"It's jewelry, it wasn't practical to begin with. It's just to make all that practical stuff worth doing."

"It can be practical! Metal jewelry can be enchanted, and at some Elf establishments you'll be dress coded out of the place if you aren't dressed up enough. But yes, I agree with the sentiment."

"You know, in Azan they think it's very silly, dressing up. But I guess you probably noticed that." It's not the only reason the royal family generally wears undyed work clothes, of course. But some of it is showing off that they don't need to show off.

"It's a sympathetic belief for Bronze Age humans to wind up with. It just doesn't work for Elves. Our tolerances vary but we need beauty like humans need sleep. - we do also sleep, but less, and suffer less from skipping it, and my understanding is that it's the closest comparison."

"If you don't sleep for long enough you'll fall asleep or die, I think. Whereas there's - nothing to protect a human from going months or years without beauty. I wish I needed beauty like I need sleep."

"You're not the first person to say that!"

"There are how many people out there? I don’t expect to be original."

"You're not even the first person to say it to me specifically. There's something appealing about having a non-negotiable excuse for luxury."

"I think putting it that way doesn't really account for the difference between something like owning jewelry and something like seeing the sky."

"In some circumstances seeing the sky can become a luxury, too." She looks up at the sky; it's sunny blue, not a cloud.

"Sure. But if you call them the same thing you lose the ability to easily distinguish the Azani thing where the king doesn't wear anything fancy as a visible signal of a philosophy where they prioritize the health of ordinary peasants, from the thing that happens when people are very angry and not at all accountable for their actions where they lock you in a sunless dungeon and cut your tongue out if you try to entertain the other prisoners."

"I'm... not actually sure I see the connection you're drawing."

"You can say of either situation that it just means going without luxuries since it's not like you won't survive either way. But the Azani thing is harmless silliness at worst, because it doesn't involve anything that really weakens humans, not if they can live in a palace with servants and a garden and enough food to never go hungry. Whereas humans can technically survive being prisoners, but it does weaken people - yesterday I would have said sometimes it weakens people beyond any healing in this life but I'm learning a lot of things today."

"That's another thing Elves can't do. Survive being prisoners. Humans are more robust than us in some ways. But it's better not to need to be."

"...You know, I know you say you have lots of humans, and I can see that you have at least some, but you keep saying things about your culture that seem badly suited for humans, and then you tell me things about your species and it all makes sense, except for the part where humans with other options want in on it."

"Well, humans do different things with the same resources," she says, gesturing around at Bangalore. "The species differences are why most people don't live in highly integrated cities. Even when we get along fine and can go anywhere we like, the average differences will tend to push like to like. What would you want, if you could build anything and live in it forever?"

The Sesat he used to believe in, but with elven skyscrapers and universal measles vaccination.

"Okay, bear with me, this will turn into an answer eventually. I haven't really tried to explain to a multiversal audience before. In between the two halves of the war, when I'd done as much as I could and was waiting for Dama to do her part, I - prayed. A lot. In Sesat it's said that the gods talk to living people sometimes, though of course in Azan it's said that Sesatis are all a bit mad, so who's to say whether they really spoke to me." He shrugs. "But I saw that if I was ever free again, I had to explain to people how angry chattel slavery makes them, and that it was - overreaching, trying to make chattel slaves out of so many brave people, that finally brought Sesat down. That once you look straight at it, a chattel slave is like a leper, a slave is something wrong and broken and dangerous, and the world shouldn't have anything like that in it - when it’s not just someone laying low and waiting to murder their so-called owner. It’s just, when you think about it, good people are good. If a criminal is too dangerous or too horrible to live with, stripping them of whatever is left of their honor won't help. And if you're not dealing with a criminal, if it's just some foreigner you've conquered - if they understand what you want with them, they'll die if they have any honor, and so you'll only have robbed the world of them and their honor. And with children - we all know it's not in the blood, it's in the upbringing. Enslaving an infant is like cutting their feet off. Yeah, there isn't and won't be a whole adult who could become a warrior, but maybe there could have been.

"And, while I'm on my slavery rant, as a complete tangent, chattel slaves are animals, and, you know, sheep have no honor either but we can still treat them with kindness. But that's a tangent. Anyway. There are - smaller losses, when people are maimed, or sick, or too hungry to think. Or when they die. It's - better when people are better. No matter what - even if we’re talking about serfs, I’ve never known anyone to brag about how cowardly their serfs were." Not out loud, anyway. "Azan always sort of tried to invest in everyone, but - without really understanding what they should be aiming for. And Sesat understood what it means for someone to have worth but had basically given up, because it wasn’t possible to invest enough in everyone at once. Until we met the multiverse. So I guess what I want to build is a place where everyone is as strong as possible, as brave as possible, as honorable as possible, as educated as possible, and a place that isn’t marred by slavery."

"Huh. - the chattel slavery was a huge sticking point with the other Sesat, that and the fact that the background culture of flattery played badly with the fact that envoys aren't supposed to lie."

"...Not that I'm accusing you of this but - if the war hasn't happened yet and you're still deciding when to make contact, I'm entirely willing to discuss whether you should let the war play out. If there's a chance you wouldn't know you should maybe pass that on just in case."

"- if we find another one we can take that under advisement? I think probably the war has been obviated in the other but you can go check yourself."

"...That's not what I meant. You should tell your precog in case there's any chance they wouldn't have warned you before looking into the future, even if they'd be going against policy to have done it in the first place."

"Oh. I will do that right now on general principle." She does computer things.

"Thanks. Not that it seemed likely in the first place, I just thought of it because you got me wondering if just waiting this long made things easier for you compared to when you met the other one. Anyway, why were you wondering what I'd build?"

"I like to get a sense of what kinds of goals I should be - helping people see a way forward to."

"I do see a way forward, I think. I get the impression you arrived expecting to introduce us to modernity and magic and here I am thinking 'do we need more refrigerated transport capacity than we currently have for our vaccination program?' instead of 'you mean we can do something about measles?'"