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will you join in our crusade?
the governor of ira sani in radiant
Permalink Mark Unread

There is a mirror with a tail coming toward him all of a sudden and Valanda's first thought is that it's an illusion. It could also be an alien from another universe with unprecedented alien magic, but no matter, he's confident in his wards. He's got wards for everything.

Except portals to other universes, in his experience those are great news.

Also in his experience, those are consensual and come with an exit.

This is not his usual portal to another universe.

Now there is an alarmed young man with a pen, a necklace of steel discs, and a tunic showing a view of a nighttime ocean, appearing where he didn't intend to be.

Permalink Mark Unread

The first obvious change is the weather. It's warm and pleasant, with a light breeze and a clear sky. Also, the gravity is a bit weaker.

Where he is now: A rocky beach with ocean below, along a black tar road, with a large complex visible off in the distance. It looks half-built, with a chain link fence and big yellow construction vehicles lying motionless around a large series of buildings full of sweeping asymmetric curves and glass facades. There are a few boats at a dock there, too. The upper levels of the buildings lie skeletal and quiet, half-constructed with large piles of metal, wood, and rocks nearby. There's a pair of humanoids wearing black walking around the inside of the fence, but that's the only visible activity. The road curves out of sight behind several hills in the opposite direction.

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He pokes a couple of things and the empty air where other things should be until he's sure this isn't an illusion.

Okay, the construction site is a good backup plan for where to find a door to try for Milliways, but since it's a construction site he'd be in the way.

The most important thing is to not get in trouble. For instance, if someone knew he didn't know any local laws, that might cause trouble. He wanders closer to the construction site in case he can overhear people talking there without any expectation that he should say anything to them. There might be magic translation here but there might not and finding that out will help him plan out how to avoid seeming the wrong kind of dangerous on the way to a door.

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The signs are in English! Some of the words are spelled weirdly, but it's definitely English. There's a looping video of cheerful happy humans relaxing on a beach, overlaid with short messages.

Paradiso Renica - Where Life Meets Art - In Partnership with Hermes-Ishtar

Eager to be finished in 2255, book now!

Apply for resort staff positions at work.paradisorenica.hi

WE ARE WINNING STAY STRONG - FREE ELYSIUM 1337

Architecture and Art in Harmony - by famed designer Charity Mendax

The pair of patrollers seem to have noticed him. One is speaking into a small device, looking at him. The other peers at the treeline cautiously. They both look human, and tanned.

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...Okay, it's not great that he's been noticed, but at least he sort of speaks some English. This is probably an Earth - maybe not, the gravity wasn't lower when he visited England - so he can probably survive here by praising Jesus and not stealing anything.

He stares at the video, trying to get the numbers straight - that's two and two and five and five, and that means the digit on the right is five and the one next to it is five times ten, so that's five squared times two which is forty-eight plus two, and the next digit is two times ten squared which is definitely more than a gross, it's twenty-five times eight is twenty-four times eight plus eight, and then the next one is ten times that much - is that a year? That's - it takes more base conversion but he can do base conversion in his head - exactly 369 years after their planet wasn't turned all to ice.

He's mostly hoping that visibly looking at the thing that was clearly designed to be seen won't look too weird but it's definitely not good that they think he's notable at all.

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"Hey, you alright over there?" One calls out.

"We got food and running water here! It's dehydrated dreck but it's calories! You can have it for free!" She - probably a she with that voice anyway - laughs uproariously.

"It's safe! The rent-a-cops fucked off days ago so it's just a few of us riding things out here!"

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"Hello! I am alright over here but I do not know why I am over here. If I have to be here for days, I like food and water for free. You can have a little defense from me for free."

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They turn and whisper at each other a bit, looking concerned and sympathetic, similar to how people in New Dover look sometimes.

 

"...Well, come on in! Gate's unlocked. You from offplanet? Have another language we should try? Oh, I'm Reynaud and that's Morgan, hi."

"Yo," says Morgan.

"We can give you the tour. Or a bunk if you need to crash after walking here."

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He heads inside, deliberately slow and casual. "I speak Hari and Ilan and I understand two more that don't have human mouth sounds. I am Valanda. I think I heard 'offplanet' before but I don't remember."

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"Oh, he's in character." The woman 'tsks' disapprovingly.

"Leave it be, Morg." He pulls out a smartphone. "'Offplanet' is off the rock. Off this big ball, from somewhere else in the galaxy. Let's see, would that be Aitch Ay Arr Eye, and Eye Ell Ay En?"

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He shrugs. "Maybe."

He casually freezes some air and steps up onto it, not yet drawing attention to the fact that he's doing anything unusual, so he can gauge their reactions.

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"Okay, let's search translatamon for those..."

"Rey." The woman stares intently at where he's standing on nothing. "Rey, look at that."

"Huh what? Ooh, that's an interesting effect."

"Rey. I don't want some lost rich kid with fancy tech to be our responsibility, they'll come looking-"

"I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for this?" But Rey looks suddenly worried, frowning and glancing between Morgan and him.

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"I am not a kid. I am not a slave. People who search for me will not be angry at you if I do something bad." Also there might not be anyone looking for him, if time isn't passing in Har, and there might not be anyone looking for him effectively even if it is. That seems like the kind of claim that would make him less safe, though. "I said you can have a little defense from me."

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"No, you're not a slave. Defense...? This uh, linguistic situation is not ideal. I don't see those languages on translatamon either..."

"Is it from a show? The fancy shirt, the - it sort of looks like magic, they dress stuff up -"

"Not any show I know. Maybe. Or a game or something. Hey, you can break character, you know. As we speak, the revolution is underway, security services got beaten back hard."

"What do we do though, I can't just go post 'hey we found a weird kid and don't know what to do about it'."

"He said he wasn't a kid. Also I mean you can."

"It's not like we can drop him off at the police station!"

"Yeah, that'd be stupid even before all this. Sorry, uh... Yeah I got nothing. Anybody we should help you look for?" Reynaud turns to Valanda again.

"Tell me straight, is anybody going to come looking to get you back and happen to arrest all of us in the process, not-kid?" Morgan asks him. Reynaud glares at her.

"Actually, any questions at all? Everything's crazy right now and it must be confusing, come to think. Sorry about that."

Permalink Mark Unread

...That is a lot of quick English with a lot of assumptions behind it. They don't recognize the in-hindsight-obviously new coinage his refugees use for his magic, which, of course they don't. They keep disapproving of his character, he knows that word, it's a word for the type of person you choose to be - or maybe this is specifically for when the type of person you choose to be is fictional? Does show have homophones or is it definitely a fake-illusion show?

"I do not think anybody who is looking for me is going to happen to arrest you. Can you say anything else about, um, 'looks sort of like magic' and 'dress stuff up'?"

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"...Reassuring, I guess."

"Stage magic, usually you do it in post but some directors want their shows to be really real, obsessed with the actors reacting right and stuff, so they throw expensive tech at the problem. Smartglass boxes that look invisible and stuff, if you have to float like that. And, you know, greenscreens and flying drones and holographic projectors to make it look like there's a monster but it's just light, that kind of thing. Tech that looks like magic. You definitely look more fantasy than sci-fi, but I have no idea what you're using to float - and it'd be small too, personal equipment."

"Ares would want it I bet."

"Anybody'd want it. There's some laboratories in Persephone, right? Maybe he's from those?"

"We should probably use smaller words and talk slower."

"Isn't that ableist or something?"

