"Well, we have resurrection, for most kinds of people, so maybe it'll be a little more popular than it used to be, even if it's not more popular than our common kinds," Melda smiles.

"...We have... a lot of dead people. And half of them would be a mess to bring back."

"Well, the - mixed news - is that it's expensive. No need to prepare for them to all come back at once next week. But someone with insurance to cover it might want to try your ordeal sooner or later."

"They'll have to talk to Jamie about it - that's the young woman with cat ears and no tattoos who sells prosthetics." Her name is foreign and has a sound Azani doesn't but he says it like he's practiced it a lot. "The one who looks like Azan she, and is kind of otherwise reminiscent of her too. Speaking of which, you said you recognized me?"

"Yes, though I'm afraid we won't be able to introduce you to your counterpart, he decided after a brief period of employment as a teleporter to teleport off the 'map', that being the set of worlds we have explored."

"Why?"

"Vanda Nossëo's handling of Sesat on that version of the planet was subject to - I'd be inclined to call it a personality mismatch, but I think the Sesati use stronger words, and at any rate we should probably have swapped out the team instead of attempting to keep the same one in place. So there was some accumulated resentment. But I don't actually know his reasons as an individual, we never met."

"I see. And you... showed up and immediately invited them to join you? Is that right?"

"I believe so. I wasn't on the team, so I don't know if he led with that. I think there was some issue with face-saving - I'm not sure I'll be much better at that, but at least I know to look out for it, so we can hope." Smile.

"Well, I can't think of a worse way to do that than to say it's what you're doing, but I imagine that's more the sort of problem you have when you show up to tell your helpless neighbors they're your vassals now and not so much when you meet dangerous, magical interplanetary civilizations."

"I do think the power disparity was really awkward and I hope this time around everyone feels more secure."

"I'm sure they will." Now how is he going to make sure Azan doesn't look weak to these people when Azan has, like, five people who do magic and is only interplanetary in the sense of shamelessly exploiting a neighboring civilization. Oh, no. "So I assume you guys have germ theory and electricity already, right? What're your major unsolved problems?"

"There are some kinds of people we can't resurrect - people who aren't what we call 'reductionist' and also don't belong to one of a couple species with particularly easy-to-handle souls. We are, as you might have guessed, sometimes a little lower on tried-and-true personnel than we are on planets we'd like to contact. And of course there's always political drama but it's about things like whether it's okay to eat meat that used to be an animal or whether it's child abuse to bring kids up in certain religions."

"What makes people reductionist?"

"Being solely reliant on their material form."

"I doubt we can help with that but it might depend on what else they're made of. I guess it's possible we could end up helping with your personnel shortage. I assume more people will only make your arguments worse."

"Yes, but it'll be a drop in the bucket. There's a lot of us."

"I did get that impression. Do most of Vanda Nossëo's people go around having political opinions?"

"Plenty of them don't! But we have a way to make every announced political opinion accessible to anyone who wants to read it. So it gets rather obtrusive."

"Which ones don't?" The ones who aren't allowed to, or aren't considered to have opinions worth hearing, he imagines, but which groups are those and how much of the population are they? Or conceivably they could be like Azan and at least theoretically have a system for escalating important comments from arbitrary people.

"The ones who have better things to do, I think is the common supposition. My grandfather never touches the network with all the political opinions on it, he does planned ecologies for terraformed planets and plays the harpsichord and takes my little cousins out to feed the ducks and things like that."

Hard to tell if that means people recreationally have unimportant opinions or if it means people who know all they have to do is whisper once in the right ear are conspicuously silent in public to signal how they don't need to worry about making themselves heard.

"Those all sound like good things to do. So - something I've noticed about the different countries I know of is that societies can vary a lot, and in ways you don't necessarily think of, and I'm curious about how yours is structured - and I bet you've met enough different people to just answer that without me needing to get specific, yeah?"

"I can say a lot of things about a lot of the states that make up Vanda Nossëo, but they vary, quite a lot. There are only a handful of things that a place has to agree to in order to join, so I grew up in a monarchy and Luca's from a democracy and so on."

"Democracy! How's that working out?"

"Oh, democracy works great," Luca says, now hanging upside down in the air. "At least compared to everything else you can reasonably do with an arbitrary set of people."