She giggles. "I've been working on curing the incentives by making it horribly expensive and dangerous to own slaves. The problem is how this is going to get me killed, so I am open to other suggestions. I don't know much about the relevant populations, though. All the news here is very skewed."

"How hard is it to smuggle written material from the colonies, and are there any sympathetic parties or similar radicals living there? If you're already printing underground newspapers, you might as well report colonial news with the opposite skew."

"I don't know any sympathetic groups that speak our language," she says, "the rulers speak Sindarin and everyone else speaks whatever the local language. We could try to find people to translate. No one here has your prodigious language skill, so it's a real barrier."

"Well, now it looks like money spent to ship me there would actually have a large net positive effect."

"...right. It totally would. Let's figure out how to make it happen, then."

"Great. How does one get a ticket? And how long would I need to be on a ship? Because, um, remember that whole limits-of-transportation-with-live-animals thing...?"

"...right. Uh, it's only three weeks' journey to the nearest coast, can that be done? if we smuggle small mammals?"

"Um, I can eat just once a week if I really gorge myself, like I did with the pig before. So, like, can we bring two goats on the ship? Are there actually rules about carrying animals? Would we have to pay extra, or do they have to be hidden?"

"I have no idea. I light ships on fire, I don't purchase tickets. You could bring dogs and claim they were pets."

Now it's Carmen's turn to giggle. "And you claim that I have an overly specialised skillset. All right. Is it normal for people to have animal companions around here? Would they cost extra? Would anyone ask if I 'lost' them?"

"Animal companions are not uncommon. They'd probably cost extra. People might think it was odd if yours both died on the trip, but not that odd and anyway we have very permissive laws on randomly murdering ones property which are not mostly usually relevant just for dogs as it happens."

She shudders. "Uh huh. One of the many problems to correct. Well, I guess I'm pretty much in a resistance movement at this point, since I only need to see the conditions in the colonies myself to confirm it. Wow, my mother would be pretty freaked out right now. She made me promise not to join the Zifarti separatist movement, y'know. Good thing she didn't think to make me forswear extra-dimensional activism."

She laughs again. "I really like you."

"Thanks! I like you too. I hope you weren't under the impression that I'm only hanging around you because I don't know anyone else and meeting new people is a lot of work. That is, at most, two thirds of my motivation."

She snorts. "I mostly interact with people because I can use them to solve problems, so - I don't really mind that."

"Do you not have any friendships that exist just because you enjoy the other person's company?"

"I kind of destroyed them all because I cared more about fixing things than about that person and after a while that really gets to people. They like knowing that people care about them more than about abstract ideas. And I don't."

"Odd. There are very few people I care about at anywhere near the level of History Itself, and I bet there are very few people who care about me as much as their special interests. Maybe what you really need is to hang around people who are so obsessed with a particular topic that they don't notice that neither of you care more about each other than about ideas.

Maybe you shouldn't be so dismissive of becoming a blood-drinker, after all? One of us, one of us..."

"Can one become a blood-drinker? And - here, most people care more about people than about ideas, and it bothers them if you don't. I don't really mind, because it's not that I couldn't live the lives they have it's just that I wouldn't want to until everything is fixed."

"I... Don't think so. I wouldn't expect so, since we're our own species, but apparently hopping between worlds is a thing, so you never know.

I would expect diminishing returns for trying to fix the world, as more things are fixed, and the most important things are fixed first. If you were immortal, do you think there is any point at which you might stop? At which it would be better to live your life for happiness than for fixing progressively smaller problems? Or does your mandate to save the world last forever?"

"Once slavery and colonization and death are over and everyone has freedom of movement and enough food, I think I'd be able to - well, I'd still watch court cases to make sure they're decided justly, but I wouldn't have to throw out everything else."

"Hmmm. My own country isn't quite there yet, but it's close enough that I feel hopeful for this cause. Unless plant-eaters are dramatically different in yet another way I don't know about."

"I am ...really relieved to hear that it's possible in principle. It's nice to think we could win even if I don't expect to live to see it."

"Well, there is still some debate in my world over whether it is possible to abolish death in principle, and there is still a very small amount of slavery that is illegal and opposed by every government, in the same way murder is - and, of course, the court system is imperfect. However, if your description of your world is accurate, we are way closer to all of these end states than you are. Did you think was impossible before?"

"...yeah, pretty much. I thought I could make it better, but I thought it'd pretty much always be bad."