The spaceship is wedged awkwardly in the alley between two wider streets; the alien is facing a concrete garage with a ramp descending underground, topped by an office building, and there are houses here and there, something more industrial over thataway.

What...?

This planet sure doesn't look uninhabited. She frowns and brings up a basic sensory array. The only thaumo residue it can detect is the stuff leaking off the ship and the very little the array itself is putting off. But it is detecting those, it isn't that the sensors are being blocked somehow...

The architechture isn't anything she recognizes, but she's never actually been outside Villarosa so that doesn't mean much. 

Maybe the locals will be able to explain. 

"Solace-delta-prima, call up a translation array with all loaded languages, please." 

"Aye," the delta fork of the personal AI of the Crown Princess of Villarosa chimes. 

"And tell Tanya not to come out, we don't need an international incident if they get mad at me for crashing here."

She hops lightly down the seven feet from where the hatch is oriented at the moment to the ground, straightens her cuffs with a flick of the wrist, and goes looking for someone to talk to. 

There's a big red truck coming up out of the garage! Somebody in the passenger seat gawks at her a little but they don't stop. They and the driver both have bright red hair, unfamiliar outfits, and, if she's looking closely, slightly too many teeth.

It's no surprise she can't recognize the style of their clothes, since she couldn't recognize the architecture, and she isn't looking anywhere near close enough to count their teeth. 

She doesn't attempt to stop the large heavy motor vehicle, instead looking around for a building that looks relatively important compared to the others--not that she'll be able to pick up specific cues, but if one is larger or more ornate that's a good general guess. 

The buildings are pretty mishmash. Most of them look like they're old and have been repaired or updated many times. They're all pretty low on decoration but a few of them have paper cutouts in the windows, or rocks arranged artistically out front, or red paint on some of the grey bricks in an interesting pattern.

This place feels very lower-class which at least minimizes the risk that crashing here will cause an international incident. 

She selects a building at random and tries the door. 

The door is not locked and leads to a hallway with some stairwells.

She selects a stairwell at random. 

On her way up she encounters another redheaded person, who sort of double-takes at her. She says something, and pauses on the steps like she's waiting for a response.

"Solace-delta-prime--"

"Language not recognized."

She frowns and rummages in her personal array database for the all-purpose language-independent translation spell she had acquired before she made it into the Royal Acadamy and gained access to the language databases there. It will draw a lot harder on her personal power, but it's nothing she can't handle. 

Getting it running takes only a few seconds, and then she has the AI feed it the audio data. 

"'I don't recognize you.'"

"No," she says through the translation array (if the other redhead is paying attention, she may notice that the sounds she's hearing and the shapes Linda's mouth is making don't match). "I'm not from around here, I had an accident with my spaceship. Can you tell me what planet I'm on?"

"That's not funny."

"I'm not joking? I mean, I guess the name of the planet might not help much, since this language wasn't in Solace's databases, but if you happened to know where I could go to find a star chart, I would be in your debt."

"It's not funny. Are you here to see Tektasa?"

"I'm really not joking. I can show you the spaceship, if you want."

"I don't have time for this. Tektasa's woken up, if it's her you're here for, maybe she'll be entertained." The local stomps down the stairs.

Not the most promising start! Sigh. 

She keeps ascending the stairs. Maybe she'll run into this Tektasa person. 

She does not encounter anyone else on the way up the stairs except a couple kids who look about three or four using the fourth landing to assemble a puzzle. There's enough room to go around them.

Aw, cute kids. 

Once she reaches the top she traverses the hallway then selects another stairwell and starts going down again. 

In this stairwell someone is replacing a lightbulb. He doesn't pay attention to her.

"Excuse me? I'm not from around here. Could you direct me to a library or something." 

"Ha, ha," he says in a bored tone.

"Why does everyone think I'm joking. Is this dress the local equivalent of a jester's bells."

Sigh. "We don't have a library. It sounds nice that your district has something pulled together. I hope you enjoy it when you're home."

"I'm not just not from this district, I'm not from this polity, I have no idea where I am but my AI doesn't recognize the language and I am trying to find a starchart. Is there some non-library place to find one of those, and if not, is there a map of--districts, provinces, whatever--so you can show me where I'd have to go to find one?"

"What kind of AI doesn't know Tapap?"

"The kind from Villarosa!"

"Where's that?"

"Figuring out where it is relative to here is what I need a starchart for."

"Ha, ha," he says tiredly. The lightbulb is changed. He climbs down his ladder and folds it up and heads down the stairs.

She throws up her hands and starts looking for someone else. 

The next person she finds is just locking his apartment door behind him as he leaves. He looks at her quizzically but doesn't seem to have time.

If he doesn't have time then he doesn't have time. She wouldn't expect him to want to take time out to help a stranger even if she didn't expect that she was going to have to do a lot more arguing before anyone took her seriously enough to actually direct her to a starchart. 

She keeps looking. 

Two opposed apartments have their doors propped open so some kids who look about seven or eight can race between them, babbling excitedly about something.

She peers into both to check for adults. 

One has an adult who is having a conversation on a local electronic of some kind; the other has no obvious adults in evidence.

She leans against a wall in the hallway and keeps an eye on the adult until they're done. 

The adult looks at her, furrows her brow, concludes her conversation and pockets her device. "...hi? Are the kids bothering... you... who are you."

"My name is Linda Serafini. Do you have any idea where I could find a star chart. I would say why but everyone else I've asked has decided I was making terrible jokes."

"...have you tried Citrusing 'star chart'."

"What is 'Citrus.'"

"I don't know what they call it in other countries, but any search engine should do... why wasn't there an announcement about an international visitor, what are you here to do?"

"I came here by accident. My AI hasn't figured out how to access the local networks yet."

"...what do you mean?"

"I...do not currently have a device capable of searching Citrus?" 

"What happened to your pocket everything?"

"Is that a local computer?"

She takes hers out of her pocket and waves it a bit.

"Yeah, I don't have one of those."

"Did your organizer take it for being crazy on the internet?"

"No. I'm not crazy, I am just very, very lost. Usually, I am not lost, and do not come off as crazy."

Much. Admittedly, she was a touch ambitious and eccentric, but she didn't think that would be helpful to explain right now. 

"Where are you supposed to be?"

"That's one of the questions people say I'm joking when I answer it."

"...look, how about I refer you to my organizer - are you from Tuviri somehow or something -"

"Being referred to someone who organizes things sounds great. I don't know what Tuviri is to answer that question."

"Uh-huh." She taps her pocket everything.

Cool cool cool. 

While she waits, she instructs Solace-delta-prime to update Tanya and Elaine on the situation and collect an update in return. They've made a little progress on the glitched ship enchantments while she's been gone but it probably wouldn't be a lot even if it had been her doing it.

"I... am watching kids right now so I can't conduct you there..."

"I promise you that I am not the kind of crazy that cannot follow directions from point A to point B."

"...okay. Go down the stairs and out the door onto to the pedestrian street, turn right, go into the apartment building with the potted tulips in the window, go in and it's the first apartment on your right."

"Thanks!"

She waves and takes the directions precisely in an extremely un-crazy-person-like way. 

