who gets to be in one. Some people like them for vacationing in; the one in the Australian Outback is mostly just a resort now, since it was originally spun up for former witches and those are neither very dangerous to bump into nor usually given to staying in Lórien for years on end.

Hmmm, hmmm, what to put on her itinerary... 

Damn, she caught herself thinking. Just go with impulse. The theme park it is. And then the architecture tours, and then she'll visit a Lorien, and then back to Patalon for the gardens. (And - well, it's obvious to anyone with sense that she'll need to deliver this copy of the local Wikipedia to the OTC, along with let's not think that just in case. Either way that's just a pause in Patalon with her beacon.) 

She waits for the bus and sips her coffee.

The bus comes in about two minutes and with a fairly dizzying number of transfers she can get to the theme park! There are people in costume - some of them may be actual magic rocks - and theme environments that look like some of the more palatable witches, many of which have rides that go through them. There are exhibition fights several times a day. There's a lightshow, come sunset. There are Kyubeys, real ones, letting just anybody see them nowadays, and you can pick them up and squeeze them if you want.

- cute fuzzy sentient aliens. Cool! She did enough reading on the bus about the theme park's theme to appreciate that these fuzzballs being citizens is a bit surprising given the history. 

"Hey, excuse me," she says to one of the kyubeys that seems less occupied. "Do you have time to chat?"

Yes I do! It goes right up to her and sits, light and fluffsome, on her foot.

"Wonderful! You work here? I'm from a newly-contacted and I only have a sketchy picture of the history of magical girls, witches and kyubeys. What little I have makes me wonder what happened that kyubeys ended up as citizens of Mir. Do you have any better an idea of the history? Are things for Kyubeys okay in Mir? Can I pet you?"

You can pet me! Kyubeys are a hive mind, so we are only one citizen of Mîr. We came to an agreement with Empress Isabella that she would supply an unlimited alternative to our parent civilization's energy needs in exchange for us ceasing to manipulate the magical ecology and giving her the wish-granter. We do not have emotions so it is not very meaningful to consider our quality of life the way it is with a person who has emotions.

Thorn squats down and pets the kyubey.

"Where'd she come up with unlimited energy? And if you don't have emotions, persumably you're here for some "cold" reason, yes? Presumably you're indifferent to being petted, and you don't get bored, and the pay's adequate. Any other reasons you have bodies dedicated here?"

In the Wish neighborhood, emotions can be harnessed for magical purposes. Empress Lúthien appeared in Wish with a song that generates happiness ex nihilo repeatably. For a short time we operated mood disorder clinics to harvest the transitional energy from depressed patients listening to the song. Now it is possible to achieve energy sufficiency more efficiently than that, such as by using magic from other universes. For this purpose it is convenient to have money and we have been paid to have a presence here demonstrating authentic Kyubey behavior for the theme of the park.

"You have certainly done that. Thank you for your time. What other parts of the park would you recommend for someone interested in history?"

The employee trainings say that history-oriented visitors often like the hall of costumery and weaponry.

"Which would be in which direction?"

The Kyubey points with a forepaw.

"Thank you." And off she goes in that direction, keeping an eye and an ear out to the sights and sounds of the theme park as she goes. In particular she'd like to see if she can spot where the exhibition fights happen.

There's an arena over there with a schedule and names posted for who's going to spar!

Wonderful! Does she have time to see the hall of weaponry and costumes before the next spar, or should she be waiting here to get a good seat?

Depends how thoroughly she wants to examine the costumes and weapons. If she just wants to swing through and linger over a couple of the coolest, she can make it back here in time to see magic rocks have at it.

She probably has time to give it a once-over like with the museum, and that's all she had really planned to do. She's a busy woman with a lot to see, after all.

The costumes and weapons are replicas of the... costumes and weapons... of magical girls throughout the ages, with plaques giving their names and where and when they operated and what they wished for and, in some cases, what kind of witch they turned into (disclosed, reportedly, with the consent of those persons).

Seems a little gauche to make a theme park of it, but then you get what you pay for. 

She goes and gets a seat for the spar.

A girl in pink-gold-black shakes hands with a girl in fuchsia-and-brown. They remind the audience that magic rocks don't have to feel pain if they don't want to, they're leaving their gems over there in boxes so they don't accidentally get smashed, and if either of them falls, the other will donate magic till they're up again. This is just for fun! And without further ado, they summon their weapons - pink has a halberd, fuchsia has a giant cutlass - and go. Both of them are full of killing intent and sparkly magical powers they can use to maneuver and attack; they're drawing it out a little, being flashy, but it doesn't look obviously scripted or fixed, just like they've narrowed their repertoire and have agreed not to go for early cheap shots that might not be deflected.

She's seen similar showfights before somewhere, and this one looks like a good one. The combatants have clearly got some experience - maybe not real combat, but at least a lot of shows - and they're also obviously having fun. She watches the fight in full and applauds at the end. It's quite the spectacle!

She doesn't stick around afterwards, though. While it would be nice to stick around long enough to see the stars properly, she has places to be and things to see. The rides aren't really of interest to her, so she'll be moving along. Is there a conveniently scheduled architecture tour?

