She nods.

Nod.

"Thank you for your time," Melda tells the man, and off they go.

The "city center" is a bunch of larpers hanging around. Some of them are pointedly ignoring each other! A group of three is shouting down a single one who is trying to give a speech whenever he opens his mouth! One over there is doing the "I'm not touching you" dance with another! The colors are as described.

These are, of course, a simulation of the circumstances that they are going to encounter when they enter the world, of far lesser scale. These people are actors, this is not a crisis, this is not about to brew over into war, and if they waste any more time than is necessary that is more seconds that somewhere truly desperate is going to suffer without float healing.

<I speculate it to be functionally democratic,> she says as they walk, <since these newly contacted people appear to be humans and the statistical supermajority of non-democratic human states in Vanda Nosseo records ban open dissidence.> Also Amentan states, but there's no need to be rude about how her species is one of the good ones.

Valerian shrugs uncomfortably. "I guess that's what we have to go on." Since this simulation is stripped of nearly everything they'd normally use to infer anything about a society. There are still clothes and words and body language and that'll have to do. He'd add if their government is still functioning but that seems rude to speculate out loud about in front of people.

Probably Melda will decide who to talk to and probably if for some reason she doesn't they'll draw a lot of attention anyway, but he's still assessing who it might be a good idea to say hello to anyway.

Xinai is trying to calculate odds of getting good results out of the three people shouting down the one. Probably not. Anyone look... mature?

One of the ones doing the pointed ignoring is just spinning and determinedly not looking at the argument.

Eh, that'll do. <Her?>

(What color clothing is the spinning one wearing?)

(Rust-brown!)

She nods at Xinai's question and starts to walk over.

The determined ignoring extends to Havvi till she gets quite close, and then she notices the shoes and looks up. "Ma'am? ...Sir?"

Human genders are really weird a fascinating cultural phenomenon that should be handled respectfully. 

She smiles. "Ma'am is fine. We are envoys from a faraway civilization called Vanda Nosseo. We were hoping to better understand the conflict between the Yes-men and the Nay-sayers, and to learn more about the war."

"Well, the Yes-men think we should involve ourselves and the Nay-sayers reckon we should get less involved even if that's pretty hard to do."

"What is the war about?"

"What are wars ever about? They're fighting over - territory and resources, respect and - do you not have wars wherever you're from?"

<Yes, but the one I was part of was an attempt to stop an evil clique of slug monsters from enslaving the known universe, so we try not to assume too much about what other places are like from our own experience.>

"Slug monsters! Yuck!"

<Yes, my people had that reaction. Most of the species proved quite reasonable once their leadership was removed, though, and once the war was decided> it was decided, it was not over, <Vanda Nosseo arrived and then they could provide them solutions to their problems that did not involve slavery. But you understand why I do not know what your war looks like. Is it between two groups of your species?>

"Oh, well, that's complicated and I don't expect it'd be very good for my marriage to go on about it much."

... Anyone who has pair-bonded have comments on this? Xinai is unmarried and intends to stay that way for the foreseeable future. The very foreseeable future.

(If nobody does she'll try to turn a listening ear to the speaker, though.)

Some human societies consider coparenting with your best friend while both of you sleep with other people to be essentially the same sort of thing as a regular marriage, but others take offense at the suggestion that these are at all equivalent, and she's not really sure it's particularly relevant to this situation anyway.

"I'm sorry we don't know much and don't know who to ask. For what it's worth we're interested in hearing things everyone knows, or hearing about what different people have to say; we're not just interested in hearing something - detailed and definitely accurate that someone from around here would think of as insightful?"

"Oh, honey, even things everybody knows aren't things everybody says."