"...can we get a different tourism person who will be, uh, more interested in showing off Amenta to best advantage..."

"Are you okay with not executing tourists. If you can swing that I'm sure we can find someone who thinks you're great but if you can't then we can't in good conscience let anyone visit anyway."

"I don't think we have a punishment on the books for peeing on buildings in particular because that's... I think literally never come up... but we can just charge tourists for the cost of cleaning to local standards if they cause pollution violations and fine them additionally if they aren't prompt in reporting."

"That sounds a whole lot cheaper than a resurrection. Fine. We'll advertise for people who are really impressed with your gender politics or something and they'll get in touch."

"...our what politics?"

"Gender. Like, you don't have fields with gender disparities, you don't have disparate sentencing, that stuff."

"...if that's what attracts tourists."

"It helps counterbalance the other stuff."

Someone announces intent to resurrect any babies Tapa kills.

"...and then do what with them?" the Tapai liaison to Vanda Nossëo wants to know.

"- maybe the parents will want to immigrate? Let someone adopt them, otherwise - look, the aim here is to get you to stop killing babies, not to acquire a lot of Amentan babies, but if we get a lot of Amentan babies out of it I think they'll do okay."

"We don't kill babies recreationally. Would it satisfy you if we seized all the perpetrators' assets and exiled them from Tapa, illegal baby and all?"

" - that sounds way better than killing babies, yes."

"Can we possibly get someone who has any understanding of historical context to do your job - we aren't doing it because it's fun, you don't have to sound as though you think we're delighted about it or less than eager to stop, we just need to replace the functionality."

"On Savandol this is an elected position."

Sigh.

(Saving babies polls very well on Savandol.)

Yvalta, on the federal level, declines membership, and attempts to find Soyok guilty of treason when he says his House is joining on its own.

What does this attempt look like exactly.

They would like to start with arresting him. (He warns his security fake-purple.)

Vanda Nossëo notifies them that Soyok's House is under their protection and that aggression against it will not be tolerated.

Soldiers find themselves back on someone else's property. With modeling-clay weapons and sticky notes that say the same thing.

Yvalta says they didn't join Vanda Nossëo and treason is illegal.

Soyok's House joined Vanda Nossëo as a polity of more than one million people in its own right.

It's not a polity, it's a House. The householders' citizenship is Yvaltan.

As precedent there's this case from a world where this empire'd conquered everywhere and the exiled princess of what was now a segment of the empire snuck dressed as a peasant to the shuttleport and then to Vanda Nossëo and then petitioned for her kingdom to become a member state. They said she had to meaningfully administer her kingdom, so she went back to it and demonstrated that laws she passed (conveyed in secret to her people) were still obeyed, and they said she had to have clearly delineated and enforced borders, so in the night one day her loyalists went out to the old borders and marked them all with orange paint and made their stand there prepared to die enforcing their borders and at that point Vanda Nossëo said "...fine."

There are a lot of movies about the princess. She's very popular.

Soyok's contractors aren't loyalists with orange paint, they're contractors.