Yup, the architecture tour is popular enough that there's one starting basically whenever, as long as you aren't picky about what time zone of which Arda you see. Here are a bunch of beautiful Elf buildings!

How lovely! She's sure there's an OTC equivalent but it seems to be slipping her memory. She follows along with the tour group and listens to the histories of particular buildings and so on. It's nice. Peaceful. 

Which reminds her, her next stop is a Lórien. 

(There's a little tension, there, but she doesn't let herself linger on it.) 

Onwards!

The Outback Lórien is currently, at the entrance she comes through, an elm forest, but whether it stays that way as she walks in is up to her.

After some walking, she finds herself in a rose garden. It feels oddly nostalgic, somehow. Like she's come home. 

She sits on a bench and breathes, and time passes. More time than she'd planned to spend, honestly. She was more tense than she'd realized. 

But she does have a mission and she really ought to be getting back to Patalon. 

Reluctantly, she leaves the Lórien behind.

It is easy to get out of; takes less time to leave than to get to the rose garden.

Then she will bus back to Patalon and go sit in the very nice not-Lórien garden and fish out her beacon. 

She sets the beacon down on the bench next to her, and takes off a necklace she's wearing. It's a silver chain with what seems to be an ordinary quartz crystal on it. She sets it carefully atop the beacon, along with the Wikipedia computer shard, and presses a button. The shard and the necklace dissappear. 

Less than a minute later, her necklace reappears. She picks it up and puts it back on. 

Meanwhile, on a flash-assembled blacksite on a desolate planet in an uncharted universe, a trained staff of forked personnel with expensive immortalities gets to work. There's also a concerned goddess kind of... hovering.

" - Clean, as far as I can tell. No memetic hazards, no traces of mental effects, the soul seems to be directly untampered with though of course the constituent experiences could be fabricated the hard way. I've duplicated the alien chip and format-hacked the copy to compatability with our systems, their corpus is available for analysis. It hasn't been much time for information gathering but something is definitely better than nothing. Let's see if what we have is consistent."

... And one hundred and forty-five Lilies, plus some additional staff, begin parceling out the recorded memory data and wikipedia pages, reading, processing, and cross-referencing.

This sure is a lovely garden and a wonderful place to not dwell on how you might have been soulripped and not know it.

She's going to go sit in the Outback Lórien again for a while.

It is just as lovely and obliging as before.

Alright, now what...

Well, she'd like to go stargazing in a few different places. And she hasn't met very many people, aside from the Kyubeys. She googles stargazing clubs.

There are stargazing groups that meet in space, on boats, in the Atacama Desert, on unsettled parts of the capital planet of Mîr, and in this very Lórien she's already sitting in since apparently Lóriens are great at handling light pollution.

Well that's convenient. When's the next meeting of the local stargazing group?

It'll get dark here in six hours.

Hmm. Any meetups of other kinds happening in the local area between now and then? She doesn't want to have to bus around but there must be cafes and things. 

Looks like actually a lot of groups meet in the Lórien; it makes it easy to find your crowd and someplace to sit and also you can eat all the plants. If she wants to just walk for five minutes right now she can crash a book club or a sewing circle or a fire-spinning group or a hang gliding lesson or a painting club or "Calvinball Orienteering" or pickup soccer or circle singing or a photography class.

What's orienteering? (She googles it.) 

Oh, it's navigation as a sport. Cute. She'd probably be good at it, but she's not really in the mood for something physical right now. Does the book club say what book or books they're reading? 

They are reading the epic of Gilgamesh, comparing and contrasting various translations.

She'll crash the photography class. 

They are taking pictures of a flower, asking Lórien to adjust the lighting and wind conditions to suit the effects they have in mind! One of them has a big film camera rig but most of them are using digital.

"Hey! Did you bump into us on purpose or just 'cause?" somebody inquires when Thorn enters their clearing.

"Hey! On purpose, I'm waiting around for a stargazing group and decided to drop by. Is that okay?"

"Sure, no worries. - Ann, try adjusting your exposure there -"

She is just now realizing that she probably should've brought a camera. (She checks quickly whether her tablet has an inbuilt camera she can mess around with, even if it's not really photography-quality.) Either way she'll hang around and listen to the exercises and chat a little. Is golden rule framing better or worse than rule of thirds framing? Do they know Ansel Adams' Zone System for exposures? Do they have disposable cameras here? She's heard that working with something a little less sophisticated can help you focus on the creative part instead of stressing about the technical parts. Would anyone else like to share some of their past photos? She's happy to offer critique or praise. 

The tablet does have an inbuilt camera! Disposable cameras aren't very popular but they do exist, especially the instant kind, kids like them. This guy would love to show her his portfolio. He did this timelapse of the view from his apartment, see? And closeups of random kitchen objects.

She'll gamely critique his portfolio - no reason not to, honestly - and take photos with her tablet camera of the flowers being offered up as subjects - and, hmm, to Portfolio Guy - "You're local, then? I'm visiting from a recently-contacted. Know any good local places? I'm kind of doing the tourist thing but travel guides never catch everything." 

"Oh, I'm not very local, I take the bus here all the way from Acapulco, but I guess I'm more local than you. But around the Lórien there's, let's see, a café with a bunch of pets like from Stork - tame owls and stuff, by the northside entrance - there's a massage place right in the forest, but their waitlist is awful - place where you can learn to fly, but I hear they're losing customers lately, it's easier to go to Cube than to get flung into the air a hundred times."