Then she will successfully make it to a door with some woodburned writing on it that reads Organization Office.

Pretty. 

She raps on the door. 

"Come in," someone calls.

She opens the door and comes in. 

"Hi. I am very, very lost, and there's some kind of cultural gap that means when I try to talk about it directly people think I'm joking or crazy, and finally I talked to someone indirectly enough that instead of just telling me I wasn't funny they directed me here."

"I see. How did you get lost here?"

"I had an accident with my spaceship. It was a little skipper, the nav went wonky and I had to make a random jump."

"Okay. The reason people are thinking that sounds like you're crazy or joking is because reds do not have spaceships, and the people who have spaceships don't land them in red neighborhoods."

"I don't know what 'red' means. When I say random I mean random, I literally do not know anything about this planet, let alone this neighborhood."

"- okay, that's... worse," says the organizer. "So, uh, if you go across the street there's our doc-"

"Kashi!" exclaims somebody, bursting into the room. "Kashi, there's something weird wedged in the alley across from the north garage -"

"Oh, yeah, that'd be the spaceship. Uh, it's not designed for atmo but it's structurally sound, it's not going to like collapse or anything. Sorry about that."

"Did you take a picture," says Kashi, "of the weird something."

He took a picture of the weird something. She looks at it.

"Do you have cloud storage?" she asks.

"- yes," he says.

"Delete it."

"Uh-huh." He does.

"Did I land in some politics or something?"

"Ma'am, if you'd be so kind, it would be very good to know if we should expect anyone with - instruments of any kind - to have noticed your ship crashing."

"Um...it's a skipper, it didn't traverse the intervening space, it teleported, nobody would've seen it. But if anyone had any kind of thaumo sensors pointed in this general direction we'd've lit them up like a fireworks display, there doesn't seem to be anything else in the area."

"I really appreciate your willingness to explain, ma'am. Can you tell me what a thaumo sensor is?"

"It senses thaumo--thaumaturgical--magic energy. The whole reason skippers are spaceships is because they function best in low-thaumo environments and inhabited planets usually have thaumaturgical residue all over the place, some spells are more efficient than others but even when you have really really efficient spells any kind of populated area is going to have enough to leave a certain level of fog lying around." 

"Okay. Is your spaceship damaged, ma'am?"

"We haven't yet fixed the glitch that caused the random jump in the first place but it didn't take any additional damage in the crash."

"I see. Do you think it will be a quick fix or more complicated, ma'am? And - have any of your companions left the ship?"

"No, they're staying behind while I do recon. I...think it should be a quick fix but it's one of those things that could be more complicated, I wanted to make sure we weren't in immediate danger before I dove into the guts of the enchantments. Solace-delta-prima, any updates from the others?"

"No, ma'am," a faintly artificial-sounding voice says out of thin air. 

Kashi sucks in a breath between her teeth. "How quick is quick, if it's quick, ma'am?"

"Quick enough that I've been asking people for a star chart instead of just waiting until night falls."

"I... see." She does not offer a star chart. "And if it isn't quick?"

"That would really depend on how it failed to be quick. It could be still doable before nightfall, or it could be a couple of days...if it were going to take more than a couple of days we would probably just patch the glitch instead of fixing the underlying problem and take it back home to be looked at by a professional. Which is also an option if leaving it there for a couple days is unacceptable."

"It would be... complicated." She glances at the person who came in with news of the spaceship. "Go park something in front of it, for now."

He nods and scurries.

"So I am guessing that we have in fact landed in some kind of political situation. Who are you hiding us from? Shitty government? Hostile foreign power?"

"If you'd landed anywhere else in the city it would be... fine. Ma'am."

"--Oh, shit, did we land on some kind of extremely secret research project?" 

"...we are not a research project, ma'am."

"...I wasn't suggesting that you were, I was just hypothesizing that there was one in this part of the city and that's why it was not fine for us to be here."

"We don't conduct research here, ma'am."

"Okay, I am not actually completely incapable of taking a hint, you don't want to tell me why it's a problem. I can respect that, we're unsolicited weirdo foreigners, you don't owe us anything. Do you need me to, like, refrain from doing diagnostic spells that will tell me things about anything outside the ship? Because that'll slow me down some if so."

"I... don't know what things the spells will tell you."

"Lots of things! I can't really say without knowing what you don't want me to know whether I have a spell to detect it...actually, no, I could have Solace-delta-prima draw up a list of the diagnostic spells in her databanks and you could check the list. It'd be a long list though."

"If you need to know things about - magical properties, the location of the planet and its moons and star, the laws of physics, the number and locations of buildings in the area, the weather, the flight plans of other spaceships and aircraft... that would all be fine..."

"The thing that I'm most concerned about is diagnostic spells that check to see whether there's any risk of sudden loss of stability of the skipper's hull, which gather a whole lot of data about the physical properties of the ship's immediate environs. Like, if I cast one of those and the ship was next to a building with another spaceship in it, I would find out about the spaceship, for example."

"We don't have any spaceships, so that sounds fine, ma'am."

"The spaceship was an example. My concern was not about a literal spaceship. You did explain that this was a poor enough neighborhood that people looked at me like I was crazy for bringing ours up. Maybe a better example would be that if there are people having sex nearby at a sufficiently regular rhythm that in theory it could cause resonant frequencies I would learn about that."

"I... can't guarantee otherwise at this time ma'am."

Giggle. "Yeah, I didn't think 'sometimes, people have sex' was going to be your big secret."

Kashi winces.

"--I'm not trying to deduce what your secret is! That's why I used examples both times that I was confident weren't it."

"...thank you, ma'am."

Linda quashes the urge to assure the woman that she doesn't need to ma'am her like that just because of the spaceship and the fancy AI; that they are not strictly hers. But being friends with people who are that rich is not strictly better when you do not in fact have access to resources; she thinks she still qualifies as not actually a class traitor but that doesn't mean she can just make people not be nervous around her. 

"Is there anything else before I go back to my ship? My friends are working on it but, uh, I'm better at it than they are."

"Might I ask what you plan to do when it is repaired?"

"...Leave? Isn't that what you wanted us to do? Although I guess you have also conspicuously failed to offer me a star map."

"Leave for... your home planet?"

"Well, leave for the planet we were departing from when we had the accident, we'd want to let them know about it. I'm from the planet we were in theory leaving for. And my friends are also not from that planet originally, although I guess it's a little more complicated than that in one case."

"I see, ma'am. And this planet would - not hear further from your people?"

"Uh, I guess if you wanted us to file an incident report or something we could? I mean, clearly we're far enough apart that we weren't in regular contact already, your language wasn't in Solace-delta-prima's databanks and those are really very good. But, like, if you wanted to be in regular diplomatic contact with Villarosa I was assuming you would be already?"

"Ma'am, Amenta doesn't have contact with any other worlds."

"What, none? ...Is this a weird religious thing? I think I've heard of colonies who've given up technology for religious reasons but it's not something I ever paid much attention to but I think they still generally let other people show up to buy their produce or whatever."

"No, ma'am, Amentans have not encountered people of other worlds before today."

"...Then how did you...get here."

"...Amentans evolved on Amenta, ma'am."

