"I don’t feel like you’re being very forthcoming, what do you think I'm trying to find out?"

"I have absolutely no idea! I guess maybe you have a magical power you didn't mention and were worried you were in violation of Bangalore law?"

"Okay. Without confirming or denying that, if that were true, what information do you think I would need to be able to make decisions about visiting Vanda Nossëo, and why was that information not provided to me before I was invited?"

"If you were not allowed to visit Bangalore, I would be in trouble for it, not you, I chose the place and brought you there."

"I see. And if in the future anyone wants to visit one of your worlds without specifically being invited, what will they need to know?"

"Usually nothing - there are places that screen incoming people but Revelation's not one - look, will it help if I just give you the entire legal code of Bangalore and its encompassing entities, and you can search for thirty decoy terms and also whatever you're worried about here?"

"Sure. - I'm not actually trying to disguise my question," though he is trying to glomarize for the people who, unlike him, do have powers, "but I probably have thirty-one real questions about your laws anyway."

Melda sends the appropriate messages and gets him a computer with that on it.

He would like help figuring out how to search for terms such as "subtle arts" and "teleportation" and "magic licensing" and, while he's at it, yeah actually he does want to skim their tax code and business licensing requirements and how they deal with orphans and the disabled. He'll be at it for a while, intermittently pacing around the palace courtyard in between paragraphs.

Totally reasonable of him. Once Melda has gotten him started on the interface she'll go catch up with the rest of her team and give him some privacy.

After a while he has some important takeaways. He has some idea how professional licensing works, and it seems like Bangalore deals less badly with orphans than Emika (at least on paper), and he's stunned by just how much state capacity they have and just how many laws they have, and he doesn't want his people to be subjected to laws like these.

(It makes sense, that these people would look at Sesat and decide it was evil for evil's sake and not worth their respect. He accepts that attitude from Dama, who doesn't know which Sesati rapist gave her her daughter, and Maki, whose singing was the last bright thing in the dungeon until his tongue was cut out. They have reasons that relate to real problems with Sesat. But strangers who literally cannot have honor and imagine all Sesati values are about being better than other people, whose own view of the world is so limited they can't even see half of the harm Sesat actually did? Yeah, he feels more comfortable being annoyed with them.)

He flags down a page (not one with fox ears) to go tell Azan she that he does mostly like and sort of trust these people but wants to ask her to keep Azan from joining Vanda Nossëo and will explain more later. And then he'd like to talk with Melda again.

Melda can come right back. "I hope that helped," she says.

"I think I know more now. I'm probably going to ask that we not join Vanda Nossëo; I'm guessing that won't put you at risk but if it will you should tell me so I can try to help."

"- no, it won't put me at risk, but I would really like to know why, what are we doing wrong with this region on these planets??"

"I used to hope someday I would have a nice country estate with a handful of serfs that I’d get to know well enough to be very good to all of them. The reason that will never happen now isn’t because I did something wrong. The reason my chattel slave doesn’t belong to me anymore also isn’t because I did anything wrong - I helped him rebel against Sesat and never hurt him in private and I only bought him in the first place to protect him from someone worse. I was absolutely perfect at doing right by him. If Azan were weak and afraid, if its people were starving and ill, if we needed to accept foreign masters - I can’t imagine any better than you. I hope we have a thousand years of peace and and a thousand happy marriages between our peoples. I’m glad you came and so will most of Azan be. That being said if you want to hear a poorly considered rant about every way I think your society is bad for humans in general and unfair to Sesati and liable to make Azan's worst traits worse, I can give you that."

She sighs. "Yes. Please."

"You can’t reliably identify what information I'll find important. You say you care about people’s strength of character but you’re making the same mistake as Sesat, and one similar to a mistake Azan has made in the past, in being so willing to resort to trying to make people weaker. It's - obviously you're not doing it to the same extent as Sesat, but you're still doing it. You still - don't want to accept the costs of other people having the ability to screw you over, I think, and I get it, people can be horrible, there are people whose deaths make me sleep easier. But - not just because they're prone to violence. Some of my best friends are kind of concerningly prone to violence and I still trust them, I just sometimes talk them down from doing anything rash, and I wouldn't want to live somewhere they weren't allowed to have magic just because they're strong and passionate and not necessarily prone to overthinking things. They wouldn't stop being kind of concerningly prone to violence, though of course you could just directly edit them into the kind of people you like better - that strikes me as disrespectful to do, by the way - but aside from that, they wouldn't be better, they'd just be less. Not - not as much less as if Sesat had its way with them, but less. It's - you know what you should hear? The stuff I yelled Azan he the first time we talked about what his plans had been. He'd been completely ignorant of what motivated Sesat's army and he'd been planning to maim us all and let one of his advisors pick out a few of us to have blinded. And... what did I say, it was something like...

