It takes a while to put everything in place and do the proper checks, but in time they ready themselves to send their first message.

They provide a sample of their own media:

An adolescence novella about a pair of young adults who fly their respective nests and, unknowingly, move to each other's towns. They experience the differences (who knew a winter could have this much snow in it?) and the similarities (at one point, they each make a meal using canned peaches from the same farm), see each other's friends and family through new eyes. Near the end, they run into each other on the Mesh, and bond over their shared homes.

---

The source code for a video game that is not not EVE Online. They encourage other worlds to spin up their own instances: they'd be interested to see how differently things evolve from the same starting point.

---

The aliens presumably have a pretty high tech level if they're capable of building interdimensional network beacons, but just in case there's anything the Brinnites have found that others have overlooked (or if it helps the aliens spot high-priority things to teach them), here is a technological-bootstrapping textbook aimed at pre-teens. (The title translates loosely as The Life That Is Waiting, Part 1: A Technology Guide for New Walk-Ins.) It covers things like how to sew fallback masks (wool felt is better than silk is better than cotton is better than linen, but better still is a mix of layers of different materials), how to build spinning wheels, and much more. Most of the mnemonics lose a lot in translation from the Tashayan, but it's clear that originally the book is meant to be memorised.

---

A fluffy romance novel. The woman and man end up in the same social orbit on Dandelion†, meet, and fall in love. They talk to each other about their jobs (her a breeder for a scapegoat stable††, him a text-chat support worker for a computer company), their lives (his cousin had a baby last year, and while he is proud of the support role he plays in bringing up a new soul, the baby's cries sure do hit him right in the misophonia), their tastes in music (she does not know what he sees in Sinida yet Denota ("oh, mostly blues and browns," he jokes), but de gustibus non est disputandum).

It transpires that they live a four-hour train ride apart, and they visit each other a few times. After a couple of years, they decide they want to move in together, and are torn over who should move in with whom: at the two-thirds mark of the book, they decide to split the difference by moving to a town at the midway point, so that it will only be a two-hour ride to visit each of their families.

The rest of the book is about them settling into their new home, forming new connections as a new family. There's a bit of hurt-comfort/suspense when the female lead catches a cold: fortunately they break off their breath-bond quickly enough, and the male lead stays well and--with the aid of a full-face respirator and lots of soap--is able to tend to her until she recovers.

At the end, another young couple they've grown close to moves in with them: the two pairs plan to take turns having children and raising them together. (There's a cute callback moment where the rest of the quad gives the male lead a gift of a high-quality, extra-comfy pair of acoustic earmuffs.)

---

A historical fantasy novel about a resistance working to undermine an evil magical empire. The tyrant rules through fear for now, but she pours her resources into seeking a lost tome of magic rumoured to be capable of reshaping even self-aware souls, that her control over the populace may be complete. They quietly sabotage her at every turn, even succeed in incapacitating one of her lieutenants with poison, but in the end she finds the soul tome...and her attempt to cast the spell reshapes her instead, destroying her memories.

In the confusion, the resistance are able to get one of their own leaders into the power void, and pick up the pieces of the empire. They debate whether to kill the former empress: what if her memories return? What if she's dangerous? What if she is dangerous: is it really right of us to just dump her departed soul on some random host, without first rehabilitating her? They debate whether to destroy the soul tome: One Does Not Burn Books, but can we really allow something that dangerous to exist?

They arrange for the person the empress has become to work as a farmhand, re-learning the world from a peasant's viewpoint. They burn the soul tome.

---

An album of music from a popular artist. It's majority fluffy love songs; some songs are about beachcombing, or running her first marathon, or (2x) Let Me Tell You All About Dirigibles, They Are the Coolest.

One of the fluffy love songs is entirely about the peaceful contentment of drifting off to sleep in her partner's arms, and it's a recurring theme in the other love songs (and is offhandedly mentioned in the marathon song, though the nuances might not come across in more literal translations like "though my tiredness was hollow, it was full of radiant pride"). The album has an advisory for sexual content. At the last minute, the Brinnites add a cultural translation note explaining why, at the recommendation of one of the members of the interworld contact team. The reasoning he gives is that some cultures are so secretive about sex that people whose convergences run in entirely different areas might not recognise a sexual convergence when they hear one; the reasoning he keeps to himself is that he is (unbeknownst to them) six thousand years old and remembers a time when convergences were rare in humans. If the other worlds don't have fae, or if their fae made different choices about how much to shape their host species, they might not have many convergents at all.

