"Well, I guess if you've already gone to the trouble of finding them, I'd be interested to meet them."

"One's from an uncontacted planet but one of them - works for us, apparently, I'll ask if he's free to come by." Email is composed.

"I'm sure that would be interesting."

(They'll have an answer in a couple minutes. He is not at this moment busy and can show up if someone sends him a picture.)

Melda sends the image of the courtyard.

And then there is an angel. He doesn't look at all like Valan in most of the ways Valan pays attention to. He has big feathered wings and skin darker than those explorers who visited from the south over a decade ago and were never heard from again and he's dressed in silky gold fabric in a very foreign style and his eyes are literally green.

He bounces on the balls of his feet and twitches his wings and grins hugely. "Hi! I heard I have an alt?"

"So I hear," says Valan, glancing at Melda.

"That's what Forensics tells me but if you find you have nothing in common I can ask for a double check!"

"...Do we have things in common?" Valerian muses. "Uh, alts sometimes have their families in common, I don't have siblings or parents or anything... I think making friends is nice, I was awful at music till I picked up the flute about thirty years ago and now I'm still awful at singing, I do like seeing wild places, I read an economics textbook once but that's all, I like getting summoned better than using Allspeak for being able to talk to people but less than teleportation for being able to go places, I don't like any mind-altering substances, I know too many secrets to let anyone read my mind but I don't feel viscerally horrified by the idea, I'm not clumsy, I don't really know what else to say?" Beyond the tendency to monologue he also has a similar way of speaking, modulo some linguistic and cultural trends in prosody; they both have an idiosyncratic way of talking that queers the binary between mumbling and speaking notably clearly.

"I am also not clumsy," says Valan.

"Wow! We're definitely alts! We're completely identical!"

Valan snorts. "Everyone thinks making friends is nice and has secrets." He looks at Melda. "Look, how do you recognize your alts?"

"I don't have any. Your voices do sound similar to me. How did you recognize your alt from Emika?"

"Someone else noticed on the basis of things that don’t apply here. Well, taking it as given for the moment, why do you work for them?"

"Because people in some worlds are really miserable and don’t have much leverage to fix it and if it’s not fixed in eighty years then without our help it never will be - if we just stood by it’d be true forever that a hundred percent of some people's lives was miserable. - Or Mîr or Elendil would fix it but I’m not counting closely allied polities run by alts of the same people as importantly different."

"And is it going to turn out that your whole species is so horrified by the concept of pain that you think anyone who inflicts any amount of it on anyone ever for any reason should be made unable to ever do it again?"

"...Um... no?"

"Why are you willing to live under Vanda Nossëo's laws?"

"...You do know consensual kink is legal, right?"

"Is 'consensual kink' what it’s called when the eighth person in one day calls you a coward and an untrustworthy scheming bastard whose whole family doesn’t deserve a clean death, not having bothered to find out how many of your family members actually did die fighting, and you hit them, and then, and this part is important, everyone else doesn’t write you off as a complete monster that can’t deserve any better than to be locked up somewhere or mind controlled into just laying down and taking it and certainly can’t be trusted with any kind of power because what if caring about your family is a fucking excuse to hurt people and your fondest ambition is genocide."

"..Wow, um, can I just - um - it's not the official stance of Vanda Nossëo that people can deserve to be locked up somewhere - people disagree but the party line is very much that no one can possibly deserve anything bad, ever, they can just not deserve it while threatening to do things to other people that those people don't deserve either - and, so, would I be right if I guessed that you're from a society where everyone is terrifyingly vulnerable, and the absolute best protection anyone can offer their loved ones doesn't actually make it impossible or even all that hard to hurt or kill them, so a normal part of your protection strategy is that if something happens to someone in your family you'll stop caring about anything other than getting the goriest revenge possible, and then you make that obvious by demonstrating that you're willing to resort to violence if someone just tries to establish common - uh, if someone just tries to make it the case that everyone knows that everyone else thinks someone you care about should be fair game, because that's the first step to actually hurting them?"

"That makes it really obvious you're an alien who read about humans in a book once but so did the wings. Sure, that's close enough, less so since we've gotten access to magic."

"...Okay. There is no amount of force that can remove one my limbs, break one of my bones, or render one of my organs nonfunctional. There is no amount of force that can do this to any of my close friends. Even if I were completely unconcerned with the wellbeing of people who insult me and didn't care at all about deescalating, the chance that I could misunderstand an innocent comment as an insult is vastly greater than the chance that anyone might ever hurt me or anyone I care about. That's for sale. You can buy it. But the rate at which it can be sold is slower than the rate at which we contact new people who could benefit from things we have better throughput on, and it trades off against other things, so it's really nice if we can try to keep demand down a little, like by not hurting each other. And, I'm not sure what you guys have already talked about, but I wouldn't expect someone who did that when it was the way to protect their loved ones to have any problems? There's a different kind of person who does it when it won't protect anyone, because they just like hurting people or because they just have no ability to change their habits or because they didn't bother to keep up with what's different in different places. That kind of irresponsibility is the same kind of irresponsibility that could lead them to hurt someone by accident, like - okay, how much do you know about daeva?"

