"What sorts of wish aren't safe?"

   "Wishing to hurt enemies or rivals, probably?"

      "What sort of things do people wish for, when they already have resurrection and safety and so on?"

         "I'd wish for Smart Guy to die."

   "See, if Smart Guy also has magic and technology and people who'll resurrect him that's not safe."

"Well, not everyone in that world is in Vanda Nossëo."

      "They're all in a place that's had technology as long as Vanda Nossëo, 'though."

   "Can Vanda Nossëo make someone fall in love with me? If they can't, I think I'd wish for Traps to fall in love with me."

         "Maybe we can wish to keep evolving outside this world."

"...some kinds of wish aren't safe because they might break the device that grants the wishes," says Nelen, slightly bemused. "Or because they'd hurt someone else, like if it would kill someone or mind-control them into falling in love with you. People wish for magical powers for themselves and other people, often they can get a bunch all together in a batch; they wish to make new planets good to live on; wish magic is also part of how resurrection works, that's a power you need a wish to get."

"Oh, that makes sense."

The boy who asked about making Traps fall in love with him looks kind of affronted but doesn't say anything in reply. Everyone else seems to find the explanation satisfactory.

"You're not very likely to get other visitors. There are two other big organizations that we're friendly with, but one is mostly just planets in this world," Warp lights up, "which has a whole lot of them, and the other is this neighborhood," Wish lights up, "with the wishes, because they rely on those for a lot of things, while we only do things with wishes from their empress that we can't readily do otherwise."

"Empress" being the word for the person who can grant wishes, presumably.

Eventually most of the band will go to bed, but a couple of teenagers will stay up all night asking the aliens more questions about magic and advanced technology and the multiverse; how many bands are there in all these organizations? How many bands have been invited but turned them down? How does Vanda Nosseo make decisions? Are there any factions Vanda Nosseo hasn't managed to make peace with? What are some of Vanda Nosseo's cities like? How long have they had immortality, and how far back have their resurrections gotten? Are the envoys all from the same band, or from different ones? Do they have ways to make less-evolved people as smart as more-evolved ones, it would be really useful if they could explain complicated stuff to adults? How does the turning-into-animals technology work, they know it doesn't work *here* but they're still curious? What are some any especially cool inventions that haven't come up yet?

They can have an introductory math lesson so they can understand the population numbers, and the number of member states and declined member states. Vanda Nossëo as a federal entity has a lot of agencies with some appointed and some elected positions; steering for the org as a whole is substantially done by members of this one template of person who appears over and over again across many worlds, but this world doesn't have one. Vanda Nossëo is not officially at war with anyone but there are plenty of people who don't like them and may or may not consider themselves at war even without Vanda Nossëo's acknowledgment or participation. Here are pictures of some cities from many different cultures! Some species are naturally immortal, but the shareable versions are mostly years to decades old. Resurrections don't have a specific chronological line where they reach so far and no farther, because usually people want their loved ones but some people want interesting historical figures. (Who then may want their loved ones.) The envoys are all from different worlds. There is intelligence-enhancing magic but it is expensive. There's these boxes you touch and they connect you in thus and such a way to a sub-world that can generate alternate forms based on samples from animals you touch. From that same world there's invisible forcefields that only keep out certain species, and there are trains, and there are flying machines, and there are golems, and there is the Internet!

That's so many people! It makes sense given how much area they operate over, but it's still pretty amazing.

Having one specific (template of) person in charge: not a good sign, these kids think bands are better to live in when they're not doing that. But at least it sounds like it's the sort of one-person-being-in-charge where they're okay with other people disagreeing with and making their own choices, so it's probably not too bad in that regard.

Lucky natural immortals! How long have the oldest ones of those who talk about history been around?

Oh no! They suppose it makes sense that once you have enough generations more dead people than living people only some of them are interesting enough to properly be remembered, but that's so sad, they're really glad that's not going to happen to their family. They wonder which people here would make that bar.

Oh well. Hopefully one day they'll be able to afford the intelligence-enhancing magic.

Turns out they're getting too tired to properly understand how Z-space tech works. Hopefully the envoys will be okay with explaining again later. One girl will still manage to produce a not-very-coherent question about why they don't have the gene-acquiring work differently that's surprisingly close to describing how the latest cutting-edge Escafil devices work.

