Macalaurës who have not yet seduced a Rebecca feel that they have been issued a challenge. They get to work on it.
He goes to Eclipse and does research. Eclipse makes him feel very uncomfortable.
"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..."
"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."
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."