"- would you rather be talking to one of the humans on my team? The thing about guessing talking to an Elf might help was seriously only a guess, Casjan and Zua are both as human as you are and Luca's from a human-psychological-range species."

"It would be helpful but I'm a little worried that - you probably can't be hurt by pointing this out, and they could be."

"I'm - not sure what kind of hurt you're modeling?"

"...Right. That shouldn’t surprise me. I think they might be trying to avoid thinking about things that would make them want not to be citizens of Vanda Nossëo and I want to be slightly careful about disturbing whatever is going on with them."

"If they want to move here no one's going to stop them."

"Sure. It’d probably be helpful to talk to one. I really don’t think you’ve done anything wrong, though, you’ve been kind and courteous and you came here in the hope that you could make everyone involved better off and we probably will be."

She sighs. She nods. She leaves and is replaced a few minutes later with Zua.

"Afternoon," says Zua.

"Yep. Afternoon. Melda thinks I should talk to a human and - seemed to feel very bad about not being able to convince me we ought to join Vanda Nossëo and didn't seem at all reassured that I don't think it's because she did anything wrong."

"- well, yeah, it would be kind of disappointing to not do the thing you were trying to do even if you didn't do anything wrong while you tried. How come you don't wanna join?"

"With only the greatest respect for everyone who had to choose Vanda Nossëo to protect their people or have any chance of installing modern infrastructure it really isn’t appealing to give up on... being... human people who care about human things. Vanda Nossëo is the second best country I’ve ever heard of but we already have magic and science - if you’d showed up a couple of years later it’d be more obvious, we’re just in the middle of building the necessary infrastructure to actually use all these advances in ordinary life - so why would we become vassals to aliens who can’t even understand what it means to do right by humans just to be told the secrets of, say, electricity when we already know the secrets of electricity? Vanda Nossëo seems great and I think that’s because of all the wealth making it easy to avoid making tradeoffs at all, because where there are still tradeoffs it seems like they’re made in ways that are obviously bad for humans but not bad for Elves, as far as I can tell."

"...lots of humans who have electricity or magic or even both join up."

"Why?"

"To be part of the grand project of panuniversal civilization? So they don't have to work for a living and can spend a few years doing things that don't make any money? Because we seem like such nice people and all the cool cultures are doing it?"

"I’m not sold on your idea of coolness and everyone could have taken a few years off," uhhh an average person works from ten to fifty, three is a few, that’s six percent of their working life, Azan was planning on doubling how much food a farmer can produce this decade, yep, sabbaticals are totally workable, "even if we had never met you. And meanwhile - in Sesat child molesters used to be castrated and disfigured and stripped of their names. In Azan defeated enemies used to have the tendons in their right hands cut. As far as I can tell Vanda Nossëo's official objection to that is 'we’re so rich and powerful we can do something strictly superior.' Is that wrong?"

"Uh... what would you want to do with child molesters?"

"Execution, why?"

"So, uh, you can see how that, like, limits them more than castrating them or whatever, right? Like, the stripping them of their names thing is uncalled for, but - oh is suicide illegal or something here?"

"Sesat didn’t let slaves kill themselves. Some of them did it anyway."

"Okay, so, suicide is totally legal in Vanda Nossëo. If somebody molests a child and they'd rather be dead than take a course of therapy or drugs or subtle arts or whatever the state of the art is for that now, they can... be dead. That's not even something we had to be rich to do, low-tech people can commit suicide."

"And that’s lovely, and if it only applied to things that would be capital crimes in a human-run country that worked well for humans it’d be great, but it doesn’t."

"Humans maybe vary more than you expect. Some cultures don't consider molesting kids a huge deal, say. My tribe used to get into fights with a neighboring tribe that was big into pederasty and that wasn't even what we were fighting them about."

"In that case I’m confused that you expect so many people to join."

"They want - better lives with nicer things in them. Vanda Nossëo'll trade with you, even if you don't join, but it's kind of hard to go shopping there if you don't get basic income in our currency because there's not that much you're likely to make that we'll wanna buy, and a lot of people don't want their entire economy to be selling curios to people who think it's really charming that it's an authentic handmade basket."

"It sounds like that sucks for the people who have nothing to sell but authentic handmade baskets and I can see why countries with neither magic nor sex workers wouldn’t have many choices, though I do expect in our case there’s going to be a market for magic painlessly detachable prosthetics that move and feel and don’t even chafe like wooden legs. And glow. And don’t have to be body parts you had in the first place."

"A lot of people also don't want their main industry to be sex? The prosthetics thing might be a fine market niche, I dunno."