They're not going to start out by investigating for secret basement lairs. There are people living here; they can land in populated areas and ask for directions. Nelen et al appear in their assigned Linver city.

There's a convenient open space for them to do so on a lawn in a park, across a curving cobblestone path from another lawn where a dozen children are playing a game with a ball and an adult occasionally glances at them to confirm that they have all their limbs in between working on something with three books and a notebook. There's a middle-aged couple coming slowly along down the path in no particular hurry. There's a musician out of sight behind some trees.

Those that see them appear draw the others' attention and except for the musician shortly all of those people are staring.

They wave and smile nonthreateningly!

The adults watch them warily as they are mobbed by children with questions about how they appeared out of nowhere and why they look weird.

They are happy to do first contact by explaining how they appeared out of nowhere and why they look weird. Cassiel will let kids pull on her feathers.

One of the kids informs them very seriously that they are supposed to bet on that if they really believe it, and also that real aliens can't breathe normal air and would be too hot here anyway and probably catch fire and die, everyone knows alien planets are different.

" - No, there could be more alien planets, maybe one of them is the same - "

"Yeah but then the aliens could still be talking birds like on - "

"That's just on TV."

"I know it's just TV but it could happen - anyway, Mel's right, though, if you really just came into the country you have to go to the Aurora."

"Or go to Southshore and get stabbed and bleed to death instead!"

The one who thinks they should go to the Aurora makes an "I guess" face.

"What do we need to do at the Aurora?" asks Tarwë.

"We have some talking birds but not very many," says Natsuko.

"You need to tell them you won't cause any trouble and always wear your lucky shoes."

"And remember the Kelly criterion!"

"That is implausible because every planet can only have one species in each ecological niche, so only one species can be intelligent," one of the kids informs Natsuko. "Otherwise, they would compete for resources and one would go extinct."

"We're from different planets, though a few of them actually do have more than one on the same planet," says Natsuko. "Sometimes this is because they evolved on different continents and neither had gone extinct by the time we met, once it was because there was a parasitic intelligent species and their hosts who were sapient but not very bright so they were ecologically interdependent, sometimes it's because of a magical being deciding to create several species... one intelligent species to a planet is pretty common, though."

"What does the Kelly criterion have to do with anything?" asks Nelen.

"You're supposed to always remember it at a casino."

The others would like to know how many planets they know of and if they've already been to Davar and met the aliens there and how many different kinds of atmospheres they've seen and if they normally wear space suits.

"Is there a reason we should go to a casino?" Cassiel asks.

Tarwë will list off planets. Nelen says that they have co-workers who are already visiting lots of places including Davar. Most places, surprisingly enough, have compatible atmospheres, but even if they didn't they'd probably use magic instead of space suits.

"Because that's where the bookies live, duh."

This, apparently, is what it takes to get one of the bemused adult onlookers to step in. "Many travelers find that their stay is more enjoyable once they've placed a few wagers. I of course wouldn't encourage you to break the law but it's a very common sentiment and there are certainly those businesses so deeply dependent on the goodwill of their local gaming establishment that they wouldn't even do business with anyone who hadn't at least put some money on the question of whether they're likely to cause any problems while in Linver. Also, if you are in fact aliens and you want to establish diplomatic relations, you need to go to someone and it's them or the government, and frankly, no one else who wants to establish diplomatic relations is ever glad they talked to the government."

"Are the bets sort of like - insurance?" asks Zanro.

"What would make someone regret talking to the government?" Nelen wants to know.

"I'm not familiar with the distinction you're making..."

"I am!" says one of the kids. "In Sfil it's only legal to bet that bad things will happen to you, like earthquakes and hurricanes, so nobody can get addicted to gambling because nobody can have any fun because you lose either way. Also, people regret talking to the government because then the government sentences them to death and they have to move someplace else and maybe change their name."

"- would the government sentence us to death?" Nelen asks. "What for?"

"Maybe - "

"Shush, we're not going to publicly speculate about specific people the government may or may not want to sentence to death."

"That's not what I was going to say! I was going to say maybe they wouldn't!"

"We're not going to discuss it in public. - Would any of you like me to show you to the Aurora?"

"- sure, I'd love to see the Aurora," says Natsuko.

"It's just three blocks that way, through the mall, I'll walk you - just you?"

And she'll set off that way toward the mall.

"I can let them know if they should join me," Natsuko assures them.

There is a mall in the way, and on the ground floor of it between a candy shop and a radio parts shop there's an employees only sign at which Natsuko's native guide knocks and says, "Doorknobs and dreadnoughts. - This is apparently a visiting dignitary, I don't really understand where from exactly but she might want to talk to the xeno people."

The door opens. "Straight down the stairs," says the bouncer, "then hang a right before you pass any slot machines and go through the first door on the right and let them know where you're from and what you're here for."

"Thank you!" says Natsuko, following the directions. Is her guide accompanying her?

Only as far as the first door on the right.

Downstairs one possible explanation for why this place is called the Aurora presents itself; everything is done in dark colors, except the icily glittering chandeliers, the delicate green swirls along the walls and ceiling, and the almost crystalline slot machines jutting out from the floor like icebergs.

Natsuko's guide makes sure she at least gets to the well-lit side room where a secretary in a green and black uniform is just now telling someone else which door to go through.

Natsuko will wait till the secretary can spare the attention. "Hello, I'm envoy Tanaka Natsuko from Vanda Nossëo, interdimensional coalition for free movement and exchange. I was told that envoys should pay a visit to the Aurora."

"Interdimensional," the secretary echoes with raised eyebrows. "Well, none of our plans for first contact involve aliens showing up on our planet knowing exactly whom to talk to, but I suppose that simplifies things. Do you have, um, evidence of your claim?"

