"Sure. So, I'm cautious about how I put this, because there's an obvious set of words to use for it that's already in use for something else that's deeply insulting, and I want to clarify in advance that - you know how, if you have a set of scales, and you put a stone on one side and a feather on the other, the scales will tip to show the stone is heavier basically no matter what size it is, and if you were speaking imprecisely you could say that's because the feather has no weight, but it's an entirely different thing from a soul having no weight? Like, the soul won't fall slower, it's not light, it's a thing you can't weigh at all, right?"

"- my soul actually weighs about three grams but go on."

"...Okay, I mean, I know in Emika they say you only have your brain and that weighs something, too, but the - abstract concept of having feelings doesn't and that's all that really matters to the analogy - anyway, in that way, and definitely not in the way that someone speaking imprecisely might say a feather weighs nothing, I notice your species has no honor and might not have any virtue at all."

"I think that's likely not far wrong under the Sesati conception."

Nod. "Okay, so now I'm confused. It's not news to you but you don't quite act like I would expect you to act if you understood, but it's hard to put my finger on why exactly I think you don't quite act that way."

"How would you expect me to act?"

"Hmmmm. It seemed like there was something off about the way you talked about that speech, like the way you talked about it suggested you didn't just disagree but actually thought it meant something other than what I though it meant, and then - I thought probably when you asked me what I'd build, we were going to end up circling back to criminal justice, or something, but we didn't, and none of that is very strange but it just feels off. I would have been less surprised by anger or condescension, not that that would have been a winning move. Maybe an explicit acknowledgement that it doesn't sound like Vanda Nossëo is compatible with what I'm hoping Azan will be like someday."

"Huh. Sesat was difficult but Azan - on the other world, which I suppose may importantly differ - wasn't."

"The country you're dealing with contains about half the people who used to live in Sesat before the war. I am regularly mistaken for a councilmember, probably because I sit in on almost all council meetings and have written substantial sections of Azan's recent treaties. If you caught them before the war but after Feris of Leopard Hill was about as old as he looked in the video, that would have been during the reign of the previous king, and he tended to underestimate the costs of his decisions to people's autonomy and sense of wholeness. Also, not to put too fine a point on it, if you'd wanted to destroy the other Azan they could neither have fought back nor run away."

"I wasn't on the team that visited them, so I don't have much way to assess whether those things were factors. What it looked like to us was that Azan was shockingly well aligned for humans in the Bronze Age, and all we had to do was introduce ourselves and catch them up on some social technology and they were ready to step into the multiverse, but of course even if that's a completely accurate high-level summary it'll omit a lot of detail."

"...Well, maybe I'm wrong about something else. Maybe if you tell me what social technology you caught them up on it'll make sense, or - at one point you offered to give your own version of the speech you showed me and that might also help."

"Do you want the version from - Sesat's perspective but with Vanda Nossëo spin, or just the one from our perspective?"

"Hm. Both?"

"From our perspective, something like -

"Sesat's commitment to being a place where everyone in it they think of as a person at all can derive their self-worth from looking down on someone else has won out. Chattel slavery is mercifully over, the victims bought with magic lessons, and the serfs are leaving in droves, so instead they're going to position us as the contemptible outgroup, partly because we don't sympathize with the need for hierarchy and partly because they object on apparently sincere principle to removing magical capabilities from wielders who have proven dangerous. This means a vote to join isn't feasible at least this generation and possibly longer depending on how much the polity evaporatively cools, but fortunately the magic lessons and trade which they're still allowing will alleviate most of the remaining standard humanitarian issues at play. Enter Sesat only at your own risk, as we're not legally able to freely operate there."

"...Wow. That’s... Sesat has managed to surprise me by being worse than I thought before, so the fact that that model of what it means to care about having some worth as a person sounds totally wrong doesn’t mean it necessarily is. I’d buy the personal sanctity concern as sincere coming from Feris of Leopard Hill, it’s consistent with his books, but it’s surprising to me that he got enough popular support to pull that off."

"I'd be really interested to hear what it means to have worth as a person in that sense which isn't about having inferiors?"

He’s so much more qualified to answer that than he was before the war.

"Sure! So let’s imagine a horrible disaster has left everyone dead except for a man and his six-year-old son. One day there’s a fire. The man could run away really easily, but the child's legs are shorter and the child is closer to the fire to start with. So the man decides whether to just run, or to get closer to the fire so the kid can get on his back. Does it seem to you like that choice tells you something more important about who he is than the choice to hold his bow in his right hand or his left?"

"Yes."

"Me too. I don’t want to presume that you see exactly the same difference as I do, but the difference I see is that the one who just runs is worth less than the other. That’s related to the son's safety, but even if he misjudged the danger and nothing bad would have happened, he’s still the kind of person who would do that. He is worth something. And it doesn’t matter if someone else has rescued ten children from fires. It starts to look as if it matters when instead of a fire it’s an enemy army, but that’s... not everything in life is war, that’d be a very small life."

"So, the leap there, from being the kind of person who would do that to being 'worth something', that's where you kind of lose me. If his son is six months old and has never had the opportunity to do anything of import, his son is still worth something, the way I'd use the phrase - otherwise it wouldn't matter if the father saved him or not, the same way it wouldn't matter if he saved a bit of scrap paper which isn't worth anything. If instead of his son it's a convict he's charged with escorting safely to exile, it still speaks positively to the man's character if he saves his charge even if the convict has done something terrible."

"...Yyyyyes and Azanis say that, too, so I really should have known better and picked a different idiom. There's a thing that a chattel slave and a pair of magic hands and a jeweled sword have in common, and it's related to the fact that you can sell them for money. There's also a way a chattel slave is different from a sword, something that makes it important not to be cruel to them, no matter how broken they are inside, and that's something that's also present in an infant. But there's a way that a brave man differs from an infant or a coward or a sword or a pair of magic hands. Sesatis mostly describe it as 'having worth', and insofar as we have new names for disambiguating it for Azanis they're all newer than the war, so I didn't figure you'd know them. You'll maybe have heard 'virtue' instead of 'worth'?"

"Both words have come up - do they mean just the same thing?"

"'Virtue' is narrower unless you're from Woodside in which case they do mean the same thing, or Azan in which case the entire underlying philosophy and division of concepts are different. Except when instead 'virtue' isn't being applied to a person at all, then it's different. Also up in Leopard Hill it used to be that they sort of meant the same thing but you heard 'worth' a little more often about men. Of course, Sesati dialects have gotten a little shaken up in the last few years, people have moved around a lot. But anyway, in the extremely narrow context of the thing I just said, they mean the same thing."

"Right. So you're culturally interested in people's strength of character - but we are too so I'm still not sure what the difference you're pointing out is."

"It hasn’t sounded like it. What actions or policies of yours is that reflected in?"