"Hell if I know. Sorry, we're doing a bad job of this."

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He's pretty lost but he sort of maybe gets the gist of... a few of those sentences... he hopes. They might be thinking he has tech instead of magic? He thinks that's what they're thinking. He might want to correct them. ...What is the magic situation here exactly, is it secret or nonexistent like it's been on some other Earths? What kinds are there? ...Come to think of it, is "magic" the word for that? No one ever defined it for him, he just knows it's how Milliways glosses sìeh when it's not being used as an abstract mathematical concept. - Whoops, and now they're apologizing for something mysterious.

"...What is magic?"

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"Uh... Inexplicable abilities or phenomena that affect the world in ways that imply a high computational effort or violate the established principles of physics and scientific knowledge-"

"Small words, idiot."

"Ahem. Right. Magic is... Made-up stuff that happens, or that people can do, that doesn't make sense."

"I don't think that's much better actually... If you call upon the spirits or your inner mana or your willpower or bloodline or anything like that and affect things without touching them or using a device - including one someone built into you - that's magic. But it's not real, you know, it's all stories."

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"I do not do anything that isn't real. I do wards on things."

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Another dubious look shared between them. "I guess we can test that, but if- Hm. If you're confused about a lot of things, which it looks to us like you might be, we might want to have the nurse look at you, would that be alright? Just in case. Though, she's not a real nurse, she was a vet - animal nurse. At a farm."

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh no, are they going around calling people animals because they're confused about what makes someone a person? Or maybe the nurse really is an animal. Sounds unlikely if they trust her professional opinions, though. Regardless, he's fine with it either way.

"The nurse is allowed to look at me. I am not afraid because she is an animal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...What?"

The other one laughs.

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"I am saying that would be alright. I think you think I am afraid because she is an animal but I am not. I might not understand."

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"The nurse is not an animal. She is a nurse who mostly helps animals, not people."

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"Oh! I am a people but the nurse is allowed to look at me." He's aware he got that wrong but he keeps forgetting what the correct singular is.

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"Yes. Just in case you are hurt but don't know it."

Clearly something very weird is going on here and they should just try to roll with it.

"We're all living over there." They start walking towards one of the more complete parts, all white marble and shiny gold and silver and abstract sculpture and neatly kept little gardens with colorful flowers. 

"Do you know what is going on, on this planet? The March Days?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not know."

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"So uh, Hermes-Ishtar owns the place, but they're - pretty evil. They control basically everything on this planet - until recently, at least. Like, it's illegal to import or make most things, only legal to buy it from them, they set the prices real high. All the higher-ups are arbitrary and cruel, and will just straight up ruin your life on a whim, or if you're inconvenient, or expensive. The police like to kidnap people for fun, and they get away with it because who's going to stop them? Uh, and they control information really tightly, which is honestly kind of the worst part? Hermes-Ishtar is the internet and media Charter, they own all of it, from the public libraries to couriers and airports. Talking about how much you hate them will get the police knocking on your door. Writing the wrong kind of stories too, or suggesting that maybe things are bad and the government should change something."

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"I do not like evil. I like righteousness."

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"Yeah, ace. Anyway, I didn't know any of this was coming but-"

"Like, under a thousand people knew it was coming. They've put us all between begging for mercy when Ares or someone gets here and the void." The woman says sarcastically.

"It had to be done," the man says with a frown. "We're isolated, and what the police were doing was definitely illegal. When the revolution finishes, we can negotiate with the Compact, rejoin peacefully."

"Yeah, that will definitely happen and can't go wrong at all."

"Well. We're far away from the fighting here. You can't trust the internet right now but - we'll see."

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"...Um, you said about a nurse?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes, Nurse Emile is in the same building we're all staying in. You can see her if you'd like, all private. Or not, if you don't want, but it'd be good to at least check." They're still walking to it; The complex is fairly large, but they're almost there.

Permalink Mark Unread

Shrug. "I'd like what you'd like."

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"You shouldn't get medical services just because someone else says so! There's a right to bodily autonomy, we've been ignoring that for too long, it's important." Rey says animatedly.

Morgan snorts and shakes her head.

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"But you think I have tech. But I don't know that I have tech."

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"This is this and that is that."

"You don't have tech? Is it an implant, then? Or augment?"

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"I don't know what those words mean."

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"Implants are devices that you put in your body." Morgan leans down and parts her hair behind her ear to show a small strip of metal embedded in her head.

"But augments are stuff you get done to you to change your body, uh, either adding new parts somebody grew or genetics, uh, the instructions of your body that you can pass on to kids, too. If it's plastic or metal, it's an implant. If it's meat, it's an augment. Usually."

They arrive at the door to the completed hotel building. It opens automatically, revealing a spacious lobby full of art features, only slightly marred by the pile of strange crates, bags, and so on strewn around.

Permalink Mark Unread

If only it instead opened on Milliways. Oh, well.

"I have the meat augment," he says distractedly, glancing around at everything in the lobby. Art features are cool! Bags and boxes are information about their technology and also the state of their supplies!

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"It's an augment, huh? Alright. Nurse set up shop down the hall, they did build an actual infirmary, so yeah."

The art features are semi-abstract sculptures often half imitating human form, some moving or changing color gently. There are also wall screens with gently moving colorscapes. The largest one is a table with a glittering cloud of shiny pieces of metal rising and falling and changing color through no visible mechanism, forming a gently rolling landscape mosaic that constantly scrolls offscreen. Soft piano music mixed with natural sounds like wind in trees and songbirds or crickets is playing from somewhere.

Bags and boxes mostly contain: Other bags and boxes, various devices with screens, clothes, towels, umbrellas, small cubes of various substances, pill bottles, quadcopter and wheeled drones, silvery packages labeled as Economy Food, prewrapped packages of toiletries, and one big crate is completely stacked with copies of a geometric crystal that changes color based on the angle you look at it.

Permalink Mark Unread

He is familiar with Earth technology and therefore concludes that some of those things are computers and automata. Unclear what the economy eats, maybe it's currency.

The changing mosaic is spectacular. And the music is like if nature-show music were made for humans.

"I like that," he says, gesturing, as he proceeds in the general direction of down the hall.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh yeah, if there's one thing they're good at it's art."

There's a small sign with arrow indicators in the hallway. Maintenance, Janitorial, Electrical Room, Nurse's Office, Manager's Office, Staff Quarters, VIP Services. The other two don't follow him, lingering in the entryway instead.

Permalink Mark Unread

He heads into the office, hoping it'll actually be Milliways.

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It is not Milliways! It's a little waiting room with a few standing screens. A little musical tone goes off.

"Hey, is that you up there, kid Morg found?" Comes a question from behind a little half-wall counter and around a corner.

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"I'm up here and I'm not a kid."

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"Sure thing, you got a name?" There's a rattling sound and then the voice is getting closer. A tired and grey-haired woman turns the corner and takes a look at him, one hand fidgeting oddly. "They texted me and said you might want me to take a look at your health, just in case. I don't have a whole lot of tools here, but we can take a look, easy. You can call me Margarine."

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"Pleased to meet you, Margarine. My name is Valanda. I do not know why I am here. Also, I think Morg thinks my augments are not like I think my augments are."

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"I see what they meant about second language. Can you remember where you were yesterday? Do you know what augments you have? Oh, do you want me to see if you are hurt or sick? You don't have to if you don't want to. You can be okay with just part of it, that's all fine."

