"We have studied our biology and seem to have evolved from  tree-dwelling sap-drinkers. It's believed that originally blood was just  a nutritional supplement for increasing iron and protein consumption,  but our metabolisms gradually became more and more specialised for  handling blood as our diets shifted. Today, we can can only drink tree  sap that has gone through tons of processing to be more blood-like.  That's where the first synthetics came from. I must warn you, I could be  quite mistaken about any of this. Biology isn't my forte."

"Huh. It's weird that we'd have such different origins and be so similar, aside form that one thing. Like, you're more like us than Elves or Dwarves, and those supposedly have the same origin..."

"We apparently think differently, have very different metabolisms, and don't age. Are we really that much more similar to you than Elves and Dwarves? In what specific ways do they differ from Men?"

"Mindset, aptitudes, family structures, vices. Elves mostly care about aesthetic things and can just lose track of entire centuries and have really weird perspectives on literally everything. Their major vices are, like, prioritizing aesthetics too much and taking their word too seriously. And believing in their religion, it's actually impossible not to be evil if you think that obeying the Valar is good. Dwarves practically don't have family structures at all, don't have genders..."

"The blood-drinkers have a fair bit of variance on some of these things, like family structures. Everything from being intimately bound to a large, complex extended family and avoiding everyone else; to being losely connected only to parents and children, not caring about other relations, and being closer to non-relatives than to kin. Our 'vices' are also high variance. There are the people who drink and smoke all day, the people who hate to work, the people who work every possible moment, the people who are too scrupulous for fun, the people who are very violent, the people who are very passive, etc. We can lose track of hours or weeks on projects that suit our interests, or be distracted within seconds from things we find boring. We've had religions with human sacrifices, and religions that have tolerated themselves out of existence. We have had such a diversity of languages and styles of dress and governmental structure over our history that I get excited just thinking about it. And I bet we'll have a bunch of perspectives you find weird, too."

She smiles and shakes her head. "Yes, us too. But even the strangest man would seem more familiar to me than an Elf. Even you do."

"Are you sure? You haven't met an Elf, right? It's possible that the sources you have exaggerated them into mythic beings.

Besides, the weirdest cultures I know about in my history books are less familiar to me than you are. It's possible that, by some happenstance, I come from the set of blood-drinkers most similar to Men. Actually, it's also possible that you come from the set of Men most similar to my culture. I'm not sure how much variance there is in your species. For all we know, we could come from the most similar tails of our respective races, and the average blood-drinker might regard the average Man as an alien."

"Huh, could be."

"What are the aforementioned cultural things like here in particular? Family style, vices, the rules of your religion, the way you dress - well, I've seen you dress, but what's it like in general? I don't think I paid much attention to other people's clothing, so I've forgotten if there are patterns."

"Uh, covering more skin indicates caring more about societal opinions, and being older, and being more respectable. People are supposed to at least aspire to marrying another person and raising children with them, and it's very bad to raise children if unmarried, and you're supposed to be serious about people you have sex with. People are greedy, people are selfish, people are power-hungry, but we aren't like Elves, we wouldn't start a five-century-long war over a single shiny thing we promised to get back."

"Even if the shiny thing were - possibly - a source of immortality? To be honest, even though my kind has never fought for that long, we have fought bloody wars over much less. Usually whose prophet was cooler."

"We mostly fight wars for selfish reasons. Land, power, political advantage."

"In our recent history, most wars were about ensuring one set of people had a country of their own, and making sure that country had all the land it could possibly claim was the 'natural home' of that people. Speaking of which, the colonies - are most of the inhabitants people who moved there from Adûna, or people who lived on that land before it was conquered?"

"Mostly people who lived there. Some people move, but not many, not enough for it to be most, except in places where we accidentally wiped the locals out."

"...Should I assume you meant 'accidentally' sarcastically, or was there a plague or something? Did the settlers from Adûna have diseases that the locals did not?"

"All of the above, or the population is nomadic and we push them farther and farther out. Very few - not none - but very few Kings thought of themselves as people who'd on a large scale massacre the local populace. But it does keep happening."

"That makes sense. Large scale population massacres weren't common in my world either before nationalism. However, at that point, countries became rather concerned about making sure that the 'wrong people' weren't living on land that Absolutely Totally Belonged To Them. Luckily, we have had very little war over the past century, so this is less of a problem today.

On the other hand, when we colonised places, we tended to move in large numbers of our own people. How do you govern the colonies if most of the inhabitants are, effectively, foreign?"

"There are many of our people settled there, they're just not a large share either of our population or of theirs."

"How are the colonies governed, though? Are they actually separate units? Do they border each other?"

"There's really a ton of variance, we're talking about a thousand years of history and an entire continent. They're generally governed by minor nobility from here who angle for it, though companies do much of the actual governing and it's an easy way for the non-nobility to get rich."

"How many colonies are there now and how connected are they? If you started a rebellion in one now, would they all cooperate? How would you even go about starting a rebellion?"

"I'm not sure, that's why I've been focusing on this end. I don't think they'd all rebel. They have very different conditions, we ship slaves from one to some of the others..."

"Why do you source slaves from a specific place? How are those people different to the native people of any other colony?"

"I have no idea. Slavery is appalling and irrational."

"Appalling, yes. 'Irrational', though? What does it mean for something to be rational, other than achieving your goals efficiently? Slavery tends to be economically efficient in the societies that practice it, so it's quite rational for people who are purely interested in money. I don't think it's particularly useful to assume that people's actions are irrational, rather than working toward goals you disagree with, when the latter explanation is plausible. After all, it's easier to change people's incentives than cure insanity...

...Unless it's not. I honestly have no idea what the state of psychiatry is around here. It's easier for my people, at least."