"Wait, you're aliens???"

Kashi makes a slight face but says, "I couldn't be particularly confident in the details, ma'am, but my understanding is that we have a fossil record of evolving on this planet."

"I'm not saying I don't believe you but damn that is one thorough case of convergent evolution. --Sorry for calling you an alien I realize that objectively I am the alien here."

"I wasn't sure whether to understand you as having assumed that appearance to blend in, ma'am, but it's a remarkable resemblance."

"We have never made contact with another species before! I mean unless you count offshoots that have been genetically modified enough that taxonomically speaking it makes sense to sort them that way but that's not so much finding as making and it's really not the same thing." 

"I see."

"I guess I should probably go back to the ship and send Tanya out to talk to you if this is a for-real first contact situation, she's, uh, she has more legal authority than me."

"Ma'am, if - I may make a suggestion -"

"Yes, of course?"

"- my suggestion, ma'am, would be that you do not treat this as a first contact situation, but that you - or some more specialist delegation - return to Amenta, landing somewhere else, without ever mentioning that you were here."

"Are you some kind of persecuted minority, is that what this is about?"

"...ma'am?"

"You're 'reds' and this is a 'red neighborhood' which suggests some kind of ghettoized situation and you're all--defer-y--and you think that you or we or both would be worse off if people knew we had interacted. I mean I could be off base like with the research project hypothesis but I'm not just wildly making stuff up."

"If you come back to Amenta," says Kashi, "dye your hair black."

"I don't think that'd work in the long run for, uh, several reasons. Seriously, though, we're not going to take the other guys' side just because they're the dominant social paradigm on one planet. In all twelve star systems of Villarosa," she tosses her hair, "there aren't any stigmas around hair color."

"Ma'am," says Kashi, slightly alarmed, "while it will be understood that hair colors on aliens do not have the same significance, you look similar enough that a first impression would ideally not include red hair before you can explain. I don't recommend - confrontational approaches - to the situation."

"I mean, I wouldn't be the first impression, if I wanted to come along I could manage it but I do not in fact have any formal authority to handle a first contact on purpose. Hence why I offered to fetch Tanya. I can not show up until the situation has been explained, but--it would be impractical in the long run to hide that I do in fact have red hair and then I would have to explain why I had been concealing it, since my civilization leaves me no reason to do so. And probably we could manage something but it seems...unnecessarily awkward. Particularly since if they do interact with us for any length of time they're going to notice that we have people with red hair, it's not, like, rare. If they can't get over themselves then there's no point in making formal contact at all instead of just, I dunno, evacuating any of you guys who wanna be evacuated."

"In the same way you were understood by people who didn't expect aliens here to be one of us, other Amentans may also think that you are one of us, if they see your hair before getting an explanation," says Kashi, "ma'am, so presenting someone who doesn't happen to have it would be ideal, but if you suggest that you've been listening to Amentan broadcasts or looking at the Internet that would suffice to explain dyeing it."

"I will definitely tell people that the first contact team should either not be redheads or dye it but actually I just decline to hide my pretty hair color that I really like and people have nicknamed me about because people are prejudiced and stupid. Political delicacy and 'that sounds like a you problem' can coexist."

"As you see fit, ma'am."

"I realize you have no reason to trust me, and I promise I am not scolding you for not trusting me, but I have to put it out there that if I would prefer that you argue with me if I'm doing something dumb."

"Thank you ma'am," smiles Kashi, which is notably not an argument.

She had to try, but that's fair really. 

"Is there anything else I should know about? Any other hair colors people are going to be stupid about?"

"Any shade of red, but otherwise no."

"By 'any shade of red' do you mean, like, also pink, or do you also mean colors that have red in them like orange."

"Also pink. Not orange or purple."

"Strictly better than otherwise, I suppose. Anything else before I go back to the ship?"

"I'm not sure if Amentan star charts will be useful to you but I can show you one."

"I would appreciate that."

It takes a little bit to figure out the unfamiliar format but Solace-delta-prima is able to figure out where they are to civilization-as-they-know it. It's...a long ways off. But nothing they can't handle, mathematically speaking. 

Linda goes back to the ship with this information and tackles the glitch and discovers that it is in fact one of the quick-fix options.

They jump the skipper back to the Grande Rosa system and turn it over to mechanics who will examine it for subtler flaws in the enchantments or damage from having been on the surface of a planet, where it was very much not supposed to have been. 

And instead of securing the services of another skipper, Linda finds Yseult and explains the situation. 

Yseult is fascinated. 

She agrees with Linda's assessment that the fact that they've never encountered for-real aliens before and suddenly have is probably not coincidental with the fact that they have now firmly exited any of the timeframes covered by any of the versions of Roses of Villarosa in the world Yseult left behind. 

She authorizes Linda to do further reconnaissance with an eye to first contact. She cannot, currently, come along, because affairs of state are more of a bitch than any little girl who dreams of being a princess would guess, but Franz is free and insists on coming. 

The results are...not encouraging. 

The caste system is, whatever, it manages to be more democratic than Villarosa without being more egalitarian, which, you can't expect aliens not to do crazy things, really. 

The problem is the secret that the organizer wanted her to be not in a red district when she learned. And Linda cannot blame the woman. 

"Yseult is not going to be happy," Franz observes. 

"I'm not happy," Linda says flatly. "I'm glad Tanya isn't here, can you imagine?"

Franz winces. 

"Maybe they could be convinced to cut it out with sufficient bribes," he suggests, not sounding optimistic. 

"Franz, your mother is religious. If aliens offered her fabulous gifts and prizes to flush holy wine down a toilet--"

Franz winces again, much harder. 

"My concern is actually less how they'll react if they learn that aliens have not, in fact, somehow independently invented the same religious taboos that they have, and more what happens in five generations if we uncork the lot of them and they decide they're big enough to start making us follow their standards of ritual purity."

"...Yseult will be disappointed if we have to scrap the project, but she's practical."

"I know," Linda says fondly, but shakes her head. "I don't think we can make contact with all of them, not now, but...they do have a sub-population that doesn't bear that risk." 

"Ah. Hm. Right." 

...

A little more than a week after the aliens crash-landed in a red district and left again the same day, a much smaller, atmo-rated, single-person pod quietly pops into existence in the same alleyway. Linda casts a spell of obscurement on herself and her vessel, then makes her way back to the organizer's office. She dismisses the obscurement on herself and knocks on the door. 

A few people recognize her on the way there but they seem terrified to interact with her.

Kashi calls, "Come in!"

She opens the door. 

"Hi. I don't think we can work with the cleenz."

"...oh?"

"The second princess's mother was a coroner. They don't seem likely to take that well."

"Ah.

"I'd - expect them to work very hard to see their way clear to tolerating it but it would be an obstacle."

"Okay, sure, but we don't have any reason to settle for them seeing their way clear to tolerating it. And we are genuinely concerned by the possibility that if we give the cleenz FTL then in a few generations there'll be enough of them to form a military coalition to impose their ritual purity opinions on everybody else. Humans don't have as strong a baby-drive as Amentans do, we had a relatively short period between when birth control was invented and we got genetic engineering good enough to handle the consequent evolutionary pressure to develop one. So our populations don't grow as fast."