---

They look forward to seeing what works the aliens send back.

---

†A cultural translation note explains that Dandelion is a microblogging protocol, something like a cross between Tumblr and Scuttlebutt. ↩

††While the book assumes you know what a scapegoat stable is, it does contain enough information for it to soon dawn on alien readers that it is a place where people go to recreationally torture animals in order to let off steam. The book treats this as entirely unremarkable. ↩

Wow! This is a lot of new works! She’d better get to work!

 

An adolescence novella

Cute and sweet, if a bit lacking in plot, with an excellent bit of culture clash!

The source code for a video game that is not not EVE Online.

Unfortunately, they still haven’t figured out how to make code work, and their attempts to make computers haven’t really gotten past calculators. (Only around half of hives have a generator, although all the alien technology’s making them more popular.)

 

The Life That Is Waiting, Part 1: A Technology Guide for New Walk-Ins.)

 

Technology guide! They’ll send some of their own over in exchange, later!

Hmm. What exactly are the fallback masks for? 

They know germ theory, electricity, vaccines, a good amount of material science, compasses, and longitude and latitude (well, similar equivalents). This spinning wheel looks to be an improvement on their current ones, and the sonar and radar stuff is new! Thank you very much, helpful alien newfriends!

(They don’t even notice the mnemonics unless they’re explicitly pointed out.)

 

A fluffy romance novel.

The animal-torture thing is weird and a bit concerning, and assuming that what a “cold” is is translating correctly, that seems like a bit of an excessive response, but not an unheard-of one. They’re also very glad to finally find aliens with an understandable opinion of babies. The pairbond leads are very cute together.

A historical fantasy novel about a resistance working to undermine an evil magical empire.

This is an excellent novel! Engaging characters, intrigue, sabotage, a horrifying threat, a really cool villain, moral debates on currently controversial issues! It has it all! This will definitely be popular.

 

An album of music from a popular artist.

Fluffy love songs isn’t exactly a popular genre, but they do have a decent audience. The notes on sex are definitely useful for figuring out why other aliens think it’s so important. They’d really like a note on what they mean by convergences, though.

---

They aren’t sure what genres the aliens want, so they’re going with a bit of everything!

 

A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer who is very unhappy with her* job and desperately wants to change it and become an explorer, but feels like she must stay in her current job for the good of her hive! The story details her becoming less happy and satisfied, until she eventually makes new friends in her fiction-reading group who encourage her to tell the hive-manager that she’s unhappy and wants to switch jobs. She does this, and becomes much happier, and finds a new valuable type of fungus for the colony, that is eventually used to make a new kind of antibacterial. It is clearly written with a moral lesson to tell people about your problems and not just tough them out.

 

A very complicated political novel with around 600,000 words, featuring nine diplomats from three different hives navigating a tension-filled debate about the morality of executions, while also trying to make the most advantageous trade deals, with several backroom discussions between every combination of hives at different points, embarrassing interpersonal drama, and a tremendous amount of dramatic irony.

 

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG, featuring several books of additional content based on other series, and a wide variety of different powersets. Nearly three hundred different personality traits are listed in the original alone, all with various mechanical benefits and downsides. 

An collection including seven novels, three books of short stories, four series about the most popular alternate universes, a collection of poetry, half a dozen epistolary books, and an annotated book of music scores. An additional eight powersets, 412 character traits, and new faction-loyalty and relationship mechanics for the RPG above are included, all inspired by this series. The base series is about a worker, named Halru, who is taken as a war-prisoner by a rival hive as slave labor and is forced to care for their grubs. Two of her limbs are cut off, and she generally has a terrible time doing awful labor under threat of death. Her best friend, Terilu, sets off on an extremely dangerous and ill-advised quest to rescue her, which at various points includes having a riddling contest with a dragon to gain fire breathing, bargaining with a Fairy Queen to gain wings, fighting a variety of creatures, secretly training under five separate rival hives to become a master of all five styles of spearfighting, and generally becoming a really powerful and dangerous warrior. She then rescues her best friend, and they return home, only to find themselves dealing with complex social dynamics now that Halru is maimed, which means that she is lower status in Semi-Generic!Fantasy!Past world. They cuddle a lot, talk about their feelings, play around with various power dynamics, and become lifepartners.