"I don't know Cube yet, what makes flying easier there? The café sounds nice. If there's anything interesting back at Acapulco I'd be interested in that too."

"Cube has morph, so you go and you get morph and you pick a bird - you get to pick, that way, the spell only does swifts specifically - and it comes with instincts and the spell doesn't. Back in Acapulco I like this one torta shop, Tia Riviera's, and of course the beach."

"Tia Riviera's, let me just make a note of that." She types up the name on her tablet. "Thanks for the tips." She takes off her pack and fishes in it, coming up with a heavy felt-wrapped roll. "- I brought some gold coins with me from my world, I hadn't realized they'd be almost valueless here. Would you like one? There weren't so many of these made, so it might be worth something as a collector's item even if the gold's not worth much."

"Oh, sure, why not, I don't collect coins but probably somebody gets really into it somewhere, thanks!"

She passes over one of the hex-stamped coins, marked with the letters OTC on both sides. "Here you go, then. Thanks again." She smiles. "I should get back to the lessons. Maybe I'll see you again sometime at Tia Riviera's." 

"I'll keep an eye out!"

And then Thorn will continue taking photos and chatting to people until the lesson ends or it's time for her to get some supper, whichever comes first. She doesn't strictly need to eat but it's a good habit. If supper comes first she'll go check out the local pet café, otherwise she'll check the schedule of events again.

The photographers are still going strong by the time it would be a reasonable moment to have dinner. Some of them are just eating the leaves off the trees.

The pet cafe has a panda and a ton of birds and all the fuzziest small mammals and some beautiful snakes and shiny beetles and a few butterflies. On her way in she is invited to choose an armband or set of them based on what animals she would enjoy having approach her.

She would prefer not to be accosted by the panda or the beetles. The rest are fine. 

She sits and has coffee and a couple sweet buns and observes the behavior of the pets. 

The pets sit on people and get petted! Some people buy snacks to feed them, and they eat those. They don't have a lot of legible body language indicating that they're thrilled about this but they don't look stressed either, they just seem to accept that this is a thing that is happening.

An owl lands on her knee, being very gentle with its talons, and hoots. A hummingbird investigates her tattoos to see if any of them are secretly flowers. A quokka comes up to her.

She gently pets the quokka, and pings it curiously with Telepathic Bond. What are its thoughts like?

This human has the green band on her arm and there weren't already a lot of animals around her so it's here now. She's petting it pretty well. Maybe she will get the itch behind its neck.

She gets the itch behind its neck. It seems a little smarter than a regular animal if it can recognize the green band on its own. The owl knows enough to be gentle with the claws, too. Stork has smarter animals? She googles cursorily to check if her supposition is correct.

The internet indicates that Stork animals are Earth-biosphere-typical; Stork magic can take nonsapient animals and cause them to respond to verbal instructions from their original servantmaker (who can then bid them to obey someone else at point of sale).

Convenient how it's just animals. Uncharitable. But it's certainly some information. 

She might as well read the page on magic on Wikipedia while she's here, get an idea of the lay of the land.

Magic refers to any phenonemon or system of phenomena which routes around, locally alters, or otherwise does not conform to nonmagical physics. Examples include:

- nonreductionist souls (e.g. Flat Elves and Flat Orcs, Materians, Dreamward natives)
- spells and rituals (e.g. Loki's spells, magic songs, summoning)
- enchanted artifacts (e.g. Flat Arda artifact magic, wizard-enchanted items, hexed items)
- magical locations (e.g. Lórien, Fairyland, Eclipse portals)
- magical species (e.g. Beach shorefolk, the wishmakers, daeva)
- individual magical powers (e.g. Aurum witches, magic rocks, eclipsed)
- origin-based magic abilities (e.g. servantmaking, spellbinding, troportation)
- world- and neighborhood-pervasive magical traits (e.g. Flat Ardas, Wish neighborhood, Materian anticausality)

There is as yet no unifying theory of magic; the categories above are not expected to "carve nature at the joints", and some examples were omitted due to being unclear in their category membership (for instance, it is not yet known if Hazel magicals can be born outside of Hazel, but the children of magical parents in Hazel are reliably themselves magical and some magical Hazel natives have mundane parents and most Hazel residents are mundane, leaving it unclear precisely where the magic comes from). There is also ongoing debate about whether things with well-understood physical mechanisms that rely on particular conditions (morph, warp) should be classed as magic, and Warp psi and subtle artistry are both considered edge cases as well (though psions are not.)

She could read all of this but that's not her job honestly more worth learning by experience. The important thing is that they're pretty magic-rich and also materially and technologically wealthy. Her guess about the gold seems to have been right, at least judging by the local's reaction. 

She clicks through to the article about servantmaking since it's drawn her attention.

Servantmaking is a form of magic that can be learned by spontaneous natives of the world Stork. This article is about servantmaking in general; for more detail, see Shines and shades, Golem (servant), Automaton (servant), Pet (servant), and Puppet (servant). For specific servant models of particular import see Charp, Stork (golem), and Shine Silmaril.