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"I was in Riuhiu yesterday. I think I know that I have, uh," they had a native word for it here but what was it - well, they also had a native circumlocution for it - he starts ticking augments off on his fingers, "in my instructions of my body that I can pass on to kids, I have the kind of blood that is good to have in Anavel Sani. In the instructions of my body that I cannot pass on to kids, I have..." Valanda gestures vaguely at his face, or maybe even more vaguely at his very green eyes, "colors. And hair that will probably not go away when I am older. My sides of my face are the same but I do not have that in the instructions of my body. Someone, uh..." He mimes rearranging his face with his hands like clay. That's not quite what happened but close enough. "In the instructions of some of my body but not all of my body, that I cannot pass on to kids, the 17β-estradiol does not get made. I have also within me," he taps in their vicinity, "two things, these are polyvinylpyrrolidone, stearic acid, and testosterone. I had other things, those are gone now, those saved me from being sick. I have also some... uh... I heard someone say 'magic' about them but I think you say 'magic' for things that are not real. My things are real. But you cannot see my magic things - I am not angry or afraid if you try to see them. And, uh, I do not know very well what 'augments' means, so I might have said the wrong things."

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She types things into a computer as he speaks.

"...Hum, okay, give me a minute to digest that, please." More tapping at the computer.

"'Augments' is a weasel word, it's a general term for lots of more specific things and it gets confusing. So, you have inheritable augments that are useful for being in Anavel Sani - never heard of it - and non-inheritable augments or some other treatment for hair color and face shape, as well as what sounds like transgender - boy becomes girl or girl becomes boy or somewhere in between, that's transgender - augments or implants. One genetic but not inheritable for estradiol, two implanted devices for - it was polyvinylpyrrolidone, stearic acid, and testosterone? And then also something that other people called magic, but isn't. All that sound about right?"

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"I think that sounds about right, but the for being in Anavel Sani can inherit wrong because it is two pieces."

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"What does it do, why is it good for Anavel Sani? I am not an expert on transgender medicine, by the way. Might not be able to help there if anything is wrong."

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"I don't think anything is wrong. I don't know how to explain more because my English is mediocre. I want the other people to know if you can see the magic ones."

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"Well, maybe we can get you set up with some vocabulary courses after this. Keep the mind off things. And we'll see, I suppose! Let's head back to the examination room, shall we?"

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"We shall." He'll go wherever and look around in case he recognizes anything.

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It's not very much like the medical equipment they use in New Dover! Well, he recognizes some things. That's a chair, that's a sink and countertop. Some of the medical tools are similar enough, if not really the same. Stethoscopes are still used in the 23rd century, for example. But there's a lot of her pattering on a bit dryly while pointing various things with screens at him or asking him to hold them while stretching or breathing in a certain way.

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He can stretch and breathe in all sorts of ways.

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Her conclusion is that he's reasonably healthy - not, like, professional athlete with a carefully managed diet healthy but doing just fine - and grew up in an Earthlike place with very little background pollution. Several things about him are kind of odd, to the point where it's easy to say he's definitely not from Earth or Elysium or the six other planets she has aggregate medical data for, and his implants and genetic augments are nothing she recognizes, either custom or proprietary or foreign.

"I don't know that anything I'm seeing is what's responsible for the 'magic' with a sample size of one, mind you, but you're definitely not from around here."

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"That is enough! You will tell them I am not wrong and not in character. I am the governor of Ira Sani in the Harish Empire and I do things," he does the walking-on-air trick again, "and people say my things are magic and I did not get an augment."

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"Well, would you look at that."

She experimentally kicks the invisible surface gently.

"Nobody believes anything they read on the internet if they're smart so it won't help with strangers, but I'm glad to help. Oh, I can give you a little DNA drive with your scans, that might help your case going forward - genetic code drive, it stores information as nucleotides instead of binary." She sighs. "Real interesting stuff, but I can't make heads or tails with it, without a bigger team and more equipment. And I probably shouldn't do research on you without permission anyway, heh."

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"I do not want you to write it on the internet. I want you to tell Morg. I am going to give some magic to some people because the people gave me food and doors, and later I am going to go away. - I do not know why I am here now but I travel a lot. If I open many doors, then I will go to Milliways later again. Maybe you will also go to Milliways because this place has the March Days and Hermes-Ishtar."

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"-The doors are important how? I'll tell folks here and keep mum otherwise, sure."

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"Sometimes a door is between two rooms and it gets a magic and it is between one room and one different room. The different room is in Milliways. Unless a door gets a magic, you cannot go forward to Milliways. You cannot go left to Milliways. You cannot go right to Milliways. You cannot go up to Milliways. You cannot go down to Milliways. Milliways does not touch anywhere else. Unless a door gets a magic. The door magic likes me."

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"-Has someone invented personal scale wormholes, God in Heaven. Or are - if you're talking magic do you mean a place you can't get to by going anywhere, even if you were as fast as light?"

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"I don't know what a wormhole is. I mean a place you can't get to by going anywhere."

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"That's a lot harder to believe than a strange boy with strange augments being lost and confused, or in character. I'll tell them what I found though, and this thing seems real enough," she gestures at the solid air.

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"I am not afraid or angry if they don't believe it. I can ward things. I will ward things if you say you want it."

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"I don't know how that works, you should tell someone else about it. And wormholes are things that make a short path between two far away places. They're really hard to make so we only use them to go between stars."

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"I might want a book about wormholes."

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"I bet there's something. Morgan and Reynaud are probably still waiting for you, you can go now if you don't have any medical questions. I'll call them and say what I said I'll say, okay?"

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"Yes, thank you." Off he goes to talk to them again.

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Valanda can hear the nurse making a call as he goes out. "Hi. Yeah, so- Valanda's ward or whatever is real, he's healthy, he's not from Earth, Radiant, Columbia, or..."

Morgan and Reynaud meet him in the hallway. "Hey," Morg says, "Two quick questions about the wards. Since they're apparently real and all. Thanks, by the way. Does it run out of anything if you just leave one somewhere? And how tough are they? I think if you're willing to use it for us some nice panic rooms would be my choice. There's already suites with their own self-contained air supplies, I don't even know why."

"Allergens. Spacers get real bad allergies sometimes."

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"It does not run out of anything but it can break if you break it. There are different ways I can make wards and they will break for different things. Or for nothing if you are very sure you will always want the ward."

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"Never? That sounds a bit..."

"Hubristic. Bad idea. I wonder who we should talk to about this?"

"It's not like anyone's in charge anymore, that's the whole point."

"Right. Doesn't run out ever? I almost want to put it on some structural beams but, hubris. Utter disaster if it suddenly fails, and making it never do that is a bad idea too probably."

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"Yes, making it never fail is usually a bad idea. We have not seen wards run out in, um... thousands of years? But maybe they run out in a thousand times a thousand years. We have not seen wards for that long yet."

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"Well, it's not gonna be my problem by then," Reynaud laughs a bit nervously.

"Why don't we show you the stupid Aero Flow suites and you can do it how you think best?"

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"I will only know what I think best when I know what you want to ward against."

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Morg gestures and starts walking, leading them down a hallway.

"It'd be a panic room. Bullets, explosions, and big hunter-killer drones," Morg shrugs. "If they're sending exotic stuff like gas or nanites at us we're fucked either way. Probably want to leave a little hole for wireless signal to get out." She frowns. "Lasers. Can wards stop light that's too bright but let light that's not so bright through?"