An included note says that while slavery and treating maimed people worse is something that happened in the past, they definitely don’t do it in the modern era, because that’s horrendously unethical.

 

A work titled Technology for Aliens that’s pretty clearly written for that purpose. It details the five most useful fungicides (two of which are safe for ingestion, although that might differ in alien biology), the Pythagorean theorem, a section on algebra, a few methods for creating paper, instructions on making steel, notes on what health risks are posed by coal, how to create fire, their current understanding of aging, and several antibiotics.

 

What exactly are the fallback masks for?

For filtering airborne germs from incoming and outgoing breath! This design is called a "fallback" mask because it's easy to make even at very low tech levels, but is less effective than modern respirators.

Come to think of it, since they have a network connection and aren't having to send information between worlds entirely through the memories within departed souls, they can give more information about things that an individual can't really expect to bootstrap on their own.

They send over information on modern airborne PPE manufacture. Most day-to-day masks are made of non-woven synthetic fabric with a ring of rubbery material around the edge to seal it to the face {{note that the valve is not diegetic}}; there are also full-face base units with replaceable filters in plastic cases, which are useful for things such as treating infectious patients, immune-disordered people who need all the help they can get, scent-blocking when working with unpleasant odors, and situations where one is likely to be sprayed with water (non-encased synthetic filters can't handle getting wet).

It looks like the Antfolk respiratory system might be shaped differently from theirs, but the ideas can probably be adapted to your own body shapes.

They also send over information on their electrical generators. They mostly use small-scale distributed solar, with geothermal to fill in the gaps. {{The bit on the time-travel-guide T-shirt about nuclear power was not diegetic: the Brinnites have not split the atom.}} Coal was a useful stepping stone back when they were first getting started on industrialisation, but yes, the health risks were awful. You still have to be careful not to rely too much on electricity--the grid-hardening measures taken in response to the Sylian Blackout coronal mass ejection seventy years ago have not seen real-world testing--but overall things have much improved since the early days.

---

The animal-torture thing is weird and a bit concerning

It gives people a chance to satisfy their violence drives in a controlled environment. It can be a bit gory, but it's sure better than beating up people. Don't worry, they don't use ensouled animals--

("I would be willing to bet money that there is at least one back-alley place in Arzavora or some shit that will sell you a raven scapegoat," one of the interworld-contact team members says.

His interlocutor makes a disgusted face, visible around the eyes even if most of it is hidden by her mask. "Probably, yes, but we're not going to say that. That would make a terrible second impression! We don't speak for back-alley Arzavorans, and we do not want anyone thinking we do," she replies.

They negotiate a bit, and--)

--don't worry, it's illegal to use ensouled animals.

Possibly Antfolk don't have violence drives? That makes sense as a thing that would differ between species, different evolutionary niches and all that.

---

assuming that what a “cold” is is translating correctly, that seems like a bit of an excessive response

It might be a translation issue? "Cold" is an umbrella term for any primarily-airborne/secondarily-fomite virus with the same set of symptoms: sore throat, depression, nasal congestion, and coughing. Studies on quality-adjusted life suggest that most people are roughly indifferent between spending X amount of time suffering from a cold and spending the same amount of time in a coma.

---

They’re also very glad to finally find aliens with an understandable opinion of babies.

Indeed. Most animals have to use instinctive hacks to directly like babies, but humans are smart enough to voluntarily undertake projects involving short-term discomfort in pursuit of long-term goals, and are willing to raise infants in exchange for getting new people at the end. It helps to have plenty of assistance, of course.

---

They’d really like a note on what they mean by convergences, though.

Huh, does that not come across? They'd have thought it was a pretty basic term, one runs into it all the time when discussing the workings of the mind...