Servantmaking is learned, not instinctual, but requires mental actions that can only be performed by a spontaneous Stork native in order to "wake" the servants. Other people can do servant programming for those servants that take programs, and be designated as legitimate instruction providers for servants which accept verbal orders. No magic is required for that or for chassis design. The demand for servants throughout the mapped worlds has radically altered the Stork economy, which was pre-electrical at time of contact (though some servants were able to take the place of some industrial processes, and quality of life was generally higher than on nonmagical worlds of similar technological understanding.) In addition to the basic magic of causing the servants to obey instructions, servantmaking can also confer properties like the golem ability to move in otherwise fixed chassis, and pet ability to respond to instructions in any language. Attempts to wish on servantmaking have not so far led to satisfactory copies of the full power.

So Stork natives are practically a magical species, and wishing isn't all-powerful. Interesting. 

She finishes her sweet buns, and gently shoos the owl on her knee. 

She could google for local brothels probably not a good idea, even if it's useful ethnographically she would not want to be a customer under questionable conditions. Plus if you pay fairly it's expensive. She could go to a bar, but does she really want to put herself in a vulnerable position? 

Seriously, girl, your libido's going to get you in trouble one of these days. There's acting casual and - she shouldn't be thinking about that. 

She sighs and rubs her head in her palm. This is being one of those days. Terribly exciting, sure, but on the other hand she can't stop jumping at shadows. And she's not going to get any peace of mind anytime soon; even g 

She cuts off the line of thought again, stands, and walks out of the café and into the Lórien again. Is that fire-spinning group still running? Let's find out.

They're gone but there is a tumbling and gymnastics group meeting now, and a contra dance.

She can do tumbling and gymnastics! Something physical will keep her brain from working too hard, and she at least knows some of the basics.

Lórien is very soft and cushy and sproingy where called for, and there are convenient branches to swing from.

What she has from sparring won't let her do anything too absurd, but it's still nice to be moving. She doesn't tire easily, so she'll keep at the gymnastics for as long as they're offered or until it's stargazing time.

They call things off when the sun's getting low in the sky. The stargazers will assemble in about half an hour.

... She's going to look for someone to chat with and see what the Lórien provides her with. 

She will find herself hiking up to a rocky outcropping on which sits a girl.

"... Hi there, I'm Thorn! The Lórien thinks I should talk to you, apparently. Do you mind if I join you?"

"Oh! Go ahead. I like having somebody to watch the sunset with. Thorn, that's a neat name... I'm Doris."

She sits down next to Doris. "Nice to meet you, Doris. I'm waiting for a stargazing group - I love the stars, and I want to see if any of them here are different from the ones I have at home. I'm from a newly-contacted, it's my first day in Mîr. Where do you come from?"

"Albuquerque. What world're you from?"

That startles a laugh from Thorn. "- Ah, well, I grew up on a world that's called Lifewell now, but I've seen a lot of worlds since. I'm a scout for a multiversal corporation called the OTC, we operate a lot of places. My job is to go find new worlds to trade with - you can imagine my surprise when I stumbled across Mîr. I've handed off the real work to a proper envoy now, most of this is over my head at this point, but it's still exciting and a bit scary. I'm trying my best not to google all the new and exciting bad things you can do with the local magic systems."

"- gosh. I don't like, usually read the news, but that's exciting."

"It really is. Kind of stressful, but also fun. There's so many new places to see and new people to meet. Like you!"

Doris giggles. "I don't really think of myself as a tourist attraction!"

"Yeah, well, finding out what's ordinary for a new culture is part of what I love about my job. So please, tell me about your life! Whatever you'd like to."

"Huh. Well, I was born in 1937. Did the whole magical girl thing. Turned into a witch. And they, you know, fixed me up with the magic song and dumped me here, and most people've left by now, so there's day trippers coming in, like you, but I really like it here, you know? And nobody's after me to pay rent or hurry up and get out of the way, so - I've just stayed. It's so peaceful. And I don't get antsy without the internet like moderns do."

"Oh, so you're one of the original inhabitants. I went to a theme park earlier today that was based on magic rocks, actually. Went and saw some costumes and weapons, an exhibition fight. Met a Kyubey, which was an interesting experience. It's one thing to playfight and make something positive of it, but, well, when you know the history I can't help but feel it's a little gauche, you know? It's probably worth something to pull in people who'd otherwise never have learned the history, but... Sorry, you probably don't want to talk about this, I'm just rambling."

"Being a magical girl was kind of thrilling, really, I don't know how you'd make a whole Coney Island of it but as long as it's not about - witching, then it seems harmless."

"No, just rides and showfights and so on. Pet your own kyubey. I think the kyubeys are a good educational measure, spending even five minutes talking to one gives you a strong impression of how alien they are. I asked the one I met if the kyubeys were being treated well and it said that it's not logical to worry about quality of life for them because they have no emotions. Ask a stupid question, I guess." She shrugs. "Do you do activities or anything here, or do you just enjoy the gardens?"

"Oh, I do stuff. The garden sends me people sometimes to talk to, and sometimes I make it snow and I make igloos and stuff, or I go swimming... the trees are always climbable and you can eat any of the plants and they taste like whatever you want... sometimes somebody brings a book in, and then doesn't want it after they've read it, and they'll leave it here and I'll find it and read their book."