"Oh. Yes, that - seems like a serious worry."

"So right now we basically have two options on the table. Option one is to seal Amenta's existence as a state secret and check back in every--hang on--twelve point five of your years, that's a much rounder number in Villarosa time--to see if Amentan culture has changed to the point where that's not a worry anymore. Option two is leaving the cleenz alone but accepting red immigrants slash refugees, because you aren't going to freak out about coroners."

"We... are not.

They'd wonder where we were going, if more than a few went."

"Manufacturing fake corpses is something Villarosa magic can do. I mean, it's never been done at scale before, but people do occasionally have reason to fake their own deaths, so the spells exist."

"I suppose we could pretend to be... having an epidemic of something."

"Our research suggests that if every single red in Rivik were replaced with a fake corpse with signs of violent death people would be upset by the lack of conveniently abusable plumbers but they wouldn't suspect alien involvement. --Uh, that's a reductio ad absurdem argument, I'm not suggesting that we do that absent a really pressing need. What I mean is that if red deaths by violence or other unnatural causes were perceived to go up across the board it seems unlikely the cleenz would care until it got to the point where services were disrupted."

"Yes. At some point services would be disrupted, though, and they might project a trend forward."

"I don't think they'd probably guess aliens, though. And if red deaths by violence went up and they got worried about that it seems like they would react by starting to instrumentally care about preventing people from doing violence to reds, although I could be underestimating their cognitive glitch around reds. The first endgame that comes to mind would be to let them invent robots once we have contingencies in place to get out everyone who's left at once, but I can see how that would seem like a really terrible idea, so we're working on alternatives."

"I see. Uh - where would we be going."

"Well, that's something where we weren't going to try to work out all the details without talking to you, but probably mostly Grande Rosa and Les Millevilles. Uh, those are two of our star systems. Grande Rosa is our oldest and the one our capital planet is on and Millevilles is, like, super urbanized."

"And what would our situation there be?"

"Depends on whether you're legally immigrants or refugees. Refugees get more slack on arrival but you'd be going through the existing refugee bureau, immigrants are more expected to pull their own weight sooner but under the circumstances the Crown Princess would have the wherewithal to create a temporary agency specialized for this situation in particular."

"What kinds of work are in demand and what training is available? Is there room for all of us? What kinds of population control systems do these planets have? What is the refugee bureau like?"

"The population control system is that when things get too crowded we terraform another planet. If things get really crowded then we scout another uninhabited tar system to claim. So I guess star-scouts and terraformers are liable to be in higher demand than previously. There is absolutely room for all of you, you're--half a percent of thirteen billion? That's sixty-five million, we're still a couple billion shy of needing to terraform another planet at the moment. Work that's in demand disproportionate to how many people want to do it includes agriculture, traffic control, and waste disposal logistics. Adult training exists but is moderately irregular and is one of the things that would be handled by an agency for the settlement of red Amentans. Also, since you're literally the first non-human species anyone's ever encountered, there's going to be demand for things like memoirs and a lot of geneticists are going to be willing to pay good money to look at your genomes." 

"Would there be any hope of accessing the Amentan internet from there? Is translation like you're using common? Will we season on your planets?"

"We don't currently have anything set up to access the Amentan internet from Villarosa but it's something we can make happen, albeit it'll be much easier if we have help from some of you who know more about how your internet works. The specific translation spell I'm using is...not uncommon, but under the circumstances it's probably better in the long run to create specific spells for Amentan languages, general translation spells work but specific language-to-language spells are better. Way easier to debug and handle idiom and so on. General translation spells are mostly used for things like watching foreign-language media, not for living in a society where you aren't fluent in the language. My educated guess is that you'll season naturally on some but not all of our planets and that seasoning can be handled by magic, but it's not impossible that after some of you show up we'll discover that we have to find and terraform a new planet that's more Amenta-like in year length and axial tilt and so on."

"Do you have any opinions on what order we should send people across in? Or about handling for people who are reluctant for whatever reason to leave?"

"I think that the first people across should probably be people who fall into at least one of 'willing to risk some amount of permaspring if the seasoning situation is complicated,' 'can help us get things set up for everyone else,' and 'in immediate danger.' I think that anyone who doesn't want to leave should probably be allowed to stay until and unless their staying presents a danger to themselves or others but I don't know enough about your internal organization for that to be a strong recommendation, I found enough red corners of the internet to lurk on to pick up the word 'cleenz' but not a lot more than that."

"What kind of setup help would be most useful?"

"Knowing things about Amentan IT and being able to offer constructive criticism on things like training programs and temporary lodgings. For values of 'able to' that mean 'will actually speak up if something's wrong,' if possible."

"I can put together a preliminary list out of people from this neighborhood and the ones we have the closest relationships with without making things too dangerously widely known. How many people should be in this batch, when will you be ready to take them, what should they pack?"

"We can take up to twenty within a week in non-emergency conditions. They can bring up to three pieces of luggage of yea size," she demonstrates with her hands, "prioritizing things they don't want to risk losing instead of necessities like food, necessities we can provide on-site. But if there are any medications they can't do without for a few days they should bring those, we checked and Amentans seem chemically compatible with human food but we don't have Amentan drugs."

"For this purpose is baby formula a food or a drug?"

"A food. Admittedly I don't know how baby Amentan and baby human nutritional needs differ but we do have fast-acting spells to induce lactation, and Amentan mammary glands are structurally similar enough to human ones that I would be floored if they even needed tweaking."

"All right. Do you want to separately vet them or should I just assemble them at a particular time?"

"The latter."

"When works best for you?"

She names a time about a week hence. 

"Is there anything else we should talk about today?"

"I don't have anything else specific lined up but I have another hour or so budgeted so if you have something to bring up feel free."

"What kind of emergency capacity do you have if something leaks or there's some sort of crisis?"

"Right now there are three heavy battlecruisers in dock for repairs to their weapons systems. The Crown Princess could requisition all three; they have a carrying capacity of about a hundred thousand people each plus skeleton crews, and they're designed to get people to and from planetary surfaces in under a minute. Call it five minutes a round trip to safely jump between here and Beau Champignon, where we could requisition fallow agricultural areas to dump people as an extremely temporary measure."

"- wow. Okay. That - wouldn't save everyone against a parallelized crackdown but it would be really something."

"The Crown Princess has read a lot of historical failure analysis of situations where people failed to competently evacuate things." 

"It seems possible that you should have a map of all the red neighborhoods on the planet sooner than later."

"That sounds extremely useful!"

"I'm not sure how to send you documents."

"Solace-delta-prima has set up a dummy email account--" she gives the email. 

"Is that secure against Amenta-side hacking?"

"On our end. If someone hacks your email they could still see what you sent. I can have something more secure set up by tomorrow but I don't have it yet."

"Most reds actually use a hypersecure anonymous email system far out of proportion to what we usually need simply because they're the only ones who don't pick up enough data on users to notice we're reds, but they might turn over their servers to governments if pressured enough, if something got out. It will do for maps, though. I can send you one for Tapa and get people in other countries to send you corresponding ones. - Tuviri may need separate handling, they have a separate internet."

