"I guess so. Anyway, why'd you join?"

"Oh, I didn't vote, actually, I was dead at the time. Big into this not being dead thing I'm doing now."

He laughs. "I’ve never been dead, what’s that like?"

"Like absolutely nothing but the part before that there was a lot of blood." She makes a "bleah" sort of face.

"Huh. Well, that’s good to know. Probably implies we should stop doing human sacrifice. Sorry it wasn’t a fun process."

"Yeah, it sucked. One'a my kids did the magic rock thing and got me back and now almost no things suck, in my life anyway."

"Did anyone you knew find Vanda Nossëo's laws hard to follow?"

"Some of them, yeah. The ones who wanted to keep to all the, like, old ways. I don't hang out with them any more, they're sexist as fuck."

"In Azan it’s not terribly unusual for women to be, say, more violently inclined than the laws I read led me to believe is acceptable in Vanda Nossëo."

"I used to slap my kids around when they misbehaved, like that?"

Is that not allowed either? That’s ridiculous.

"Azanis don’t really have formal dueling customs but they have the instinct to avenge wrongs and protect their loved ones. The women too. It’s odd from a Sesati perspective and I don’t think I’ve heard of another nation where if you push the women too far they might beat you black and blue but that’s the thing I mean. And it’s not just that people get surprised or let them do it, Azan she once defeated two men while unarmed and in chains and one of them didn’t survive." And, yeah, that’s the Azani woman with the absolute best access to training and meat, and, yeah, she was twenty and they weren’t, but still.

(It doesn’t go over well with Azanis to say Azan doesn’t really have women.)

"Wow, badass. Yeah, we didn't do dueling, we did shunning."

Maybe humans just vary a lot. Well, it's not implausible that foreign humans would do weird things. It doesn't seem like Zua's experiences have much bearing on whether anyone he cares about would be okay in Vanda Nossëo.

"I hope that worked well for you."

"God, no, it was awful, the whole tribe schismed over it once because there was somebody shunned whose friends thought it was unfair and we all had to shun everybody who talked to them and eventually it was enough people they just left and I never saw them again."

"...I'm glad you found something else to do." Should he be confident that he's right about what works for humans - yeah, it doesn't sound like these people were ever under the impression that their way worked, and it's not like he's attached to the first idea he ever encountered about how a society should be structured to be good for people.

"I guess if we'd killed them instead I'd've seen them again. They're alive now, I assume, just mad at me, about the shunning, which is pretty reasonable."

"I'm sorry."

"So you're like, really attached to dueling?"

"...No? I just said Azan doesn’t really do that? I'm really attached to the people I know who are very trustworthy but have a tendency to do rash things in anger being whole and healthy and treated in ways that make sense given how they behave in a wide range of circumstances instead of harmed for falling afoul of overly strict laws with very little benefit. And I’m really attached to foreigners not coming in and claiming the right to decide whether our people should be allowed to have magic powers."

"So - what is it you think is gonna happen, your buddy's going to go on a pub crawl across the multiverse and kick somebody in the face and you don't want them to go to substance counseling about it -? You want to be on the teleport license committee or something?"

"Yeah, you can gloss me as being on the teleport license committee, Azan she and her council and I have discussed how Azan's laws should be changed in light of the existence of teleportation already. We of course welcome stories of the experiences of our friends in comparable situations; even though your society is very different from ours and what works for you is very different from what works for us, we can both learn things from each other."

Five years ago he would have identified this mood as too pissed off to keep playing Azani-style games but that's not it, really. It's the way Zua is talking like it's a done deal that Azan will be joining and the question is whether Valan can be bought off; it's not very Azani at all, it's more like how Sesatis talk, and that calls for a response on the same level, and that's obnoxious and he's mad about it, and besides that it calls the whole idea that they're not really here for conquest into question.

And that might not be right. Cross-cultural communication is hard. He keeps an eye out for signs that Zua looks confused or surprised or in any way not like she's falling right into the next step in this conversational dance.

She looks thoughtful, but in an almost playful way. "Not everybody can be on the teleport license committee, that would sort of stop being a committee at some point. I guess you can be on the Azan teleport license committee if you don't join up and you have an in. Especially if you have enough of an in to stop them even holding a vote. Or is it that you just don't think the regular folks'd vote yes?"

Hard to say if that’s confirmation. It’s not disconfirmation, anyway.

"A little of both."

It matters whether the common people would be better off joining Vanda Nossëo and they probably have useful input on that, if someone had time to discuss it with them, ask as many clarifying questions as necessary, and answer all their questions in turn. But it's not feasible to do that for everyone, and Azan's people are - probably not smart enough for democracy, but regardless not used to it, not capable of giving a useful yes or no answer alone with no way to find out what Vanda Nossëo is like and no one to ask for advice. He's pretty tempted to suggest that they give everyone a chance to visit Vanda Nossëo, and get their own basic income program started, and get a little library in every village, and give everyone time to take advantage of not having to work all the time to get used to studying and thinking, and hold a vote when it would mean something. See how Vanda Nossëo would like that. He'll say so if it ever seems wise, but it doesn't right now.

"Well, I mean, no rush on the vote if you want to wait and feel us out a bit more, not everybody can be a Maitimo."

"A what?"