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There are a lot of Amentan countries. Vanda Nossëo representatives are dispatched to all of them. These Elves (two with black hair, one with silver) take a shuttle down from the lightleaper to a country called Calado, and radio ahead to request permission to land at a elegant modern spaceport.
okay by comparison Voa and Tapa look like thriving modern democracies
hastyriser
"So, I seriously don't do diplomacy - I breed and fly giant winged firebreathing lizards, that is how much I don't do diplomacy - but there are like two hundred forty Vanda Nossëo member states that accept immigrants and if you'd want to leave you could just make friends in illegal orders class and then go home with them."
hastyriser
"They can come too? By 'no one will swap into Calado' am I to take it that the other countries on this planet suck less?"
"...haven't really traveled..."
"We've got a bad reputation but I assume everyone's got problems up close and we just don't have good - PR -"
hastyriser
Nod. "Okay. Well. Our courts don't want to ruin anyone's life. People need to know that you will regret trying to kidnap and coerce our citizens, but they will take into account that you could not, actually, have known that, and you didn't hurt anyone, so you're almost certainly not going to go to jail. Not talking to you," he adds to the senator, offhandedly. "If you need to reach us for some reason you can write things on any of the pieces of paper on this notepad and we'll see them, okay?" He takes the notepad from one of the other Elves. It has a line of pretty Quenya at the top. He hands it to a grey.
Spaceport, but they plan to make an announcement to the media in a public location and would prefer somewhere where they won't be impeded in reaching one.
They are welcomed by solicitous purples who want to know if they need anything and guarded by outward-facing greys and greeted by a blue.
"Hello! We're citizens of Ambaróna, which is a member nation of a galactic consortium called Vanda Nossëo. The universe has trillions of aliens, and we make contact with alien species based on who is the highest humanitarian priority and who has the best prospects of becoming a new member state. Membership in Vanda Nossëo confers economic and trade benefits, comes with guaranteed security against invasion or violent overthrow, and comes with limited access to some resources that are expensive even by the standards of advanced societies, like terraformed planets, immortality, resurrections, and teleportation.
We're going to present to your government the specific criteria for membership in Vanda Nossëo. But your government can't decide to make you a member state without a free, fair vote of the whole population, one vote per person old enough to write a ballot. So if they decide to go ahead, we'll be publishing information online about what this will mean for you and answering any questions you need answered in order to cast your vote with confidence.
We're also offering aid to help with short term food and health crises, and we will look into the most tenable prospects for longer-term aid.
We want you to have free and unfiltered communications with us while we learn about your world and open normal diplomatic relations. Towards that end, we are employing a special technology of ours that allows us to get copies of any written messages addressed to us. To write us a message, please write 'Yvalta open channel' at the top of a piece of paper, and then write your message. We'll have a team reviewing these messages and taking them into consideration in making our policy recommendations. Vanda Nossëo member states all have absolute freedom of speech - you can never get in trouble for something you say - and the messages will be fully confidential and not disclosed to anyone here on Amenta without your permission.
We're making this announcement in every country and in every language, and we were assured that this will reach everyone in Yvalta. If you know of a better way for us to reach anyone in Yvalta who might not get the whole unfiltered message this way, please write 'Yvalta open channel' at the top of a piece of paper and then write your note to us.
Questions?"
Messages start coming in.
- They don't mean reds, do they?
- Does membership involve freedom of movement?
- What are people without paper supposed to do?
- Reds can't vote, they know that, right?
- Food would be appreciated here and there and that other place.
- What are the preconditions for resurrections?
- What are their population controls like?
Every person old enough to fill out a ballot gets a vote in votes related to consortium membership.
Membership comes with freedom of movement for purposes of travel and work. Many member states take unlimited immigrants from any other member state, and some of the rest take immigrants with an annual cap. Member states that take immigrants get more limited resources like terraforming and immortality and resurrections.
You can type it, too.
Every person old enough to fill out a ballot gets a vote in votes related to consortium membership.
Food will be delivered to those locations.
Resurrections are available only to Vanda Nossëo member states. Within those, they're distributed based on a variety of factors and a typical member the size of Yvalta would get a thousand per Amentan year. Persons who are killed unlawfully by a citizen or subject of a Vanda Nossëo member state get resurrected at that citizen's expense, so if any Elf killed a Yvaltan the Yvaltan would get resurrected.
Most Vanda Nossëo member states do not practice population controls of any kind. In some it's illegal to have children without demonstrating possession of adequate means to care for the child and lots restrict forking.
- What's forking?
- No, seriously, reds can't vote. They're not people, do the aliens understand that part? They look like it but they're not.
- Thanks for the food!
- Reds can't have freedom of movement either.
- What if the citizen can't afford it? How expensive is it?
- Why don't they practice population control? That's irresponsible.
- Do they ever take immigrants from non member states?
Forking is getting a copy of yourself made. This Elf did it, four times, because there were lots of things she wanted to do with her life and she lives somewhere where that's allowed.
If the reds are unable to fill out their ballots because of not being intelligent enough then those ballots presumably won't get filled out. Only ballots that are filled out will be counted.
Everyone gets freedom of movement. They can offer reds a generous contract where the reds stay in their district in exchange for payments, that's legal. There's one place where the aliens don't want to touch people of a different gender than them and this was allowed after aliens of all relevant genders were bribed into voting in favor.
Resurrections run fairly outrageous prices right now because they're so rare. You can get a payment plan if you don't have that much, or purchase insurance in advance that'll cover accidents. The insurance doesn't cover murder but if you're worried about being bankrupted you should just not commit murder.
Some species don't need population control because their birth rates are right about replacement and Elves don't because their children take a hundred twenty local years to grow up so their growth rate is glacial even though birth rates are reasonably high and some species rarely prefer to have children at all once they invent birth control and some species just have tons of space on their planet or planets and centuries before they will need to worry about that, by which time terraforming will have gotten cheaper.
There are countries that take immigrants from non member states. They're rarer but there are still hundreds. The recommended method is to buy yourself fluency in the language - they have a means of making people fluent in all known languages, it's available for sale or as a membership perk - and then go there for tourism and get some people to vouch for you and convert your visa. Amentans might be a good culture fit with orcs, who also like babies a lot and who have dozens of planets, or Mïr and its protectorates, some of which take non-member immigrants and which have extremely powerful technology that makes everyone there immortal and resurrections there free of charge. Elves take non-member immigrants who are a good cultural fit for Elven societies. They're not sure yet if that describes Amentans.
- Reds are smart enough to mark ballots they're just not people.
- What if a red did not take the payments and went around befouling the entire universe, it doesn't bear thinking about, if they won't prevent that then they definitely won't be allowed to grant "everyone" in Yvalta freedom of movement and all the actual people will suffer for it.
- How will all this interact with service contracts to Houses?
- How expensive is the language thing?
- What's Mîr? Why don't they share their extremely powerful technology?
- What constitutes a good culture fit for Elves?