"I have magical powers, does that do the trick?"

"I would love to see your magic powers."

Natsuko lifts into the air and spins around there, hovering. And produces some sourceless music.

"Well, I do see you have abilities beyond the norm." Cool antigravity, cool hidden speaker, cool foreign music, not really evidence of interdimensional anything. "And this is your first time in Linver?"

Natsuko settles on the ground. "That's right."

"I can find someone who can see you shortly and has participated in drafting some of our tentative plans for meeting further aliens."

"Great, thanks! I arrived with four colleagues, do they need to teleport here right now or can I handle the preliminaries?"

" - It would certainly be fascinating to see people teleport although you can probably handle some of their paperwork for them."

"I can teleport, it's just cheaper under one of their magic systems compared to mine. How about I get underway and call them over when it looks like they'll need to be here."

"I'm sure that's fine." This does not, in fact, cause anyone to know that teleportation is actually on the table, and also if it were it would still not prove that this human is from another universe, but no sense in being rude about it. The secretary passes the relevant information on and then points Natsuko at the correct door to go through.

Natsuko goes through the door!

And she is promptly greeted by a man at a desk, wearing a black mask with stylized green ferns on it and a pair of glasses. He has a cup packed densely full of writing implements and a calculator sitting in plain view.

"Hello! You're Tanaka Natsuko, right? Here to wager on your stay in Linver and whether there'll be any trouble establishing contact between your interdimensional coalition Vanda Nossëo and Linver? I'm Verret and I can help you with that. You can have a seat if you like."

"Thank you!" Natsuko sits. "I'm an envoy from Vanda Nossëo, interdimensional coalition for free movement and exchange, and I'm not actually sure what the wagers are for or what currency I'd need for them, but I was directed here pretty emphatically and will bring in my colleagues if we all need to be here."

"We can take stavrata, Sfil crowns, Thjefljen crowns, Marya pence, austers, and in a pinch we can take other coins for the value of the metal or I can call someone in to assess jewelry or - the weirdest thing I know we've ever accepted is a music box. If you want to rent a room at a hotel, let alone an apartment, or buy a weapon construed broadly to include a knife or a lighter, or start a business, or in some cases pseudo-randomly if you just happen to be in public, you'll need to have made a bet against - the standard version is whether an arbiter will find that you killed someone without reasonable provocation, committed theft, or injured someone broadly construed where poisoning someone or forcibly having sex can count - you can read the full text of any proposition or have me read it to you, that's a summary - or else people will generally not want you around or want to do business with you. To a first approximation you'll be more trusted if you pay more. And as an envoy from elsewhere, you also - so the government of Linver isn't in control of all the resources that could be used to engage in a war. And it isn't very good at explaining itself or telegraphing its decisions. And it can't meaningfully implement a lot of important international treaties, and refuses on principle to become a signatory to some that it would be - very useful to be a signatory to. It helps to have public records of how much money changed hands at what odds on what propositions - concrete example: the Aurora's management placed a hundred thousand stavrata bet against Linver or a statelike organization primarily based in Linver being found in the next decade to have engaged in conduct that would violate the Blue Peak Accords on the treatment of prisoners of war if the party in question were a signatory, and we have similar bets from people representing signatories that nothing like that will be done to any of our people. That is almost as good as having a central government that's willing to commit to not mistreating prisoners of war. Make sense?"

"Yes, actually, it reminds me of Dwarves, they're one of the peoples in Vanda Nossëo and they do a lot of things like this but they tend to construe it as insurance rather than betting. I don't have any of those fiat currencies; I can get metal or jewelry but you should probably know that they're both almost totally worthless in the Vanda Nossëo economy. However, we will buy them from you if you wind up having enough economic interface with us for that to be a problem, so you might choose to take them from me anyway."

"Hm. Got any intrinsically valuable things to sell? Not food but something like - uh - you know, I think the central example of a thing that doesn't require trusting you would be math but I'd have to call someone else in for that - I heard you have really spectacularly high-quality speakers? I don't know, maybe metal is the best option."

"- how would you have heard specifically about speakers - anyway, yeah, I can get stuff including speakers if those will move well enough to suit you." She pulls out her computer and starts typing up a request to Procurement.

"I don't know how much you want for them or anything but we'd at least like a couple, probably. - I suppose you also don't know how much you want for them and if I quote you a price in stavrata you won't have any grounds to argue about it. What other sorts of cool gadgets have you got?"

"Oh, lots, I'm just going to have the guy pop down a whole gadget basket." She sends the message.

"Sounds good. I'll page someone who can appraise them."

And a dude appears and hands Natsuko a basket and nods politely to Verret and disappears again.

Natsuko plunks the basket on the counter.

"You can teleport??"

He can't have anyone here nearly that fast since his guy has to traverse contiguous space to get here.

"Yes, though not as well as he does, different magic systems."

"Different magic systems. Naturally. Got any teleporters in the basket?"

"No, though some of these have recordings of magic songs on them." She pulls out a little music player.

"What do you understand the word 'magic' to mean?"

"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."

"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."

"...you need a minute? Or, uh, a rundown of their limitations?"

"...Sure."

"They can't make people. They can make eggs, of people who hatch from eggs, but that's pretty well policed and anyway doesn't include humans. They need to have a reasonably good idea of what they're trying to get - so, since none of them presently know you exist, they will not go for your diary or anything, though one could over the course of some weeks replicate this entire planet and go rifling through anything that caught their eye, if they really wanted. It's possible to store information in a way proof against their access as far as anyone is currently aware and it works for humans but you need a brain implant and the easiest way to get it is to have one of them install it for you."

He takes notes on all that and passes the information along. Not that it's very likely to be true, or anything.

"I would appreciate evidence that it works that way."

