"I'll notice in plenty of time if it looks like you're about to wander somewhere dangerous but your own caution around heights will most likely do the trick, a lot of the safety stuff is for kids and their parents, pets and pet owners."

"In my experience animals and children young enough not to notice that heights can be dangerous couldn't read and the point of adult supervision is that they already know things like that."

"I'm probably not explaining it well, I don't have human children - or any children at all. Maybe there will be illustrative examples at our next stop."

Allspeak kiosk. Bop.

Shrug. He’ll keep an eye out.

"Anything here you want a closer look at or shall we move on?"

"We can move on."

Pop pop.

"This is a human city. The world is Revelation and the city's called Bangalore. This world was pretty advanced when we found them already because they can summon people from adjacent worlds with very useful magical powers - those aren't humans exactly but they're psychologically alike and some of them used to be humans."

Relatable, he doesn’t say.

He looks for neon warnings and tries to judge the tech level and see how electricity gets used when there’s enough of it to do anything anyone might want with it and they’ve had a long time to come up with new things to want to use it for.

There's a bright orange traffic cone marking a spot in the sidewalk that has been peeled open for plumbers to do things, and a truck the back end of which has a CAUTION - WIDE TURNS sign with a little picture, and nobody has coordinated the traffic lights or the car's lights to look nice together at all. But the buildings are tall and there are street food carts and people with wings and must-be-electric bicycles and little hovering drones doing photography or carrying packages and busy shops nobody has to staff and shady trees full of birds whose poop is being busily scrubbed by little robots that shuffle along the ground.

Blind people could use a warning about the pit but they couldn’t use that warning. Maybe when Azan starts needing to do that kind of maintenance on their power and water they should play music.

...He really, really wants a fleet of electric street sweepers.

"And all of them have a tendency to fall into pits?"

"I think the cone by the pit is there so if people are reading something while they walk, or can see high contrast things but not detail, or are going fast, have enough time to go around it? It might also be helping the robots navigate."

"That’s... huh, that does make sense. I thought people wanting to be blind was a weird Azan thing but you did already tell me Vanda Nossëo was basically Azan in space so maybe I should’ve guessed. And your robots navigate differently?"

"People wanting to be blind is weird but there are a lot of people. And our robots navigate in some of the same ways but since we don't want orange cones around we have to invest in making sure they can avoid falling in maintenance holes in other ways. You can get little objects that send out a signal that robots know to steer around. It might be humans don't like those because they can't tell if they're working easily? We can ping them with the chips in our heads. Not like the one for the chiplock computer, my kind of Elf is born with chips."

"Huh. Weird. And the computers can't be used for that, or it's just more convenient for you?"

"Computers can't talk to arbitrary other computers; in a space Elf society we can standardize all our devices to talk to the kind we're all born with but humans don't have that option."

That doesn’t sound right but he doesn’t know enough about computers to dispute it. "If I’d been in Sesat more than twice in the last five years this would have subtext but I haven’t and it doesn’t - I get the impression you’d like Sesati architecture better than Azani?"

"I do, actually, though of human architectural I like medieval Islamic best."

"I haven’t seen that kind yet. Anyway, what is there around here that I shouldn’t miss?"

She can take him on a little tour of Bangalore and buy him a souvenir if anything catches his eye.

Well, he wouldn't turn down jewelry made of cool high-tech metals like steel, if it's on offer. Azan doesn't have the steel going spare for that sort of thing and there are people who'll look at it and see ideas for how to make not-very-familiar metals behave.

(Also, caring about jewelry seems like it will play well with aliens who are obsessed with aesthetics.)

She'll buy him a neat steel necklace with anodized colors all over it and little loose pieces inside larger partial enclosures with holes in so you can see them.

Fancy!

"How do they get it to look like that?"

"Good question, I have no idea if this was handmade or printed or conjured or what." She asks the vendor, who says the jewelry like that is conjured but she anodizes it herself at home so they're all unique.

"I know how to make jewelry but it was the bronze age when I learned."

"There'd actually be a market for that, you can charge extra for things being handmade and authentic, but a lot of handcrafts are from a purely practical perspective obsolete in the broader multiverse," apologizes Melda. "The good news is that most people have plenty to spend on being impractical."