The meeting with the diplomat did not go as well as I'd hoped.
We met in the food court of the Sisters of Eve station. Their station in ROIR-Y is what you'd expect at the frontier: it is patched together from stuff that can be found locally and from whatever can be traded in these forlorn parts. It is not smooth and polished like the new AIR stations, but it consists of a collection of panels and machinery from all four empires that somehow got welded together and interfaced. Not always successfully, the hangars have loose cables and pipes and broken lighting here and there.
Walekh Hemanseh, the diplomat, is a jovial man of Amarrian ancestry. He has facial piercings and a wide mouth that from time to time opens up for a bellowing laugter. He speaks a Dekleinian dialect, but no standard Amarrian or any of the other Empire's languages. As they do not have universal translator devices, he brought a human translator with him. This translator is a henchman he calls Mike, and who speaks very rudimentary Amarrian. Mike also carries a gun and a large knife, and I think he was high on Frentix.
We sat down in a small diner, and were served steaming bowls of noodles with chunks of undefinable meat, and a piece of dried out bread. The conversation was not easy, Mike was not always able to understand what I said. And he cut his lip trying to use the big knife to eat pieces of meat out of his noodle bowl.
It soon became clear that Walekh cannot represent the Federation of Honor Passion Respect Alliance as a whole. He works for the Honor Passion Respect coalition, which is a small part of the alliance. His chieftain, for which he works as a diplomat, rules one star system far away from where I need to be, and they also have a wormhole operation.
He wanted to hire me not as a priest but as a diplomat to the Empire. Their alliance is at war with "We Form Volta", yet another outer space independent barony that contests their sovereignty. He hoped I could get the Empire to come and help them to fight against Volta. He boasted that he had slaves and would give them to me as part of the deal. I had to disappoint him. Truly, these "diplomats" in the outer worlds are very naive and unrefined.
The only positive thing that came out of our conversation was that he assured me that indeed his people are in need of spiritual guidance, and he accepted a shipment of scripture datapads. Two of the missionaries will go with him, the third one wants to go deeper into the unknown. I am keeping the supercomputers, the nuclear reactor, most of the holoreels, and two crates of scripture datapads for later on.
I will have to proceed without "laissez-passez" from the local warlords.