"I don't have anything like hard proof unless you want to trust our truth-discerning magic, but if you'd like to access our information network for corroboration you can find it there."

"I wouldn't expect you to be able to prove the limitations but they were, uh, pretty limited themselves."

"Yeah, they really are. I think a lot of demon labor - that's the species, they're called demons, we can kick the magic translation if that sounds awful because it sometimes does - that we employ is just used to check up on the other demons we don't employ and make sure they're not getting up to shit. Most of them are sweethearts though."

"Most people are sweethearts. It doesn't help nearly enough."

"Huh, I don't know that I'd say my experience is that most people are sweethearts. Maybe you have awesome social technology we'll want to copy."

"Well, what's wrong with your people?"

"My theory is that most demons are sweethearts because they mostly don't have childhoods! They just pop into existence all grown up without any weird hangups from their parents because they haven't got them. Some of them used to be humans, those are like humans more or less."

"What are humans like that makes you say they're not sweethearts?"

"Oh, I'm a human myself, I'm not trying to say we all suck, or anything, but if you look at the stats we have a pretty bad crime rate compared to all the other common species, say. I guess 'crime rate' has to mean something else around here."

He laughs. "Yeah. Well. I think people I have to go after for stealing things or getting into fights are sweethearts, mostly. Maybe we're using the term differently."

"Totally possible. Anything you want to see besides the flat planets?"

"Everything, but that wouldn't take a reasonable amount of time at all. Are there other things you expect to be particularly germane to the future of relations between Linver and your various planets?"

"You might like Dwarves! They also have very comprehensive insurance."

"I assume not for the same reasons?"

"Not at all, they just hate having to accomplish things with laws."

"What don't they like about it?"

Dwarfsplanation ensues,

Eventually interrupted by the arrival of a physicist and someone to babysit the office.

"Hi, so, apparently I'm here to consult on planetary satellites?" says the physicist.

"It can be hard from some perspectives to distinguish between magic and advanced technology, so I proposed taking a trip to a flat planet orbited by a moon made of a flower to demonstrate that there is at least some magic. It also has a sun made of fruit, but you generally don't want to look straight at that one, it is still a sun."

The physicist, who has been only sparsely briefed, glances at Verret, making a baffled face.

"She can supposedly teleport to another universe with different physics," says Verret. "I really have no idea how she pulled off the apparent teleportation earlier."

"...Okay?? Okay. I'm no good at seeing through magic tricks but I can try."

"Is this everybody who wants to come? I can do the teleport but I'd rather call in my team lead, his is better."

"I'm not coming," the security person says.

"Just me and - what's your name?"

"Lelly Delta."

"Okay! I'll see what Nelen's up to." She stares her computer into doing stuff.

Nelen appears a moment later. "Hello, I'm Nelen Utopia. The nearest Arda that's still flat is... Shadow, actually - and the next closest is Flashdark, ugh - and Telperion doesn't actually have the sun and moon, it still has the Trees - so I guess we want Shine, it has off-model Silmarils but I think the sun and moon are standard, does that sound right to you, Natsuko?"

"Wow, I didn't actually realize till you spelled it all out how few Ardas are doing the normal Arda thing at, like, any given time," Natsuko snorts, "Shine should be fine."

"...It's nice to meet you, Nelen Utopia," Verret says because there doesn't seem to be anything else that it makes any sense to say to that.

"You too! Okay, that's five hops, do you two want me to take them fast or slow, we're not going through anywhere scenic but might as well ask?"

"Why is it five hops?" asks Lelly.

"Worlds can be next to each other or not. Most of the ways we know to teleport will only take you to one that's next to the one you start from, including mine. So I have to go through other worlds on the map." He can pull up a map to show them.

"...I see. Okay."

"So we're going this way," he draws the path with his finger, "and I'll go fast if you don't have a preference. Say when."

"I want to see the places in between," Lelly says. "We can go whenever."

"Okay!"

Pop! An Edda teleportation waypoint. It looks like a big empty field. There's a robot lawnmower off the distance.

Pop! A Space Arda waypoint. This one is a pretty beach.

Pop! A Hex waypoint. It's a moon over a ringed planet with atmosphere but no plants or anything, though there are a few chairs and a set of shelves with first aid kits and spare tablet computers on, and also, for some reason, a small minigolf course.

Pop! Stork waypoint. It's a field, but this one doesn't have a robot lawnmower and the grass is weirdly soft and lush with little pink flowers poking through.

Pop! Here they are in Shine. Fortunately the moon is up at this time.

And what does the floral moon look like?

Looks like a flower! It has petals and everything! It glows silver!

...Okay. And this planet is supposed to be flat. What's between them and the horizon?

They're up on a very high mountain, so they can see all the way to the edge!

It's fucking flat!

Lelly is so confused.

Okay, the gravity doesn't feel immediately absurdly abnormal, what does that tell her about the size and density - she starts trying to calculate the implied strength of the material the planet would have to be made of - actually, scratch that, it could be a really good video projection of an alien world and that's much more likely.

"I would like to visit the edge."

"Okay, but stick close to me, it's easy to fall there," Nelen says.

Pop.

Gravity's heckin' weird out here.

If she goes to her hands and knees maybe she can avoid falling and maybe she'll be in a position to grab something if she somehow falls in an unexpected direction?

How weird is it, exactly? Is there a distinct point where it changes direction? For that matter can she see how thick the edge appears to be?

It's super fuckin' weird, exactly like a bunch of incompetent gods slapped magic on it till it approximately behaved.

"...Okay, I have no idea how you'd do this. Any of this. This is so weird."

"It's magic!" says Natsuko.

Lelly gives her a dirty look as though this answer is shockingly contemptible.

