"I guess I won't sneak any of their humans out at this time, then, not unless I find a way to move a whole planet. Can you do that?"

"Nope."

"Oh well."

...hug? "Sorry."

She does not especially want a hug and is puzzled by the offer. "It would have been lucky for the first concrete idea I had to work but I'm not surprised that it didn't."

No hug, then, all right. "Yeah. I can tell you about situations like that when I find them, lots of places have some kind of trouble."

"I'd appreciate that! The Federation is good at almost everything and it could absorb more people."

Nod. "Will they only take immigrants from worlds with FTL, or are other Earth humans okay? Some worlds' physics don't seem to allow that."

"They don't have a policy on that. The policy as written specifically requires warp drive, actually. But I'm hopeful that if they have incentives to do so they'll resolve the dilemma sensibly when presented with alternate universes."

She nods. "Worlds with space travel tend to all have different ways of doing it, it shouldn't be too hard to give them a reason to be flexible."

"Oh, good."

"Is there anything else you'd like me to watch for?"

"I'm not sure what you're in a position to see. What have you run into the last week or so?"

"Let's see - yesterday there was live music in the evening, and I spent the afternoon practicing algebra with a kid who brought their homework in by accident. The day before that everyone who got a door was from a post-apocalyptic world, and I did magic for some of them. The day before that, the bar was taken up by someone charting out some kind of plan, and the crowd was kind of boring aside from that - we did have someone come in wanting to trade some pretty pottery, though. The day before that... I spent some time with my tribe, so it gets harder to remember, but the last day I spent in Milliways before that I think was the one where the dragon with the shapeshifting magic came through and a bunch of us went flying with them... the day before that was pretty boring, I remember thinking about that while I was flying... I don't think I can remember back farther than that very accurately but the day before that might have been the one where a couple of demigods got into a wrestling match in the backyard."

"Wow. What kind of magic did you do for the people from postapocalyptic worlds?"

"A bunch of them had permanent bases and were scavenging for supplies, and being able to teleport things and people home helps amazingly with that, you can get ten times as much done on a trip pretty easily sometimes. I did portable portals for getting food and water from home instead of having to carry it for a bunch of them, too. And some of them wanted portals to other bases or emergency boltholes, and a couple of them had magic in the world and I made things that could detect it for them."

"And none of these people just wanted to - move to other, better worlds?"

"I'm sure they would have taken the opportunity - I think some of them went back with each other, actually - but nobody who was there was able to take them. If it happens again I'll let you know."

"Thank you!"

"No problem. What do you do here, anyway?"

"I'm a surveyor - I go take a first look at unexplored systems to flag anything that Starfleet might want to look at."

"Neat. Are you looking for anything in particular?"

"No, whenever there's reason to believe something in particular's in an area that's Starfleet's job. I do particularly like systems we've gotten radio from but the Prime Directive means I can't say hi, I just get a closer look."

The kobold nods, "that makes sense. Is there anything else someone considering moving here should know about the place?"

"The Federation forbids genetic engineering. It takes a very hard line on that. I can't in good conscience recommend engineered refugees come through them and don't have the expertise to recommend another civilization for them. The Federation is not always perpetually at peace; some of our neighbors are unfriendly."