"They're this template with really ridiculous charisma, they're great at getting on the same page with people. Frankly I don't get why they don't print off a few thousand of them and have one leading every envoy team but here I am."

...Well, that’s sure an interesting capacity for them to have.

"Huh. I don’t expect that would help," he says slightly coldly. Yep, that’s confirmation that Vanda Nossëo doesn’t actually care if joining would be good for Azan. There’s probably some anti-war faction to appease but being better at talking people into things that aren’t in their interests isn’t considered objectionable. Well, that’s not really surprising, probably most diplomats are like that.

At any rate that isn’t how Sesatis talk so this conversation probably doesn’t have Sesati-style subtext on her end. Zua probably just genuinely can’t mentally inhabit a world where Azan could turn them down. And that’s terrifying.

"Some people genuinely do not like Maitimor and you are sorta prickly so I could imagine you being one of 'em." Shrug. "If you're not going to join are you still going to want stores here? Bus stations?"

"...Yes? Do you meet a lot of people who don’t?" Wow, that’s one of the most sympathetic things she could have said, and also, wow.

"- well, it really depends why they don't want in and I'm still gathering blackberries in the dark over here, so it seemed worth asking."

"I believe you about that, because cross-cultural communication is very hard, but I'm almost out of ideas to try to fix it. Honestly, I thought it was easier to talk to Melda, we were just under the misapprehension that there'd be less inferential distance with you. Uh, when I was speaking to her before, I said i didn't particularly think trillions of people is a size of political unit that can be governed well, but it sounds like you've never actually experienced better governance, and - in general it sounds like I shouldn't expect you to be at all sympathetic to any of my concerns, so I expect us to be unable to go beyond my listing things that don't sound to you like reasons to object to Vanda Nossëo and you saying you don't understand. For example, I was able to infer how effective your birth control is from the fact that men are allowed in Vanda Nossëo, and the fact that that worked is extremely objectionable."

"...why... wouldn't men be... allowed in... was Melda getting all Elfy about you about people having kids by accident, she's not actually supposed to do that, Elves hate that shit but that's because they just literally can't get pregnant on accident unless an evil god is fucking with them."

"...Good for them." (Elves not needing to exercise self-restraint can go on the list of reasons Elves don't interact with the entire concept of personal virtue and Melda claiming otherwise is probably some kind of misunderstanding.) "No, she mentioned acceptable levels of risk and that you guys are comfortable just taking capabilities away from people if there's a thousandth of a percent chance they might cause problems with them, and that is - I don't have that many objections to Vanda Nossëo's specific concrete policies that I've heard of so far as compared to lots of other places, but that's the most objectionable underlying attitude I have ever heard of a government having and I want absolutely no part of it."

"- if somebody with Melda's powers goes nuts they can teleport a planet into a star."

"Cool! Can you walk me through - like, does your resurrection require you to have a body or bring them back in the location where they died or something?"

"No, you can do it with a demon or somebody with wished on powers like theirs, and with a magic rock, but people die at a pretty sharp clip if you let them alone - not Elves, again, they don't get old or anything and if they do manage to kick it there's a not especially evil god that puts them back - so there's a huge backlog. There's only one of the thingamabobs that can make magic rocks or wish powers onto folks and we have not the fuckingest clue how it was made though, so that's a bottleneck."

"Okay. Melda said your concerns were about unfixable problems, and it sounds like the unfixable problem in that scenario is that some of the people have friends or families on other planets who miss them for a few years, is that right?"

"...yeah, and they don't all get rezzed same-day, so that's a nightmare - happened on Melda's planet, everybody on it dead, guy was churning out a dozen rezzes a minute and it took super long and they were all so fucked up about it."

If everyone he’s lost were going to come back to him someday safe and sound, he would manage not to be fucked up about it. They aren’t, and he’s not fucked up about it even so. At a dozen a minute - how many people live on a planet, a billion? So that’s -

- that’s a pretty distant someday.