"If you get me the name of a contact person in Tuviri I can go there in person but I would prefer not to show up on the doorstep of someone who has no context whatever."

"We don't know anyone in Tuviri. I can see if anyone does, but it might be no one does."

"In which case I suppose all I can do is lurk on their internet to get enough context to at least make a better first impression there than I did here."

Kashi nods.

"Would it be helpful if I could get you on the Tuviri internet? It ought to be doable."

"Yes, that would help, though I'm not sure the existing machine translation for their language is good."

"I'll get you a translation spell."

"I might want to delegate the spell, I anticipate being very busy."

"I'll get you a widget with a translation spell on it and you can allocate the widget."

"Thank you. - what should I call you -"

"Linda Serafini; 'Miss Serafini' would be the usual non-familiar form of address given my age and so on. Linda is my given name and Serafini is an ambilineal family name."

"Miss Selafini," attempts Kashi. "I'm Ina Kashi, my given name and job name, and one says Kashi in work-related contexts and Ina otherwise."

"Understood. Possibly the differences in how names work between Tapa and Villarosa should go in the cultural pamphlets we're drawing up, I'll talk to the first batch about that." 

"I don't expect to have to produce bodies for curious cleans until massive numbers of reds are being removed, but how will that work when it comes up?"

"I or my factotums will come to the staging area with an appropriate amount of biomass and take a snapshot of everyone there and once they're removed I'll use the spell to apply the snapshot to the biomass. --I can also do that not in the staging area, if it would be better for them to appear in a morgue or what have you."

"What requirements are there for a staging area?"

"Contains all the people who are leaving and none of the people are not, sufficiently spatially discrete that it can be reliably described to whomever is casting the spell."

"So it doesn't have to be in, say, a large enough room to contain a big batch and a spaceship, it could just be a building."

"Oh, yeah, most of the spaceships are going to stay in space. Very, very cloaked so the cleenz can't find them, but close enough by that we can teleport people to and from the planet's surface without doing lots of complicated math."

"And getting their luggage and not the windowpanes won't be a problem?"

"As long as they're holding onto their luggage and not the windowpanes. Having a strap attached to your wrist at one end and the luggage at the other works okay for that."

"Okay. I'll get you those maps and gather the pilot batch."

"Awesome." 

She puts the maps in a prearranged order set that can be sent out with the press of a button if the battlecruisers turn out to be necessary on short notice (Yseult has the button, of course; she gives Linda as much leeway as possible for the project but some things can't be delegated). She makes sure the temporary housing for the first batch is ready to her standards of ready. She requisitions the light personnel carrier she'll be collecting the first batch in. 

At the appropriate day and time, she makes the jump to a point in Amenta's solar system on the opposite side of the star from Amenta, engages all the stealth spells, makes the much smaller jump to her near-Amenta point in space, parks the ship and jumps down. 

Kashi has assembled a group of fifteen adults, two two-year-olds, a one-year-old, and an infant.

Aww! Cute kids!

She smiles at everybody and checks to make sure they all have a secure hold on their luggage and then jumps everyone onto the ship. 

The one-year-old shrieks. They all look pretty tense.

That's fair. Sigh.

"It's going to take me a couple minutes to double-check the jump calculations to get us safely back to Grande Rosa," she says. 

"How does that work?" asks one of the adults.

"Because of the way astronomical bodies move, we're in a slightly different place relative to Grande Rosa than I was when I left, so the nav equations have to correct for that for the jump back."

"And the computer doesn't do that, you have to?"

"The computer does it, but for safety reasons I have to check the computer's work. Which is a lot faster than doing it from scratch."

He watches over her shoulder for a value of "over her shoulder" that has him about five feet away from her.

She does some complicated math things to a glowy projection. 

And then when she's satisfied with her math she jumps the ship. 

"We are now in Grande Rosa," she announces. "Do you want to go down all at once or in smaller groups."

"All at once," says the oldest red present.

She jumps them. 

They land in the lobby of the temporary housing unit she requisitioned for the purpose. It's...a government building, but for a government not under the impression that people needed the joy sucked out of them by a dismal gray environment. 

There's nobody behind the desk. Lying on the desk are a series of room keys, metal tabs attached to plastic dongles. Each key is on top of a trifold pamphlet explaining where each room is located in the building and what stuff is in them so they can sort out who gets which room. The housing unit has a single main kitchen and pantry, as well as a handful of communal spaces on the upper floors. 

"Now that I'm not teleporting people, I assume you're the person who needs the milk spell?" she says to the woman holding the baby. 

"That's me, yeah."

"Cool." 

Array up, tap. "There you go. Very cute baby, by the way."

"Thank you. Um, do I need to keep shaving her head?"

"I am ninety-five percent sure the answer is no but I have no idea why you would have to shave her head in the first place."

"Her hair grows in orange."

"--Oh. Yeah, no, that's completely fine."

"Cool."

"Should I draw unfortunate conclusions from that fact coupled with the fact that nobody here is standing next to you with significant-other body language going on." 

"It's kinda unfortunate. But sometimes hair just does that, mine was white when I was a kid."

"Yeah, I wasn't assuming for sure. Sorry people suck. She's still a really cute baby."

The mom kisses her baby's little hand.

Aww. 

"Who's here because they know things about the internet?" she asks slightly more loudly. 

"Me," says another red, raising his hand.

So she leads him off to talk to her IT people and let everyone else settle in. 

"I do the splicing and IT for my neighborhood," he says. "But I'm probably not the world expert among reds, because I think Kashi wasn't casting that wide a net - needed people who'd go without their whole extended family and whatnot, and would actually go and not tell people -"

"Makes sense. We could get by without any expertise at all if we had to, it'd just be harder."

"What do you need to know?"

"Uh, let's wait to ask that question until we get to the IT people."

"Okay. Uh, they didn't tell us all that much, can I get the - basics?"

"Sure. Our computers come from a completely different programming tradition, so they're going to work differently in a lot of ways." 

"Hoo boy. I guess that makes sense. I was told you're magic aliens, too."

"Yeah, a lot of our computers run on magic instead of silicon."

"But you still program them about the same?"

"There are some underlying differences but if you know how you can compensate for them."

"This is... exciting, I'm going to go with exciting."

Giggle. 

When they get to the IT people the internet red asks them for a rundown, asks them a lot of questions, looks at diagrams, draws stuff on their whiteboard, explains web protocols on Amenta.

Once they have all this information they'd like him to take a look at their internet and see what commentary he has on it. 

"Sure, do you have anywhere in particular I should start - should I get a translation spell, will that let me type -"

They have a prototype Tapap-Villarosan translation spell; it will let him type but it's still probably pretty buggy so they'd extra appreciate if he'd tell them when something's weird so they can check if it's a cultural thing or if the spell is wonky.

"Sure thing, it'll be sort of like working on a translation project back home." He gets online. Searches "Amenta".

He gets one hit, that turns out to be in a document outlining the red immigration project in a dusty government database. 

"Not public yet?" he wonders, backtracking and searching for maps of the known world.

"No, not yet."

