"Would you like to describe it in your own words?"

"Membership is - participation in our governance, a commitment to the safety of visitors, a leg up in the economy, a safety net if something happens and you need help. Your vote would count as much as mine, a tourist would feel just as confident in coming to check out your city as mine, you'd get just as much basic income as I do, and if the multiverse throws something at you or Emika gets aggressive or anything like that we'd be right there with you. It's joining an alliance, not a feudal hierarchy."

"An alliance whose laws you decided on before I ever heard of you and won't change for me."

"If you think you're getting at something a lot of humans need then you could start a campaign to get a lot of humans to vote for a change."

"You have a lot of faith in democracy and if everyone mysteriously did vote for the thing they'd vote for if they understood the question and were aware of all the important context I think I might find that in your alliance where everyone is allowed to leave or die there aren't many people who really take issue with anything about how things are run."

"I actually don't have a lot of faith in democracy, I'm from a monarchy because that generally suits Elves fine, but it's the mechanism we have for making sure everyone's input is incorporated when there's a lot of everyone. If you just want to live in a small society that's not part of a larger umbrella I could understand that, but you - haven't seemed to just mean that."

"Well, you did say the other things are because you have too many people, so who knows."

"It's a big contributor. But there won't stop being so many people even if there's no umbrella organization."

Shrug. "Zua expected we wouldn’t want you to open any shops here, is there a reason we might not want that?"

"Some places that are relatively hostile to us are that way because of general isolationist beliefs or economic protectionism of some kind and those don't want shops. That's probably what she had in mind."

"I see. Well, Azan is kind of isolationist, but not in that way. Anyway, are there - other things we should talk about beyond 'yeah, it isnt likely Azan is going to reverse course on principles most people here are willing to die for just to spite the least concerning foreign country in all the worlds we know of'?"

"- are you saying that Azan most likely will join, and it's just you personally who's against it?"

"...No? I don’t have the final say in the matter but I do expect to get what I want. Why does 'we are interested in peaceful trade and not in political union at this time' sound like one or another of 'we’d love to join immediately' or 'I reserve the right to duel you, a woman from a culture where they don’t even practice for that in the first place, to the death, for no reason'?"

"- you said words other than 'we are interested in peaceful trade and not in political union at this time' most recently. You said 'yeah, it isn't likely Azan is going to reverse course on principles most people here are willing to die for just to spite the least concerning foreign country in all the worlds we know of'. I'm repeating these words exactly as I understood them to check for translation problems. To my ear that suggests, for example: that 'most people', being a different set from you specifically, may have interests at work which might not be identical to yours, and the thing about not spiting us sounds framed in a - less adversarial - I apologize for the misunderstanding."

"...That's fair, I did say those words and I think I'm getting touchy and that's not really fair to you, both because the thing we've been doing is very hard and because you're literally a different person from the one who just pissed me off. Anyway, in Azan, it's - important to let people go where they will, and compete to be worthy of them, and I'm not against that at all, and I would also at least consider dying for that principle. So you can expect not to have problems with people who want to live in Azan and sell things, or people who want to help other people move in or out. I - hm. I am not entirely confident as to how adversarial you're being, and even less so now that I've talked with Zua, but - there hasn't been much to say about you opening a bus stop, say, because that's great and I can confidently predict that Azan she will have no objections, no one on the council will be worse than neutral toward it, our existing laws cover it, I don't have any concerns about it, I don't expect it to be notably disruptive or bothersome in any way beyond the possibility that someone living next to it would be annoyed about all the traffic - and now we've spent this whole time talking about the only one of the things you came here hoping for that anyone has the slightest objection to and I'm concerned it's left you with the impression that the range of plausible outcomes here isn't wholly restricted to ones where you get most of what you want and we get most of what we want and almost everyone is better off, so just to be really clear - you are not close to provoking a war, you can basically expect to be the ones imposing limits on trade and travel, outcomes that anyone involved would describe as atrocities are not very likely, you're not even likely to meet with widespread distaste on a personal level - I don't like Zua but that doesn't even imply anything about the two of us getting along with anyone besides each other in particular. If there was a subtextual way I was supposed to communicate that I'm sorry for having failed at it."

"I appreciate that all this quibbling is only about - comparatively minor things. Is there something I should be chiding Zua for or would you rather keep it between you?"

"I don't want her hurt but you seem like you might have the kind of culture where that's not what chiding her would mean, and I'm not sure you could say anything useful about it anyway even to the extent that it’s about how diplomatically she expressed herself as opposed to - honestly expressing objectionable things about the attitudes of people in Vanda Nossëo."

"I mean, she's on an envoy team, she should make some attempt to diplomatically express herself, though I could imagine her having picked up cues that suggested to her that she should be - blunter - depending on what was said. Did she say something about... dueling?"

"You want to get into it? Okay, so I said - no, let me start further back. She said Vanda Nossëo would 'do something' if she 'went super nuts' and asked if a poorly specified 'they' that I thought was probably Sesat but might be Azan would give me more arrows if I 'went nuts', with the arrows being I-thought-clear metonymy for all abilities I might be able to use offensively. Not being sure which she meant I answered for both. Azan used to have that horrible custom of cutting tendons to disarm people, but it doesn’t anymore, and that’s not random, that’s because Azan he and I talked about it and he realized it was horrible, and I expect Azan she to have similar sensibilities and also to listen to me, so I expect future changes will be more likely to happen in the direction of less of that kind of thing, rather than more. And Sesat of course didn't literally give me arrows in the first place - Azan actually does, sort of - but there was sure a time when they decided I'd gone nuts and should have fewer metaphorical arrows and I have some issues with how they handled that situation. And she said - this is a paraphrase because I'm worried about not catching a misunderstanding - that it sounds like these horrible bloodthirsty impulses of mine would be satisfied by prize fights but she doesn't want to be challenged to a duel to the death and that's a consideration of overriding importance. Her precise words were, fuck I don't actually remember exactly, something closer to 'there's, like, entertainment deathmatches and shit' and 'I don't want somebody deciding that my life is a deathmatch now without my say-so' - I'm pretty confident in the accuracy of that last part. So I think there's an element of, uh, her saying things that you're probably very sympathetic to and that I think of as horrible, and also an element of - I'm not totally sure if I misunderstood the relevance, or if she just didn't really listen to me and had that counterargument ready no matter what I said, or if I missed an idiom, or what, but my guess is it's the second one. I don't think she was too blunt."

"So, it's understandable that having been yourself subject to invasive, broad, likely traumatizing, interventions that were at least described to you as being preventative measures issued by a justice system, anything reminiscent would be really upsetting... I'm going to try speaking in shorter paragraphs to allow more course-correction, does that sound totally nonsensical as a response to what you said?"

"It sounds sensible. Neither of those things was described exactly that way but it sounds sensible and I can also try to let you get a word in edgewise."

"So there's - do you have concepts that map onto 'false positive' and 'false negative' -"

"Like when you think there's someone in the bushes but there isn't, or you think there isn't but there is?"

"Yes, just like that. And it's possible for systems to make both kinds of errors at different times, and possible to find one kind of error more recoverable or palatable than the other, and possible to find reducing one or the other sort of error more resource-intensive or to require more compromises of your other values and needs, right?"

"...Sure?"