"I understand why it would feel like anything was justified to avoid the kinds of things people do to each other when they’re careless. It’s just - I don’t know. The theoretical possibility that someone could do something bad doesn’t seem like a good reason to bow to some aliens I hadn’t heard of yesterday. And - you can live the way those laws I read imply people live. It’s possible to be okay even when the only thing keeping you safe is the fact that other people treasure you, and when you can't be part of the - the ways people relate to each other, when they're strong and proud - it's possible to be okay even when people handle you like a delicate bit of pottery. But it's very hard, and it's a lot to ask of anyone, and it's not as good, and maybe it's inescapable, and maybe it's ridiculous of me to treat it like it's something about Vanda Nossëo's laws when it was never really what life was like for everyone. But I - I knew, you know, that not everyone could take the time to practice archery like I could, that not everyone could afford good weapons, but I never made a law saying they weren't allowed. And in Azan they can, actually, if a farmer's son shows promise he can be trained - if a farmer's daughter shows promise she can be trained, I've met an Azani soldier who was a farmer's daughter. And like I told Melda, I think it's - good for people beyond just whether they end up any use in a war, if they think they can aspire to grow stronger. And if they know that everything will be taken away from them if it's not convenient for their superiors, that leads very bad places that I'm not saying you've already gotten to but I am saying I want to live in a country where whether we go there is not luck. Is that by any chance clearer than the last several times I said it."

"...not really, because I don't know where you got the idea that you can't aspire to grow stronger in Vanda Nossëo. I was this random resurrected no-powers human and I went and learned to be a wizard, and, yeah, they'd do something about me if I went super nuts, if you and your archery went nuts would they keep giving you arrows??"

"'Giving'. Ha. - In Azan that's a reasonable question. No, they would not proactively give someone free stuff, something Sesat never did in the first place, and yes, there exist fights where disarming someone or seriously injuring them is a sensible thing to do. And, yes, until recently Azan's policy was that defeated enemies should have the tendons in their right hand cut, and that was absolutely at least as horrible a policy as any of yours. I talked with Azan he about it, years ago, and he ended up changing it, partly because I said so. The fact that it was a horrible policy mattered to Azan he, and it matters to me, so now Azan is better. Vanda Nossëo so far as I can tell is ruled entirely by people who don't care, so it won't improve and might get worse. And then there's Sesat. About which that question as phrased doesn't really apply but it's..." He trails off, shaking his head. "Let's go with 'no but they metaphorically should have.'"

"...yeah I don't think I really get what kind of world you wanna live in. There's like, entertainment deathmatches with prizes and shit, if that's what you want to do, get into deathmatches, and they have rez insurance and all, but I don't want somebody deciding that my life is a deathmatch now without my say-so."

"I am aware that you don't understand. I didn't expect you to, because if you were going to you would have just asked the Star-of-Stars why he hates you so much at any point since you first encountered the other Sesat. I'm trying to bear in mind that your confusion is genuine and you have even less context on why what you just said might be offensive than you do on anything else, but that's taking up enough of my attention that I don't really have any spare for a good answer, and having a government that saw me the way you do would not be the worst thing that has happened in my life, that honor goes to the time Sesat should have metaphorically kept giving me arrows, but it would certainly suck."

"I don't actually know if I in particular could get an audience with the Star-of-Stars but even if I did and I asked him I don't see why he'd make more sense than you do? I can try it if you think it'll help. Uh, you sound kind of done, should I go?"

"I did find Melda easier to talk to."

"I'll... send her back and let her figure out if that means you actually want to talk to her, shall I, this snazzy headband I have on only makes me better at math and stuff, not at people." Off she goes.

"Yep," he mutters even though she doesn’t seem to care if he has a response.

Melda comes back, looking worried.

"I’m sure she’ll stop sticking her foot in her mouth with practice but I don’t want to be her practice when it’s just going to consist of endless variations on 'so why don’t you want to bow to us? the last three times you answered this question I somehow misheard you as saying "because I love hurting people and am a complete monster" but maybe this time will be different!'"

"- just to be sure," says Melda, "you know the bowing is purely a metaphor you are applying to the situation and neither literally customary nor how we think of it?"