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"I do not think I can do that. I think I can grant the walls of the panic room infinite tensile strength, compressive strength, and shear strength. If I tried to stop light that's too bright, I think it would not happen that you would be satisfied. I think you would like it if I did a different kind of magic, that is called illusion, but that I cannot do. What are lasers?"

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"Lasers are weapons that use strong light in a narrow beam to heat things."

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"I can stop heating things!"

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"Nice. We can black out the windows and keep the walls from melting then. That's probably damn useful in some kind of industry I'm not thinking of..."

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"It's useful in many industries! It is difficult but with very precise knowledge I can make the universe less aged."

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"...Negentropy?"

"Are you seriously claiming to violate one of the most fundamental physical laws. The stars will burn away and leave nothing but cold dust, infinitely many years in future."

"I mean, a 'fuck off' field is already a violation."

"But that's just materials science, not entropy. It's always bullshit when the scientists fix it in fiction!"

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Oh, good, he was worried his English wasn't up to the task of getting that across.

"Yes."

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"Okay, yeah, they're going to- Uh, honestly, you might want to not be very interesting or accessible until some of the dust settles, you're incredibly valuable, ridiculously valuable-"

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"How would I not be very interesting or accessible?"

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Morg speaks up. "Stay away from Persephone City. Don't use the internet. Convince everyone here to keep mum or at least confuse the narrative enough that you sound like a hoax instead of a priceless opportunity."

"Oh, I can do that," Reynaud snorts. "Maybe my stinking "social media coordinator" experience is actually useful for once."

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"...I am willing." Suspicious that they actually just want to keep him for themselves for reasons not best described as moral, sure, but even if they just want power they don't seem omnimalevolent so them winning their war is probably fine.

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"Oh, if you want to go where the fighting is, by all means. You'd be useful, probably save lives. We can probably scrape up enough credits to protofab a cheap car. We're not going to keep you."

Morg turns down a hallway. "The aero suites are right through those doors. Either way, it'll probably be decided one way or another in a few days. Persephone City is the only place the matters for controlling the planet, and I keep on top of the feeds. The liberation front has the comms center, they have the technical university, and they have Yang. Only the police complex and the airport are left. Until the reinforcements get here in a year or two and then we're all fucked. Maybe not all, but, yeah. I'd give it even odds they'll promise you your own moon and anything else you want if you ward stuff for ten hours a day, or you'll vanish into a blacksite to be poked and prodded forever."

"I feel like the thing you need is enough information to orient," Reynaud says hesitantly. "We can talk all day about what you ought to do but why even listen, right? Only problem is you can't believe everything you read on the internet. Hardly any of it sometimes."

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"I do not want my own moon. I want to open doors." Shrug. "You were kind to me. I want to be kind to you."

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Well, here's the saferooms-to-be. They can slightly awkwardly show him around and then let him work. They're nice, fancy hotel rooms, that's for sure.

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He actually has lots of questions about the rooms and the appliances and their threat models but once he understands exactly what he's doing he... doesn't do anything visible and then declares himself done.

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The rooms are made of high-tech materials and the appliances are mysterious and designed to break if you disassemble them to figure out how they work (they decide it's probably best to mostly leave these untouched after a brief discussion) and the threats are mostly humans with guns (laser or ballistic), or little flying robots, or, uh, orbital bombardment... Computer hacking would also be bad...

They tentatively test out the newly warded rooms but admit they can't really tell how well it will work! And hopefully they'll never need to actually test it. Anyway, how about some dinner. They've tried to make the Economy Food less disgustingly bland and mushy by adding lots of whatever else could be found. It's alright. Aside from Morg and Reynaud and the nurse, other new people present at lunch include: A very pretty, quiet, and sad woman with fox ears and a tail, a small and wiry and hyper person of indeterminate gender who announces they want to be called 'they' and wants to know allllll the technical details about wards, a pair of brothers who say they're stranded delivery drivers and talk in rapid Greek to each other a lot, and a grumpy blonde teenage boy who complains a lot and everyone else treats kind of like a child.

(Reynaud warns Valanda not to let the teenage boy, Xavier, know about anything that's supposed to be secret)

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If the person who's... he's guessing transgender but for a nonhuman gender, and trying to feel out if he should ask... is willing to go be out of Xavier's earshot then Valanda will gladly go on about magic for quite a while.

He takes a small amount of the alien food. He can probably open a Milliways door and go home to British/Anavel Sani fusion cuisine eventually. Probably. It would really suck if not.

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Alex will totally go out of everyone else's earshot to talk shop!!!! If Valanda has questions of his own they're happy to answer those!!!!

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He has questions about the technology here! His technical background is... better than it was when he first discovered Milliways, at least, but he still has only a kind of shaky grasp of twenty-first century tech with occasional islands of deep knowledge of highly specific things, and he's very interested in what the fuck is happening.

(He's keeping an eye out for otherwise-poorly-explained discomfort that might indicate that he does actually need to figure out Alex's gender to interact with them in a way that makes Alex happy.)

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Well, the thing is, there's a LOT of highly specialized technical knowledge out there. Like, more than would fit in dozens and dozens of people. But the pillars of modern technology are:

Fabricators and fabricator rights management, which can produce arbitrary objects like structure mages if fed the right materials and given time and energy. A fabricator can build a mining robot and then an ore processor and then another fabricator and then the two fabricators can build TWO mining robots... Repeat forever. Except the patterns for this are all patented and restricted heavily so that the corporations that researched and developed the products and designs can earn their due profit from the sale of said designs. Of course, there are lots of failsafes and obfuscation techniques built in to make it hard to 'crack' a fabber and produce your own stuff, or make unpaid copies of some corporation's products. Copyright law is, of course, extremely on the corporations' sides here, to the point where they can charge whatever they wish for basic necessities and people have to fall in line.

Computers, software, and virtual intelligences, especially the VIs. VIs are computer programs that can 'learn' what to do, and are narrow and restricted enough in the right ways - like not actually having emotions, or having certain kinds of long-term memory, or being able to learn anything outside of what they're specifically designed for - to not actually be people. There are quite a variety, and most people work with a VI in their daily work, guiding or curating or double-checking its work. As a special effects engineer, he would craft specifications for a VI to paint explosions, spaceships, background characters, or other things to insert into shows. Creating full computer-program-people, artificial general intelligences, as slaves was popular for a little while but is currently illegal - and (he sighs wistfully) most of the knowledge of how to do it was deliberately destroyed.

Warp Drive and Korolev-Chandrasekar Gates! These are what granted humanity the stars! Warp drives propel ships across interplanetary distances without the need for excessive amounts of fuel. The KC-gates use portals to connect two points of space around distant stars, dodging the need for long durations of interstellar travel at sub-light speed. How exactly the physics here work is extremely weird and complicated and secret, with the Solarian Navy coming down hard on anyone who fucks with warp drives or particularly the Gates outside of extremely narrow approved bounds. Even the known blueprints for drives are utterly black-boxed: They're so complicated that it's impossible to tell how they actually work, what's necessary for the function and what's just there to make it hard to tamper with.

Biological augmentations and cybernetics are very far from Alex's expertise, but Cernonnus Botanicals has thousands of gene-lines of engineered animals, augments, plants, specialized viruses of all kinds. There's special modifications for spacers living in zero-g, for a cure to aging in humans, advanced medical treatment for any kind of disease or trauma, dozens of different kinds of modifications - like poor Helen the foxgirl - plants adapted to suck up toxic materials or bacteria meant to make an entire planet habitable, custom pets, so much potential and all of it crushingly expensive.

