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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
And she will glare at the rest of Yvalta. Is he taking immigrants who make it to his territory successfully?
Yep. He has emergency transfer contracts drawn up with token obligations attached for anyone who gets to a place he can have them signed.
Soyok is there, and his wife, and their daughter, and her husband, and their sons, and the one son's wife. (Soyok's other child married out.)
"Thank you so much for organizing this," he says once all of these people have been introduced. "I am the director of immigration and foreign affairs for my nation of Ambaróna, and my alt is the director of Vanda Nossëo; I know them to be delighted you are moving forward with membership."
"We almost voted against, back when it came up for us. People felt like too many things were changing too quickly."
"There's an as-yet-unexplained phenomenon whereby different universes sometimes contain the same worlds - at different stages in their history, or sometimes with minor variants. We haven't found any other Amentas yet, but it would not be surprising if they existed, and if they did they might well have all of you living there. A world much like mine, with my family ruling it, was the flagship member, but my native world made contact with them later."
"Well, you know, founding Vanda Nossëo is more appealing than joining it. - and more importantly we'd just come out of a particularly awful war, some people wanted a few centuries of peace and quiet before we took on lots of new obligations."
"If you find other Amentas what are you going to do with them?" wonders Soyok's daughter, cutting her lamb into tiny bites.
"Well now we have lots of Amentans on the civil service track, they'll almost certainly be the best equipped to handle it."
"Yes! We put out job listings - sorted them all by caste, with the help of some local consultants, though it's legal for people to take out-of-caste work - and got lots of interested applicants. The language fluency is a pretty significant job perk, I think that contributed, and lots of people want magic, and then for any given planet there are always lots of people who want to be involved in policy and oversight, making sure their concerns get adequately represented."
"It seemed like a bit much to me, at first, but the thing is that different species care so intensely about such different things that you really can't have much trust in government if people don't feel like there are people involved in decisionmaking who are like them. We can say 'yes, we're taking the pollution precautions your theologians requested' as often as we want, but that's never going to be a fraction as reassuring as some Amentans on the relevant oversight committee deciding to move their families abroad. And it's the same for everybody, and there's a lot of us these days."
"Because you obviously all think pollution is nonsense we'd forget about if you bombarded us with enough shiny objects," Soyok's daughter says.
"Would you? Our evaluations were all 'Amentans born elsewhere would not re-derive this but the ones we've got will not give it up'. But you have exactly the general idea - aliens are different from one another, profoundly so, and scrupulous adherence to procedures we don't really care about can't possibly be as reassuring as involvement by people who do care. You can't get there just with adequate magic cleaning procedures, because people care about more than their government technically fulfilling its obligations, they want their government to agree that the obligations matter. So you've got to have representation everywhere, for everything."
"I'd be interested in how you think our prioritization system should have handled Amenta - you were a few thousand down the list, because the anticipation was that you wouldn't appreciate contact with people who didn't share the pollution thing. Some people have told us very emphatically that we should have been here sooner, but of course the ones who think we should have stayed away might be less likely to say so."