Some of the hits are star charts of inhabited space with varying levels of political detail. Some of the hits are supposed to be maps of the universe, or at least as many galaxies as anyone's managed to identify yet. A very few are maps of just Villarosa.

He wanted the first thing; how many non-Villarosa places are there that humans have colonized?

Lots and lots and lots. Villarosa at twelve systems isn't even a remarkably big polity. There are over a hundred thousand systems known to currently support human life, and the map has a footnote that the cartographer can't promise that nobody has colonized a new star system that they haven't heard about. 

"Hey, uh, is it likely that any of these other guys will find Amenta?"

"No. If it were likely for anyone to find Amenta it would have happened before now. Humanity's been in space for a long time." 

She points at a little corner of the map, just a little one-system polity. 

"That's the Sol system, and their third planet is Earth, and that's where humans evolved. But Earth hasn't had more than the itsy-bitsiest fraction of the human population for thousands of years. Uh, thousands of our years. More than one thousand and less than two thousand of yours."

"Uh-huh. Uh, but Amenta'll invent spaceships sooner or later, and meet whoever's around."

"A hundred thousand stars is still only about a millionth of the stars in the galaxy. And since you guys don't seem to have magic at all, even if you invent some kind of magic-free FTL--which is possible, nobody else has but nobody else has had reason to on account of magic FTL existing--it'll still probably take you a very long time to meet anyone else. Unless there are more than just humans and Amentans out there."

"Okay.

That's probably enough time for us to run around touching everything."

"Probably so!" 

He wants to know about immigration law, and law in general.

Villarosa's immigration law is slightly complicated but basically as long as you aren't an agent of a foreign power you can immigrate if you want, it's just a question of how much bureaucracy you have to wade through to do it. There are space stations where people who are in the process of immigrating to Villarosa can stay so that you don't have to stay in your country of origin while you wade through the bureaucracy if that's bad for you. Government inspectors tour the facilities at irregular intervals to make sure they continue to be humane environments. 

Red Amentans most likely fall into a category called "clear and present need" where immigration is expedited on account of actively hostile conditions in country of origin. Examples given for this category include dreadful economies with no guaranteed basic income, and situations of ethnic tensions that have not yet escalated to the point of actively producing refugees.

There are also clauses for the nobility to expedite immigration into their own areas of geographic responsibility, including the entire kingdom in the case of the royal family. 

The distinction between the nobility and commoners, and between the upper and lower nobility (the "Alta" and "Basso") are enshrined in law, but a lot less restrictive in a lot of ways than Amentan castes. For one thing, there aren't any distinctions between any castes other than blue and not-blue and gradations of blue; for another, non-nobles aren't forbidden from owning real estate. There isn't actually anything one is forbidden from doing on account of being non-noble; there are places of noble privilege where the nobility have first dibs on things like political positions, but if none of them want it then they become open to commoners; there aren't any cases of rural towns just not having a mayor because no blues lived there.

There's a distinction between law at the kingdom level, law at the system level, law at the planetary level and law at the sub-planetary level. Laws that apply across the kingdom mostly fall into the "don't kill, don't steal, don't vandalize" common-sense level; specific regulations are usually at lower levels than that. 

What about Grande Rosa, that being the one he remembers hearing they might mostly go to?

Grande Rosa is the primary system of the Kingdom of Villarosa! The capital planet, Rosamund, is the fourth planet in the Grande Rosa system. The Grand Dukes of Grande Rosa are widely held to be second in power only to the royal family itself. 

Grande Rosa has a lot of laws about preservation of historical buildings, under what circumstances a building can be declared "historical" and what happens to it afterwards. Grande Rosa has stricter than average laws about what kinds of buildings can be built where. It also has "public beautifaction" laws, which are somewhat controversial. Grande Rosa has the strictest eugenic laws of any of the twelve Grand Duchies. 

Every single planet in the Grande Rosa system has been terraformed, and every moon and microplanet that can be terraformed using existing magical technology.

What are the eugenics laws?

Every resident of the system (resident being defined as a person who has lived there for a local year) has to have their genetics on file. If an automated scan of someone's gene file turns up any genetic defects, the matter is brought to the attention of a human geneticist to confirm the computer's assessment. Anyone with a government-registered genetic defect is required to use a government-approved fertility clinic with gene-cleaning capabilities in order to conceive; they aren't sterilized, but natural conception carries heavy fines. These fines are waived if the penalized can testify under truth spell that they were never informed of the registered defect. Anyone who is informed that they possess a registered defect is permitted to appeal the ruling up to three times in order to have the case examined by a different human geneticist, in case the first geneticist was wrong or lying. 

That's the only mandatory eugenic program for commoners, but there are also complicated legal codes concerning reproduction by the nobility, who are much more heavily engineered. 

There are also various programs to encourage people to take advantage of free genetic modification to their children. Those do exist in other Grand Duchies, though, albeit less numerously. They don't have a very high level of uptake as it is; most people (most commoners, that is) produce children the old-fashioned way. 

Huh. Why don't most commoners do it?

Because it's a huge hassle, you have to go in and have eggs and sperm taken and then select a zygote and then wait while they mess with it and then have it implanted and the whole process can take months if you get unlucky, and just turning off the birth control and having sex is fun and easy. 

Of course, that only works if you have both sets available, so marriages that are all the same sex have a much higher uptake than heterosexual couples and triads-or-higher with at least one of each kind of equipment. 

That makes sense. "How long will it take for all the genetic stuff to be available to us?"

"That depends partially on you. Legally speaking, nobody can do more than scan your genes for defect without your consent, and we don't have any idea what a defect looks like in Amentans yet. There are going to be geneticists who will pay good money for rights to mess around with Amentan genes, but even with the best simulations available the fact of the matter is that stuff that's routine for humans is going to be experimental for Amentans. But the more Amentans who license out their genes to the more scientists the faster it'll go."

"There are Amentan geneticists to crib from."

"And that is true, but the impression I got from the Amentan internet was that they're not really as sophisticated as ours yet. Like, I expect that by the time our geneticists are satisfied that their work on the Amentan genome is up to par, an Amentan couple will be able to come in and say 'hello, we would like our baby to have mild springs,' and the geneticists will say, 'you got it, coming right up.'"

"They don't know how to do that, no. But they know some genetic defects." What's Villarosa's relationship with its neighboring systems like?

"Well, fair enough, that part will take less time."

Villarosa isn't currently at war with anyone, nor has it been in the lifetime of its current ruler. There were some border skirmishes with the Republic of Geliswade in his father's time, though; the two nations don't really like each other, mostly because Geliswade objects in principle to monarchy and nobility but isn't actually a great example of the virtues of republic. Villarosa isn't formally allied with anyone, either, but it has strong trade agreements with Trefoil, Meixing, and Fujisan and weaker trade agreements with several dozen other countries.

That's about all the substantive stuff he has an appetite right now. He starts browsing for music while continuing to report on the user experience of the translation spell and the internet.

Villarosa is a very, very big country compared to anything on Amenta, and has the music output to match. It's disproportionately what the population of Ancient Earth might have considered thematically appropriate to a baroque monarchist space opera romance, but even with that caveat the diversity is stunning.