She lifts off from the wonky ground and twirls in the air. "Anything else that's supposed to be blatantly impossible moreso than flying? We could introduce you to a telepath - though I think some of those aren't technically magic I wouldn't know how to tell the difference, myself?"

"What in all the nine skies do you imagine you mean when you say something technically isn't magic."

"You know, now that I think of it I'm not sure that actually bottoms out in anything other than 'the magic-detecting spells don't register it as magic', and frankly the magic-detecting spells have at least a couple of really stupid opinions, so I guess that might be one of them."

"...I have. More questions now. The first three are just 'what the fuck' three times." Lelly shakes her head. "You are probably aliens. Congratulations. I think. I guess you already knew you were aliens but now the Aurora can know it too."

"Ready to go home?" Nelen asks.

"...I guess."

A series of pops ensues and they are back where they started.

At which point after conferring briefly with Lelly and the security guard, Verret tells the aliens, "I believe you were sent to me in error because some parts of your situation weren't well-understood and I'd be happy to handle things from here but you should know that people with more foreign policy experience are also available."

"The rest of us have been looking for such people," says Nelen. "If you'd be willing to direct us that would be great. But if there's more to do here I can leave Natsuko with you."

"I mean, what I'll do is let the person you spoke to who directed you to me know that you're actually aliens, I don't know whose other business it makes the most sense to reschedule and at any rate you shouldn't just show up and surprise them. It's - going to be exactly like talking to me but with more geopolitical knowledge, there aren't the foreign kinds of diplomats here except when foreign countries send them."

"I'm not sure if we actually need the geopolitical knowledge, since there are other teams in other places."

"I didn't follow that reasoning."

"If the diplomats know things about neighboring countries, I'm not sure that's necessary, because our colleagues are already there learning directly from those other countries? I suppose there could be important context on relationships between Linver and its neighbors."

"Normally when discussing what a country might do in the future I think it's important to know what it's done in the past and what obligations it has. Is it not like that where you come from?"

"Less so, I think? Adding as much of a capabilities jump as we do tends to create something of a discontinuity. But it sounds like Linver takes its historical obligations unusually seriously."

Well, that's threatening even though at this point it basically isn't news.

"It does relative to the rest of Tey, anyway. - Apparently you can talk to someone more qualified in ten minutes."

"Oh?"

"A colleague of mine who's been working on the first contact checklist and knows a lot about global trade and other things that are probably relevant to you. If you'd like something other than incompetent fumbling."

"We'd be happy to be introduced."

"You people do talk like diplomats. Anything else you want to hear about or anything in the next ten minutes?"

"Is there anything we can do for you?"

"For me specifically or for the Aurora or Linver in general or Tey in general...?"

"You or people you know. Like, I have a very good healing spell, for example."

"I'm sure you'll have a lot of takers once you've demonstrated its safety! I'm pretty happy with my health," but he's mildly impressed with them for noticing the glass eye - oh wait no they probably just had someone conjure a duplicate of his entire body and dissect it, "but I'm curious how exactly it works - like if someone has lost a few pieces and there isn't physically room for them to grow back, is that something that happens?"

"The spell-prompted regrowth can exert a little force but not a lot but I don't think any opportunities have come up to test it in situations more complicated than people's clothes moving out of the way."

"...Sounds fun to test but I shouldn't volunteer until someone's checked that it works at all."

"Okay. Some planets what we do is we set up shops where we sell castings of that sort of spell, and also multiversal goods, in exchange for local songs and stories, but it's mostly suitable for places with a low literacy rate where we need to worry about things like that being lost forever."

"You - yes, that makes sense, and reflects a shared value. Also if I understand correctly there's a poem about that kind of attitude that I almost quoted at you but why would you know what I was talking about, and I'm literate so apparently it wouldn't even buy me anything. What do you do when you meet literate societies?"

"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."

"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."

"I'd offer you a computer to give everyone subtitles but we don't have your language loaded up into the corpus yet."

"How come they're not comprehensible anyway, like you?"

"Well, I have the translation magic and not everyone gets it if they don't plan to travel. I sound like I'm speaking the native or expected language of everyone who can hear me unless I turn it off and I understand you the same way, as though you spoke fluent Anitami."

"Why don't people all get it?"

"They haven't felt the need to go to an installer since it'd be mildly inconvenient and everyone they talk to knows their language already, or they think it'd mistranslate things - it does sometimes make errors we have to correct for though usually they don't substantially impede communication - or they like learning languages the long way, or they don't like magic, or probably reasons that haven't occurred to me."

Nod. "That makes sense, thank you. So what other places are there?"

"With humans who have souls? Well, there's the one with the soul animals I mentioned. You can't touch them - they won't make that difficult but you really really can't touch them, it hurts them, understood?"

"I don't expect animals that you refer to as souls to make people a better comparison than being made entirely out of things that have mass, which it also sounds like these people are, since the animals are evidently tangible."

"...okay, would you rather see some reductionist humans next, or a more cosmopolitan city, or Materians?"

"Let's see if the reductionist ones are even distinguishable."

"Natsuko's reductionist," Nelen mentions.

Hop!

"This is a nonmagical city on the same planet." It's Kinshasa, which has been taking pretty well to the multiverse but retains plenty of local color and a nice obvious timeline in the architecture between things that were put up by demon last week and things that are somebody's fishing hut they haven't wanted replaced yet.

"All diplomats are robots in disguise. - That's a joke and not literally true."

"I'm reductionist too, just not a human. Do you want to see magic robots after this? There's a planet where people can make them."

" - I don't think I know what you mean by 'magic robots' but I guess I'll learn if I see them."

"Some of them just look like robots but others look like animate sculptures, they're pretty neat."

Pop pop pop pop pop pop.

"This is Pineappolis - it has a real name but it's really long and it's the capital of the Pineapple Islands so people just call it Pineappolis."