"You can do what you like. You don't have to answer to me, I'm just some cripple who can't get out of bed, because I threw away everything else I ever had for you and your country. I would have liked to do it sooner, too, you know. I knew you didn't enslave civilians and that was good enough for me to want to give up almost everything, turn my back on the people who saved my life time and time again, and throw myself on your mercy. But I didn't because it would have put my family at risk, and you didn't know that, and you didn't wonder, and you were so happy to assume I was a monster who opposed you out of purest malice that you left me, you left someone who loves your cause more than I loved my  life or my health or the good regard of anyone I knew, alone in Sesat. You didn't try to coordinate with me because you didn't think I was worth coordinating with and so now here we are. We've lost things we didn't have to lose, if you'd bothered to wonder if I might not be a complete monster. And you know what? Everyone in the army who didn't care, everyone who was selfish and afraid, knew something like this would happen if they surrendered. And that worse would happen if they surrendered and you lost anyway. And what would it even get you? The same thing that toppled Sesat, a bunch of people you thought you'd wrecked so thoroughly they posed no threat, and whose ability to help you, and whose willingness to help you, you could not count on because you threw them away thinking you never could have had them in the first place. And the most self-respecting of them, and the ones who were least squeamish, and the ones with the best reflexes, would all have been dead. How did you think you were going to hold so much territory without flipping anyone in our army? You wouldn't have had to see the dead stares from whoever you had left alive, you wouldn't have had to see what becomes of people who no longer believe it's worth striving to be better and stronger, people who no longer think of themselves as worth investing in because any investment will just be taken away, but you know perfectly well that's no excuse for you not to have known and done something different.

"Or something like that. It's been years. And you're not Azan he, and Vanda Nossëo's mistakes aren't Azan's mistakes, but maybe it's helpful."

"It's - no, I think I'm still confused, I'm so sorry," says Melda. "I - I think a lot of this is about scale? About the - sheer number of people, and how much one of them could do if they took it into their heads, things we can't fix - so we don't wave off little things, because they might mean big things later, and they almost never do, but with trillions of people you can't afford to be wrong a thousandth of a percent of the time... or I'm reacting to the wrong thing entirely, I don't know."

Shrug. "Maybe living in countries with trillions of people is bad for humans, but that really doesn’t make it more appealing. I think we might want to import your birth control because I'm guessing it fails less than a thousandth of a percent of the time since I have yet to see evidence that you preemptively castrate everyone."

"- yes, we have birth control that fails less often than that and you can have it."

"Great. Anyway, I don’t expect you can see why a human would be harmed by that, I think it’s something that has to do with the ways we’re different from you. Like - you saw the state Sesat left me in. I bet your understanding of what was objectionable about it is 'it was physically painful and logistically complicated.' Right?"

"I assume it was also psychologically traumatizing! Elves aren't immune to trauma!"

"What exactly does 'psychologically traumatizing' mean?"

"A sufficiently stressful experience, especially one prominently featuring helplessness in particular, leaves - mental scars, that affect how people feel and think for a very long time."

"I guess you could say that. But - lots of things are stressful. Losing my parents was stressful. Making the choice to buy a slave was stressful. Having sex for the first time was stressful. All of those things left mental marks of some kind or another. But - there's something different about losing things you've worked all your life for, and watching the connection between your will and the world around you shrink. Because... I'm not an Elf, and I'm not a sheep, and I'm not chattel. I can survive pain, or mental scars, or hunger, or needing someone else to bathe me. But I need to be worth investing in, or there's no point. I've seen how humans get when they give up on themselves because everyone else has given up on them. I've spent years trying to help Azan recover from that. And it doesn't sound like that's how your people are, and I'm not saying you haven't created one of the better places I've heard of for humans to live, you clearly have, and I'm not saying you routinely go as far as Sesat, and I'm not saying all your humans are too broken inside to have any worth. But - I seriously doubt you can know what it feels like to be made less like that, because - gods but all anyone would have to do is get one so-called 'oath' out of you and you'd be such convenient chattel, and you wouldn’t even mind if you were told not to. And it wouldn’t even be taking anything away from you, they could just tell you to act like it never happened and you would. And humans aren’t made for that and treating us like we are damages parts of us that I don't think you have."