"Not enough to be sure where you’re going with that question."

"So, we naturally start existing in worlds with only other daeva, who we can’t hurt very badly, and we have powers like - so, the memetic example for angels is turning people into furniture, but that’s - there are subtler things, that we can do by accident. And for a long time whenever I'd visit other kinds of people, they’d summon me with magic that let them list things they didn’t want me to do and I physically couldn’t do those things until I went home, and - it wasn’t better but there were good things about not having to be personally one hundred percent responsible for the safety of the people around me. I wanted to be really confident that I knew how to avoid hurting people, and how to make it easy for other people to tell that I wouldn’t hurt them, before I started mostly getting around in ways that don’t let other people put those kinds of restrictions on me. Because I don’t want them to be hurt or even afraid. And if instead I had been in the habit of not worrying about it and trusting other people to protect themselves, it’d be stupid to give me more power while there are still people saving up for indestructibility."

"...Huh. That's - I can see why you'd end up like that. I don't think I understand how you live like that but I can see why you'd at least think it had some upside."

"Also, I have read multiple books about humans, dated an ex-summoner, taken classes where my classmates were mostly human from mostly human instructors, and listened to literally thousands of hours of mostly humans telling me stories mostly about other humans. Different planets are different and humans deal with that by having different kinds of societies. Cultures of honor like yours are common but mostly not in the conditions there are in Peal polities - I think there's a tendency for humans whose planets used to have honor cultures to think of them as obsolete and one of the evils they've moved past, and I'm sorry, that's just going to suck and there's no way around it. And also consensual kink is the thing where you think pain is really fun, or being bound and gagged is really fun, or both, and someone who thinks hurting people is fun shows you a good time."

Valan pulls his mouth to one side and makes a vaguely thoughtful noise.

"Anyway, I thought of something. I have this demon acquaintance who made a solar system just for showcasing the vegetation and insect life of their top hundred favorite biomes and if you're my alt you'll want to see it."

"I think that's up there with 'I like making friends'. Yes, I want to see that. Maybe when everything we need to do in the few days after meeting yet another world is done."

"Oh. You guys were in the middle of stuff, weren't you. Here, so you can get in touch later." Valerian offers him a business card. " - 'Yet another'?"

Valan stares at the business card for a while before pocketing it. Probably it will make sense eventually. "You're not the first aliens to drop in. Anyway, I don’t have any brilliant ideas to tell if we have anything more in common than any random pair of people but thanks for telling me about your powers, it's... good to know."

"Any time. I have questions of my own but I should probably save them for later and get out of your hair, yeah?"

Valan shrugs. "Maybe they'll be enlightening."

"Is 'what’s the coolest thing about your planet' enlightening?"

"No, and of all the places I know of this version of Azan is the best in the multiverse at least as regards the wellbeing of its people. So far."

Valerian snorts. "Okay, yeah, I buy it, that’s - not something I'd say but paying attention to the things I'd pay attention to. Anyway, nice meeting you, please be in touch."

"I will."

Valerian disappears.

Melda has been hanging back a bit anxiously. She takes a step forward once Valerian's gone.

"Well. I was right that that was interesting. I think I have even less idea what your society is like than I thought I did and - you know, I see why you'd want to start off by making it clear that joining you peacefully and getting paid for it is an option, but the more I learn the more I think no one could know what they were getting into after less than a year's study."

"A lot of places do take a while to get familiar enough to go ahead with a vote. It's all right to need time."

"Were you planning to say anything if we'd decided to hold a vote today and make it known that the king wants everyone to vote to join?"

"- well, it takes a little longer than that to set it up. Usually we have everybody watch videos of Princess Elspeth explaining the procedure. - she's magically difficult to misunderstand, hard to disbelieve when she speaks the truth, and works on recordings."

"Creepy! How confident are you that she's only hard to disbelieve when telling the truth?"

"A track record corroborated by immune disinterested persons."

"Did she tell them they were immune?"

"If you want the complete experimental history it's probably up on Manalabs."

"I probably do. What's Manalabs?"

"It's a website that collects information about magical experiments and research."

"...Is there maybe a book that lists the top fifty things like that with answers to the obvious followup questions about them until you've reached a point where the answers will reliably make sense to someone who can't be counted on to know any specific individual thing about modern technology?"

"I think most people start with Wikipedia. Do you want me to show you Wikipedia?"

"Yes, please."

She will navigate his computer to Wikipedia for him and show him how the display and character input settings work and then he can look up Manalabs and Azan and anything else that pops into his head. "It can be edited by anyone - most people don't, some people spend a lot of time researching and refining articles, and a few people do vandalism that's usually quickly corrected; if something seems odd you can check the previous versions of the page like so."

"Oh, this is really cool." And probably wrong about a lot of things but a way to learn what the consensus is on any given topic is very useful even if it’s about as accurate as asking a crowd and believing whoever shouts loudest. He’s definitely less informed than the average crowd about a lot of things right now, but more importantly he can check what they say about the other Azan and the other Sesat. And Manalabs, sure, why not, he knows less than an average crowd about it.