"You like a quiet life, then? I might bring you some library books if you want, I'm sure there's somewhere I can get something. What kinds of books do you like?"

"I like romances. Happy endings, you know."

"I like romances too. I'll see if I can find a good one for you."

And then she'll just sit and watch the sun set for a little while, unless Doris has something she'd like to say.

Nope, sunset-watching seems good by her.

When it's full dark and the stargazing people are probably convening, Doris says, "I'm going to go to sleep about now. Good night! Thank you for coming by!"

"Thank you for having me." Thorn smiles.

She stands up, and goes off to her stargazing group.

There they are! They meet on a high plateau; she'll have a bit of a climb, but the climb is an easy spiral around the cliffside. There's a telescope, and a bunch of people with picnic blankets. When her head comes up over the edge of the mesa someone says, "Welcome!" and someone else says, "No lights! Turn everything off or bury it in a bag!"

She waves, stops for a moment, and puts her tablet into her backpack. Then she comes and joins the rest of the group. 

"Hi all, I'm Thorn."

"Hi Thorn!" they chorus, and a few people lob names back - a Miles, a Mavis, a September, a Arthuriana.

"Nice to meet you all! Has anyone got a planisphere I can have a look at?"

"I use an app for that..."

"I have one at home but didn't bring it."

Thorn spreads her hands. "Oh well. Nice to meet you all. Nice name, September - I work with a December, so it's always fun when I encounter someone with a month name." She looks around for somewhere to sit.

There is plenty of ground to sit on, and she will find whatever spot she chooses as yielding and well-shaped as she could wish.

She takes a spot near September (though not stealing any picnic blanket) and looks up at the sky. 

She's fairly familiar with Earthly constellations, having had to navigate by them fairly frequently. Can she spot the Southern Cross? Orion? The Pelaides? 

It looks like a perfectly ordinary set of Milky Way springtime constellations!

Not that she expected anything weird, but nonetheless. It's really clear seeing tonight. That's worth something in and of itself. 

She lies back on the grass and listens.

"Orion clearly has a dong."

"Clearly, nothing, constellations aren't clear, they're not even a real connect the dots puzzle, it's just -"

"Okay but he does though."

"Yeah he's right."

"Yeah. You're outvoted."

"True to the ancients' sense of humour. Just think: some Greek dude centuries ago may have thought the exact same thing. It's practically traditional."

"Now I wanna go ask an ancient Greek dude."

"Did anybody get Aristotle yet?"

"I think mostly people who want to talk to Aristotle go to Limbo."

"He's got to have a huge waiting list, though, it couldn't hurt to have extra Aristotles."

"Maybe they'd fight."

"Aristotles are not betta fish."

"Yeah, most people I know get along pretty well with themselves."

"I met my alt from Eclipse and he's awful."

"Dom or sub?"

"Dom, and he could not let a minute pass without reminding me, it was like I made him insecure or something? We don't talk."

"Is he the only one you looked up?"

"Warp one's dead, Aurum one's a granddad -"

"Really!"

"Yeah, he stayed with Jess and they had a kid."

"Bet this Jess didn't like that."

"Shut up."

Oof, personal drama. She'll stay out of that.

"I checked and I don't have any alts on the other Earths. I'm probably downstream of a magical girl at some remove, I guess."

"Some people just don't for no obvious reason."

"Yeah, but the most conservative explanation is probably a magical girl saving my great-great-grand-somebody."

"Or killing their romantic rival."

"Morbid."

"We know some of them farmed witches..."

"Mooooorbid."

"I don't tend to have alts, but then my original got hold of forking technology and got a bit overenthusiastic. We're like a big family now."

"Huh, forking that works for humans?"

"I think it's already kind of weird when Space Elves do it."

"So don't fork yourself, simple as that."

"How many of you are there, Thorn?"

"I don't actually know how many of me there are at this point. Well over a thousand, anyway. My activities of the last year can only be understood statistically."

"Wow. I guess there might be that many of me somewhere, if Earths usually have me, no reason to think we've more than scraped the surface."

"What are some good stats about how Thorns are?"

"Thorns like exploring and having new experiences; generally they're employed on Half-Tamed worlds doing hazardous work; most of me are part of the broader selftree organization that shares funds and non-private memories; a few of me spend all their time doing tourist things or going to conventions. We're big fans of hobbies - they're part of how we differentiate ourselves - and romance - a lot of us come back from frontier worlds with partners. I'm a fairly fresh Thorn so I just have our "general knowledge" - a background of navigation and survival on a few hostile worlds, plus some randomly-chosen fun stuff from our pool of public memories. That's part of why I love the stars; I remember using them for navigation, though those memories are more properly the Selftree's and not mine."

"The Selftree, what a cool word..."

"How do public memories work?"

She pulls out her quartz pendant from beneath her top.

"This is my soul - well, a backup of my soul. I won't die or anything if it's destroyed, it just perserves my memories and identity. With my consent, memories can be pulled off the crystal for other people to experience, like a full-sensory VR environment from my past point of view. Most Thorns are fairly chill about other Thorns experiencing parts of their lives vicariously, so we keep a library of memory crystals like this one - the Thousand Stars - with the most interesting things that have happened to us saved for the rest of us to browse. Occasionally we let people we know well share in a few selections if we trust them enough. What's contributed is up to the individual Thorn, and then the Archivist - or the Restricted Archivist, for memories that are somehow dangerous - decides what is reasonable to be made available to who. In general we just don't contribute anything we consider intimate."