(The fae member of the contact team has thousands of years of acting experience and does not let his reaction show.)

...but then, if indeed you have spiracles and no violence drives, they suppose they should expect other such fundamental differences.

(Phew. He is definitely going to need to discuss this with the Council ASAP, though, in any case.)

It's--well, if you're missing this then for all they know you're also missing things they'll use in the explanation, but they'll do their best...it's a blurring or interconnection between two aspects of the mind. Some are sensory, like the music-colour convergence the male lead of the romance novel mentions; some are regarding a person's base desires or drives, like the singer-songwriter's sleep-sex convergence; some are emotional, like how some people's sadness bleeds into fear, or more mildly how some people can detect the nuances of anger versus frustration and others cannot. There are enough possible convergences that generally any given one is present in a minority of the population, but almost everyone has at least one, and often several.

---

A tale for young workers about a new mushroom farmer

Aww. Yes, it's often more important than people realise to check other options first, rather than buckling down to get the most obvious method done.

---

A very complicated political novel

Some people attempt to read this in one go, but most of those who try that burn out. The most successful readers are the ones who get together (often but not always virtually) and take a lot of notes on what's going on: some of these notes may end up looking a bit like the Terran stereotype of the conspiracy board with bits of red string everywhere.

They also take a lot of notes on what the ant politicking looks like. Even fiction gives a sense of what's within their space of ideas. It's a lot to take in, though.

---

A rules and lore book for a tabletop RPG

Neat, if admittedly also a lot to take in all at once. That's alright, though: fluency in a jargon takes time. Many people read the books, and some people make spreadsheets that assist with character-building, but relatively few people actually play the game.

---

The base series is about a worker, named Halru

Ooh! Some of the bits with Halru having a generally terrible time are pretty emotionally difficult, and some people skim through them, but overall the series is widely considered well worth the read. The worldbuilding is fun, as is the Halru/Terilu interaction.

---

A work titled Technology for Aliens

Thanks! Some of those fungicides were unknown, and they'll get to work on testing them; that's a neat trick in the paper-making there; they're not sure how much the medical stuff will cross-apply with such different biologies, but it certainly would be nice to stick around longer and with less suffering before setting out into the wilds of an unknown multiverse.

If admittedly a little less unknown than it used to be. For that matter...well, their guess would be that Antfolk brains are likely too different to make for compatible hosts, but in general the Brinnites will have to keep an eye out for whether any of their own departed have turned up in the newly accessible universes. Probably not, it's a big multiverse out there, and even if they did it was probably long enough ago that they've since departed again, and even if they're still alive there they might have been away for thousands of years, but...even so, it would be nice to get to know what's become of one's homeworld, wouldn't it?

The Zmavlipre are also excited over the otherworldly media-transporting portal. They read what the Brinnites have sent over. Attached are the summaries of people's impressions.

---

An adolescence novella

"Are the references to flying literal or metaphorical? Zmavlire'a – the biological name for our species – cannot fly." Speculation on Brinnite biology, and requests to send anatomy textbooks or the like.

---

The source code for a video game that is not not EVE Online

"Sadly, our civilization does not have the tech level to handle this. We have sent it to scientists and mathematicians to look over." They explain that while there are attempts to build machine computers, they are vastly inferior to drone computers, even more so with drone computers provided with working memory aids and slide rules. 

---

The Life That Is Waiting, Part 1: A Technology Guide for New Walk-Ins.

"What is a walk-in?"

"Zmavlipre already know how to build spinning wheels and masks. We have figured out how to make dirigible balloons, but they're still rather clunky. We have recently (in the last 144 years) figured out how to use electricity productively for lighting, and we know that electricity and magnetism are related, but we haven't figured out radio transmission yet. 

Germ theory is relatively new, but experimental results seem to vindicate it. The germ-theorist biologist camp is happy that they have received otherworldly confirmation of their theory, but are reluctant to update on that too much, given the fact that it is a literal different world, and may have different physics, let alone biology. Likewise for the chemists who advocate for having an atomic model." There are many thank-you messages over the technological blueprints. Pleas of varying urgency and desperateness from scientists to trade research and data – the manner in which they are doing so is implied to be extremely low-status and unbecoming. Other commenters are upset about them lacking dignity and giving a poor impression of Zmavlipre.

