That's about when Valan gets back, coming up over a rooftop and dropping down near the envoys like he's trying to make up for several years of not being an obnoxious showoff.

"Azan she is aware of your presence and expects to be able to respond to any trade proposals you write up for her within a few days. One of Vida's assistants is available to discuss technology sharing as soon as is convenient for you, and I will be available most of today and tomorrow to talk with you about whatever else might be relevant. Here, see?" Seals are absolutely not going to stay a reasonable way to verify information for long but today it's what they've got.

(They should know who Vida is already, she's been on the council since before the war, though she got more famous after it.)

"Great, thank you!" says Melda. "Is this a good place for us to be during this time or should we move somewhere else?"

"It's not too much in the way but if you want to come talk where you won't have ten other people coming up to you at once we can go borrow the royal courtyard, I like it there but I have no idea if you will."

"I expect it will be perfectly suitable. Maybe Luca can wait here since his services as a tattoo remover seem in demand."

"There's got to be a better way to do this," says Luca.

"I'm sure there is, but it's not standard enough that we have whatever that way is on the ship!" laughs Zua.

"That's the other thing wrong with calling that spell a healing spell."

He'll show them to the courtyard.

"Oh?" Melda asks.

"It doesn't just do things some people won't think of as healing, it also doesn't do some things they will."

"My understanding is that all the spells of that magic type were originally developed for personal use in a specific context and only later shared with others and their creator considers them functional first drafts rather than elegant finalized masterpieces," shrugs Melda. "I'll tell the shipboard coordinator that we want something more directly targeted at tattoo removal here soon. What else should we expect demand for?"

"I would have felt the same way when I was twenty. Well. I don't know how to scope that question but I guess we can always use more copper wire and steel and aluminum." Being able to use lots of those things puts a floor on their capabilities without also putting a ceiling on them, right? He hopes that's right.

"Well, good news, those are cheap, there are people who can magic up ludicrous amounts of normal material goods like that whenever they like and some of them work for competing commodities sellers. You'll need to be on the transit network if you don't want to arrange every delivery as a one-off, though."

"Huh. So you basically don't go hungry and no one is naked or cold, am I guessing about right?"

"You are! There are some distribution and education limitations - I don't know if this specific problem is real but as an example I could imagine it being hard to find people who want to make deliveries to that one planet full of indiscriminate mindreaders, and of course if someone's parents don't let them talk to outsiders they may have a hard time coming by directions to the groceries and social services and we have to pick a spot on the tradeoff line between being intrusive towards perfectly good families versus letting some of those slip under our notice. But there is no fundamental material scarcity."

"Convenient. Well, now that I'm thinking about what I'd do with a bunch of completely nonmagical objects I'm tempted to ask what you'd want for a hundred thousand doses of measles vaccine but I don't work in medicine and I have no idea if they know how to verify that it is a measles vaccine and not something else."

"We have vaccines! Not just measles but a lot of common human diseases; I think the other copy of this planet had one or two that were novel they've been researched by now. Would being able to test our lie-detection song magic work?"

"It might! I'm not sure how I'd do that either but that's probably just because I haven't thought it through yet. Does it go by exact words or what?"

"Yes but not with such exactitude that you can't rely on it through magic translation."

"Huh."

And he gets them into the palace courtyard and then there's no longer an audience to worry about or be reassured by as applicable. "So what kind of deal did you end up working out with the other Azan?"

"Oh, they wanted full membership almost immediately. Azan as we found it there was one of the closest things to the Vanda Nossëo project among humans at this technological level anywhere," says Melda, "and they recognized us as kindred spirits. The integration of Sesat here might change something, I'm not sure, and the same is true of you already having contact with other worlds."

Oh, is that what they're up to. "I think Azan learned a hard lesson about being too enthusiastic about that, if I understand you right. It's very easy to overextend yourself and get everyone you care about worse than killed. But I think people still like the idea of having a country people can come to when they hate where they are. I can show you the agreements we've come to with Iral and Niazon, if you want, they might give you a sense of how our foreign policy has changed in the last few years. But what exactly does full membership entail?"

"I'd love to see those agreements. Full membership in Vanda Nossëo requires a majority affirmative vote of the entire population, and having and enforcing laws against killing people, torturing them, raping them, or preventing them from leaving - other laws vary and some of the enforcement and implementation details do too."

"...So basically if they have the same laws as you and open borders with you and no one has any objections you stop bothering to distinguish?"

"Not quite. It's fine to have laws preventing some people from entering your state. The borders remain in place both for local legislation, and so the state can leave Vanda Nossëo later if they want. Membership's primary on-paper benefit is the defense clause - we'll defend member borders from aggression. In practice, it's very economically beneficial - it's not that you can't get tourists and businesses here, or go traveling yourself, without joining up, but it gets a lot smoother when you're a Vanda Nossëo member state and people aren't choosing to leave our umbrella at their own risk."

"I can see why the other Azan wanted to join. And I suppose you ran into trouble with Sesat because they heard 'laws against torturing people' and said 'sure, we have those'."

"Yeah, we usually have to clarify that this includes slaves, or includes children, or includes crazy people, or includes other species, and that if you sarcastically ask about whether rocks can vote you're going to get very earnest telepaths trying to establish communication with your rocks."

"If anyone notices that rocks are people I want to know about it but we don't prosecute them for murder when they kill people and invading armies don't enslave them so I don't think they should get a vote."