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He follows... some of that.

"Is it - uh - if you went far away and farmed your own land, then would you have more food than you have if you pay the fabricator owners?"

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"Your own land? Good luck getting anything like that. And buying tools. And buying the right gene-lines of seeds. And paying your taxes. No, farming it not viable and I'm not sure what else you're getting at."

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"...Uh, in my country, people... have seeds. For a long time. So if people bought very good food and did not plant for ten years, and then someone who was selling the food, they made it more expensive, then after this people would plant ten year old seeds. Also if someone owned all the land someone else would make more land. I am... afraid I maybe know why that is different here, but the thing I maybe think, I thought it before and I was wrong."

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"The land is all owned by the Charters, given to them by the Solarian Compact. I don't think... Heirloom seeds are probably not illegal, but I have no idea where I would get any. I think the Charters do their best to make things like that, anything that could stop them from taking advantage, go away."

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"Hm. Is it bad when they get what they want?"

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"Well, if it comes at the expense of everyone and everything else, kinda yeah."

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"...Sorry, I think I said that wrong - what is the expense? How is it bad?"

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"Copyright. Anything and everything is copyrighted. That's the worst part, that chokes and tangles everything else. Or- no. At the root if it all, the people with power get more power by hurting everyone else or restricting their freedom too much. There's too many ways they do it, they confuse you and say they're helping you. But. They are not. Some people might as well be slaves with their debts and the costs of everything!"

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"I want to read your laws but if I can go home then I can get them on my way. I want to have very different laws at home. But, uh, I think I said something wrong again. The copyrightists confuse you and say they're helping you but they are doing a different thing. What is the different thing?"

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"Taking all the money they can possibly get from us! I can look up the legal code?"

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"I don't know how to ask the question I want to ask. If you asked me how my country is bad, I would say - sometimes people get eaten alive, sometimes people get sunk into the depths of torment, sometimes people are in bondage and get the laughter of their captors and taskmasters, this is because the people are unrighteous sinners who have not love for their fellow creature." He mostly knows how to talk about morality in Hylian, or at least in Hari or Ilan using a lot of Hylian loanwords, but he's sat through some sermons by an Englishman from the 1800s.

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"Huh.

Some people are in bondage through trickery and lies, while the rulers claim all are free. Sometimes their very bodies and minds are turned against them by cruel design. Sometimes police get away with murder, rape, and torture, while the rulers say the law is fair. Most people find themselves cheated of the fruits of their labor, while the rulers say all are prospering. Some people are hated for who they are, for religion or gender or augmentation, and suffer all the indignities listed before and more. This is because the people are unrighteous sinners who hath unnatural lust for wealth rather than caring for their fellow creature. When you say 'the depths of torment', do you mean Hell?"

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...They get off on having money instead of having sex with other humans? And that makes them evil?? Whatever, humans have the weirdest kinks.

"No, I do not think people on my planet go to a hell. I mean sometimes they get, uh, for example, pulled apart by each of their limbs? It is like a hell but they die after instead of before. I think I am trying to figure out if this place is as good as my home and you want it to be better or if it is worse and you want it to be as good."

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"Ahh. How awful. I don't really know. I think here could be much better, could be nigh on a paradise, if only, if only. But I don't know your... World, if we're accepting the inter-universal aspect here. Perhaps you should listen to each of our complaints?"

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"Yes! That is what I was trying to ask for."

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"Well you'll have to ask everyone else for their stories - except maybe Helen, I'll ask if she minds me telling you, she doesn't like talking about it - but for me, I'm from Columbia, far away, and I got a technical degree in basically VI-wrangling, came out here to Radiant after I got a job offer to work for Hermes-Ishtar producing shows and media. But the school and the trip out here and the TransTech that keeps me sane are all extremely expensive- And once I arrived, oops, that position is no longer available, we have a junior job where you have no creative control and much longer hours and worse pay, though! So I got to work on it. And H-I owns 90% of everything on this planet, so complain to them? It gets recorded in some database somewhere and you're labelled a 'troublemaker' forever, and it just gets worse. Forget about buying a ticket back home with that debt on your shoulders, too. So before all this kicked off I worked twelve hour days for an abusive boss who always found something to complain about in my work, without really accomplishing much of anything, earning just barely enough to keep up on my loan payments. Really living the dream." The last bit is said with a sarcastic scowl.

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"...Why did you come out here? Why did you think they had a job offer just because they said it?"

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"Well, I only just stopped believing it, really. I read a lot of things about how much opportunity there is on the frontier, I met with professionals who explained about the benefits packages and things, I had a digital contract in hand for all that's worth- A whole song and dance. Hermes-Ishtar is very good at telling people things. They control the galactic internet backbone, most of the news..."

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"How do they control the news?"

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"Uhh, there's a bunch of ways that all kind of add up to 'convincing people other news is fake' or 'blocking news they don't like from being spread' or 'secretly controlling non-aitch-eye news'."

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"...I think I understand."

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"I'm concerned you don't actually, I've found that language barriers are really bad for things like this, but I'm not great at explaining things..."

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Shrug. "Maybe."

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Seems like he doesn't wanna talk anymore. Oh well, the 'magic' was interesting and has Major Implications, but if he doesn't wanna talk, he doesn't. "...Want me to set you up with some books or something? Or just leave you be?"

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"If you want? I like books. I also like talking but it sounds like I'm not doing a very good job of talking."

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"Oh, I'm just worried I'm boring you. I'm not exactly the most sociable person but, uh, I don't know what to get up to while we hang out here away from the fighting. I'd work on some sort of film project but I don't have my cameras or editing software, so I can't."

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"You aren't boring me."

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"Huh, okay. I mean, my favorite topics are the shows I've worked on mostly. I guess I could talk about those?"

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"You could talk about those!"

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Alex has 

SO

MANY

COMPLAINTS

about the stupid higher-ups' creative decisions! Or rather, lack thereof! Everything has to be so bland and "demographically safe"! They wouldn't take a creative risk to save their lives! It feels like half the shows are just copies of each other with newer tech and different actors! Division X, about a team of Ares soldiers heroically escaping the crazy rebel-anarchists on some fake planet, is almost exactly the same as The Cobalt War, about a team of plucky Rhodes mining techs escaping the crazy mining-monopolists on some fake planet!!! The romances are all the same! The teen school dramas are all the same! The plucky immigrant/corporate assistant/solnav cadet stories are all the same! The space operas between the nice republics and insane rebels are all the same! It's infuriating how nobody actually gets to try cool NEW ideas!

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"We produce different stories in the Harish Empire. I might like to see one of each of yours. And maybe I can tell you about ours."

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"That'd be interesting, sure. The internet's probably intact enough for me to log in and stream some movies, sure. Want me to commentate as you watch?"

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"Yes!"

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"Great!"

They can use the theater since he doesn't have any XR implants for full-immersion tracks that make you feel like you're right there in the story! Alex is of the opinion that those are an entirely different art form, anyway, much more direct and visceral than shows. Lots of XR tracks just go straight for utter sensation without even trying for, like, theme and story. It's a valid form of art, but not Alex's favorite!

