Okay, she will go back to the reception desk person after looking for a place to toss her empty hot chocolate cup.

There’s a receptacle for that and the person will be right with her after handing some papers to another new arrival.

She can wait patiently, yeah.

The person waves her over.

"Hi. I've looked through the books and I'm confused about why the Bastion folks live underground to avoid, what, wear and tear on the meadows? Is there something special about the meadows? I also would like to know what my residence decisions do to influence the odds I'll get magic, I want magic."

"Yeah, they say it's because the meadows are a planar treasure that's been famous since the bronze age. I think probably it has something to do with the big stable natural caves under there and the fact that they only get new arrivals aboveground. I don't think it'll matter where you live on the scale of, like, which world, just don't immediately disappear into a jungle with no way to contact you."

"Shan't. What do the partisans for New Jerusalem and the Bastion tend to say when talking up their planes?"

"That they're safe places full of decent people where you don't have to be constantly looking over your shoulder. The Bastion has the longest history of organized fighting on behalf of human interests and the biggest human society anywhere ever. New Jerusalem is safer from demonic incursions than anywhere else and if you ever want to adopt a child it'll be slightly easier to do it there and they're the only ones currently providing services to people who've been to Hell and came back too wrecked to be part of society. Which is kind of unfair, they're the ones hosting them but we help."

"What... happens, when demons incur."

"Depends. Kidnappings. Impersonating random people who just got hit by vans and waiting till they're in position to sabotage infrastructure. Spying. Mostly they don't, these days."

"I guess that explains why the background check, you guys pretty good at that?"

"I think so and I figure if they were so good at it that we wouldn't notice a bunch of them slipping past us then we wouldn't be getting into arguments about exactly how heavenly this place is."

"I'm not sure how that follows, but okay. The humanitarian projects you mentioned, what form do those take?"

"Well, there's some hells where they don't even want people to stay and be tortured, so rescue missions aren't really diplomatically complicated; we do some and so does New Jerusalem. There's one that the Bastion is slowly turning into a nice place - it's easy to get there from the Bastion and hard to get there from here, we're not helping. New Jerusalem keeps pissing off the lava assholes by stealing their slaves whenever they try to send them to Earth but, uh, we're not as hard for demons to get to and it's harder to reach Earth from here. Mind, we can't actually stop people with a ton of magic and no sense of self-preservation, but if you want to do that you should move to New Jerusalem."

"I think of those I most like the sound of turning a hell into a nice place, can you tell me more about that?"

"Well, it’s not a very bad one. There’s a dragon that eats people but that’s all, they come back after. They just don’t... have stuff? Before people started sending things they just... existed, in these barren caves, in between being eaten. I think there’s a longer-term project to send some people who are into that once it’s a nicer place aside from the dragon but right now it kind of sucks."

"Yeah, that sounds like they need help with establishing anti-dragon defenses and having, like, food and stuff like that, so that they can be one of the nicer places and maybe help out other people later?"

"Yeah. I’m not sure it’d benefit from one more person who doesn’t even have magic working on it but I wouldn’t know."

"Does the Bastion have other humanitarian projects? You did mention it as a standout vantage point for them."

"Staging ground for New Jerusalem to race demons for new arrivals to a place they emptied out a while ago. Other than that, just normal things - uh, different things are normal here - expanding internet access and research into making body alterations cheaper, seeking out and adopting dead infants but that's actually easier from New Jerusalem, there are people trying to help families separated by death find each other but they do try to work in as many places as possible, the Bastion has the largest public library known to man but really at some point it doesn't especially matter if you have the largest library or ten libraries a tenth that size."

"What is there for humanitarians to do here in the Republic? Also what's a good way to get a summary of the politics, that seems maybe important."

"Honestly, a lot of the same sort of thing. Helping with the staging for rescue missions. Around here feeding the poor is in the domain of private charity. There's a charity that offers everyone the chance to learn to read and a charity that just tries to grant people's weirdest and least fulfillable wishes. And the organizations that deal with people too screwed up to be part of society take donations - of, like, money, so they can pay staff."

"And the politics summary? If it's a republic that matters a little more than if Jesus is just being the monarch."

"Welllllll... what summaries are good and what summaries are hopelessly biased partisan garbage sort of depends on who you ask, but I can try. There are fifteen major parties in Parliament and I can only sort of remember their taglines - so there's the Liberal Party that's big on extending the set of contracts you can legally make, the New Day Party that's hawkish on demons and supports intervening on Earth, the Peace and Freedom Party that says they're about 'safeguarding the ability of the people to access the fundamental features of a joyful life', the Conservatives, the Neo-Anti-Counter-Reformists, the Islamic People's Party, the Socialist Party who want 'public control of the means of production', the People's Socialist Party who also want that and don't trust the other socialists to get it, the Inspirationists who support 'the final merger of all ways of knowing and the radical restructuring of politics in light of Oneness', the Labor Party, the Anti-Labor Party, and that's eleven and I can't remember - uh, the Arian Heritage Party which has a really unfortunate name collision in English, I mean the disciples of Arius and their cultural legacy - and the Purity and Uprightness Party and... yeah, I can't remember."

"And who's winning lately - or whatever it is in a parliamentary system, I didn't take a lot of foreign government relevant classes."