"Not by default, no. If you have some special aptitude for it, or for tasks which require it, then perhaps."

"I've seen it done but not hired any myself so far."

"That will be all, then." 

Chiko bows and steps out.

The next blue girl has navy hair with the tips dipdyed cyan, is extremely short, and introduces herself as: "Fekka Tsumininia. It's an honor."

Isidonia has known dwarves and halflings, and Fekka is taller than them. But her first thought is still that they included a child in the selection, until she looks a bit more closely.

She gestures to the chair across from her.

"A pleasure. How did you choose Tsumininia?"

"It's a compressed line from an old song about governance standing in where parents can't, about creating a big collective project built out of people who aren't all family who can just defer to a shared ancestor nor all friends where they can track all loyalty on an interpersonal basis." She would rather not be asked to sing it. The chair expects that sometimes people are four foot ten and Tsumininia has no trouble getting into it.

She thinks, briefly, of the orphanages in Cheliax, and then she is composed again. "Tell me about yourself, and your other prospects besides this position."

"Oh, I'm election track, but - the normal thing to do, if you are election track and my age, is to either become the mayor of a little farming village so small that no one else is running, or do unrelated policy work in various departments for several years first. You need a history, a reputation, contacts and experience beyond just following your parents to work and going to blue school, to win. I think this will play very well in elections if I get the job, and if I don't, I can go work in my grandmother's office, she's the Supintaska provincial education supervisor."

"It seems wasteful, that you must prepare for so many different potential roles at once, instead of knowing what you will inherit." But she supposes it is often that way, for the nobles of the robe.

"...once I was offered five hundred thousand tap to take an image of my step-grandfather's pocket everything but I can't say I was particularly tempted to do that."

"How long will it take you to obtain that much money through legitimate means?"

"That really depends on how my investments do - or I could sell something off but I certainly wouldn't choose to do that for no reason - but if you're asking if it was a big bribe, I think it was meant to sound like one to a two year old and would have been a very small line item in the budget of any enterprise which wanted that everything image."

She found that answer less interesting than Ninpa's, but perhaps Fekka is too young to have been truly tested. She moves on instead of digging further. 

"If you were running our social calendar, who are the people you would invite to visit us first?"

"Well, that all depends on what you want to accomplish. If you want the Tapai government to dance to your tune and they're dragging their heels on something you want, invite over the ambassador from Cene - the ambassador from Voa, even - and make nice with them. If you haven't got a tune yet and want to learn more, top greens - social science ones most likely, I had a chance to talk to the trio they were able to grab on short notice out there and you've got a biologist and a linguist and a xenologer, I'd want to get you anthropologists and political scientists and historians. If you want to break the news that you exist with a great big splash, TV people - also greens, but not the same ones."

"TV people?" she asks, curious.

"May I show you?" she asks, pulling out her pocket everything.

"Of course." She'll angle herself for a better view.

Tsumininia pokes it in a few places and then, on the little screen, there is a video of a middle-aged blue man with bright sky-blue hair at a podium, giving a speech; the view zooms in, on him and the hand he's gesturing with; it cuts off mid-sentence and picks up with what's clearly the rest of that same sentence, but now he's giving the speech in front of an auditoriumful of yellows; it cuts again and he's with a bunch of purples surrounded by shipping containers; and then the video fades to darkness, though his voice continues, to display (in sky-blue text over the black background): One message. One Supintaska. One Tapa.

"That's my step-grandfather's campaign video for the governorship of Supintaska which he won last year. You can take videos yourself on a normal pocket everything - I can show you that too if you like - but doing it effectively is a skill."

"I understand the significance of the ambassador from Voa, but why do you suggest Cene?"

"Oh, Cene's big and prosperous and not as firmly aligned with us as Anitam. Talking to the Anitami ambassador would barely be provocative."

She does not think this girl has made any enemies, yet, and seems a touch too eager to. "Where do you think our hosts draw the line between leverage and ingratitude?" she asks mildly.

"Oh, I'm not necessarily advising doing any of this, but if you did want to, that would be how you'd do it - politely. If you wanted to apply leverage and you chose something that would make sense in your own context it could easily be incomprehensible or badly miscalibrated for the amount of pressure you meant to issue. Talking to the Voan ambassador would be provocative but it is not, say, also a crime, or also likely to be misinterpreted as a proposal of marriage."

"I am already married," she says, with some sense of horror. "Does that not settle the question of whether any interaction is a proposal, here?"

"- well, it makes it less likely but by no means impossible."