---

A fluffy romance novel.

"Do they actually love each other? They act more like friends, not like lovers. They're not even physically affectionate* with each other." Other commenters chide this commenter for assuming that their romance works the same way. Other other commenters complain about the lack of sex. One commenter says that the two characters ought to go to a therapist because they lack caicni, which is necessary to have good lives and relationships – the word seems to translate into something like 'passion' or 'force' or 'energy'.

"I am very interested in figuring out how to do microblogging. The way we communicate over long distances currently is by sending letters via the mail service, which usually takes days. In the big cities, however, you can usually get next-day shipping provided that you post your letter early enough." Another commenter gives context that may or may not be helpful: people who are romantically interested in each other will sometimes send a drone to personally deliver the message verbally.

"Drones would be better as torture dummies than animals. They have a more satisfying pain response, and are more similar biologically. At least, to Zmavlipre. It's likely that, given that your biology is probably much different from ours, that you would not find them similarly satisfying. Also, drones can be easily trained to manage and maintain themselves on their own – this is part of basic drone training. I imagine that you have to clean up after your animals' waste yourselves, which is saddening." One of the commenters speculates whether it's possible for drones to be transported through the portal, but considers it likely that living things would probably not survive the ordeal. Another one helpfully encloses an pamphlet on anatomy: roughly speaking, Zmavlire'a are (believed to be, under current best science) descended from cephalopods. They have a roughly humanoid body plan, but (some of) the differences are that they are hermaphroditic, do not have hair, but can lactate, have plates of nacre/shell material on the shoulders and head (but that these can occur elsewhere on the skin), and have six retractable tentacles on their back that they can use to smell and taste, similar to a vomeronasal organ (which they additionally have in their mouth). Drones are similar, but are sterile, and also a little smaller than people. People can reproduce asexually, but that only works to produce drones – other people can only be born through sexual reproduction.

"What is a breath bond?"

There are many speculative comments about the Brinnites' dioecy, and how that would translate into romance and family-formation norms. They have a similar system where a couple of people (the vast majority of parents are couples) take turns being the gestating partner. It is traditional to take turns so that the other person can care for the other, even though that is not strictly necessary because drones exist. Other commenters speculate that this is probably why two mating-pairs move in with each other and do the taking-turns thing – they don't have drones to take care of children for them.

* 'Physically affectionate' seems to encompass minor acts of violence.

---

A historical fantasy novel

The soul magic system is very interesting, but there's surprisingly little exposition on souls and 'self-aware souls'. Some commenters think that there was a mistake, and that this is probably a part of a series. If so, they would like to have the first book as well. Many of the commenters think that it was a fun read, although there are fewer commenters for this one compared to the romance and adolescence novels.

Commenters universally express horror over trying to control the minds of people.

Commenters generally agree on the actions taken by the characters, except for the farmhand thing. One gives helpful context: in the Imperium, the capital punishment is shunning, or the stripping of citizenship, which permits people to do what they want with the person – who now has no state protection – and not suffer criminal charges. In other places, a common punishment is binding the person and permitting them to be tortured by the wronged party, with a duration proportional to the wrong inflicted. One commenter says that the tyrant ought to be subjected to that for a dozen gross years. 

---

An album of music from a popular artist.

Dirigibles are really cool! Currently, only drones have ridden them, but there are many plans over building a dirigible with a nice interior suitable for people to fly in.

The commenters are confused about the sexual content advisory. It's an album of love songs – of course there's going to be sex in it. They are more confused when there isn't actually any. A few commenters speculate that coitus among Brinnites takes a really long time and involves a long period of sustained contact, which explains the 'sleeping in their lover's arms'.

Zmavlimu'e does not have 'fae', at least, as far as they know. They also don't know what 'convergences' are. They know of synesthesia – it is rare but not unheard of – but are unsure about whether this is related.

