"How often do you get to reclassify new species as reductionist?"

"...I don't think that's ever happened? There's work underway on being able to resurrect them anyway with more powerful magic, and I guess sometimes locals tell us they have souls and turns out they don't after all, but - yeah, I don't think that happens."

There is a possibility that theirs is the only solar system in which science has been invented. It would be convenient, but it's only a possibility.

"Well, we were already studying how the world works and how to control and verify the return of the dead, I'm not sure the existence of simpler people in some other world who can resurrect each other really changes that. So you were going to provide me with evidence that violence and theft are going to drop across the board. 'Because you said so' is something, seeing your absurdly cool video games would be something else, frankly I'll believe in your money when it's in my bank account. I can think of environmental correlates, if I went on a tour of a neighborhood I'd have a guess about its crime rate but not a perfect one, especially with aliens."

"Do you want to... watch public trials, visit various neighborhoods, play video games, talk to some Dwarf financiers about getting the currency exchange workable so we can get money into your account even in theory..."

"I should visit neighborhoods while someone else figures out the currency, I think. I could figure that out but I'm not really in the top twenty people most competent to handle it."

"Okay, well, there's shipboard Dwarves who are happy to talk about that to whoever's the right person for the job. - other people sometimes work in finance but Dwarves like it overwhelmingly more than anyone else and cultivate good reputations for it."

"Huh. Well, when Mal shows up - "

Mal shows up, carrying a briefcase and two notebooks and a folder of loose papers.

" - ah. Everyone, this is Mal. Mal, these are Nelen and Natsuko, and they're aliens from another universe with different physics who so far as I can tell maintain that they have no souls."

"We're from different universes," says Natsuko.

"Hello, Mal, pleased to meet you," says Nelen.

"Hello, Nelen and Natsuko, pleased to meet you, too," Mal says with an intonation that echoes Nelen's oddly precisely. "I believe I've been asked to discuss with one or more of you or your colleagues how to facilitate trade between the people of Tey, including those who live in Linver, and the people of your universes."

"You can borrow my office for it if you want," Verret says, "I'm going to go teleport to another planet anyway."

"I'll bring down whoever's on deck for - ah, it's Yrsa. I'll go get Yrsa and then escort Verret." Pop pop, he comes back with a short bearded fellow who introduces himself briefly to Mal and then wants to talk about the buying power of the local currency and the typical wages and the velocity of money and savings habits etc. etc.

Mal knows about all of these things, often off the top of his head and the rest can be found in the assorted material he brought with him.

Then they will have quite a productive conversation.

"Do you have any parameters you want to give me on neighborhoods so I'm not just picking at random while you suspect me of having cherry-picked?" Nelen asks Verret.

"I'd say they should be populated by humans but I'm not sure soulless flesh robots count even if so far as I know they can honestly say they experience love and joy, and for all I know maybe half your crime reduction strategy hinges on mixed-species neighborhoods anyway. Let's go with someplace that won't cause me to become infected with an alien pathogen, and where I can breathe the air."

"...humans with souls is doable. Do you care if it's not technically in Vanda Nossëo? We have two allied polities and one of them is the main landing point for humans with souls from a specific world."

"Why not both? We can go there and also see somewhere in Vanda Nossëo."

"All right." Pop pop pop pop. "This is a wizarding village in Hazel. Most humans from here are reductionist but some of them aren't and those ones can do magic, and can leave ghosts when they die - research is underway in getting the ghosts usefully stuffed back into bodies but it's not there yet. The magic pops up sometimes in kids here without magical parents but that seems to be local to the world, results aren't in as of now on whether wizards having kids outside Hazel will have wizard kids because understandably they don't really care to test it and nine month precognitive range is kind of expensive. There are also various nonreductionist magical creatures, though I don't think we'll see any here unless we go to the bank or a dodgy bar."

Nelen has chosen Diagon Alley which is somewhat more accessible to Muggle visitors than most wizarding locations and is also an exciting and populous shopping district.

"What kind of ghosts do they leave?"

It's very cool!

More importantly, is it a place where people stop and gawk at shop windows? How wide a berth do they give each other? What's the range of moods? Are the children well-fed? Are there young men - that might not be a relevant category - are there groups of any age or gender that seem like they're getting each other all worked up? Do the shop windows have bars or shutters ready to keep rioters out? Maybe they wouldn't, maybe they have invisible force fields or maybe, given teleportation, they wouldn't bother regardless.

Also. It's very. cool.

People do lots of window shopping and chatter about it in their foreign language! There's plenty of bumping up against each other and crowding in anyplace highly trafficked but given the opportunity to do so people seem to be giving strangers at least eighteen inches and their friends six to twelve. People look busy and sometimes a bit overwhelmed but mostly they seem to be pretty chill about it. The kids range from "plump" to "obviously just shot up a foot". There's some teenagers, three boys and a girl, over there, who have gotten into a bit of a tiff over who has to pay for their ice cream and who agreed to do so and who definitely did it last time, and started hexing each other over it, leaving one with a beak and one with mouse ears and one with an elephant trunk and one with all of his hair sticking out like he's been electrocuted. Eventually beak-kid agrees to cover the ice cream and they all disenchant each other. The shops don't have bars, at least not obvious ones, though some do have shutters perhaps to signal when they are closed, and the bank has a security troll out front.

"People who don't have local magic or a really generalized magic detection solution can't see them," Nelen says, "but the ghosts are generally - static in personality and skills, only erratically able to learn and incorporate new facts especially on a long-term basis, tend to adopt a kind of dreary aesthetic or outlook as what might be just a psychological side effect of being insubstantial, and report that they decided to become ghosts rather than 'moving on' to some unclear further destination when they died. Occasionally one disappears and the others report that they most likely 'moved on'. They're actually not very dissimilar from disembodied Elf souls, which are also typically invisible and insubstantial and so on, and Hazel wizards can see those too, but there are a few other differences that might be down to species or down to other soul-related differences."

The magic fight seems a little at odds with the idea that people mostly don't do that. They seem fine so it's arguably unobjectionable for them to do it, but Nelen didn't say it didn't matter if people fucked up, he said they mostly wouldn't.

Maybe it doesn't count as fucking up here.

"I don't think that's how death works where I'm from."

"I wouldn't expect it to. Materians usually don't leave ghosts, though I think they can in their home plane. Spirit animals don't. There are humans in Edda who have souls that are concrete external animals, disappear in a shower of sparkles when they die, those don't leave ghosts either."

"Mostly 'soul' is just an old-fashioned way of saying 'mind', but some people say robots would be soulless because we don't know how to give them souls and they'd just do what we programmed them to - some people say that as 'they wouldn't be connected to the pneumatic aether' but actual physicists start screaming and don't stop for five minutes, I have timed one, if you say it like that. I mean, the last four minutes and fifty one seconds involved words, a substantial fraction of which belonged to sentences, but it was still screaming."

Nelen giggles. "We don't know what your souls do yet, or where they go. Someone just tried to resurrect a person from your planet and it didn't work. We don't have AIs that seem unambiguously like people, though you get activists who are concerned about them just like with chickens. - do you want translation magic, so you can understand random people around here -"

"...How does that work."

"The translation magic? It's Edda sorcery, same underlying system of magic as my teleportation and healing and so on, but developed by a different magical tradition, and as I am not thousands of years old I haven't made much headway in understanding it, I just know how to bop people on the head with the magic wand and correct for common glitches."

"I'll pass, we're a lot less than thousands of years out from doing that with computers that we can understand."