He visits a national park for a while first, but shows up at the lab the next morning, carrying a Draak-sized necklace with big metal cylinders hanging from it.

Purples and a green meet him! "Good morning!"

Good morning. I won't be giving out any substantial advice on technical things today - perhaps a few general comments - unless we work out a deal, but I would be glad to discuss the business side of things.

They can do that! The green runs in to get a yellow.

He has numbers for how much fuel the existing Draak ships consume to go from place to place! Presumably the yellow can make projections for demand based on this. If Amentans can industrialize this like they've done with computers that will be a boon to both species. Draak don't do industry, generally speaking.

They can do a back of the envelope estimate. They think it's amenable to industry.

The fusion powerplants are also good for electrical power but he can't guess whether they will beat geothermal. Maybe the moons can benefit from it.

They will see about spinning off a division to look into that.

I would be willing to work directly with your researchers to improve what you have already done for the right consideration. As one of the inventors of fusion power, I hope my credentials don't need to be established. I would want either very steep consulting fees or a stake in the profits your technology will eventually make.

"How much stake? We don't leave a lot of capital lying around..."

He can definitely negotiate a business deal. He's aiming for somewhere between a twentieth and a fifth, depending on some of the details.

That's kind of a lot and he's leaked enough that they can probably get off the ground on their own.

Sure, but not as quickly. Well, he has lots of other things to do with his time if they can manage it on their own.

They'd cut him in at two percent, or five percent of their extant division with the option to spin off other divisions later that he's not cut into.

At those percentages he can give them lots of data and spend a solid week or two working with greens and hand over some machinery from his ship, but whether he wants to take the deal depends how much of his time they want him to devote to helping them out in the long run.

Just enough for a good head start.

He was imagining much more of an ongoing commitment, that's where the high initial offer came from... Yeah, he'll take the two percent deal. He doesn't have any instincts about how corporations work and what spinning off new divisions would look like, so he mistrusts the five percent deal. Maybe it's a bit irrational, but there it is.

He'll just go get some more things from his ship while a contract is written up, and they should summon whoever is in charge of actual development so he can get to work with them.

They can take care of that for him.

He comes back with more stuff and figures out how to collaborate. He knows this particular kind of thing very well, he seems to know every field of physics tolerably well, and has been studying manufacturability so he is fairly good at pointing out what they're doing right and what they're doing wrong, and translating the principles behind his one-of-a-kind-masterpiece fuel collectors into something Amentans can make. It will take a lot of compromising and figuring alternate methods out, though, because he can do all sorts of magic to cheat at making things.

He'll gladly keep this up for 16 hours a day until whenever someblue tells him the school is ready.

The school is ready now!

-Excellent. Where should he go, and is he going to meet blues in the capital first? He kind of forgot about that when he set down to engineering.

He can land in the designated river spot whenever but the blues would like a day's notice.

He'll give warning. For now, let's see what they've arranged for a school.

They have rented a place that is an outdoor skating performance rink in the winter but was in the middle of being renovated; he will fit on the place that's usually a rink and there are seats for lots of greens.

He flies to the place and looks around for the nearest green.

Hello.