"She doesn't want long-term residents?"

"She's fine with long-term residents who rent rooms or earn them through working for her. She objects to long-term constant presence in the main dining area due to this making it hard for her to arrange that mutually incompatible groups be able to enjoy the main dining area, and she strenuously objects to long-term monopolization of the door. …the delegation's probably had her temporal nature explained to them but you haven't. Time doesn't flow consistently for different non-communicating groups in Bar, if you leave the main bar area for a few minutes and head back she can probably fit in a decade of unrelated-to-you visitors if she wants. This usually doesn't get too problematic because people can just arrange to meet up with each other after a certain subjective duration for either of them, and she's a nice person."

"Huh. We're two for two on extremely powerful inhuman entities being nice. Weird."

"You've met two, I've met more and a lot of the ones I've met are terrible. I wouldn't rely on the trend generalizing if I were you."

"That is less weird. Worse, but less weird."

"Yes, I'd agree on both those points."

"What's terrible about them?"

"Omnicidality. Torture as in hurting people because you want to threaten them or such, not as in finding whoever's available to supply pain as a component. Promoting diseases because they like it when people have diseases. That sort of thing."

"...That's weird again. Those are - none of those are 'they don't really care if humans have happy lives, they just want to arrange golden ratio spirals of rocks and destroy farmland to do it.'"

"I think powerful inhuman entities with preferences totally unrelated to people are both unlikely to be produced by my world and likely to just leave it if they’re there. Also I don’t know of human-specific deities and I’m not a human, if you want you can, say, touch my head and notice that it has leaflike structures.”

He does this. Ooh, leaflike structures, very cool. "I like your leaf hair. I haven't run into a word that includes all humans and includes nonmagical people with hands and language and doesn't include non-people animals or magical people. I am really intrigued by the idea that you know how to make powerful inhuman entities, though."

"I like my head too. At home to talk about people who are not Milliways or your world's magic or such I'd probably say 'mortals', but I managed to patch my personal senescence problem and thus don't want to define myself by it, and I don't really know why that word implies 'person' even though I think it does. I'm not sure the thing you want to talk about is actually a natural category, I'm magically created and I have some innate magic like turning into a non-humanoid plant, but I have language and use hands and we seem fairly cognitively similar. I have hypotheses on how to make powerful inhuman entities of a specific type, but I haven't tested them, they'd be risky if I'm even slightly wrong and take a lot of input of resources I don't have. Unless you count 'what if there was a big strong animal and someone made it intelligent' as making a powerful inhuman entity, in which case I just straightforwardly know how to do that."

"I wasn't counting that but separately I've never met a big strong animal before and now I want to - anyway, but you have your own innate magic and hands and you can talk, that's amazing."

"No large animals in your world, or just no opportunities for you? Either way, that's unfortunate. I could shapeshift into a large animal at some point – that's not innate power, that's from a source I work with, but it's not particularly costly to me – if that'd help with anything. Also, do you want speculation about how humanlike people including humans and non-humanlike powerful entities co-evolved in my world? Because it sounds like that's where this conversation is going."

"No big animals, we try not to make things too crowded, the world's only thirty miles across. I would appreciate either or both of speculation about that or the opportunity to pet a large animal."

"Thirty miles is tiny, that's smaller than some demiplanes, though probably yours isn't dominated by a featureless desert. Speculation first, this language doesn't work amazingly with paws or such."

"So, when life in Suaal, including very simple life, does or experiences things, it produces 'quintessence', which is an intangible substance that contains meaning. So if an animalcule holds onto some chemicals it finds for future consumption instead of immediately expending them on an energetic task, that might create a tiny bit of quintessence of 'preparation' or such. More complex life and particularly more cognition-prone life produce much more, it's actually pretty hard to detect contributions like that and these days animalcules are of course part of a broader ecosystem. But maybe they historically weren't. Anyway, the thing with quintessence is that it likes to clump together and have more of itself, and it can act towards that. So maybe you end up with some tiny spirit of holding onto resources, or such, and it goes 'hmm, I will help life hold onto resources better', and then the life is stronger and does more things and has more experiences and such, and this produces more quintessence, et cetera. And if you keep running that for a while maybe that's how you get humanlike people and gods of humanlike things, like laws and slavery and agriculture and friendship."

"So what you really need is a coordinated project to all be extremely nice to each other and not drive each other mad and achieve cool things, which I suppose you would definitely never have thought of doing otherwise since that has no other upsides whatsoever."

"Basically, yes. Is there a convention for semantically meaningful sighing in tactile sign? Anyway, my actual plan here is to hang around accumulating resources and then eventually fight all the entities in that class who I don't like, effectively putting the remaining entities in charge."

There is such a convention and he can explain it and also explain the "lol" gesture he made at the end of that last sentence.

"Are you going to want to find out if you can make some kind of deal with ours?"

"I mostly want to see if Bar can do any type of communication at all, so it seems premature to think about deals."

"I guess, but... if you only start thinking about what you want to say after I've brought some of it here, I'll be hanging around with it the entire time, and I'd like to minimize the amount of time I spend doing that."

"Ah, sense. I approximately want to communicate 'Have you considered not being intrinsically hazardous, then people would interact with you more, Bar probably will lend you as many books about not being a hazard as you want' but that's not really a deal with me except in that it's towards my values. I don't really know what sort of things it offers or could offer, generally."

"It would surprise me if it was doing that on purpose. I know it can do things including but not limited to conjuring things out of nothing, for values of 'things' that include space as well as mass."

"Huh. If there's a non-ongoingly-magical object I need and have information to specify I can buy it from Bar. I'd appreciate a larger space-warping bag than I have, but those might be more complicated than other ways of creating space and I'm not sure your magic would be up to it. Mostly if the magic concludes I've done it any favors or wants any trade with me it might well be simplest for it to pay Bar – your delegation will probably be told about payment details – and ask Bar to give me some credit with her."

"Huh, I guess that makes sense. Are there other things you want, in general, that I might not think of to mention?"