---

The Zmavlipre are still compiling good things to send to the Brinnites, but they assure that it is forthcoming. The Imperium does have protocol for first contact, but it's rather sparse – partly due to lack of state capacity, and partly due to assuming that 'people will (and should) just figure stuff out on its own'. It mostly thinks about how to handle diplomatic and military relations, and also giving the aliens context into Zmavlimu'e. The initiative to send media to Brinnites is handled by individual citizens who have tentatively formed a group, and not by the government itself.

Are the references to flying literal or metaphorical?

It's a metaphor for leaving one's childhood home and seeking a new place to settle down. Not everyone does this, but many do, usually in their early twenties around the end of adolescence.

They send basic human anatomy guides. Humans cannot fly, at least not under their own power. Good thing they have airships now.

---

they are vastly inferior to drone computers, even more so with drone computers provided with working memory aids and slide rules.

(Are these people...doing...slavery? That sounds like a great way to get slave revolts.

They look over the stuff in the Zmavlire'a anatomy guide on drone reproduction. It sounds like...souls produced through parthenogenesis never quicken? And the sapient Zmavlire'a are using the non-sapient Zmavlire'a as service animals? That seems like it would be very Uncanny Valley, like talking to parrots all the time; but then, aliens gonna alien, and these people seem to have evolved around it. They're not even the first eusocial aliens the Brinnites have met!)

---

"What is a walk-in?"

It's what happens to the soul of a person whose body has died. They awaken within the body of someone else, almost always in another universe though staying within the same one is at least theoretically possible. (The original person (or, in some cases, people) is still there: they share the body.) The Brinnites have occasionally met walk-ins (albeit far fewer than they would expect, given how many people must be out there: the philosophical debate has some similarities to the Terran idea of the Fermi paradox), though most of them were on only their second or third lives and had not known to prepare; still, it was a walk-in who first taught them to boil drinking water (unfortunately she didn't know why it made people less likely to get sick, just that it did), and they have some stories of other worlds from people who have been there.

They send The Life That Is Waiting, Part 2: An Interpersonal Guide for New Walk-Ins. It contains advice on how to live as part of a multiple system, especially as a latecomer whose host may have lived for decades expecting that they would always have their body to themself. Emotional regulation (you and your host are both going through a very disruptive experience, and the host may not even have known this was within the space of things-that-might-happen: be careful to be kind to both of you), mental exercises to help with headspace-building and establishing intra-system communication, and so on.

---

There are many thank-you messages over the technological blueprints. Pleas of varying urgency and desperateness from scientists to trade research and data – the manner in which they are doing so is implied to be extremely low-status and unbecoming.

You're very welcome! They're glad they can help, and they look forward to successful scientific partnerships.

It does suck to think you're doing pretty well only to find out that others are further ahead than you, but we all stand on the shoulders of giants and accepting help lets us do even better than any given person can on their own. They can't think of any reassurances that aren't likely to backfire, especially given how little they know about Zmavlipre psychology, and instead pretend not to have noticed the low-status implications.

(A couple team members mutter references to a Brinnite novel with a plot similar to this. Some other team members sigh in response: it's not that even an information-only connection to other worlds isn't dangerous, but they have gone over that matter a million times. Like they didn't-say, accepting help lets us do better than any given person can on their own: not [making contact and sharing in the benefits of a broader community] is also dangerous, just in absence rather than presence.)

They send some research and data. Some things, most notably genomic data, have been quietly removed: the holes are likely not apparent without already knowing the extent of Brinnite science.

---

Other other commenters complain about the lack of sex.

Well, they do also have erotic romances. Given some of the stuff Zmavlipre have said about "physical affection", they try sending some porn-with-plot aimed at sadists†.

†Lit. "violence-sex convergents".

---

I am very interested in figuring out how to do microblogging. The way we communicate over long distances currently is by sending letters via the mail service, which usually takes days.

That's one of the great things about computers, especially ones capable of sending data wirelessly! (See, basically you make an alphabet out of patterns of light in one of the colours that no creature can see but a suitably-made machine can, and then you shine those light patterns...) Once you've got a lot of them throughout the population, one computer can pass a message to the others around it, and those can pass it along to others they're within range of, and so on, until everyone can see it. You can encrypt the message, too, if not everyone is meant to know its contents. And even at low computer densities, you can get a lot of it done with radio transceivers.

