"I suppose that makes sense, my other name was just taking what was supposed to be an insult and nothing deeper," Zhi'an said. "The people of your world hate those with powers? That would make things difficult."

"Tell me about it," said Quickstep.

"They fear us, rather," said Gauss.  "I hope to be able to overcome that fear, but Apex's group started things off with some rather dramatic efforts, and the factions of the government that know about us have been trying to capture us, which doesn't help."

"This is going to make things difficult then. I suppose making first contact will be very difficult at this point," Zhi'an said.

"Well, I don't know about impossible," said Gauss.  "Dangerous, though."

"Very," cut in Phantasma.  "Like I've been telling you, big guy.  Someone, probably the government, has shot down ET crafts before-- a bunch of times, lately.  I'm not inclined to trust them to be reasonable about it."

"Really? That's surprising. No one ever said that this planet was dangerous," Zhi'an said.

"Well, what constitutes 'dangerous' for your ship?" asked Gauss.  "We have nuclear fusion and fission weapons available to us-- well, several governments do-- among other things."

"More other things than you might think," Phantasma added.

"I meant with your government shooting down space craft. That's pretty impressive," Zhi'an said.

"Well, as I said, our government has access to some dangerous weapons," said Gauss.  "So... are abilities like yours common where you come from?  Are there a lot of these 'super-heroes'?"

"No, I was the only one on my planet that had them, thanks to being forced to endure various experiments," Zhi'an said.

"Ah," said Gauss.  "That's a bad business... is there anything that we can do to make you more comfortable while you're here?"

"I don't know anything about your planet. I'd like a chance to learn more," Zhi'an said.

"That's a tall order," said Gauss.  "Can you narrow it down a little bit?  What do you want to know about?"

"Let's start with food. What do you eat? The Safian like shape would probably mean you're omnivores, but that's not taking things like religious practices into account," Zhi'an said.

"Well, broadly, the society here are omnivores--" Gauss started.

"I'm a vegetarian!" cut in Eris.

"--with certain exceptions," he continued.  "There are some animals that we don't eat, but if you just get food from stores or restaurants, that shouldn't be an issue.  What kind of food do you eat in society out there?"

"Wow, that's a question. I've seen a lot. Live small animals, an all liquid diet, there was a species that appeared to be an all liquid diet like the above, but they actually skimmed out masses of small plankton out of the liquid," Zhi'an said. "As for me and the rest of my people. We prefer food with higher levels of salt than most species eat."

"Well, that's fair," said Gauss.  "What do you eat, besides more salt?"

"We're omnivores like, um, whatever your species is called. Our planet was mostly water where fresh water is unknown, so even plants and land animals had a large salt content," Zhi'an said. "We're also amphibious, but not the best swimmers for a semi-aquatic species."

"Well, you may need to add salt to you food here," said Gauss.  "That's not generally a problem, though.  Salt is a common condiment here; you can just use lots of it.  Anything else?"

"Not that I can think of," Zhi'an said.

"All right," said Gauss.  "Well.  Is there anything that you want to know about this planet?  Or anything that we can do to make you comfortable here?"

"I should note that I'm not actually speaking your language, it's the universal translator and I can't actually read anything," Zhi'an said. "But as for questions: what is the name of your species? What's the government like? Any important notes about the fashion of this planet?"

Gauss started to answer, and then laughed at the last one.

"Well, I'm not an expert at fashion," he said.  "You might want to talk to Phantasma or Eris about that... Most of the people on this planet are humans.  Ones like us are called 'mutants,' but I think that we're still humans.  Our government is theoretically a representative democracy, but the wealthy and powerful-- and wealthy and powerful corporations-- have undue influence over it.  There are also dozens and dozens of different nations here, some of them much more powerful than others.  This nation is one of the larger, wealthier and more powerful ones."

"Oh, so this planet is still broken up into nation states? I haven't encountered many of those, but then again you haven't built spaceships capable of traveling to other planets yet," Zhi'an said. "I'll give you guys what's left of my ship, as long as you don't make weapons with it."

"That's very generous of you," said Gauss.  "We won't make weapons out of it; I don't think that we need to.  We have our own gifts, after all, and it's more natural for us to use them."

"...and all the engineering talent left with Apex," Hopper put in, grinning lopsidedly.

"That wouldn't matter.  We have principles about these things."

"Thank you," Zhi'an said. "As I'm not stuck on this planet for the foreseeable future."