I've got a list of names | Glowfic Constellation

Afen is disappointed in the universe. He bounds back and forth across his room explaining why to his wife, his infant granddaughter, the end table, and a reporter flabbergasted by her good luck and cringing silently against the wall in the hopes he won't remember she's there.

"There is no reason to suppose that a species evolving independently of Amentans, with their own evolutionary history and living mammalian species likely related to theirs, would end up looking like us. None. Every explanation every scientist has ventured to the press has been unimaginative and unconvincing retroactive refitting of bad models to baffling data. Aliens shouldn't look like us but with different hair colors. Aliens that are not made out of carbon at all would be unsurprising; aliens with only as much physiological dissimilarity as exists between us and animal species on our planet would be mildly surprising; aliens with opposable thumbs would be truly remarkable. This is not remarkable and biologically enlightening; this is just inconsistent with everything we understand about the universe. It doesn't teach us new things about evolution; it should make us rethink evolution. - don't quote that part, they'll take it out of context."

Reporter nods rapidly.

"All of that said, I've picked up three of the languages and I'm working on building a good machine translator, it's a challenge with as little as they've produced in the way of electronic records. I'm absolutely going there to meet them as soon as the politicians figure out what to do with themselves."

"Do you have any predictions about that?"

"About politics? Why would I have predictions about politics? They deliberately obscure relevant information, for one thing, and for another it's deathly boring."

"- I mean, sir, surely you hear from your son about -"

"I have seven children and some of them are very dense indeed but not quite dense enough to try to interest me in politics."

"I was referring to -"

"I know who you were referring to. If you want a statement from Aitim go bother Aitim."

"Thank you for your time."

"I did not alter my activities in response to your presence and therefore you can't yet be said to have wasted any of my time though you should go before you do."

...out skitters the reporter.

Total: 9381

Posts Per Page:

‹ Previous 1 2 … 252 253 254 255 256 257 258 259 260 … 375 376 Next ›

« First ‹ Previous 256 of 376 Next › Last »

"Oh, I think it'd take weeks of preparation."

chanuphis

"Maybe it'll work. The Muggleborns are going to be immigrants?"

"It seems like it'd be hard to pass them off as anything else. Or just visitors, or hired expertise, since we will need the buildings all done up like wizards did them and you didn't have the foresight to arrange for your family to personally possess all of the skillsets involved in impersonating an alien government."

chanuphis

"How foolish of us."

Timothy Laurence Way

too-early-and-too-late

"There are some Muggleborns who work on that but I'd be really sure that their families don't, uh, hate you."

"Understood."

"This doesn't protect humans."

"It does not. Does anyone have ideas on that?"

chanuphis

"Might be able to solve that through conventional diplomacy after you have a wizard government."

"The leaders of my wizard government had probably better actually be wizards. You all want to immigrate and then get elected to positions of power?"

chanuphis

"Sounds fun."

"Are you enjoying yourself?"

"I could stand to be more able to protect my people than I am, but, you know, for how many powerful people are very angry with me I am enjoying myself quite a lot. Feeling very blue."

Sigh.

thesignalandthenoise

"If I understand how wizarding governments work correctly all the magical hybrids will be under their auspices, not yours, so if that proportion goes up a lot..."

"It'd need to be formally structured in a way that makes it accountable to the normal government, and ideally a subsidiary thereof, unless we want to do something as ambitious as create an entirely new government which will gradually inherit the population of Anitam."

Theodore Thowegood Way

"That sounds great, you should do that."

"It crossed my mind but if you fucked up at it - the difference between the current Anitami government and a perfect ideal government is substantial but the difference between the current Anitami government and a failed state is indescribable and I know how relations with our neighbors will go under the current system and I have no idea how to make a government that gets equally stable foreign relations while being definitely better in ways that we can't just make the actual government better, given the time and leverage which we have."

chanuphis

"I mean, there are genuine problems associated with making wizards answerable to a population that mostly doesn't know about them and is therefore inexperienced in addressing their needs, which differ considerably."

"We'd have to tell more people than just the council but I don't really see how it'd be a concern in principle? It is the job of governments to set up different laws for different subpopulations with vastly different needs, we literally color-code for it."

chanuphis

"And you train people from childhood for it. Maybe I'm just not envisioning how many people you plan to tell. I suppose your government won't be a signatory to the Earth International Statute of Secrecy..."

"Yeah. And it wouldn't be a secret for that long if the plan is to hybridize the whole population in - and it should be, if hybrids are convenient in the way that wizard-veela and wizard-merperson and wizard-giant hybrids and so on are convenient then they'll be longer-lived milder-springing more durable magic Amentans and I don't see why we shouldn't try to get every Amentan the chance to have grandchildren like that."

Pelape Milath

thesignalandthenoise

"How are all the other countries going to react to this?"