There are indeed a lot of robots doing stuff here with no obvious electronics or means of propulsion or exhaust and some of them look like they were made of solid stone or wood or ceramic or glass or something before they up and moved like a cartoon.

...Okay, so if these people can't personally observe the engine they call it magic, good to know.

"I like these. Do they sell them or are they too magic for that?"

"Oh, they sell them but they're nontrivially expensive since demons can't just make them and have them run, a local person has to tap them to activate them. There's a factory that way if you want to see."

"Sounds interesting."

They can hop on the tour path for the factory! Some of the local robots are unloading chassis that look like themselves off a shipping container, which is once empty teleported out and replaced with a full one. The inert chassis go on a conveyor belt that splits them into several lanes, each of which has a person relaxedly kicking back with a hand in poking range of the progression of chassis: poke poke poke poke. Each one when poked straightens up and leaps off the conveyor belt to line up to be teleported out; when one is missed on the belt for whatever reason, a person who is also doing some kind of work on a computer catches it as it goes by their end of the production line.

Why should physical touch matter? It's not a question of imparting momentum. It doesn't look like there's a material being transferred although of course human hands are always producing and always shedding material. It seems more like causing them to have minds, or something akin to minds, but at home psychic phenomena don't involve physically touching things that aren't brains. It's more reminiscent of magnetism - but being reminiscent of it at a glance isn't really the important thing -

Really the important thing is to be sure if they're using words strangely or actually don't have any scientists on any of these planets. What would they have asked if they did have scientists? This is hard to guess when he is not, himself, a scientist.

"Does it always either work perfectly or leave them inert?"

"I think this part does. The design step can fail in more interesting ways."

"Interesting how?"

"I've never seen a buggy one, they don't ship those, but I'd imagine some of the same problems you can get with a computer program if you know anything about those."

Nod. "Does anything happen if they try poking something that isn't designed, like a tree or a grain of sand?"

"Those don't turn into golems or automata, like these, but they can remotely 'puppet' things with conventional moving parts, and also bits of light and shadow..." He looks around and spots a scheduling chart on the wall where all the people have colorful lights shaped like their names that look like they're being shone on the board, except from nowhere. "Like those. And they can make animals follow natural language commands."

"In what languages can they make animals follow commands? What's the minimum thing that makes it possible to make a golem or automaton? What counts as an animal and do the animals have a choice about it?"

"The animals follow commands language-independently and I haven't the foggiest how that works but could probably borrow one if you want to try it. I can look up the minimum viable automaton..." He does this; apparently you can make an automaton disk spin with a word on the disk and one on the surface it's spinning over that the axis is stuck in. "The animal has to be able to hear and not a person, some animals are too smart for it to work but the ones that aren't as I understand it don't have options besides doing what they're told - by whoever enchanted them and whoever they authorize, though, not random people."

"Have they tested that with monkeys, ravens, humans with partial anencephaly, robots - are there any plants or fungi that count as able to hear - do they actually have to be able to hear or just perceive the commands, does it not work with sign language - what if they can only hear part of a command - can you tell without seeing them obey a specific command whether they've been enchanted?"

"- it sounds like you might want to talk to a specialist in servantmaking magic? I don't know the answers to those or even where to find them online off the top of my head."

"I might. Maybe after we finish up with - hm, what was your goal in bringing up whether people make nuisances of themself when they're rich and have video games?"

"We were talking about prospects for widespread amnesty for pre-contact crime in Linver?"

"You talk like a diplomat. I've said this several times and it hasn't been a compliment any of them. I am not a judge. I do not work for the government. I do not sentence people to death. No one in my entire organization does that. If you want me as someone who is not a government employee but knows more than you about Linver to tell you what the government will do, I can tell you there are no prospects of any such amnesty. What is it about the idea that makes it appealing to you?"

"- I mean, if you don't want to talk to me, that's fine and I can drop you off at home, in fact my teammates are working on finding people to talk to in parallel and maybe one of them has turned up someone more suitable. But we like amnesty as of around the time of contact because it reflects changes in circumstances and commensurate changes in lifestyles and laws and the salience of many crimes that often come with that contact."

"There isn't - okay, to be completely honest, there are probably a handful of better options, but they're not going to be qualitatively different, just people who do what I do and remember slightly more recidivism statistics off the tops of their heads. You are certainly free to talk to the government if you want to. But I don't punish crimes, I prevent problems. There isn't anything I could possibly do that would constitute granting amnesty. I am a correct person to talk to about the reasons to expect people to cause fewer problems in the future. But it's not clear to me that that's even the fastest route to get you what you want, because you're probably picturing someone with some amount of power insisting that some people have to stay somewhere until they've suffered enough, like a national government, which you are not dealing with because it's - honestly, it'd be funny to get to spy on you trying to get anywhere with them - I'm just wondering if there's something you're waiting on before you stop by Blueberry Hill and let people know they can move in with you."

"Well, you did indicate people object to emigration. We'll be happy to take whoever currently lives in - Blueberry Hill - if that isn't going to cause a diplomatic incident but we'd really rather not have any of those."

"Anyone there is too dangerous or untrustworthy to live anywhere else and mostly they're welcome to leave if you'll take them but what exactly are your concerns about diplomatic incidents?"

"Ultimately we'd like Linver to join Vanda Nossëo or at least feel friendly to it."

"I doubt it will do the former. The latter might happen, insofar as a state can feel friendly, which arguably isn't possible at all."

"There can be - official stances, general tenor of public opinion, interest in various trade and tourism and so on, I don't mean I expect the state itself to manifest emotions."