"Oh, are you non-reductionist?"

"Maybe it's like a Space Elf chip, that's reductionist."

"Most Thorns aren't reductionist, though it's possible for us to transfer to a reductionist body if we want or need to - though that takes a specific neighbourhood."

"Huh! Do you think it'd work on our non-reductionists? Right now you have to be reductionist to get resurrected."

"Or an Elf."

"Or an Elf or something that works like one, yeah."

"I don't know! You would definitely need an intact soul, and having a copy of yours on file obviously has some risks. Back home rich people buy an immortality policy with a reputable company - the more expensive the policy, the more frequently you update your backup. Most people just get by with a Grace, though."

"It works for Space Elves."

"It works for the versions of them that are alive."

"Grace?"

Thorn pulls out a gold starburst amulet with a dozen small black jewels inset. An orange LED glows dully at the center.

"Magitech from where I come from. It prevents aging and does emergency healing. The orange LED means it's on battery power - the black gems are the batteries, they contain stored pain for the sacrificial magic to feed on."

"Wow that sounds so ominous."

"I said no lights!!!"

She tucks it back away. "We're working with what we have, that's all. Gracebearing - suffering pain to sustain the Grace network - is a respected job where I come from."

"Does it count if they kink on it?"

"It absolutely counts if they kink on it."

"Oh, well, that works out then, I suppose."

"Quite."

And she lays back on the grass and looks up at the stars.

The Empress Isabella will be happy to talk to the envoy from their neighbors. If it's convenient she prefers to take most meetings in her time-dilated office; she can stop time for herself but a lot of her bottleneck activities these days involve other people.

That's fine by Morning-Glory. Far be it for her to waste the Empress' time.

The Dwarf assistant escorts her to the palace and from there to the time-dilated office, where sits Empress Isabella, in her magical girl outfit plus a crown. "Hello, welcome to Mîr," says Isabella. "Am I correct in thinking that I don't look familiar? So far a lot of worlds we've met have alts of me in them."

"Thank you. No, I don't recognize you; I would guess that your alts don't exist in the OTC, given your tendency towards historical significance."

"How about Earths and Ardas?"

"We have many Earths in various states of repair, but no Ardas."

"How odd, we've found Ardas slightly commoner so far. Do you have a preexisting protocol for meeting new multiversal organizations? We have some but they haven't encountered reality before."

"It's similar on our side - plans, but no previous experience. The closest thing in our history is the Namer's War, which involved a slaving society of mind controllers gaining access to our dimensional transfer technology through careful subornment of the agents we sent there - but naturally we hope this will go much better than that did, both through improvements to our protocols and due to Mir being a closer cultural fit to the OTC."

"Oh, we had some of that, some Yeerks got ahold of teleport-capable hosts. All sewn up now. Is there any immediately obvious cultural tension we should have an eye on?"

"The OTC is more interventionist in some cases - we've completely evacuated two notable multiversal neighbourhoods of everyone who'd come. We also are working from a significantly less convenient magical background - much of our magic is powered by suffered pain, though that's spread out over as many volunteers as we can get by offering financial recompense for it. The OTC is not imperial; it is a corporation, which owns the patent on our method of interdimensional travel, as well as a number of other key pieces of multiversal infrastructure. At the top level there is a Board of Directors who vote among themselves on issues of company policy; below that there are planetary envoys such as myself, who liase between the company and individual worlds; below that there are managers and staff of individual worlds' projects and stores. While the OTC is contracted by the Trade Worlds as a whole to serve some governmental functions on the broader scale - multiversal defense, enforcement of a minimum standard of law, passport control, and so on - it is not officially a government, and only loosely represents the general will of the Trade Worlds as a whole."

"Mîr's sister polity Elendil is performing evacuations of one of their neighbors of anyone who'll come and isn't themselves excessively dangerous, it's not that we're opposed in principle. - I should perhaps explain the sister polities, I don't know how much you've read -?"

"I was a little preoccupied thinking about the implications of Daeva. Please, go on."

"So, in our general area of the multiverse there are a lot of Bells and a lot of Ardas and for unclear reasons it is typical for those two things to come into contact first and join up with the rest of us later. Elendil is run by two Bells who found each other before we found either of them; they got started on things in a particularly crowded world called Warp, evacuating the native world of the one of them who isn't from Warp and remaining in contact with their neighboring Arda, Telperion. My wife's from an Arda and she and I founded Mîr together; we focus on the neighborhood where wishes work. And Vanda Nossëo was founded by Loki in her world with some people from her Arda, Elentári. But Bells and the kinds of people we join up with on Ardas work together well and are reliably aligned, so while those three organizations are administratively separate, we share resources really freely. Some of my alts aren't formally with any one of the three, though all of the ones for whom that's the case live in Vanda Nossëo worlds since Vanda Nossëo's wound up being something of a catchall."

