Cool.

Yup. Eventually one of them asks her if she was consulted on the profit disbursement structure of the food.

...No.

Okay, does she want to be?

Yes, that would be good.

So the arrangement was set up on the guarantee that at minimum the participating farmers would receive 150% the pre-crisis value of their farmland for the farmland, which is yea much, plus labor costs assessed thus for planting harvesting shipping etc., which the government would supply either out of food sales or the budget if something went wrong so the farmers bore no risk since they didn't want to ask around a lot and get bids; and the food they're selling is bringing in this much and there's taxes hither and yon and the government's taking in that revenue, and the government is probably planning to pay Odette something out of that?

Seems reasonable. (She really doesn't know much about the local economy.)

Neat. Back to fooding.

Fooding!

Tapa continues to have a billion people and futuristic food preservation ability and will not be telling her to stop soon.

This is still unpleasant but she has some sense of scale and will not complain. She can keep this up for months if she has to, although she's liable to slow down a little and start sleeping every night.

They will not object to her sleeping on a nightly basis.

Yaaaay.

She's going to be so so so so so bored by the time she's done but not, you know, dead, so.

A billion people can sure eat a shit ton of food.

Uuuuuugh. She's going to need to come up with a better solution than this at some point. Food food food.

Eventually they move her to some orchards for tree-based food.

Great.

Well, the harvesting machines are pretty neat?

Illia will appreciate them, she's sure.

...She starts getting faster at this.

...okay. They rope in some more farms so the purples can keep up.

Her acceleration isn't constant but it is definitely a thing.

Meanwhile Illia has not been idle, either, although it's certainly a more pleasant kind of not idle. She continues learning Tapap, of course, and interfaces with various people who need to be interfaced with, and plots, and reads the internet (particularly looking for reactions to the aliens) and sometimes walks around the city, sometimes as herself and sometimes illusioned as various castes of Amentan.

Not red, surely.

Well, no, but yellow and purple and orange and grey, for sure. She avoids blue on the grounds that it would not be inconspicuous and green on the grounds that she is from a preindustrial society with completely different art and suspects she would have more trouble passing for green than the other castes.

People sometimes comment if her wardrobe is inconsistent with her presented caste.