"People seem to feel that way about reds."

"Hmmm?"

"On four of the seven occasions someone has identified my species so far on my vacation they choose to immediately comment on a group from my planet who have all been shuffled off because they weren't welcome there."

"Ah. I don't read the galactic news much. - the thing about treating some people worse than others is that - if we're all glad the Elves didn't decide to run their mutliverse collective that way - and they could have, they used to keep that non-obvious but after the Kandrona war there wasn't much point in pretending - anyway, if we're glad that they didn't go 'but we're objectively superior, we're smarter and faster and prettier and cleaner and longer-lived, of course you don't get the same rights we do' - then we've got to - generalize, right, and say that maybe when we did the same thing..."

"That's very philosophical of you."

"None of the justifications for bigotry seem compelling when you realize they could apply to you. And that's because none of them are right."

"Is this something conventionally taught in local schools or -"

"I went to school before we met the aliens, they just taught that we used to oppress people and now we try to fix it. I don't know about these days. But people online talk a lot about what real cosmopolitan secularism looks like, the hard kind, the kind that isn't about 'we look different on the surface' but 'we are, actually, deeply and profoundly different and some of us are in fact better' - and it comes up sometimes there."

She nods politely and moves on.

Bird people with eighty-three polities sixty-nine of which are members.

What's keeping the other fourteen?

Philosophical belief that there should be some independent bird people countries, too small to be a state on their own and don't want to be a protectorate of any existing ones, religion.

Is Vanda Nossëo being pushy about it?

They've given one of the religious objectors a bit of a hard time. The religious objectors are pretty mad at them over it. 

(The other thirteen they left alone.)

What are the religious objections?

They burn heretics alive and don't want to be made to stop.

Next.

Avast is new and small - eight hundred million - and everyone older than three Amentan years is an immigrant. They have a distributed democracy thing where every neighborhood of six hundred has a representative. Almost all humans.

Why did they move here? Where from?

Cube because the commute to Vanda Nossëo was such a hassle! Cube because they had a phobia of tigers and lots of people in Cube go around as tigers all the fucking time. Aurum because the vampires are scary. Aurum because the idea of a vampire mating on you is scary. Casentar because they prohibit skiing and this guy loves skiing. Ambaróna because they didn't like monarchy, or Elves. Mîr because they didn't like how powerful the Empress was even though she's really benevolent about it. A dozen other places for reasons like 'the trains are better' or 'needed to get away from my folks' or 'I'm writing a thesis on the distributed democracy thing' or 'I wanted to live on a majority-human planet."

Next.

Ambaróna is full of reds does she skip that one?

They're clean, right?

Yep! They had live video feed of the whole process in case Amentans didn't trust them and wanted to verify.

She's not going to talk to the reds but she will go where they went.