---

One of the commenters speculates whether it's possible for drones to be transported through the portal

(aaaaaaaaaAAAA)

but considers it likely that living things would probably not survive the ordeal

Uh, indeed, yes. Definitely, uh, do not try to send living things through whatever mechanism brought the physical network beacon here.

(They beef up their emergency plans. They don't have nukes, but they sure do have a lot of regular explosives.)

---

Drones would be better as torture dummies than animals.

(The two people talking about ensouled scapegoats earlier look at each other like they're looking into the camera on The Office.)

(The consensus the team comes to is that they are just...not going to touch that discourse for the time being. That seems even more likely to backfire than the status thing.

Some people are thinking about peripherals again, this time with them as the virtual invaders; nobody says anything, let alone makes any proposals. They're all very aware of the implied bioweapon threat earlier.)

---

"What is a breath bond?"

It's when a pair or small group agree not to mask around each other on a long-term basis, accepting a certain amount of risk of airborne disease transmission between them. Housemates are just about always breath-bonded: it wouldn't be very practical to have to wear a mask in the place you eat and sleep. Of course, accepting a possibility that another person is infectious is different from accepting a certainty that another person is infectious, hence why the male lead got out his respirator when his partner got sick.

Hmm. The combination of you knowing about masks but only suspecting germ theory makes them wonder. It's possible that you figured out masks help without knowing why, like that walk-in's culture with water-boiling, but it's also possible you mistook them for talking about decorative masks. They send the same PPE information package they sent the Antfolk, minus the hypotheses about one might adapt masking to a spiracle-based respiratory system.

---

there's surprisingly little exposition on souls and 'self-aware souls'

Souls are like-reality-unless-noted.

It seems like the translation may be having trouble with "soul"? The...essence of individual identity, the fundament of one's self? Infants and the smarter species of animal have them, but (out of the creatures native to this world) they only "quicken" and become people in post-infant humans? Is this helping?

---

Commenters universally express horror over trying to control the minds of people.

They know, right?! That would be awful! They're so glad that's not a thing in real life.

---

In other places, a common punishment is binding the person and permitting them to be tortured by the wronged party, with a duration proportional to the wrong inflicted.

That makes sense in many cases, but also she wasn't really the same person as the empress anymore, and it didn't seem right to punish her for things her predecessor did.

---

It's an album of love songs – of course there's going to be sex in it.

They note that in many cases Brinnites do write poetry (musical or otherwise) about specifically the non-sexual joys of pairbonding. Sex is something very personal, and not everyone wants to discuss in public their relationship with it. Most especially, few Brinnites would want to listen to sexually explicit music together with their blood (that is to say, genetically related) family: the anti-incest instincts that evolved in order to discourage inbreeding have ended up applying quite broadly in practice.

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They are more confused when there isn't actually any. [...] They also don't know what 'convergences' are.

Yes, they've received reports from other aliens that the cultural-translation note for that was still assuming too much context. They send the Zmavlipre the same explanation of convergences they sent the Antfolk, and integrate it into the sexual-content-advisory cultural-translation note for future opening transmissions.

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They know of synesthesia – it is rare but not unheard of – but are unsure about whether this is related.

Interesting: sense-convergences are more common in Brinnites than desire-convergences, it's just that this isn't saying much when both rates are fairly high. Perhaps that relation holds even when the absolute probabilities are scaled way down.

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Zmavlimu'e does not have 'fae', at least, as far as they know.

That seems likely, though it's also possible that yours were always more secretive. Fae sightings used to be more common (though never all that common), but the humans have barely heard from them in a century and a half, ever since the incident where some humans blew two of them up.

Many people still leave offerings of books and music in the forests: it's good to be on good terms with one's neighbours, even and perhaps especially if one is more dangerous to them than one used to be. Sometimes, if one brings a comatose person to certain parts of certain forests for a few hours, there will appear a note with no fingerprints telling one whether the comatose person's soul remains in their body (and might still awaken) or whether the soul has moved on.

(we're perfectly capable of obtaining books and music ourselves, but the thought is nice nope, he is not even thinking that too hard right now, he is definitely completely human thank-you-very-much)