"Well, there was nothing to have a civil war over. He was dead, he couldn't be put back in power, his successor was working with the coup."

"Oh. Why did his successor do that?"

"I don't know. There are a lot of reasons his public explanations might not have been the true ones. He said that he realized that the imperial experiment had failed and was introducing the instability it had been intended to solve."

"The imperial experiment?"

"The justification for the thing the Oahk empire was doing."

"But what was that?"

"They were trying to get uniform population controls everywhere by conquering the world."

"Everywhere has them now, right?"

"Yes. And everywhere having population controls was really important, and even worth a war to achieve, but permissions systems are a dreadful way to do it and the Oahk Empire did lots of other things badly too."

"What other things?"

"When they conquered countries they murdered lots of people and forced millions and millions to have abortions very late in pregnancy, and they expanded far too quickly and weren't able to stably govern all the places they were conquering, and they could have gotten compliance with the population control measures they demanded without having wars at all, and their soldiers were not very disciplined and killed even more people than they were ordered to kill, and they did not appropriately test whether things were a good idea before subjecting billions of people to them. If they had, they would have noticed that permissions systems didn't work, but permissions systems were not the only thing that the Emperor just assumed was a good idea because he thought he was very clever and did not need to check."

"What's a pregnancy?"

" - that's how babies are born."

"...which is how?"

"A woman becomes pregnant with a very little baby and then gives birth."

"...new," she asserts.

" - huh. Okay."

"And weird."

"When we go out and about you will see some people who are expecting babies, they have big tummies where the baby sits." Gesture.

"Oh, huh. I saw some of those but didn't know what was up."

"They are expecting a baby and oh so very happy about it."

"Are babies that great?"

"Almost everyone says it is by far the best experience of their life."

"Would you have rather got a baby?"

"We are so very happy we got you and could not possibly wish we'd gotten someone else."