Then he will be able to find some things he likes after enough random stabs! "I think I like it here," he remarks cheerfully.

"I'm glad." 

Meanwhile the other reds are settling in. Peka has figured out how to nurse her baby and is doing that, and singing to her. Couples and families and the IT guy's husband and a few singlets all pick out rooms and go touch everything in them.

"Room" is perhaps not the most precise word; each is essentially a little suite, with attached bathroom containing soaps that the Amentans can figure out and some cosmetics widgets that are likely to take trial-and-error. Each of the suites has a recognizable bed, with a set of various blankets, some of which can be identified as basically a quilt (albeit a more regular one made of more expensive fabric than a red quilt is likely to be) some of which are more arcane in origin but still, ultimately, blankets. Some of the suites are set up for individual people, with smaller beds and not much furniture besides a desk and some storage items, and some of them are set up for couples, with bigger beds and more storage space, and a few are set up for families, with a second room attached with two of the smaller beds, a table and chairs, and a toy chest full of toys cheap enough to write off like the little bottles of hotel soap everyone steals. 

The reds are enchanted. Some of them start investigating the food situation rather than luxuriating indefinitely in the suites.

The pantry contains a couple of shelves full of dry ingredients, several shelves full of packaged foods, a small fridge/freezer combination full of cold ingredients, and a large fridge/freezer containing things like milk and juice and ice cream and microwaveable meals. The kitchen has a cupboard of things like mixing bowls and measuring cups and cake pans, a stove with space to put up to ten things on it at a time, a very large oven, a couple of microwaves so that more than one person can microwave things at once, and a chiller. 

Peka will try a microwaveable meal! Someone else will try the recipe on the back of a bag of couscous.

Picking at random will yield her a denebian venison steak with sliced lotus root and peas. It wants to be microwaved for five minutes, and the back of the box contains a chart explaining the nutritional content of the meal and an affidavit that the meat inside is 100% vat meat, no animals were harmed.  

She is not sure what demographic that is catering to but the steak is great! She eats it one handed while Katin sleeps on her shoulder.

If she wants dessert there are a very large number of flavors of ice cream available and also some non-ice-cream options like hand pies and little boxed cupcakes.

She wants CUPCAKES!

The little boxes offer the flavors "chocolate" "carrot" "yellow" "red bean" and "bananas foster"

...it is an exciting day and she is going to do her darndest to eat five cupcakes. (She gives Couscous Guy half the banana one.)

It is at this point that someone accidentally discovers that squeezing the plastic dongle on the room keys summons a holographic stylized person made of translucent glowing blue shapes. 

"Yeep!" says the someone, one of the two-year-olds. "Dad!"

"What the heck -" says his dad.

"This one is Solace-delta-sexta," the hologram says in a faintly artificial yet distinctly feminine voice, folding its "hands" and bowing its "head" deferentially. "This one has been assigned to the Amentan preliminary immigrant group." 

"Are you a computer program?" asks the kid.

"Yes. I am the sixth designated delta fork of the AI Solace."

"What are you for?"

"My projected tasks are answering questions about Villarosa, facilitating access to the Villarosa internet, and providing access to various private databases managed by the AI Solace."

"We have Internet here? Will it work with our pocket everythings?" asks the dad.

"Compatibility between Villarosa internet services and Amentan computing devices has not yet been achieved. The Villarosa Internet may be accessed through screens available on request." Demonstratively, she pulls up a holographic screen, more opaque than her own projection, containing the home page of a popular Villarosa browser, Racines. 

"Do we request them from... you?"

"Yes. This is one of the primary purposes of an AI of my complexity."

"It would be nice to get online."

"The possibility of simply providing physical devices instead was considered, but it was judged that assistance would likely be valuable, to begin with."

"Yeah, you probably have different... icons and stuff."

"And stuff," the AI agrees. 

"Do screens get delivered, or do we go get them somewhere...?"

...She points at the holographic screen she pulled up.

"Oh, we just use - the one you're - projecting?"

"Yes. I can maintain arbitrary numbers of them at once."

"Oh. Okay."

"I want to see pictures of animals," says the two year old.

She presents the two-year-old with a screen with search engine image results for cute animals. 

He is delighted by all the weird alien animals. "Can reds have PETS on this planet?" he asks.

"Yes. Would you like to learn more about domestic animals in the Villarosan systems?"

"Yeah!"

She filters the selection of pets she brings up for suitability for small children--nothing really high-maintainence that their parents will inevitably have to actually take care of, nothing delicate that's easy to harm by accident. But this still leaves a wide selection of highly-engineered fluffy creatures, some of which are recognizably derived from (or at least based on) old Earth critters like cats and dogs, some of which are not. Popular offerings include tiny elephants and tie dye penguins and a fictional critter that looks sort of halfway between a Care Bear and a lemur.

The kid is fascinated by Earth-derived dogs and will happily scan lists of breeds trying to find the best one all afternoon.

After probing a bit into his tastes, she recommends some breeds in the doberman/german shepherd/we engineered this to look like a cross between a wolf and a jackal because why not family.

Eventually he settles on a mostly-sheltie derivative and previews it in pink and wants to know how he can get a puppy.

"The first step is to ask your parents for permission."

"Daaaaaad..."

"I don't know how we're going to afford things or find a place to live in the long run, let alone deal with a dog!" he says.

"It's probably wise to wait on a puppy until you have a stable place to live," the AI agrees gently.

"Well where are we supposed to go?" asks the kid.

"I don't know," the AI says. "It will depend on what your parents decide. And they have to learn more about Villarosa before they can decide." 

"What do they have to learn?"

"That information was not in my briefing."

"Oh." The kid decides to read up on how to care for puppies in lieu of getting a puppy Right Now. The dad starts looking at real estate listings.

There are a variety of real estate listings of a variety of prices listed. Reading between the lines, while some of the cities are built as densely as an Amentan city, especially on the capital planet, not all of them are. 

"Dogs need walks," says the kid. The dad adjusts his search to accommodate this need.

Even in the really densely built cities, there tend to be parks sprinkled around (some on rooftops and some not) where one can go to exercise a pet. Several of them are advertised for this purpose. 

Linda and Internet Guy return shortly thereafter. "How is everything?" she asks.

"The toys are VERY GOOD," announces the one year old, who has pooled blocks with the non-dog-wanter two-year-old in a common area and built a village.

"My kid wants a dog," says the guy whose kid wants a dog, looking a little overwhelmed, "and I'm not sure about anything between here and there..."

"That's extremely reasonable. I'm talking to some people about getting retraining stuff set up but we don't know much about what reds are going to want to retrain as, yet."

"I don't know what there is," says someone. "Can I be a wizard? Is that a thing we can do?"

"Kashi said there was demand for farmers? - and waste disposal but I don't actually know if that will actually take any less retraining, your equipment will be all different," says someone else.

"I want to be a spaceship pilot," says a third red.

"I assume you can be wizards. Do you want to try a spell?"

"Yeah!" says the would-be wizard.

"Solace-delta-sexta, offer him a preprint light spell." 

Something unfolds in his mind, almost like a strong mental image of a sort of mandala pattern. He can't automatically tell what each piece of it means, but he can tell that each piece means something, and he can tell that he can sort of push on the gap in the center in order to execute it. 

