"You're welcome! Anyway, we don't have these where I'm from and this place is too small and too pretty for any of the urgent applications even if you took it into your head to donate it, I guess I'll have to find planets how I was originally planning to after all."

"Guess so. Why not just run off and leave the whole mess behind, though?"

"...'cause a billion people, or however many are left after the war, are gonna die?"

"Well... and? Do you like any of 'em?"

"...yes, but even if I didn't..."

"Even if you didn't...?"

"...then I still wouldn't want a billion people to die?"

Tias seems to find this very puzzling for some reason!

"...are you from a place where it is customary to be indifferent to large death tolls?"

"I dunno? I guess not, Dad's always annoyed when we lose a lot of people in the war even if they're all Ceirene."

"Ceirene?"

"Ceir is the outside of the planet, Aluvanna is the inside. You look Ceirene to me, I guess 'cause there isn't an inside of your planet for you to be from. Aluvai have the fangs and claws and long ears, like me."

"Gotcha. Uh, I do care about people of different ethnic backgrounds and nationalities, yes."

"Huh. I'm not sure I care about anybody," says Tias.

"...sounds lonely."

"I guess. Wouldn't it be exhausting, though, getting mad every time somebody dies even if you've never met 'em?"

"I don't hear about all the individual deaths but the war was exhausting for that among other reasons, sure."

"Oh, what'd you have a war over? Not invading aliens, I'm guessing."

"First time the planet got punctured the city on the far side appeared to have been attacked."

"Oh wow. Yeah, that'd do it."

"Sure did. But then we all discovered that actually the problem was the planet getting eaten."

"I bet that sucked."

"Tremendously. Hence my attempt to go looking for alternate dumping grounds and somewhere to escape to."

He laughs. "Makes sense."

"Thank you."