Morning-Glory nods. "I see. The Consortium has a similar kind of relationship with our local goddess, Aura; she maintains a neighborhood known as the Lucidity with her abilities, which has become one of the more heavily inhabited areas of the Consortium. Would you like a basic map?"

"Yes please."

"Here's something basic." She pulls a holo-pen from her suit pocket and flicks it on.

"Goodness. Here's ours."

Morning-Glory nods. "It would appear our dimensional technology may be better at finding mutual neighbors - that or we may simply have swept our local area over a longer duration. How long has Mir existed for?"

"Not that long, sidereal - it feels like ages to me but it's actually less than two decades - Vanda Nossëo's older, Elendil's in between. Our state of the art for finding neighboring worlds is either looking for specific things - like Earths and Ardas - with my wife's powers or similar, or, alternatively, worldleapers, but this is not considered very safe now that we know Materia is a worldtype."

"The OTC's existed for around a century now. Exploration is a hazardous job for us as well - we have some basic scanning, but we can't determine if a world is hostile without visiting. So we use forking technology on volunteers, with the understanding that any given fork may not come back from any given mission. The woman I came with, Thorn, has volunteered for this several thousand times - she has a somewhat unusual mindset that conceives of each fork as a part of a greater whole, reinforced by use of memory sharing and archival."

"Charming! The forkable species in our sphere - Space Elves - take on disproportionately dangerous work compared to their non-forkable counterparts, but we don't have a memory sharing and archival solution for them."

Morning-Glory nods. "Opportunities for trade, then. Once we know each other a bit better."

"Quite. Are there particular things you've seen here that you're interested in?"

"Can one go to Cube, morph there, and then leave retaining the morphed form? Without side-effects?"

"One can! There are technically side effects but they're things like 'you have to do something complicated to regain the ability to morph', it's perfectly good for the typical case."

"That'll be popular, then. Such things can be done with Persona magic but they're currently quite expensive. Matter synthesis is also more expensive in the OTC; I expect demon-based mass production to have an advantage against our transmutation and robotic assembly solutions. Replicators would also be a wonderful technology to import, even if their capabilities are more limited than they appear."

"What're your most exportable magics?"

"Condensed receptacles for abstract concepts that can be broken or read from to release the stored quality - it's a little unpredictable what's extractable, but we can do sleep, memory, souls, time, pain - that one matters because we have a second magic system that does enchanted artifacts which run on pain. Those are exportable as well, they function just fine on pain from a weymark and have many applications. Enchanted items for scrying, compressed-dimension containers - those are dimensional magic and don't run on pain. If we're including magic you'd have to travel to the OTC to have installed, then there's also the fruits of Persona magic - physical and mental enhancements and modifications of various types, up to some fairly impressive levels for the most expensive ones. Forking is included there. There are also some oddities like fruit with limited-time magical effects when eaten and ritually programmable black glass."

"What is a weymark?

"It's the generic name for an extracted concept. Generally they take the form of jewels."

"Can you tell me more about your map - what's up with the abandoned worlds, what are the implications of all the neighborhoods, what's special about the ones that get names on this map -"

"The abandoned worlds are considered to have physics - generally magic - hostile enough to make them unfit for long-term habitation. There are a few one-offs but you must be wondering about the Skanthivus and Imperium neighbourhoods. Put briefly, in the Skanthivus neighbourhood there is a predatory infectious magic system that hates other magic systems and also advanced technology, and in the Chaos neighbourhood emotions give rise to horrible psychic phenomena and evil gods."

Morning-Glory crosses her arms. "Regarding the other neighbourhoods, I'll summarize briefly - new pain-based artifacts can only be created in the Lifewell neighbourhood, Weymarks can only be made in the Origin neighbourhood, demiplanes can only be made in the Seria neighbourhood, forking and personal enhancements can only be done in the Theta neighbourhood. The Lucidity is the area a particular friendly reality warper is able to access - she's able to do astroengineering projects and emulate the effects of other magic systems. 

As for Cthonia - that was the focus of the Namer's War. They have a magic system that allows one to mind control and bodily puppet others if you know their true name. That magic system is now broadly illegal to use in the OTC, but the extent of that system's neighbourhood is still recorded so people can weigh their risk." 

"Yikes. At least Materia stays in its own box as far as we've observed. I wonder if you'd like to hire some of my emotionless sapients to do recon in Chaos... What constitutes someone's true name?"

"It's possible to strip Paradox infection from a host with Persona magic, fortunately - we had to do a lot of that during the evacuation. We would love to hire some Kyubeys or other emotionless sentients to help evacuate the parts of Chaos we haven't got strong access to. 'True name' is the name you most identify with - generally the one you use most, though Cthonian culture differs on this point. It can change over time, in which case the enslavement decays, but that generally requires lack of attention from the controller."

"The Kyubeys are a single hive mind, their creators are what I'd tap for something like this."

"That makes sense. I don't know the operational details necessary to speak to the effectiveness of that plan, but it's plausible that it could offer a significant advantage."

"The risk would be that they go in with intel that can be extracted from them, but probably there's a way around that with a sufficiently clear mission spec, we can get into the details later on probably... is there any obvious reason, given that the OTC is not a government, that Vanda Nossëo can't operate basically unimpeded in OTC space, and vice versa with your people coming through to trade in Mîr and Vanda Nossëo and Elendil?"