Those technologies are indeed cool. This band already have the hang of storing information on objects (They will draw some diagrams to demonstrate. Not related diagrams, the contents of the diagrams isn't what they're demonstrating here), but being able to store it more densely and transmit it between objects is interesting. For density probably you'd want to make a really thin, flat material and fold it a lot? They probably won't be able to figure out details until they're better rested.

There are beings who are tens of thousands of years old but Nelen isn't sure what they mean by 'talk about history'; if you do talk to one they'll tell you about creating their planet and stuff though. There are weirder beings that have been around for billions but they definitely don't talk about history.

The idea is that as you resurrect well-remembered people, those people, too, will remember people, and gradually everybody will filter in. There are projects that work to figure out enough about history that they will not miss people just because they died young and unremarked or because they weren't well liked at the time, but those people aren't as much of a priority as people who somebody misses through their legacy or a personal connection.

Natsuko steps in to talk more about Escafil devices, since she's from Cube, but isn't an expert on them, since she's a wizard.

Sounds like it's time to break for the night. Is it okay if the envoys put up a building over there and hang out in it?

Yeah okay, they can break for the night and the envoys can put up a building.

(before they go to bed the teenagers will wake someone else up to keep watch)

The building goes up by magic. Natsuko does it log cabin style - it's not something they're doing around here but it should be legible - and the envoys hang out in their building, though sometimes some of them disappear briefly.

In the morning, the band will breakfast on some of the fruit and vegetables they gathered the day before, then most of them will head out foraging. They'll especially look for peas and sorghum since those are supposed to be good for crop rotation.

One of the kids who stayed up last night, named "Paint", will stay behind to start with since 1) she's kind of tired now, 2) she wants to ask the envoys more about technology now that she's rested, 3) she thinks she's on to something with the "thin sheets for writing on" idea and wants to see if she can get it working.

...is it paper she wants? Cassiel can make her some paper.

That looks right, but she wants to figure out how to make it herself.  Unless she's on totally the wrong track thinking this is how to store information densely, she's not actually sure this will work and Cassiel would probably know better than she does.

"It's not how computers work, but it's still cool and a lot of books and things still work like that. Do you want me to tell you what paper's made of?"

"Yes please!  I was thinking maybe bark molded flat somehow, or wood or clay cut really thin, or animal skin somehow made to not rot?  But that paper doesn't really look like any of those.  And what are books?"

"Books are lots of paper all stuck together on one side, so you can turn one page over and see the next one. Paper can be made of a bunch of different things but it's not cut out, it's dried out from a pulp. People have used various plants for it to get different kinds."

"Thank you!"

Paint will set about attempting to beat various plant materials into pulp to see if they dry into paper.

Looks like she's having fun.

Meanwhile, other envoy teams have encountered:

- Similar accounts about how evolution works here. Some bands have a lower portion Homo sapiens like members than Paint and Star's one, and a couple have only fairly Homo sapiens like members because they won't admit anyone else.

- Some variety in social structure; nothing very complicated, but a lot of bands are more hierarchical than Paint and Star's one, generally with highly-evolved young adults or older teenagers at the top. Several have formalized alliances with one or two neighboring bands. A couple of the more hierarchical ones have formal social divisions and roles because the people in charge felt like inventing them.

- A surprising amount of technology for how new everything is and how little infrastructure anyone has. A lot of the coastal bands have simple dugout canoes. Many bands have bows and arrows. Some bands have fired ceramics or small amounts of smelted copper. The aurochs-followers have indeed bred the youngest generations of aurochs into domesticated cattle, and have also invented simple wheeled ox-carts for them to draw.

Wow. This world is weird. Cool, but weird.

Eventually, rainclouds will start to gather and the foragers will hurry back to their shelters, mostly with less than a full meal worth of food.

Do they want umbrellas?

Umbrellas are great! How are they made?

Well, Cassiel makes them by magic but they can look up a How It's Made video if they want to know about the industrial process.

Wow this is some really impressive engineering! It looks like probably most of this could be done more straightforwardly by hand if you didn't need to make so many umbrellas, why do these people need so many umbrellas?