 

The movie Alex selects first is Celestial Dive. The introductory sequence is a gorgeous sweep across huge swathes of landscape filled with fantastical sights and dangerous-looking beasts. The first part of the movie shows a few quick scenes of a human boy growing up. He plays with his family, bothers his aunt for stories about being a knight, and defends a lizard-augment child with glowing eyes from bullies. They use the story device of him being bored in class to deliver exposition about how there are weird magic holes in the ground that constantly generate bloodthirsty automata; People go into these holes to fight the automata and bring back magic stuff, and the smart and skilled ones get really super rich and everyone wants to be a successful diver, including our protagonist.

Cue training montage! He's training with lizard girl and they plan to work together but she's acting more and more fidgety and suspicious as time passes. They meet more friends go on their first few dives and have a few scares as they learn the ropes, but pull off clever tricks of combining simple magic in novel ways- ("The liquid oxygen thing is the same thing they always do with cooling magic to make characters look clever," Alex complains) -and learn some of the fantastical rules and creatures of the holes in the ground, like gravity-warping areas or the dangers of slime swarms. They get scammed or tricked/bullied a couple of times but always by ugly people. There's a few scenes with Mysterious Hooded People lurking around doing suspicious things.

Suddenly, oh no! The hole in the ground did something strange that it's not supposed to and the two of the other three friends (not the protagonist or lizard girl) are dead! And lizard girl is missing! There's an extended sequence of perilous near-death experiences and harrowing fights. (Alex sighs in disappointment. "The suspense is pointless, they're not going to kill him, the movie's only halfway over!") Eventually one of the lost companions reunites with the protagonist in an especially dangerous area. Later it turns out that lizard girl has been part of a shadowy evil organization this whole time! She fights the protagonist between angry speeches about their feelings and how it's evil to hurt people/this is the only way to have justice!

Lizard girl defeats the protagonist but doesn't kill him. (Does kill the extraneous party member, though.) A mysterious hooded figure tells lizard girl about how now they can take over the world! What?!?!????? ("Of fucking course it's taking over the world.") Hooded Figure delivers a lethal-seeming blow to lizard girl! Hooded Figure does something with a powerful magic artifact while the protagonist crawls, mortally injured, to his friend. He kisses her and they hug each other.

Then in a stroke of luck, the hooded figure's magic backfires - because he tried to cheat his way into magic power instead of earning it the hard way! Instead of just giving him a surge of power, the two heroes are boosted as well. They fight and kill the evil man, and emerge happy and victorious! There's some vague ominous hints that Take Over The World Guys are still trying to do that. Roll credits.

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"I liked it, it was new for me. I liked to see the educational policies of their world - I want to know about your education but it is probably bad because no one can trust anyone to tell the truth. And that was a strange ending, I did not understand that. I thought, uh... there is something about the, uh, the music, the art, the way that the camera looks at people... I think it means something about taking over the world. The people who made it, I think that they think that I think... something... about people who take over the world. And I thought I knew what justice is but I think I'm confused about it too."

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"It's not a great ending honestly. They changed it late in development, Laura was supposed to die but they wanted to sell action figures and collectible cards of her and have a sequel because she was popular in the pre-release advertising. The cinematography wants you to know the Foundation is evil, yes. Taking over the world and supplanting the proper meritocratic and democratic processes," eye-roll, "Is evil, don't you know. I wouldn't trust what this movie says about justice exactly, though it's a good example of formulaic stuff H-I puts out. Did you catch the parts where they hate adventurers so much because the adventurers are ultra-rich? How they wanted to increase taxes and charitable programs? They're using the Foundation as a straw-man. They want you to think that people who think inequality of wealth is bad, are evil and want to take over the world. Because that one did."

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"I think I did not understand the part where the Foundation was evil or why they tried to kill Laura. I think I do understand... if I think that the economy is not doing what I want it to and I want to levy taxes, then I want to take over the world, yes. I have to have the political power to levy taxes. But I think maybe I'm wrong to think that's what you mean that they mean."

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"The filmmakers think that democracy and the free market is the right way to run the world. Someone taking it over by force, like the Foundation is trying to do, would be bad. Now, I disagree at least partially, at least on rampant market exploitation, but that's what they think. The filmmakers made the Foundation evil because they want people to think communism and socialism are evil. They tried to kill Laura because that's an easy way to make them seem greedy- That Karl didn't actually want to help people after he takes over the world, and is just lying for power."

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"What does 'the free market' mean?" Most of his economics reading has been in Milliways which translates it mostly into Hari because that's the language he knows most of his game theory jargon in. He can take a guess but it wouldn't do to make assumptions and be wrong.

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"It means a lack of government economic regulation and laws. No minimum wage, no false advertising laws, limited fraud protections, no penalties for confusing, scammy warranty and insurance practices, no anti-monopoly measures, no overtime work laws, no work safety regulations..."

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"False advertising laws are the most important laws."

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"Hmm? Why?"

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"...Maybe not here... I can prevent theft. I can prevent murder. I can prevent vandalism. I can do all that by doing things to me and my things. I cannot prevent lies by doing things to me. I have to do things to the people that want to lie."

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"Yeah, we can't prevent any of those things. Unless the revolution succeeds and we get, I dunno, some kind of popular front police? The Compact does make lying in advertising technically illegal, but uh, there's lots of misleading stuff that's not technically lying and people will just lie all the time anyway and not get punished. A lot of Compact laws end up like that, they just don't get enforced unless it's convenient for some corporate big-wig. So, petty theft? Yep, go to jail. VP Wang commits wage fraud? What do you mean, we have no record of that, prove it in a court of law on Earth. Also you're going to get evicted in the meanwhile because VP Wang calls his buddy who owns the apartment building."

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"...I think they are wrong that taking over the world and levying taxes to fund charitable programs and enslaving the market is bad."

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"Well I'm glad we're on the same page, then! Next movie?"

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"Only if I still don't know everything about it!"

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"Well, no promises. Unknown uknowns and all, you don't know what you don't know. Hmm... A romance, or a space opera?"

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"A space opera!" Ooh, an opera about space.

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Worm Star is set in a big galaxy where humanity has spread out in a huge, archaic empire. Everything is overly bureaucratized and running in sheer inertia; They borrow a lot of pomp from nobility tropes. Crowns, gold, gems, tasseled uniforms, everyone having four or five titles, blatant nepotism.

The main character is an astonishingly handsome blue-haired prince, immensely wealthy and powerful, who is charged with restoring order in a 'lost sector' infested with pirates and rebels. He's charming and determined, leading several battles against a recurring 'pirate king', where orchestral music plays and people in fancy uniforms shout at each other about missiles and armor and damage control over exploding computer consoles in between CGI shots of the ships fighting. The pirate king talks about how the empire isn't wanted here, and newly 'liberated' planets aren't happy to be conquered back, because the Empire's laws and police are rather brutal. One of the prince's subordinates actively hides just how bad it is from him, knowing the prince is a 'bleeding heart' who'd disrupt things trying to help people.

After the first few big battles there's negotiations with the local planetary governors and industrial magnates for new ships and supplies, and the prince and his guards have a running gunfight through a rusty frontier city trying to catch a female assassin who murdered a merchant he was trying to make a deal with, which ends in a damaged cable car riding a huge black ribbon up off the planet; The assassin falls, but unbeknownst to the prince, manages to survive with a personal parachute. The prince is disquieted by this and asks for reinforcements from his father, but is told that actually he needs to send some of his ships back because of unspecified trouble back home.

