"It hasn't struck me that way but it's hard to tell cause from effect from coincidence and you might have a bigger sample."

"Well, it's the arbitrary set of people thing that really bites you. If you have a good queen that works fine in a lot of ways especially for a smallish country," Luca says.

"It seems like there are even more people who need to be good in a democracy but I haven't really studied them in that much depth so I wouldn't really know."

"They just have to avoid overwhelmingly being bad in the same direction," says Luca. "But I'm not a political scientist. Anyway, we don't have a problem with monarchies."

"Huh, that... huh. I wouldn't expect that to work but I guess I can see how it could? What else - what do people eat, how do you handle unfree labor, will anyone take issue with the fact that not everyone wants all the normal physical abilities most people have?"

"I don't have to eat!" says Luca. "I can though. Everything humans can and also things that would taste good to humans but are poison."

"I eat tree bark," says Shila Kolen.

"When I'm at home I just eat flowers and the leaves off the trees," says Melda. "But we eat mostly the same things humans do too. - these are specific flowers and leaves that humans can, also, eat."

"We don't have unfree labor, everyone has freedom of emigration and a basic income guarantee they get whether they work at all or not," says Zua. "You have to be really rich as a society to pull it off, but it's incredibly neat once you are."

"I remember the king in the other Azan didn't want to see, and that's fine, we just recommended him a medical alert bracelet so in an emergency that would be clear," Melda says. "Some people have very different physical abilities anyway; there are species that can all fly, or read minds, and nobody's expected to acquire those to match."

"...Some people read minds, huh? Can you stop them?" Even a fake way to block them means they can't act on the information they get until they're ready to never have anyone trust them again. Probably. Unless they're making bad strategic choices.

"Depends. Some Elves - not my subspecies, but most individuals who look like my kind of thing - can do it; them you can keep out by designating some of your thoughts private by internal metaphor. Everyone has a range limit, though some have very large range limits; some kinds can be blocked by some materials; and of course nonconsensual mindreading is illegal in most jurisdictions and incontinent mindreaders usually have to wear some kind of suppressant gadget if they want to go traveling to those jurisdictions."

"Will you accept my say-so that Azan she will be displeased by mindreading being permitted within Azan or do I need to go run to her audience chamber and demand her immediate attention?"

"Oh, I believe you! And nobody among our envoys is an incontinent or untrustworthy mind-reader. Will Azan she need further urgent precautions or contingencies in place or will that do for the time being?"

"Are your trustworthy and continent mindreaders reading anyone's minds right now, have they read anyone's minds since coming here, and are they planning to start reading minds without consent in the foreseeable future?"

"They're almost all Elves - the term is, for silly reasons, 'Flat Elves', for the ones who can read minds - and those are at this time all aboard the ship unless they have been called down as float healers or teleporters somewhere that needs extra hands. They might use their telepathy to talk to people who know how to interface with it already. It's possible they would, say, read a small child's mind to find out if they were injured or just lost, if they found a crying toddler. They have not been extracting any information that I would expect anyone to consider private or sensitive and won't start, it's an extremely firm principle Vanda Nossëo adheres to that mindreading is hostile by default and we take it very seriously."

"I'm glad to hear that."

"Anything else that seems top priority to cover?"

"Well, if I say no, what's next on your agenda?"

"Plausibly asking to be put on Azan she's agenda."

"I can go let her know you asked and come back here when she's ready to see you." Which will be after they've had a chance to talk strategy since apparently their continued independence hinges on being able to act like they're extremely magically powerful.

"Okay! Do you want us to avoid talking to other people while we wait, it might be a little awkward to do that if they ask us questions."

"...Why do you think I have the authority to forbid people from talking to each other. Is that normal where you're from?"

"No, but if it would be delicate for any reason this would be a good time to warn us."

"...I think I'm not any better positioned than you to notice ways it could be awkward for you to talk to people who are very similar to people your allies spooked into a blind jump to some other universe from which they never returned. That seems like it would be cross-culturally obvious and you've decided to talk to people here at all anyway so you clearly have a plan for it."

"We got along very well with Azan. It's Sesat that was spooked."

"Most of the surviving Sesatis live in Azan or Niazon. We're the ones without tattoos."

"Thank you - why are tattoos popular among non-Sesati in those countries?"

He laughs, hand over his mouth, embarrassed and hysterical, and tries to answer. "Um. No, it's." He breaks off laughing a bit more, slightly more happily, and shakes his head. "You know how Azani and Sesati are almost but not quite the same language? We thought we 'conquered Azan', and they thought we 'conquered Azan', and during the brief window where we thought we were agreed on that, we marked them all with slave tattoos. Except Vida. And then it turned out they weren't interested in being conquered in the way we meant it and, uh, anyway."