"So if I show up with fancy robots and tell everybody that we're trading them the robots for their reds, the reds will - what, panic? Riot? Try to hide?"

"Be really scared, probably - there's not anywhere good to hide, we're not supposed to be outside our neighborhoods except for work with shoe covers and gloves and marked vehicles and everything. Rioting maybe, but it always gets at least some of us killed so maybe not if it looked really inevitable."

"We don't want to badly scare people either, though. - we'd resurrect anyone who died in riots but it's still much better not to let it come to that - I don't mind in the slightest kissing you in front of everybody but if it'd get in the way of everything it might make more sense to kiss you in front of everybody on the planets we bring reds to instead of the one they're leaving from."

"Maybe, yeah - I don't really know how to reform planets, sorry."

"Don't apologize. I don't either, and I have advisors who do. I just - don't want to ignore you on something with personal stakes -" Hug. "Maybe we can set up a really pretty district of the city for them here, and then from there they can decide if they'd rather be self-governing or citizens here or what, and I can suggest to all your terrible governments that they let a few red emissaries come tour the place in advance for riot-prevention reasons -"

"They might go for that. It'll pollute the place like nobody's business, kill your tourism, but maybe that is fine."

"I do not think we were counting on tourism from your world. Anyway we can misleadingly imply it's a safely segregated district while we still need their cooperation for things." Kiss.

Kiss! Snuggle! She's so snuggly.

And he would like nothing more than to snuggle her forever and will in fact snuggle her quite a while.

But the next day enormous shiny lightleapers coast into her home planet's star system broadcasting in a rotation of the local languages - "Hello! This is a diplomatic envoy from the Noldor of Endorë, and we greet you and your people. Please identify to us a convenient location for us to disembark and meet you."

Several competing locations are offered. Tapa has the prettiest one.

He has four diplomatic teams and can send one to everybody!! He'll go to Tapa, though, because it's where Peka's from. Elves dispatched to less pretty ones pout. Macalaurë makes a face at them. They never pout at Maitimo.

They teleport to the offered locations.

This surprises the people who are there to meet them and seem to have been expecting shuttles. They are greeted by various mixes of blue and green and yellow. One of the greeting parties includes gray-haired guards.

He will enquire politely about the caste system rather than confess it was already explained to him by his kidnapped red girlfriend.

A green person explains to him that among their species different people are suited for different tasks. This runs in families and is typically indicated by natural hair color (it's customary to dye to match when there's an irregularity).

How interesting!! That's not typical, though (having had some warning the topic might come up) he can offhandedly list a few other species who have something vaguely similar - "and gender of course functions like that in lots of primitive societies, though less so in advanced ones."

They don't have much gender division here! While they can imagine that aliens might find some dimorphism there they don't seem to have much except as pertains to pregnancy and things directly related thereto.

Yep, some societies have more dimorphism than that - Elves don't especially - and also in some societies the childbearing are more or less continuously pregnant or nursing, which produces some of the same incentives with respect to educating and training them. Anyway a caste system would be inherently prohibitive to meeting the humanitarian standards of certain interstellar federations he knows of but not his.

Gosh, interstellar federations. That's sure exciting.

They are!! They have abolished material scarcity and can help fund the terraforming and colonization of new planets, as well as ensure the safe passage of ships to and from those new planets, and interworld portals are in the final stages of development. His interstellar federation additionally does resurrections and limited distribution of a cure to aging and age-related mortality and has technology-sharing agreements and is very generous with trade terms among members and - "we won't enable military interventionism except in exceptional cases, but we'll happily give our members the means to a secure and absolute national defense."

This is all extremely exciting. They have some military stuff going on right now but it's a matter of food, if the food thing were sorted out cleanly they could withdraw.

The food thing can almost certainly be sorted out at once, even if they don't happen to find Elf food edible. Is it a temporary shortage or a potentially ongoing one?

Long-term; they don't, without the farmland they're currently trying to capture, have independent food security. They're on rationing now and were planning to divert the summer harvest from the area they're holding.

If they clear a location and describe precisely what they want there, food can be dropped off this afternoon. "It doesn't need to be things we'll have heard of, we can make arbitrary amounts of material goods if they exist or if a precise blueprint does. But that's a stopgap. Who'll want to compare notes on agricultural productivity -"

They don't have a minister of agriculture on hand but if the aliens would like to come to the capital they can sure find one!

The aliens would be delighted.