The prince decides to go directly after the pirate king, wrongly thinking he's the source of all the problems. The chase leads them to several fantastical worlds with distinct climates and architectural styles - a tan desert planet, a chilly frozen planet, an ocean-covered water planet, all of which they have gunfights, vehicle chases, or swordfights in. They encounter the assassin several more times, but the prince sees her leaving her targets to save children. Later, she tells him that the merchant she killed liked to kidnap and torture women. The prince admits he admires the assassin's determination to do what's right, but they each have their duties and cannot be together. Then he tries to capture her, but she gets away again.

The climactic battle is a chaotic fight in a dense asteroid field, with hidden ships and mines all around. The pirate king's base is an old forgotten colony ship, beautiful in abandoned grandeur. Just as the prince is lining up for the killing blow, the assassin contacts his ship! She begs him not to fire on the old colony ship, since there are innocents in cryo-sleep in it! The prince has to make a harrowing decision - kill the pirate king and restore order to support the Empire, but also kill hundreds of thousands of innocents and ruin a wondrous piece of lost technology... Or let the pirate king get away to continue making trouble across dozens of planets.

He decides to let the pirate king get away. That's when his subordinate tries to kill him and take over the ship, and there's a dramatic mutiny and room-to-room fighting! The prince looks on his subordinate with shock and shame, the subordinate says that the prince's father would be disappointed in him. The prince has the traitor locked up, and then takes control of the ship, but by now the pirate king has gotten away. The last few scenes are him talking to the assassin, betraying the empire on the reasoning that it's only making things worse by being so brutal and restrictive, and establishing a new free-market republic with the colony ship, even as the empire dissolves into civil war.

All the music is, of course, extremely dramatic and impressive-sounding, and the costumes and props are top-notch in terms of artistic detail. All the empire technology is artfully intricate and lavish, and all the frontier technology looks ruggedly reliable. The pirate king's scummy-looking outfit and comically irreverent antics and banter were well done too, Alex thinks.

Permalink Mark Unread

It's...

It was made by people who have a lot of skill at causing humans to come to intuitive assessments, right, the way that Mar Geru makes agerah feel at home and the imperial capitol building makes most mammals feel small. So the intuitive assessment that the empire is bad is, of course, wrong. In the long run it's the fighting itself that could have killed the innocents in cryo-sleep, the lack of imperial law enforcement that allowed the merchant to kidnap people, and this is... it's the mistake he was worried about his immigrants making with abolition.

"It did not have as much music as I thought an opera had but it had as much space as I thought a space show had. It, uh, it reminds me of a show I saw in Milliways, it had more singing and it was - it was from Earth so maybe you saw Les Miserables already?"

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"Oh, that is ancient, pre-KC. I remember reading the script for a class, but I've never seen it played. I probably should, maybe it has some cues for us to take here!"

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"Oh?"

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"Well, I don't remember much about it, but a big theme was the harshness of the justice system and revolutionary ideals, right?"

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"...Hm. Yes, everyone was making mistakes like that. Slavery for the first offense, and having a revolution, and being unrighteous, and dying. Except the person who gave Jean Valjean silver."

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"I'm not- Oh, the priest. Real kindness and humility is hard to find these days, huh... Do you think a highly authoritarian regime is good? Or just that revolution and war is bad? Am I on the right track here?"

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"My home is highly authoritarian and I like my home. Uh, but it isn't... like this place. People can learn the news even if the government doesn't want them to know it. I like our false advertising laws. I think... your authoritarian home is not as good as my authoritarian home. I think everyone thinks France is bad. And - France is bad but - the revolution in Les Miserables does not make France good. I hope that your revolution makes your home good."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"I hope so too. I... They rarely are, but we're doing it anyway." He laughs, then sighs. "'France is bad'. They got better... Eventually. Not that it's relevant to anything here and now. And yeah, some revolutions don't make anything good. When it's over, if we win, we should all get involved in politics. What a nightmare."

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"Sometimes politics is lonely and tedious but I do not think politics at my home is a nightmare. Why should you all get involved in it?"

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"When only a few people are politicians they inevitably start thinking about their own incentives and not everyone else's."

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"I don't know if elections work for you but I think someone told me they worked in America."

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"Maybe for a little while. It depends a lot on how you set up your elections. People start scheming to win the elections, and if you do it wrong the way to win the election is not to be the candidate that best serves the people, right? Gerrymandering's an easy one, fuck with the state boundaries so you get 51% of the vote in some regions and the places you lose the vote you lose by 90%, but it's still just one vote- Sorry, that one's a bit of a twelfth grade reading level, I can draw it out if it seems important."

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"...I don't think I understand it and I want to understand it."

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Alex will explain gerrymandering! He sketches on a tablet app to demonstrate.

So, the let's say Animal Kingdom wants to have elections. They decide to split the kingdom into five states, and each state will appoint one person, and the five people will rule the kingdom together. There's forty lions and sixty monkeys, so each state has 20 people in it. If you draw the boundaries so that each one contains random or even distributions of people, there will be five monkeys on the council and no lions. Not very fair. And if you draw the boundaries another way, you can get three districts with 12 or 13 lions, and then two districts that are all monkey - so three lions get elected, and only two monkeys, even though the monkeys outnumber the lions. Also not very fair!

"That's the basic idea, anyway. Lots of details, lots of fussing and arguing. Election design is hard stuff."

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"Um, I have questions. Why don't all of the lions and all of the monkeys vote together for one person? Why don't any of the monkeys implement policies that are popular among lions or any of the lions implement policies that are popular among monkeys? Do lions and monkeys do different jobs?"

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"This is super simplified. It just - shows the idea. In reality it'd look like, concentrating poor people in one district when you want to raise regressive taxes like sales tax, that hurts the poor more than the rich, or concentrating certain ethnic groups who you don't think will vote for you there. Uh, gerrymandering was a huge issue with the old American two party system - that's also got complicated reasons for why it existed - and it still dominates some political thought today. Uh, the idea is that the monkeys don't trust lions to implement monkey-favorable policies and vice-versa. A lion candidate would accuse his monkey opponent of not understanding lions. We have a concept called 'class warfare', which um... Okay, I didn't expect to go through a full theory lecture today but I can try."

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"I want to hear it if you want to tell me the lecture." He seems to struggle to phrase this and says it rather slowly.

Permalink Mark Unread

"...In socialist theory, the notion of a class is a specific category of people with specific sets of interests, desires, and incentives. When splitting people into classes the division will never be perfect because people are complicated, but you could say that land-owners and non-land-owners are two different classes. You would expect without knowing anything else that those two sets of people are going to react to things differently, and want different laws and policies. You could also consider classes of people who live on a planet and people who live in space- Spacers and grounders. Or people who farm food and people who manufacture things and people who work in stores and distribution- Farmers, factory workers, and retail workers. Class warfare, is the act of... Coordinating to benefit the class you belong to, often at the expense of other classes. The people who are rich and in power are a class, and they use class warfare against the poor. It's not always actual violence. Disinformation is class warfare, and limiting opportunities with economic incentives is too. Am I making sense so far?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yes. Um, do all the things - are all the things - do you not have people who own land that farm food and people who own land that don't farm food and, uh - I don't know if this question makes sense. Also, what is socialist theory."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You sometimes have people who can belong to multiple classes, yes. They're a tool for understanding politics, not a fundamental truth. Socialist theory is the philosophy of socialist schools of politics. The main tenet of it is shared ownership of things like land, or intellectual property - or just not enforcing any kind of intellectual property - and giving support to every member of a community. Free food, free housing, free healthcare. It's mutated a lot, it's been around for centuries, though. It's one of the common revolutionary schools of thought. The other common ones would be anarchism- No government at all, or a government that does almost nothing- And democratic federalism, which thinks the defunct Democratic Federation was great and wants to try the same thing again. You mentioned America? DemFed was the successor state to the United States of America."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Is the socialist school of politics related to the Church of England?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Er, no. What even is-"

He looks something up on the phone. 

