"Pandas are gone. Tigers are doing pretty well. This one sea turtle home to Australia went extinct and it was a big deal apparently."

"You don't have pandas? What happened to them?"

"The Red Army slash-and-burned huge tracts of their native habitat for farms, and had enough magic folk on board to kill the spirit who lived there..."

"Poor pandas. They're getting a lot of help from zoos and stuff, my world, even though they're fiendishly hard to captive-breed."

"Zoos try to repopulate endangered species? Huh. I guess if there's no spirits..."

"Zoos don't do that where you're from?"

"I mean, there's families of zoo animals, baby animals are cute. But trying to repopulate the species in captivity? It sounds absurd to me. The spirits are much better at that."

"They feed birds with hand puppets so they won't imprint on humans, and stuff."

"Well it sounds like your world's zoos have got things figured out."

"I bet the spirits would hate Sea World though. Do you have Sea World?"

"Sounds vaguely familiar. American? What malicious rumors about them are there?"

"They keep captive cetaceans, not super well."

"Hm, I bet spirits aren't super happy about it but it's not a massive trigger point unless they regularly capture more."

"I think they mostly just breed them?"

"Yeah, ocean spirits won't really care about dolphins or whatever that aren't in the ocean anymore. They'll probably be a little distressed but nowhere near as bitter as ocean dumping or oil spills make them. I don't talk to ocean spirits much though."

"Do you talk to other - land spirits? Besides yours?"

"Yep. Borbados is the only one I'm the designated mediator for but I know a dozen or so others, they'll give me ecology gossip or whatever."

"...ecology gossip?"

"Oh, that darn Yserat's pumas are eating too much again, I had to close a waterhole to drive them off. Stupid roads, they make my cliffsides itch, you should look out for erosion in such and such a place..."

"Cliffsides itch?"

"I was paraphrasing. He said that they 'tremble worryingly' and he would be 'much relieved if the source of distress were alleviated'. Heh, I actually got Borbados to testify before a traffic regulation court and they banned 18-wheelers on some roads, that was... Interesting."

"Nature spirits sound like hell on the global economy."

"I don't know about that. Probably, yeah. Mining is the single most debated issue in a lot of places, I'll say that much."

"I wonder if you're lower tech in general."

"That's kind of a hard question? It's 2012? This cell phone is kind of old because it's like the most durable cell phone ever manufactured?"