...push!

A little firework-like light bursts in front of him. 

"You can be wizards!" Linda says brightly, giving him a thumbs-up. 

"Well, that's what I want to do then."

"We can't all be wizards just because being wizards would be cool," says the one interested in farming.

"Yes, some of us will have to be spaceship pilots instead," says the would-be spaceship pilot.

"Okay, I think the preliminary proposal I draw up is going to have a focus on training for jobs that de facto don't exist on Amenta, with a more generalized orientation to get people familiarized with the local economy and conditions and educational standards and so on before being funneled into more conventional training programs for people who want to be farmers and so on."

"Plenty of us will be fine with doing conventional things like farming," says Farming Red. "Especially those of us who are older."

"What are the educational standards?" asks the parent of Dog Kid.

"Well, nobody goes through all the mandatory schooling without picking up any magic, for example."

"I heard there aren't population controls here at all, is that right? Besides your eugenic screening," says a different red.

"Yep. Probably once we have a solid enough handle on engineering you guys there'll be some soft pressure to select for milder springs, but it's not like anyone's running out of room. Space is big." 

"So I could take my implant out like right now, if I wanted, and figure by the time we have the baby we'll have a place?"

"Are those designed to come out without a doctor doing it? Anyway, yes, that sounds fine."

"I've heard of people getting them out at home. Doctors'll fuss at you about it, of course, it's just real nice to know I could."

"I don't think our doctors are at this time competent to prescribe you anything chemical but removing implants they should be able to do."

"What will you do if somebody has a medical emergency here?" asks Farming Red.

"If it's a really bad emergency and our doctors can't handle it then we'll pull out a stasis pod."

"Oooh."

"We should still get one of our doctors in the next batch."

"We don't have a lot of those going spare."

"Okay, maybe the batch after that."

"And some pirated medical literature sooner," she agrees. 

"Yeah."

"When should we expect people who want to look at our blood or whatever?"

"How soon are you comfy with? I can get people in tomorrow if you want."

"Tomorrow's fine by me!" There are some nods and no active dissenters, though Peka asks, "Will they need a sample from the baby? She doesn't like needles any more than most babies."

"--Oh, needles aren't necessary, there are magic scanners."

"Cool, as far as I know she has no opinion on those!"

"Babies usually don't have opinions about things that aren't strongly pleasant or unpleasant sensory stimuli!"

"Yeah, that." Babysmooch.

"Babies are nice. I'm not planning on having any anytime soon, but I am looking forward to the prospect." 

"Still single?" tuts a red.

"Are we allowed to hook up with humans?" says another. "- I'm not hitting on you, it just occurred to me to wonder."

"No, I have a boyfriend and girlfriend, but we're not married yet, and all three of us are still in school. I wouldn't accept if you were hitting on me, but I wouldn't be offended either and I don't see why you couldn't, lots of people are more single and/or open-relationshipped than me."

"I mean, we look a lot like you with our clothes on but who knows if it would actually work," someone else remarks.

"Hey, if they have tentacles I'm still down," says the one who wondered in the first place.

Giggle. "I have seen your internet. We look basically the same with our clothes off."

"Are we allowed to leave this building?" Spaceship Pilot Red wants to know.

"Yeah, we haven't issued a press release about you yet but you're not classified or anything. --Although if you encounter any reporters and start talking to them please tell Solstice-delta-sexta to warn the rest of us, especially if they find out the location of this building." 

"Can it hear us from outside?"

"Yeah, it's assigned to the group, not the building."

"I have never met a reporter, how do we tell if someone's a reporter?" says Peka. "Do they say that when they start talking to you?"

"No, but if someone asks a lot of intrusive questions, they're probably a reporter."

"Will they say yeah if we ask if they're a reporter?"

"If they work for a newspaper then they have to say yes if you ask or they aren't legally allowed to publish. If they're a freelancer, on the other hand, there's a lot more wiggle room."

A couple of bolder reds decide to go for walks Right Now.

It's a bright sunshiney day! There are streets with even less non-pedestrian traffic than on Amenta. There are skies that are conversely well-populated. There are pedestrians! Some of them have red hair. Some have black or brown hair. Some of them have yellow or orange or silver hair. A few people have blue or purple or green hair, but not very many.

They are a little shy of the ones who have clean-Amentan-like hair but they keep reassuring each other that they are pretty sure that "grey" has big teeth or that "yellow" is weirdly tall and is probably a human.

None of the ones who have clean-Amentan-like hair take any more notice of them than any of the others, nor of the ones who have not-clean Amentan-like hair. 

Some people have children with them. The children vary wildly in age; if there are any discrete cohorts they aren't immediately discernable. 

When they get back from their walk around the block they ask Solace how long years are here.

"Do you mean the length of a solar year on this planet, or a standard 'year' across Villarosa for timekeeping purposes."

"The first one."

"The kids didn't seem to be spaced, and we were told there was a risk of permaspring."

"Humans do not experience the 'springing' phenomenon," Solace-delta-sexta explains. "Male humans are fertile at all times, and female humans are fertile on a personal monthly cycle of varying regularity. For the latter purpose, a local solar year is approximately half an Amentan year long."

"What season is it now?"

"It is the beginning of summer."

"I noticed the microwave meat thing said it was grown in a vat. Why do you grow meat in vats?" Peka asks.

"Many reasons. It is, at scale, cheaper. Vat-grown meat has zero pathogens or parasites even when raw. Also, if you assure people that they can avoid food that used to be cute fluffy animals at no cost to themselves, then they can go look at pictures of cute fluffy animals and pat themselves on the back for being a good person."

"Then why isn't all the meat vat meat, and they still have to print it on the box?"

"The overwhelming majority of meat available for sale in Villarosa is vat meat, but there is a niche market available for 'authentic' meat sourced from artisanal farms or places where it is legal to hunt."

The next day, Linda comes in with a black-haired woman in a labcoat. 

The reds have made themselves a little communal feast out of the contents of the kitchen and are all sitting around and eating it. The one year old is sitting on the table.

"Hello!" the woman with alien hair says brightly. "I'm Maria Hargraves, I'm here to take medical scans."

"Hi, Hargraves," say a few reds in unison, forgetting how Villarosan names work.

"Doctor Hargraves," Linda corrects. 

"I don't think it's necessary to stand on formality," Maria demurs. 

"It's the right thing to say!" Linda protests. "I called all my doctors doctor whatever when I was a kid, it's not some weird upper-class thing." 

"Doctor Hargraves," amend a couple reds aloud politely.

"Is this everyone?" Doctor Hargraves asks briskly, calling up the diagnostic spells. "I can do everyone at once, if you'd rather, though I'd prefer to go one at a time, I'll get more precise results that way."

"One at a time is fine," someone says.

She starts scanning people. She gives each of the two year olds a lollipop when she's done them. 

The two year olds are very happy with their lollipops. The one year old wants one too but can be distracted by a cupcake.

The children are very cute. The doctor is happy to sit on the floor to achieve eye level and explain to them anything they want explained.

Non-Dog Two Year Old wants to see the scans and find out what they all mean!