"It can work on a small scale. If you find an individual person somewhere who's, say, having trouble pulling together rent money for the month this one time, and give them a large chunk of cash, they may well be able to go from there with that investment. It doesn't work on a large scale because poor people are often clustered - so you'd have to give money to everyone in an entire poor country and wait for their increased spending power relative to their neighbors to make a difference; it wouldn't do more than affect liquidity a little bit internally, and the poor countries are not often ones that have very casual economic relationships with everybody else - and because it doesn't address the reasons people have trouble hanging on to their money, ranging from innumeracy to expensive addictions to silly status games."

"Hmm. Would those people do well if we moved them into a system like ours, or would they - I don't know - take from others and never contribute anything -"

"Some people would do that. Well, depending on what you mean by 'contribute', you might have a broader definition."

"It doesn't take much in the way of resources to give people a happy life in Valinor, but we'd have to do this in Endorë and I don't know what it takes in Endorë - I'm debating whether it's a good idea to set up a kingdom for humans here and try to solve their problems that way or just to make a lot of money and try to act within the structures of your world."

"You'd probably meet with some political resistance siphoning off substantial human population. Probably not insurmountable." She remembers that she was writing up a set of Governor orders and finishes them.

Right, yes, that. They can figure out how to solve the people literally starving to death after the game, they're not going to fix it today anyway.

Uses some of the same skills anyway. What a nice game this is. So fun to cheat outrageously at.

She can't have any plays that come to fruition within a dozen moves or they'll be foreseen. It's an interesting constraint. Gets harder towards the end of the game, when most things have quick payoffs.

And Isabella has no such limitations, and she can avoid anything that will be obviously noted and countered within that time, although there's interesting she-knows-I-know-she-knows going on...

It's definitely the most fascinating game she's ever played.

...Isabella starts laughing a few minutes in advance of her victory.

Well of course she would.

It does not make her any easier to counter!

She would presumably have refrained from laughing if laughing prompted Maitimë to think up a way around it!

Not necessarily. The look on Maitimë's face was just a little too fantastic to resist laughing about. Anyway here is the last turn.

That is in fact pretty fucking brilliant. She is delighted and annoyed in approximately equal measure.

"I like this game," chirps Isabella.

"I bet you do! I am terribly curious what it was like from your end."

"I usually had to try about fifteen things to find a good one. Never would've been able to keep it straight without the eidetic memory."

This is an extremely complicated stare but 'jealous' is definitely among the emotions in it!

Isabella's beaming is extremely uncomplicated!

"All right, congratulations, I will demand a rematch sometime but for the time being I have indoor plumbing to negotiate. Do you want the Valar told about you or not?"

"Hm - I'd like to wait a week to see if the portal's figured out from Earthside in that time. After that I'd rather navigate the Valar than let my brother keep worrying."

"Sounds good. How long is an Earth week?"

"Seven Earth days. So, about three and a half of yours."