"I left out a lot of detail on interspecies hybridity and species magic since it didn't seem like those would be the primary draws on Amenta."

"I'm sure some people will absolutely leap at the chance for alien hybrids, though it might take a bit since without it obviously on the horizon people are tending not to marry aliens yet. Species magic?"

"In my world, every species has its own unique magic. Manipulating what magic a hybrid inherits is--related but distinct from manipulating the DNA itself."

"Ah. But since we don't have any it won't come up till more people are marrying aliens."

"Exactly. Or until we can get alien tissue donors; I can work from more than two genetic sources."

"Ooh, that'll get the plural marriage rates up like anything. Not that that's a key metric these days."

"Which it was previously because when you have population controls more adults in a marriage increases the number of children available to a given parent without increasing births per capita."

"Yes, that's right."

"I'm very glad you didn't have to wait longer for access to more planets. I'm used to a very different set of population pressures--most species in my world have a much lower baby-drive than Amentans do, but we also don't die of old age--but my world also has natural portals between habitable planets; not having them was...never an issue for us."

"...there would be so many Amentans if we'd started out that way," he says. "Goodness."

"My species is on the higher end of the range of child-obsession of species I know, and I've been satisfied with just the two for decades. We didn't evolve; our species start during magical events called 'Geneses.' We try to limit them, mostly, but they ever happen."

"Oh, Arda species are like that, too, their gods place a bunch of starter adults and they go on from there."

"We start as babies. Which is most of why we try to limit Geneses, people prefer to have children on their own terms rather than because babies are randomly appearing and need parents."

"There's a world where everybody's like that!"

"Oh dear."

"I think these days they have it under control. Still. Here people want their own babies."

"Very reasonable. My own children don't have anyone but my wife and I in them; I completely understand the biological imperative."

"There will be an incredible rash of marrying aliens if your services are widely advertised and that's all to the good, Amentans are an important part of peal labor pool supply and getting magic and so on incorporated into our population will be very beneficial. What kind of throughput can you manage?"

"Depends on how complicated the job is. 'We're the same sex and species and we want a healthy random-assembly baby' I can do in less than an hour. 'There are five different primary genetic contributors and four of them are different species' of magic and we want as much of that tacked on as possible and three of our species have mutually lethal biochemistry and we have a four-meter-long list of aesthetic specifications' can take as long as a month. Most of the jobs I've taken in the past have taken multiple days but less than a week. That's in total time; given a biology lab that's to my standards or better I can eject a project in progress to switch to something else."

"What are your bio lab standards, in general lay terms?"

"Relevantly, they need containers into which I can deposit bundles of cells and expect to be able to retrieve them alive later, and the materials to mix substrates to deposit them in."

"- that doesn't sound hard. I expect I can get you a spot in a university lab or somewhere private, what's your preference? University labs have more paperwork and private labs will take more of a cut."

"University! I love universities, they have so many people who know so many things and will talk your head off about them if you show interest. Assuming these universities are anything like the ones I'm familiar with." 

"University full of greens it is! Let's see -" He pulls up some things on his monitor. "What things matter to you in a placement?"

"Nowhere near anything military. A strong genetics department or program or what have you is a plus; since there's this whole other perspective of genetics I'd like to see what I can pick up about it. Housing for my children and their companions as well as myself--and my wife once I can get her resurrected."