"Oh, pre-DemFed Christian schism, huh. No, it's not particularly religious, though Black Catholics do espouse charity and kindness still, so it's sort of related."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I think I might have heard the word 'Catholic' before one or more times?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's a religion. I, uh, don't really feel competent to give you an unbiased overview of that but the 'net might have something."

Permalink Mark Unread

Shrug. "If it's not newer than the nineteenth century, I will be able to learn about it at home."

Permalink Mark Unread

"No, it's definitely modern. But like, all the stuff you're referencing is 19th century, and there's a lot of gap between here and there. Lots of history. People change what things mean, on accident, on purpose."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Yes. I do not know how to ask good questions about that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I guess the best way to put it is... Back in the 16th, 15th, earlier, they had lots of schisms, right? Catholics broke off into Protestants, Church of England, Anglicans, all that. But in the 20th, 21st, religion kind of became less of a big deal. Not a life-defining thing to most folks. Lots of people became agnostic - believing we can't tell if there is a God. Then it started getting popular again once we colonized other planets, with the DemFed's rises... Catholicism was still the big dog in town, the most important. And Hermes-Ishtar bought the Pope. Just like old times. You can buy forgiveness for your sins, you can pray with your money. Worship the altar of prosperity and greed. That's the White Catholic church. The Black Catholics are the people who said 'Martin Luther said it and I'll say it, fuck that and fuck the pope for betraying God'. They're all about freedom, mercy, neighborliness - but they can be violent too, stealing shit, killing rich people. Or so I've heard, maybe that's vicious propaganda. I'm a homicidal anarchist according to H-I's propaganda machine now, I bet!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...I do not understand thinking we can't tell if there is a God. But in my country we can also tell how many atoms are in every faraway star."

Permalink Mark Unread

Alex shrugs. "Well, there could be a God, sure, that hides himself from everyone and everything and has no detectable effects on the world. Or there could not be. An all-powerful entity that does nothing? It's unfalsifiable. You can't prove it wrong. Or right. That's what faith is supposed to be, maybe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I did not know that God does nothing. Hylia does something sometimes. I think Hylia is an example of the same species as God."

Permalink Mark Unread

Alex frowns and shakes their head a bit, sighing. "Well, I don't know what franchise Hylia's from. I mean- If it's some sort of, media, gaslighting, thing. It's hard to believe, right? Sure, doc says you're from nowhere we've ever seen, but portals to another world is a really damn big stretch. I still half think you're just... Thoroughly confused somehow. Anyway, yeah, God doesn't do anything around here, if he exists. He might have done something in the distant past but we got no way of checking, and the stories are consistent with people making shit up."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do you know how I can know if I am thoroughly confused?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"...Things that would be consistent with you just being thoroughly confused, like, if we found some record of you arriving on the planet, or for some reason the places you remember being are all kind of small and you couldn't go everywhere you wanted, or there are weird inconsistencies in what people say and believe sometimes, like an actor forgetting their lines or mentioning computers by mistake when computers don't exist. They have a whole star system where they build immersive fake worlds and people pay to be heroes in the fake world. Goddess Hylia sounds a bit reminiscent of that, mythic fantasy style. Fight monsters, purge the great evil, and save all the magic races through valiant battle."

Permalink Mark Unread

If they have such a record he won't learn that by consulting his memory right now. He's pretty sure people didn't weirdly mention computers sometimes before multiversal contact. Hylia's world... is exactly as described and that's the first thing that's made him take the hypothesis seriously as something actually plausible rather than something he should test on principle.

"...'Kind of small' is how much?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"A city block would be small- The size of the fence around this place would be a little bit small. Not having many books or meeting many people is a different kind of small. They could maybe fake going to different places, if we're thinking someone has gaslit you your entire life? Any sudden desire to go somewhere new would face delays. If someone was really extremely devoted to this - for your magic, I guess, to get warded items you don't realize are valuable out of you? ...It stretches the imagination in all kinds of ways. It's ridiculously implausible. It's just that alternate universes are ridiculously implausible too."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hylia's planet is bigger than that. I walked a lot. I saw... I saw very far away at the same time as I was walking a lot? I flew over my planet's ocean but lots of different parts of my planet's ocean look like each other."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, big landscapes are a point against, they'd need to rent out a big section of a planet and not use it for anything else. It should have taken a long time there and back, if it didn't another big point against. Were things set up so it made sense to make magic things all the time, as much as possible? We haven't heard tell of any supposedly indestructible new products, and they'd probably be news... Though, we don't get all the news out here. That's the only reason I'd see for doing something like this, really. It'd be hugely expensive and inconvenient, other people would wonder what the hell they're up to, I can't see anyone with the resources to do such a thing, doing it without expecting to profit somehow. Except SolNav, they're more about order and the community of humanity, but they wouldn't try deception, they'd... I don't even know, just stick you in a cell for questioning and then make it a luxury hotel later, maybe."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It did not make sense to make magic things all the time for seventeen years but it made sense to make magic things all the time for a few months. If someone could control all of my life and that person wanted me to make magic things all the time... I would have different parents."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yeah, makes sense. I kind of think in tropes, given how I work in media, I guess. But the next question is, what should I expect from alternate universes. And not just one, either, a whole pileup... Interdimensional consortium? Cross-world invasions? Some universe-eating threat we'll have to find and deal with? I mean, not everything's a story, though..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What is an interdimensional consortium?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Like, the old United Nations, it wasn't a federation, more like a diplomatic agreement zone where diplomats from various states could discuss things without immediately jumping to war, work out trade deals, stuff like that. But between powerful states in different worlds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Maybe that is like Milliways."

Permalink Mark Unread

Alex snorts. "You said it was a bar? There's an old cliche, that all the real diplomacy happens over shots in bars, not in the hallowed halls of government. Where leaders can speak candidly to each other instead of speaking to the public. Maybe not just a cliche."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I do not understand that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"When discussing things publicly, politicians have to think about what their constituents want, and what their competitors will say about the things they say. If someone says 'we should compromise with the other state to avoid a war', another politician can say 'that guy wants to compromise! wouldn't compromise, I'd win the war, vote for me!'. That's- Very disruptive. Not great for actually negotiating between countries. So politicians have to do it where other people can't hear."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I understand that your politicians are deceitful and wicked. I think that in my home shots cause people to die...?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"-Oh, shots can mean bullets, but it can also mean small servings of alcohol."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh! Yes, you can buy small servings of alcohol at Milliways - do I mean 'at Milliways' or 'from Milliways' or 'in Milliways'? I don't know these things."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All three of those work for buying something. Slightly different connotations... 'From' means you take it and leave, or get it sent to you, I guess? It's hard to explain, and buying is unusually weird. Also, shots specifically refers to 'hard' alcohol - drinks that are mostly alcohol, not drinks that just have some."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My pleasure. Hm, what were we talking about before I got all paranoid?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"You told me about socialist theory."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have to admit, this conversation is kind of exhausting, it's tiring to guess what you don't know, and you don't know what you don't know, and," shrug. "Maybe I should just get you some history wiki to read for a while, I dunno."