This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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
"They couldn't do anything. Usually it's wrong to do something that's against some society's deeply held beliefs but most societies don't have a deeply held belief that other people getting rights would be the worst thing in history."
"You know things about yourself, though, and all this politics is really about what's best for you and people who've been through the same things as you."
"I don't think the clean castes are ever going to stop hating us. People would miss the planet I think."
"If the Amentan theologians rule that after being resurrected you are clean, do you think you'd want to go back?"
"...I don't know how to live like a clean person or do a clean job. And I'm not sure everybody would believe the theologians. And then I couldn't see my family."
And he wants to know what her plans are now and what being resurrected is like and whether her family believed it.
She is a little too overwhelmed to have any real plans. It was just like not being stabbed anymore and waking up in a hospital. Her family is pretty confused but there do seem to be all-powerful aliens about so it's not like it came from nowhere.
Being murdered was very scary and painful but she doesn't have any feelings very specific to the individual who happened to do it because being murdered is sort of an ambient background risk if you are a red. She's not sure what she'd say.
The subheadline is the thing about being murdered being a background risk of being red. It's reported mostly accurately and interspersed with anecdotes about horrifying things that have happened to Rivikni reds and describes her as 'cautious' and 'guarded' and 'skeptical' about the accomplishments of non-evil modern societies. It notes regretfully that she didn't shed much light on the painful debate about whether to go rescue all the reds and leave the evil Amentans to throw their evil tantrums.
Huh.
She attempts to find out more about the world in which she finds herself so she can figure out what's next.
The local species is humans. They're like Amentans but don't live as long or want children as much. Their planet is in a dimensional neighborhood where a special technology called morph exists. It lets you turn into anything else with sufficiently similar biology; practically all carbon-based life with a central nervous system is similar enough biology. If you stay for more than two hours you have to touch another box to turn back, but the boxes are everywhere. Accordingly no one ages, and morph cures injuries and illness so they don't have much of those either; even before contact they were a stable peaceful rich post-industrial society and they qualified immediately for Vanda Nossëo membership and lobbied aggressively to get enough resurrections to cover their whole populace. In exchange Vanda Nossëo got them to agree to accept all immigrants from anywhere in the universe with a five-year path to citizenship. The high rate of immigration has put a strain on the enough-resurrections-for-everybody thing and they currently outlaw extreme sports and harshly punish irresponsibility like impaired driving. There's a universal basic income. They're in a Vanda Nossëo voting bloc that has passionate public positions about issues she has no context on (and even on the issue that she has context on, they are confusing; they are apparently of the opinion that Amenta should be dragged to Edda-range and pollution rendered unreal by the Aether.)
The newspapers? The local Vanda Nossëo embassy? The online forums devoted to digging up Amentan atrocities and being mad about them?