"There are lots of people who want to interview you. The usual way to pick would be to pick whoever is offering you the most money for an interview, but you could go with whoever has the most readers or someone who's from a minority group that was enslaved before alien contact or something like that."

"...highest bidder is fine."

"Okay."

Journalist comes in a little later! Journalist has hair that's just a little too brown to look yellow. 

Kvina folds her hands and looks at her knees and waits.

" - hi. I'm Eketa Naari with the National Evening Post. Thanks so much for agreeing to talk with us!"

"You're welcome ma'am."

"I've got questions from my readers on every conceivable topic, do you have something in mind you'd like to start with?"

"- no not really."

Journalist wants to know about her family and whether she's worried for them and how she feels about calls to go get every red out of Rivik right now!

She has a brother and her mom's still alive and she has two kids and three grandkids and one great-grandkid. They said they haven't had heat come down on them in particular over her but everything is very tense right now. She doesn't know what they would do with all the reds in Rivik.

It sounds like contact was mishandled! Is she angry about that? How does she think they should have handled the situation? What would be a good environment for all the reds from Rivik?

She's kind of confused about their contact procedures but it hadn't occurred to her to be angry. She thinks they should have emailed people. That's an awfully open-ended question.

Like, do they want to live in a direct democracy or a representative democracy or a place with magically enforced ground rules and no other laws at all, do they want to live with other Amentans who aren't terrible - are there other Amentans who aren't terrible? - or with other species, if they want to live with other species do they have an opinion about which, do they want to live somewhere with a universal basic income or somewhere which successfully petitioned not to do that, warm or cold, urban or rural...

She's pretty sure most clean Amentans hate reds or don't think about them at all. She doesn't know much about any other species. Rivik is warm so she's used to that. She's never heard of a universal basic income. Rural would be... different. They've never voted before and she doesn't know what kinds of voting are best.

Universal basic income is when the government gives everybody money every month no matter what. It's popular.

Won't the government run out of money doing that?

It's usually funded out of taxes or with support from Vanda Nossëo, which has absurd amounts of money because of selling planets and resurrections and immortality and miscellaneous other magical things. Lots of places find that they can afford it just off the savings from not having a standing army anymore and having healthcare cheaper because of magic.

Kvina didn't do very well in math but she doesn't understand how you can give everyone money for free and then pay for that out of taxes.

You mostly tax rich people who are earning a lot more money than they're getting for free.

Because they're singers or whatever?

...yeah, or own a big company or a lot of land or a lot of investments, or they're a teleporter or healer or telekinetic and get outrageous pay for their in-demand skills.

They don't just sit around taking the free money?

Some people do that but lots of people like to do things. ...also the free money is not enough money to afford most fancy magic stuff or to afford to travel all the time to cool remote alien resorts, and on planets that aren't as nice as Casentar it's not even enough for immortality or resurrection.

Oh. She sees why people would work if they could earn enough money to never die.

Yeah. There should be enough of that to go around and here there is enough of that to go around but not everywhere.