"I see." He'll alert people to that, too, just in case. "If you have all that and can travel to different universes, what brings you here?"

"Well, when you have basically everything one thing a lot of folks like to do with it is find more people to bring in on the having everything deal. That's us."

"...Interesting. Well, far be it from me to keep you from giving other people magic translation and indestructibility and so on. If you're selling that's different but if you're giving things away for free and the people you give them to want them I wouldn't dream of stopping you."

"What's the complication with selling?"

"It's that there is to my knowledge no evidence of you having run a legitimate non-fraudulent business anywhere in this universe. Naturally, as an alien, you have no local track record to show me, and naturally, as an alien, you can be expected to be party to a lot of innocent misunderstandings. You may also intend to offer some products I have no evidence but your word exist at all and which you surely cannot have tested locally, since you're an alien who just got here."

"Huh. Do you have any interest in checking out our extrauniversal track record?"

"Lack of interest is not the reason I have not spontaneously developed the ability to visit alternate universes."

"I mean, we could bring you."

"I also don't know how I'd judge your track record from some other world, I don't know who keeps track of who's how trustworthy and you could tell me anything you wanted about it. I also don't know how I'd confirm I was in another world and not just on another planet but admittedly it would be kind of weird to lie about that part specifically while being from twelve light-years away."

"There's planets that are flat. On those you can tell with a telescope that the moon is generating its own light and is made of a flower. I don't think that would be possible here but I admit I don't know if you know that."

"I can neither confirm nor deny any knowledge I may have about the feasibility of light-generating floral celestial satellites. - I'm going to ask if I can get someone from the university to come along, they'll know more than I will." He's totally read science fiction with an interestingly-shaped glowing artificial satellite but maybe it was inaccurate. This seems like a job for a physicist.

"Sounds good to me."

This is much fiddlier than it needs to be now that they need to very suddenly change their security procedures so that there aren't places, like his office, that are all three of sometimes uninhabited, sometimes used to host unfiltered people, and sometimes used to contain sensitive information.

He can summon someone to babysit his office and attempt to have a physicist summoned. ...That's going to take a while. He apologizes for the delay and asks if there's anything else she'd like to cover first.

She's curious how bet-insurance came to be the standard means of guaranteeing good behavior in this region!

"So the thing is, Linver, as a country, doesn't break its word. Other countries - like, Nxtr or A'i, if either of them signs a treaty and there's nothing about the specifics to suggest something different, my assumption would be that there's about a ten to fifteen percent chance they'll be found to be in violation of it in the next ten years and conditional on that happening there are still decent odds they'll take steps to make redress for it. It's not meaningless, but it's not a sure thing. Linver breaking any treaty or agreement or promise of any kind this decade is currently valued in such a way as to imply that people think the odds of that happening are lower than one in a hundred. It's..." He sighs wistfully and shakes his head. "Anyway, that might be necessary background, if your people are more like other countries on Tey than like Linver. Because the thing about Linver is -

"So two thousand years ago the government of Linver made a deal to implement a specific set of laws. They didn't agree to never have any crime because that was beyond the ability of any polity on the planet to guarantee. They just agreed to implement and enforce the laws Lyrial Imperator came up with. And that's what Linver's government has done, without ever stopping or giving in to practicality or social pressure, through two thousand years of social and technological change. So." He shrugs. "We have a code of laws we can't change, and it doesn't ban everything we wish it could ban, and it doesn't allow everything we wish it could allow. If the government tells you someone's a criminal wanted dead or alive, that might mean his father in law didn't approve of his marriage, or that he's a surgeon who saves lives in ways Lyrial Imperator - who designed the laws - would have been impressed by if only they'd been invented two thousand years ago. Anyway. At this point with how unpopular the Imperator's laws are and how many people need to have nothing to do with the government because of it, the only thing that could keep society from collapsing is a criminal organization. So I think the answer is that gambling's illegal and if it weren't we'd use something else that was. Though I wouldn't call it standard in the whole region, it's just a Linver thing."

"I'm surprised this has gone on this long without the government being replaced by something that doesn't consider itself beholden to the previous government's promises outright."

"There has never been and might never be any other entity on this planet that's kept all its promises for two thousand years. Even if we wanted to make a new one that hadn't made any stupid promises, it'd take two thousand years to build that kind of track record."

"I can see why many people might be reluctant to destroy something so hard to replace! Just, it's actually unusual for a human government to persist continuously for that long, let alone under conditions where it's widely understood not to be performing a lot of the functions that governments are for, so I'm surprised there haven't been any successful revolutions or coups or conquests."

"Why do you know so much about what's usual for human governments?"

"Humans are pretty common! We're not sure why, the other species that are common are created by divine intervention but while versions of my home planet recur there are also humans in one-off planets like this one in a way we don't see other species repeating."

"That... is very weird."

"I know, right? One of the big mysteries."

"I suppose taking that at face value it suggests prior colonization efforts. Tey has nonhuman primates and the other mammals seem pretty similar to us, but I guess maybe someone could have noticed that and thought it meant we could eat the food and breathe the air..."

"Oh, we're pretty sure that's not it, there's a species that can conjure arbitrary material objects and on most planets with humans they appear to have evolved."

He starts thinking about material objects that have existed throughout history or currently exist. Eventually the list dissolves into incoherent internal screaming.

"................oh."