"Usually with literate societies we can just let people come to Vanda Nossëo and earn money there and buy stuff to bring home. After some initial finessing of the currency."

"Well, that'll be easy. I - I will leave it to my colleague to decide how much to bet and at what odds that it won't provoke anyone important into doing anything you'd care about if you help anyone leave who wants to. Which is an example of the kind of thing that's improved by knowing more about the history of Linver's relationships with other countries."

"Do people object to emigration from Linver?"

"That question makes me think you come from a very different context and I'm unsure how to bridge the gap but with the caveat that I'm worried this will somehow communicate the wrong thing, yes, lots of people object to that for lots of reasons."

"My home planet was actually struggling with trying to keep population down when Vanda Nossëo contacted us and all our countries wanted a lot of empty planets to settle as a signing bonus. It varies a lot. What bothers people about it here?"

"The government theoretically has to approve people leaving, and separately approve - you know, I don't know how to phrase this without making it meaningfully easier for you to figure out what you want to conjure, and I don't feel like doing your work for you for free - suffice it to say that no one I know is especially likely to care about adults who don't have debts or contracts keeping them here."

"We usually do a lot of amnesty around when we show up because we find that a lot of questionable behavior is drawn by circumstances we can fix. I get the sense Linver's government is not really equipped to support that."

"Including for debts?"

"Often basic income covers them easily; sometimes we handle debt by buying it, do you have the concept of buying debt here?"

"Yes. Some things foreigners aren't allowed to buy out, but yes."

"Why aren't foreigners allowed to buy it?"

"Not everything is perfectly fungible."

"- well, yes, but is this a problem that could be solved by employing a local to handle it on our behalf, or having one of us move here, or...?"

"Maybe. Seems likely to me but it's another thing I'd expect having more relevant prior experience to help with. - Though I might be who you want to talk to about your amnesty ideas in general."

"Why's that?"

"My career has mostly been in identifying people who won't fuck up again. I'm okay at it. And, uh, secondarily in dealing with people who are causing problems."

"Okay. So, let me explain the conditions under which people often won't fuck up again - anyone who becomes a citizen of Vanda Nossëo is entitled to a substantial payout every couple of weeks that is more than enough to live on, support a family on even if you don't want to spend your kids' basic income too, get transit access to explore the multiverse with, etcetera. They never have to work again, if they have specific peccadilloes that bother their neighbors like using drugs or going around naked or taking anything that isn't nailed down they can most likely find a place to live where that's accepted behavior, some of our psychotherapists are magic, and we have a genre of entertainment called video games which many people find fun enough to spend all their time doing even if their default non-video-game behavior is murder. Also, most people can be resurrected and our conviction rate is approximately perfect, which makes murder less appealing from two directions."

"Gotta admit if everyone would be fine afterward I'd personally be a lot more interested in murder, and it sounds like your video games must be a lot more fun than ours, I'd definitely rather hunt someone who could laugh about it afterward than pretend to play extremely stylized tennis by twiddling my thumbs. I mean, I agree with you that I expect a lot of people who'd commit murder or theft or something under normal circumstances not to do that if they live like that. Also and more importantly - " but not the MOST important thing here, that's the MIND CONTROL " - how do you confirm that people you've resurrected are who they say they are and can you resurrect the Imperator?"

"Identity is a conjurable parameter, meaning demons can check it. We can resurrect people here if you don't have nonreductionist souls, or if those souls are in a condition we can access; most humans are reductionist but I don't actually have confirmation on that for you guys yet." He checks his tablet. "- damn, looks like you're not, I'm so sorry."

...Is that because they cannot actually do that? Or would they be more likely to claim they could in that case, because the whole point of the claim would likely be to impersonate people... Not really enough information to form useful guesses.

"What does 'nonreductionist' mean?"

"It means you have a soul that is something other than just the way your body and brain work. Some of our colleagues have those, though nobody on this team."

"Well, we don't actually know about Cassiel but it's kind of academic," amends Natsuko.

They cannot possibly seriously believe in the literally nonsensical world models of obsolete religions that hold to nonsense like gods and the six classical elements. "What does it mean to have a soul that isn't part of your body or brain?"

"So there are Elves," says Natsuko, "they're the tall stupidly-pretty ones with braided hair, and about half of the Elves in the multiverse are cyborgs, with metal chips in the backs of their necks that store their personality and memories with the brain mostly acting as swap space and an interface between the chip and the body. And then there are soul Elves, the ones from the flat planets like the one you saw, where instead of having a bit of metal do that they have an insubstantial soul thing. When we want to resurrect those we have to go where the soul is, usually with their god of the dead, and give it a new body to move into; when we want to resurrect a chip Elf, other ways to back up and print the data to a fresh chip work fine."

"So nonreductionist people have components that don't have mass and that you don't have the ability to manufacture. Is that right?"

"Right. Soul Elves are the simplest example to explain because they have the cyborg counterparts but there are also other cases, like, apparently, you guys, and people from Materia including the humans there."