"I expect we can make trade and tourism work. I can put money on that later when Mal and Natsuko are done. I expect you to have more problems if you piss off the Aurora or similar, and we're less concerned with keeping criminals around. There are a few things people can do so bad we'd want them marked before they go wander around nice neighborhoods full of people who don't deserve to not even know they have oathbreakers on their street. But people aren't kept waiting for that kind of thing."

"If you have exile as a sentence then even if you join Vanda Nossëo you don't have to let people in, just out, if that helps."

"So from my perspective I have told you four times in different ways that you can have what I understand you to want here, which is the safety of people we have historically not been able to live with peacefully, and every time you've responded by trying to diplomatically address an objection I don't have. I can offer them better odds soon, when I've figured out more precisely how much I trust you and how your statistics will relate to ours and what your statistics are, and probably I'll talk to someone with a similar job to mine in Vanda Nossëo, and that won't take a spectacularly long time but it won't be instant, and then they'll need to know they have options, which won't necessarily matter to them if they're broke and no one wants to lend to them, and then those that can pay can do that as fast as we can see them which is not infinitely fast. The homicide rate in the area between Blueberry Hill and Southshore averages more than one per day. The government is not going to agree to join Vanda Nossëo even if you could play nice with them, which you can't, you've already broken their laws, and the Aurora and similar organizations won't object to the people in that area, specifically, disappearing. Also, whether you actually do feel safe letting them move into your neighborhood is an input into what it'll cost them to come back eventually. Do you want to keep watching this robot factory or is there something else you'd like to be doing now."

"We're here in the robot factory for you, I'm happy to take you anywhere you like. I understand that you don't in your own person have all the objections I'm imagining, I'm trying to - use you as a proxy for mapping out possible diplomatic pathways. Can you - elaborate more on what the relevance of the odds you're offering and the finances of those you're offering them to is, if we can already make off with any willing emigrants in that area without upsetting the Aurora and cannot possibly make nice with the government?"

"Well, the difficulty and delay involved in their potential re-entry into broader society in Linver means they might otherwise spend months in the area with the highest murder rate in - I think it might be the entire world but definitely around Strell. Or that they might not successfully spend months there. I don't in my own person have all the objections you're imagining, but that's - uh - if you tell me that there's no problem with taking something from Vanda Nossëo, and you've misjudged, or have a disagreement with someone else who works for them, who gets in trouble for that?"

"Taking something from us? Taking what? I have a supervisor, if, say, Natsuko and I disagreed on how to interpret a policy or something, but I'm not sure what you're thinking."

"So, part of my job is knowing what behavior the Aurora objects to. If I in my professional capacity acting freely and without being subject to deception represent to you that you can start a business in our territory, or facilitate emigration, or change the Aurora's carpets out for handmade rugs with cartoon elephants, what do you think happens to you if you do that and then Mal says, 'hey, wait, Verret, actually you missed the meeting where we all agreed we hate elephant rugs'?"

"To me? Nothing - well, I guess I might streamline the nothing somewhat by telling my supe under lie-detection that you told me this but basically nothing."

"Do you think that's just because you think they wouldn't give you up if the Aurora wanted to see you bleed?"

"I... keep having the impression that when you talk you have pretty specific ranges of scenarios in mind that have not been communicated to me and this is making it hard for me to follow what information you're trying to extract. If I made an innocent mistake and this affected my personal or Vanda Nossëo's reception with the Aurora then, yeah, no, Vanda Nossëo would not hand me over for ritual bleeding or a beatdown or whatever it is you're alluding to. Though they might let you have Cassiel if she volunteered, come to think? If this is just an elaborate way of saying Cassiel needs to handle all the rug-replacements you're about to request then I'm... still pretty confused but at least in a more specific way."

"...Okay, I meant the opposite of that, but I also wanted to check if you had a specific expectation for what might happen. The reason I don't have a specific scenario in mind for what the Aurora might do to you is that they would absolutely not do anything to you - that's not true, they would try to communicate to you, in words, that I was wrong to say whatever I said. It's, uh, I have been assuming and putting a lot of trust in the idea that if you represent to me that Vanda Nossëo is okay with some behavior, I won't get in any trouble for it, and if that's not true then I want to go home right now."

"Vanda Nossëo is not going to get you in trouble for believing me about things to do with Vanda Nossëo unless something really and obviously bizarre comes up, like me suddenly having a psychotic break that the precognitives don't catch and telling you that Vanda Nossëo wants you to murder people and you not even, like, checking with one of my teammates about that before going ahead, which would probably at least get you tried. I have an eidetic memory and I'm pretty well read up on policy, I'm a reasonable source on that kind of thing."

"Having no expectation that I share your instincts for what would be obviously bizarre and no reasonable source of common sense against which to compare things you say about worlds where people make magic robots under moons that are flowers, I don't find that assurance satisfactory and I'd like to continue this conversation in Linver."

Pops ensue and they are back in the Aurora.

"How about we go for a walk," Verret suggests since his office has been commandeered by the people working out currency issues.

"Him or me or both?" Natsuko asks.

"Both if you want, maybe catching you up will straighten something out."

"Alrighty." Natsuko will fall into step with them.

"So Nelen tells me he's concerned about thieves and violent people and I am unsure if he wants me to do something about that."

"- concerned about -" begins Natsuko.

"I am concerned for their welfare," clarifies Nelen.

"Oh, well, yeah, aren't we all. I don't think you're personally responsible, just, you're doing the native guide thing at this moment and you'd know what'd try to get between us and their welfare better than we would."

"I'm not sure 'native guide' is the most precise - aha. Are you by chance just talking to me because someone pointed you in my direction without an explanation and I have useful information and you haven't yet figured out which building is the capitol."

"We are definitely talking to you for that reason except one of our teammates might know by now which building is the capitol, but if they have, they did not suggest that we come join them there," says Natsuko.

"Didn't you say the government wouldn't work with us anyway because we've already broken laws?" asks Nelen.

