Tail-flick.

She considers and discards several more things to say.

...I will arrange for an early return.

She turns and goes.

Skyclaw comments, You might want me to stay. Some of those people were angry. Some of them might be stupid enough to think they can get away with dropping a rock on your ships or something. I won't touch the ships.

"The whole place is -"

"Yes. Thank you," interrupts the other blue.

Skyclaw doesn't say anything else. The giant Elder, the Architect, flies back to the mountain after a while.

Skyclaw fights someone who comes up wanting to break the ships, and wins after a brutal match, and plucks two feathers from their head before resuming her guard as they slink away.

The shuttles receive a synthesized voice radio transmission with orbital rendezvous coordinates that night.

The Amentans depart.

Shining Truth darts some distance out to interplanetary space as soon as they're all undocked in their home orbit.

The Draak currently on Amenta are the adopted eggs' parents, the Seeker, Sunwind, Bloom, the diplomat Ice, and a miscellaneous two dozen or so lingering near Tapa's conference.

The eggs' parents are asked very gingerly by the families hosting the eggs if they have ever eaten someone.

Ruan asks Bloom.

Meksi asks Sunwind, stammering horribly.

Amseli asks Seeker what the best way to find out about everyone else might be.

One of the eggparents took a chunk out of someone while they were still alive before they ran away, does that count? Bloom hasn't. Seeker goes still and declares that he will ask everyone, since the Amentans are positively reeking of anxiety about it and might offend, and asks if feathers taken off a recently-dead person count.

Sunwind proudly declares that no less than three challengers or lawbreakers have become his food at one time or another!

That doesn't count, hooray!

Ruan is so relieved!

Feathers off a dead person are polluted but would presumably not be eaten. The theologically complicated thing here is whether it's possible to recover from eating a dead person; if you've just touched a feather you can wash or burn that off.

Meksi runs away, crying.

...What???

...Oh. Uh oh.

A conflict is imminent (maybe) so he'd better run away from his (potential) enemy's favored terrain. Like, right now. He darts out of the empty set building where he was staying and towards the loading lot as fast as he possibly can.

Security greys meet him there. "Where do you think you're going?"

Right past or through them and into the air, apparently!

"STOP. YOU HAVE TO STOP RIGHT NOW. WE'RE NOT GOING TO HURT YOU IF YOU DO AS WE SAY."

This does not override his overwhelming instinct to GTFO.

Soon he is chased by a helicopter. It's loud but he's telepathic. The people inside think it's EXTREMELY IMPORTANT that he knows to go straight to the conference site and not land anywhere else even for a second, and it's going to follow him all the way there to make sure.

He dives as soon as the helicopter approaches, thinking to land and dig a hiding spot, but such loud thoughts can be heard even a good distance away. Instead he levels out and goes faster. He tries to lose the chopper, but can't keep that much speed up for long. When he gets to the conference site he circles in the air.

The helicopter people think loudly that it is okay for him to land at the conference site.

He thinks right back at them that he will stay in the air where he can burn off adrenaline and his instincts won't scream at him to bite someone for now but will only land there when he does land!

I am ashamed of myself, Seeker tells Amseli. It is true that I have autoclaved myself since last I touched anything that might pollute me, but I do have feathers taken from the dead. They have sat in a corner of a cave for hundreds of years, untouched. I filed away pollution in my mind as 'handled' and became over-excited by everything else, when I perhaps should have anticipated... This.

"The feathers aren't a very serious problem. The feathers might pollute you but it'd be fixably. There isn't up to date theological consensus on cannibalism. It may be unrecoverable for anyone who's done it, we're not sure."

I continue to not be a theologian but I will observe that it would be very inconvenient if that is the case, so perhaps they will try harder than usual.

"They might benefit from knowing what extremes, like autoclaving, could be on the table."

Not everyone can survive autoclaving or similar treatments - it depends on strength of Earth. I could ingest a literal ton of bleach. It would be awful but I would live. I could be washed with razor-sharp steel wires. I was once infected with Blueblight but burned it out with a cocktail of extreme venoms and poisons, then treated others the same way. I could bathe in potent acids or bases or liquid nitrogen or molten stone or withstand a lot of hard gamma radiation. I can withstand the True Song of Destruction, which is a harm beyond the physical world.

But I am an Elder Draak, with all the power that implies. Most could withstand much less. Though, I may be able to keep them alive even against such treatments.

"Radiation's promising - I'll pass all that on to people with more experience than me in pollution theology."

Seeker collects information and reports that one of the guards, one of the explorer corps, and one of the miscellaneous visitors are cannibals. And that the crew of Shining Truth sent him a rant about too-short turnaround times but that's probably just empty griping and anxiety talking, reading between the lines.

Amseli records a public apology for not having caught this problem sooner and promises everyone that the cleanup will be publicly funded. It goes online. The cannibals need to stay in one place under observation - or depart the planet - till the greens are done with their emergency theology conference at least.