"Things that do not operate strictly according to the regular laws of physics."

"What do you mean by - "

But that's when someone arrives to appraise the gadgets.

Natsuko can demonstrate and explain them all!

Will she take a thousand stavrata for the basket? That's about six times what it'd cost to get her the cheapest insurancelike product that will let her interface with Linver's society at all for the next half year.

Since there are only five people on her team, yeah, sure.

And the other person can take the basket of gadgets away to be played with and disassembled and studied.

"And who are the other four people?"

"Their names? Nelen Utopia, Tarwë, Zanro, Cassiel Jones."

"Normally I get additional identifying information. I suppose there's no reason aliens would know their dates of birth on our calendar any more than you'd have a legible work history or references I could talk to, but still, there might be other people with those names."

"I'm the only human on the team, if that helps."

"Maybe you can summon them and I can get pictures of all of you, or is there some other easy way of verifying that they're not human? Though if there might be other members of their species here at some point that also might not be specific enough. How do you unambiguously identify people where you come from?"

"Oh, if pictures will do it -" She can call up their personnel headshots. "Nelen's hardest to tell from a distance, it's just the hair and the teeth. Usually people have cryptographic identification. You can also see all our ID numbers on this page if that will help, those are unique."

"That will help, thank you." He studies all the pictures for a long time and copies down all of the associated numbers and double-checks that he's copied them down correctly.

She can have five receipts (he keeps carbon copies). They're all on yellow paper printed with the text of the proposition with some blanks filled in by hand with names and ostensible ID numbers and expiration dates and some different letters and numbers that don't obviously correspond to anything, and eventually also his signature. "I don't tell people what would tip someone off that one of these had been altered or faked. And if you're wondering how to tell if someone you deal with here in Linver has a history of that kind of behavior, in the vast majority of cases if they've been left alive they'll have an explanatory facial tattoo."

"Can you elaborate on what kind of behavior?"

"...Altering or falsifying documents to falsely claim that someone bet on a proposition they didn't bet on, or bet a different amount, or did it on a different date. It's fine if you fax exactly these with no alterations to someone even though that will cause there to be a copy I didn't write."

"And things equivalent to faxing?"

"Like taking a photograph of it? These are public. Copies existing isn't a problem, if they're accurate. The thing that would be objectionable is if you did something deceitful."

"Okay." She takes the receipts, takes pictures of all of them. "Okay if I take a picture of this room so Nelen can pick me up? My way needs refills if I cast too many spells and his doesn't."

"Yeah, I don't leave sensitive things lying in plain sight." He's going to have to pass on the implications of that capability, though. That's terrifying if it's accurate. "You want to be picked up and not, say, discuss anything about trade between your people and ours, nothing like that?"

"Is this where we do that, too? In that case I want to do that."

"Out of an excess of ethics I have to let you know you could also go to the Sapphire Spire or the Dragon's Cave and get exactly the same things done, we try not to let it matter where exactly you stop first when you're doing foreign policy, but yeah. So what brings you to Linver?"

"My team was assigned to land in this city to make contact and learn about the locality and see what kinds of exchanges people here would be interested in. There are similar teams in most densely inhabited places on the inhabited planets of the system."

"Well, I hope you didn't try sending the same species to Davar as you did to Tey. Uh, insofar as we have first contact procedures, our first priority is to get to a state where we're pretty sure we're not going to immediately try to annihilate each other. Or worse but worse doesn't seem very likely. The thing that this planet prioritized making known to the people of Davar is that - anything that talks may as well be our cousin, when it comes to deciding how to divide up resources. But even if not for that, even if we hated them... not everywhere can say the same but Linver, as a country, has never broken its word and I don't expect it ever will. I think that's probably not news but I didn't want to skip anything that might be. And besides that I have no idea what kinds of exchanges are on the table, really, you're, uh, not like our best guesses about aliens."

"We don't go around annihilating civilizations and I sure hope nothing we do will offend anyone here to the point that vice versa would be on the table. Why would they need different species?"

"Well, personally, I would die if I went anywhere in the Davar system - uh, Davar is the planet, the actual celestial body they mostly live on is actually one of its moons - and it wouldn't even achieve anything, if I somehow didn't die and had the materials for it I'd communicate with them using radio because that's how we know to do it. They're fine and we have treaties about asteroid mining rights and sunlight access and mutual protection from hostile parties from outside the system, we just didn't achieve that by meeting in person."

"Oh, we have magical translation and indestructibility and such."