"Well, you don't have to tell them, and I assume some of your team haven't yet. I can just tell you I'm not a randomly selected person whose sole value to you is in educating you before you talk to some diplomat but if you have no evidence about Linver beyond what I've said then it'd be unreasonable to expect you to believe that, so how about you check if your teammates have gotten through to the vicar or their staff and if not I'll show you to the place so you can metaphorically beat your head against a wall for a while."

Nelen shrugs and checks the team chat for updates.

Meanwhile in the past,

It's not actually easy to miss the capitol. It's the huge building with the marble statues out front and the sign saying OFFICE OF THE VICAR OF LYRIAL IMPERATOR.

Well, that looks pretty promising. Tarwë assigns himself since Zanro is engaged in conversation with a seven-year-old and Cassiel is more attention-getting than he is. In he goes, looking for more helpful signage.

There is helpful signage. Would he like to go this way to the tax office or that way to request access to public records or that way to acquire a form to fill out or that way to talk to the police or that way to attend a public meeting except there aren't any of those scheduled for today or that way to talk to one of the vicar's secretaries?

The last thing sounds most relevant!

The secretary who isn't currently on the phone or currently looking through a drawer for something smiles. "Forgot your mask, hon?" she asks, offering a box of disposable surgical masks.

"- I'm sorry, I wasn't aware it was customary. Will this do?" he asks, pulling a sash off from his belt. The surgical masks are not really pretty enough.

"Sure, sure. It's mandatory in the capitol building. What can I help you with?"

He ties the scarf around his face. "I'm a representative from a multidimensional confederation of peoples attempting to initiate contact with the peoples in this system."

"Oh, are we doing a training exercise about that? Um, I mean, welcome to Linver, it looks like your aster tongue let us skip the entire prime numbers step. What do we need to know about your needs to be able to ensure your comfort?"

"- I came equipped to see to my own comfort. Aster tongue, does that mean translation magic?"

"It's from Black Rosette. Um, next, while you're here, you should know that most artificial objects are considered private property and should not be damaged or moved without permission, that all parts of all humans involuntarily secrete lipid mixtures known to sometimes cause harm to other life-forms, and that you should not create new openings in the outer layers of the human body." She says this like she's memorized it and is expecting to be graded on her recitation.

"Thank you. I appreciate that you're trying to be clear, but is there a version of this which assumes I have met and worked with humans in the past?"

"Uh, well, not a version of the first contact checklist, but what else can I do for you?"

"I'm trying to find who I should talk to about establishing relations between Vanda Nossëo, which I represent, and your people here."

"Um, I think I'm not supposed to give you an appointment with the vicar just for fun, sorry, I can tell you worked really hard on your costume and it's really amazing."

"Thank you. Is there a demonstration that would get me an appointment?"

Blink blink. "Of... you being an alien? Sure, probably, I guess it depends on your species, like, one of the species from Black Rosette has frog tongues and one of them can shed all their hair and then grow it back in five seconds and one of them has six pairs of wings, you got anything like that?"

"I'm an Elf, and this is what I really look like, and we have extremely sensitive scalps so I'm not going to shed my hair, but I do have a colleague with one pair of wings, should I call her over?"

"...Sure, but only if she doesn't mind that I'm going to try to take her costume off."

"I'll warn her."

Cassiel disengages from the crowd and sweeps in, creating a mask out of thin air as she does and affixing it to her face, and presents a wing for the receptionist to pull on.

Well, she's not going to just pull, seems more informative to go around behind and find the joints, otherwise it's probably just superglue.

Nope there are wings and feathers growing out of this person's skin.

"Can you move your wing a little?" She wants to see if the underlying muscles seem to move right.

Flap.

"I, uh, I will arrange an appointment for you, also your wings are really cool."

"Thanks!" says Cassiel. "Hey, question, what are the masks for?"

"They make it less likely that people will make each other sick. In other countries they wear them more but here you only have to in places like this."

"Oh, cool. I can't get sick but I guess you can't believe me yet."

"Mhm," she says vaguely, and goes back to her desk to type something, and a little later she lets them know the vicar will see them shortly.

"Thank you," says Tarwë.

The vicar will see them in a spacious office with a large desk and two armed guards currently visible.

"Welcome to Linver," says the vicar, "and welcome to the planet Tey."

"Thank you," says Tarwë. "We're envoys from Vanda Nossëo, a many-universe and many-planet association of shared values of free trade, free migration, and universal sapient flourishing. Our team was assigned to this country and we would like to learn more about it and establish a presence here."

"The people of Tey also care deeply about universal sapient flourishing. All creatures that speak or write are like cousins to humanity. We have produced an introduction to our planet for aliens and would be delighted to provide you with a copy."

"Thank you. Humans are, for unclear reasons, common in many universes, so we're familiar with the species."

"I used to be a human," Cassiel volunteers.

"But the specificities of your planet will be new to us."

"I can show you how to borrow the copy from the library here - or we can get another if it's out right now. The third volume covers things I wouldn't expect to be the same for humans from another world."

"Thank you very much."

He can show them to the same library as they keep all the other public records in. The three-volume series is conveniently a published work titled Introduction to Tey for Aliens but a vast quantity of it is taken up by turning an illustration of a periodic table of the elements slowly and painstakingly into an entire dictionary and then describing humans, so a framling with translation magic could certainly be forgiven for writing it off. But the third volume is a discussion of religions and cultural mores that tries to assume genuinely zero shared context other than chemistry, physics, and the facts about humans transmitted in volume two.

Tarwë will set about reading it. If there's nothing else to do here Cassiel will go back out to where Zanro's waiting and resume making swag for passersby.

There isn't anything else to do here unless she wants to talk with the vicar or check out some public records.