"The OTC is contracted to ensure the security of the Trade Worlds, and to be blunt, we don't know you. We've been systematically decieved about polities' character before, and in your case the twin facts that you have unknown magic and that you're multiversal means that you could easily have something unacceptable hidden, either by magical means or in an uncharted world. We're willing to extend some trust, but free access to the whole of the Nexus is not immediately on the table, especially not for magically powerful individuals. The OTC can generate simulated or otherwise controlled environments; based on the conservative assumption that you could have similar capabilities, we don't yet have the data to confidently assert that you're nonhostile. As such, more diplomatic exchange and negotiation will likely be necessary before free travel is established in either direction. I hope you are not insulted by our caution; we have too much experience with the worse kind of world to be anything but. 

Even after basic trust is established, individuals with alien magic are likely to have tighter passport controls for some time - we do not have native ressurection technology, so the risk/benefit calculation on the part of our contractors is likely to weigh against. 

In the longer term, bringing in certain types of foreign infrastructure is also likely to be contentious; aside from the obvious security concerns, the OTC's daily operations rely to a certain degree on a steady income derived from its maintenance of multiversal infrastructure in the Nexus, and serious competition on those core industries would be likely to sour relations if approached too hastily. 

There are likely things I'm forgetting, but those seem to be the primary concerns."

"I'm not insulted, no, just trying to get a picture of how you do - customs, border control, that kind of thing; I think possibly you're at least as much of a government as Vanda Nossëo is in practice even if it's not your underlying mandate. I don't know how your interworld transit works, but as a gesture of good faith, our most common type that doesn't target at complete random relies on having an adequate mental image of the place; magic rocks with teleporting ability like my wife can use other parameters but still need to be using some parameter. If you're very paranoid about this you'll want to make it hard to learn that you're off Patalon, and not distribute accurate pictures of at least whatever world is adjacent to Patalon."

"Without getting overmuch into the complete adjacency map, our contact on the Patalon side is a Half-Tamed world some distance from our core. With what you've given us, we should be able to take steps to prevent the whole adjacency chain back from being easily derivable by your magic. Thank you."

"I mean, not to sound threatening about it but we could likely figure it out anyway, it'd just be more annoying, but I don't think there's anything obviously urgently worth antagonizing you about it."

Morning-Glory smiles slightly. "Understood. Now, while I can't unilaterally invite you to send an envoy or team of envoys to see parts of the OTC, I expect that a proposal to such an effect would be accepted by the Board of Directors, particularly if you were willing to accept a team of envoys to your worlds in return. Would you be interested in such an arrangement?"

"Isn't one of your people already gallivanting around Mîr? More like her are welcome. I think we'd like to send you some envoys."

"I'll pass that up the chain when we conclude this meeting, then. 

In the longer term, technological and cultural exchange seems likely to benefit both the OTC and Mir. Priorites for the OTC are likely to include setting up local shops for import and export and establishing free travel."

"We have teleporting bus lines and I can let the people who manage those know to expect to add a bunch more lines. Unless your solution is better."

"I think it will be a matter of some debate which dimensional transport system is better. Let's hold off on that for the moment."

"Mm-hm. Vanda Nossëo likes operating import and export stores too, but mostly as a gentle introduction to the concept and a way to get consumer-grade goods into the market, rather than a fundamental value, it's more heavily relied on in low-tech situations... one thing I imagine wanting to do early is check your map for adjacent Bells and Ardas, even if you're confident there aren't any you've already met, just because we're so efficient at turning those in particular into aligned net resource gains."

"Most of the local area is either hostile or has already been swept, but I'll relay that to the Directors."

"It's not impossible you'd parse a world with a Bell in it as hostile - or for that matter an Arda, depending on when you found it and what kind it was - so checking again would be good. Also apparently sometimes we're species that live ten years, or dimension-hop on our own and are in different worlds at different times, and accordingly we now have a policy of re-checking frequently."

"That makes sense. May I ask what divinations would be employed to that end?"

"Althood is a conjurable parameter, but only if the demon knows what worlds to quantify over. My wife's teleportation and some similarly specced other magic rocks can teleport to Bells or whatnot, but we wouldn't care to try that in hostile territory without precognition relay to Eclipse set up - the psions in Eclipse don't work if they leave, but they can receive and act on extradimensional information no problem. Once we've determined someone is there we can extract them from the universe without entering it with a Materian-style wizard spell."

"Could you check worlds simply by name or designation, without requiring a demon onsite?"

"Most likely, yes."

"I don't think it's feasible to conceal the names and designations of all worlds within the OTC for any significant period of time, so most likely we'll provide you with a list of the names of all charted worlds to check. My bosses will naturally not be thrilled about the implied ability to conjure information from arbitrary parts of the OTC, but that capability of yours would seem to exist regardless of what we do about it."

"One of my alts is a demon, if that helps. But in the long run, yes, we don't have such perfect information security that we are concealing from all of Hell what worlds there are."

"That would likely be helpful."

"Should I ask him to join us? Or anyone else, if there are other people you think you might benefit from meeting - I'd suggest people who are formally part of the Vanda Nossëo and Elendil structures but realistically I can speak for them in broad strokes."