Rubelite's facial expression doesn't change at all when she cries.

Sigh. 

"You know, the Amentans might invade you too."

"I have the same information as you, Anaander."

"How can I get social competence?" Rubelite asks Cor, the nearest unoccupied one.

"...heck. Uh, practice helps. ...do you write things down or do you just spaceship things?"

"I spaceship things."

"Okay. Let's get you something to write with. Maybe what Cam has, it seems really fast." He takes her hand and goes to follow Cam.

"We don't have a problem," he says quietly to Pelape in case she's following all this.

"You sure? Is it because of all my social competence?"

"Nah, he just thinks he'd win a war and he sees more upside."

"Good to know."

"Also there's a cooperativeness thing. Can explain more later if you want. - assuming we're permitted private conversations? I guess possibly we aren't."

"Rirosseth could be a relay if you're worried?"

"That might be good. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Any ideas to help Rubelite that Cor might not think of, I'd be really upset if I were suddenly some smallish percentage of myself and wasn't even going to get to loop in the rest later."

"I take it the Valar from your world definitely won't play peacemaker?"

"They're not all bad all the time, Aulë helped me out with some of my side effects, but, uh, Mirelótë sounds like she can give hers marching orders and we super cannot do that and involving them could make things worse."

Nod. "Uh, if you think his threat model is wrong you could talk him out of it, I just don't know that it is."

"It sounds like he thinks an informed Rubelite would wittingly or un- inform the rest of Anaander that Osirion et al exist and that she might somehow use this information to independently develop enough magic or sufficiently sci-fi tech that she then shows up here and conquers the place for its... nonmagical resources, I guess, since ex hypothesi she can in this scenario duplicate magic effects just by having the vague idea that this might be worth looking into, but maybe the place has interesting nonmagical resources other than sand I just don't know about? I'm not sure what advantage I have over Anaander in communicating that this sounds really weird as a thing for her to do."

"I don't think that's what he's worried about, I think he's worried she'd destroy it."

"Because it's got... plausible threats to her empire or something? I got here pretty recently, the stuff here doesn't obviously scale that way..."

"It's come up that people here can conjure matter and that this plausibly allows people to destroy planets pretty easily. Although so can the kind of thing Cam is, I don't know why he isn't worrying about that, Cam's not gonna but there's more of those."

"There's that - the locals don't actually know very much about how dangerous their magic is in combination with other information, but it's probably very, and we're postulating here that they can reach our world, if they can send us back. But the main consideration is the treaty with the Presger. The one that Rubelite might be able to help me renegotiate. The Presger feel very strongly about violence between different species. Humans killing humans, that's fine, they fundamentally don't understand what a human is so they don't care and I'm not sure I want them to understand what a human is because if they then extend their principles to object as strongly to humans killing humans then they might, just, hermetically seal all humans away from all other ones or something. Or exterminate us, for being so evil.

If the Presger find out about this planet then the treaty's broken and I don't know what happens after that but it's plausibly very bad. If I find out about this planet I will just try very hard to make sure the Presger don't."