The book explains that Tey has multiple cultures (a culture is a collection of habits and technologies, such as language and stories, shared among a group of people), and that drawing sharp dividing lines between them is difficult but the administrative divisions known as countries are useful, as are some broad geographical regions. Many human cultures have concepts such as friendship, contracts, laws, commerce, art, and sports.

Humans sometimes like telling stories for reasons besides how true they are. There are complicated cultural rules about when this is okay. Some stories that might be true or might not be true, but that humans really, really, really strongly care about, are included in the book, because some humans think that understanding humans must involve understanding these stories.

In a geographic region called Strell, they tell probably-mostly-true stories about a historical figure known as Lyrial Imperator. "Imperator" refers to Lyrial's administrative role and "Lyrial" is a personal name. Strell at a certain time about two thousand years before the writing of this book was divided among many countries, some of which had just one dense collection of human habitations and some surrounding land being used for food production, and the people in them frequently caused each other injuries. Laws and customs permitted some humans to injure other humans, who were not allowed to injure the humans who were allowed to injure them. Most humans were allowed to be injured by some humans and allowed to injure some humans, but it wasn't cyclic, so there were some who were allowed to injure any humans in their country and some who were not allowed to injure any humans. Often, decisions were not made predictably and according to rules more stable than "what this specific human decides shall be done". Lyrial Imperator, through a combination of persuasion and coercion, changed all of these things. The Imperator's memory is something known as "sacred" the writer hopes someone else will manage to define in the third draft. The Imperator introduced the concept of "rights" which are things that humans try to make sure other humans have (and are interested in extending the idea to aliens, though what's good for humans might not be good for aliens, so maybe aliens should have different rights). The Imperator's original list was a right not to be forcibly caused to totally stop engaging in metabolic activity other than after a specified-in-advance human or group of humans concluded that they had probably done something against a law or if they were trying to forcibly cause some other human or humans to totally stop engaging in metabolic activity; a right not to have strongly dispreferred sensations inflicted on them; a right not to be construed as having entered into a specific type of contract called a "marriage" without having actually chosen to enter into it; and a right not to have certain (unspecified in the book) body alterations done. People have since thought about other things that might make good rights and have some more recent ideas.

And then the next section is about the myths from some different area that isn't where they're trying to do diplomacy right now.

And then the last section explains the types of administrative structures countries on Tey use (there are some parliaments, a few monarchies, some executive-and-legislative with separate court systems, some executive-and-judicial with separate legislatures, a few weirder things), though Linver isn't any of the handful of specific examples given for any of them, and attempts to give the beginnings of a sense of what kinds of things humans on Tey do (farm, arrange fibers into fabric to drape over humans, fix it when humans experience pain and lethargy due to overgrowth of microorganisms, produce rhythmic noises that other humans find pleasant, engage in this sport which seems to be a cross between golf and backgammon and catch...), and mentions other works that are considered culturally influential (some fiction, some nonfiction about ethics, some nonfiction about history, the not-edited-for-aliens versions of the myths mentioned earlier...).

Wow, if this is the sort of thing these folks thought aliens might find useful when they have aliens in their star system they have already met the teams on that other planet must be having a time.

He returns to the receptionist when he's skimmed through the book and asks for a meeting with the vicar.

He can have one.

"Hello, vicar. I'm Tarwë and I'm a representative of Vanda Nossëo, an interdimensional organization consisting of many states and peoples aimed at universal sapient flourishing."

"So I hear. That sounds like a noble goal."

"I think so. My team has arrived in Linver - simultaneous with other teams in other places in the star system - to see what the best route might be to opening relations, trade, and possible eventual membership."

"Provided all applicable laws are followed, Linver welcomes foreign trade. Our laws are available for the public to read at the library you just visited."

"Are there many you think likely to be relevant for this situation?"

"It depends on what sort of trade you're interested in establishing."

"With lower-technology and especially lower-literacy places we often establish shops where we collect and record cultural tidbits - personal anecdotes, songs, fables - in exchange for imported goods, but places more like this there's no single strategy; wealthier cultures vary much more in what they care to buy and sell."

"You can't truly come to understand the needs and desires of a people just by talking to one person."

"Of course not. I'm here for now, but I have four teammates, and we can all talk to many people."

"Of course I support the development and sale of products that improve people's lives, help people grow wiser and more learned, and make people healthier, and I'm against products that are dangerous or illegal or harm the environment. But personally, I'm fond of shoes that light up."

"We do have those. ...should I just go read the legal code before attempting to have any less generic discussion?"

"I would encourage you to do that or have someone in your organization do that if you're going to be doing business here. My guess is that volumes one and three contain everything immediately relevant to you, but volume one should make it clear what else you might need to know. But I also don't know that we would be having a less generic discussion right now if you had read all of it."

"I'll let my teammates know - they'll actually be able to get a copy without going through the library -" He looks at his computer, then puts it back in his pocket. "The last person I talked to wanted verification that we were... real, would that be of interest to you?"

"Well, yes."

"I don't have a good sense of what would be convincing to you. I know several magic songs that can do things like warm up the room, detect lies, enable me to walk on water... or I can call someone in with more impressive abilities."

"If you can walk on one of the fountains outside it'd be evidence."

"All right." He gets up and starts singing the song so it'll be in effect by the time he gets there.

They can follow and observe and not interrupt the nice singing.

And he steps onto the water in the fountain and paces around it, singing the entire time.

The vicar watches impassively but one of the visible security people is visibly impressed. Even if it's fake it's all very well faked.

When he's gone around three times he steps off and concludes the song.

"You sing very well," says the vicar.

"Thank you. It's a species trait, I'm not particularly accomplished at it for an Elf."

"Supposing that's true, what are you hoping to accomplish here today?"