And so he goes off to do that; by lunchtime he has four dozen gift baskets with blankets and block sets and easy-grip balls and realistically proportioned but fantastically colored stuffed dogs and chickens and crows all packed up and ready to be taken into the city.

And everybody with a magic baby gets one!

Hooray!

It occurs to him that he should email his red contact and make sure they're getting in on all this too - hopefully the plan to get them integrated will come together, but failing that, having them take over trash reclamation seems like it might be a viable alternative if they can craft.

Hello again -

It seems that Amentan babies raised on this planet will pick up at least some crafting; I've sent some crafting-material toys into the city to be given to the ones showing signs of it, to make sure they have the best chance of learning the basics. Have the reds been included in this? If not, is there a good way for us to get things to you?

-traveler

No, and they're talking about transferring everybody with a baby back to Amenta.

Why do these aliens suck so much.

I'm so sorry. Do you know of anything that might convince them to let you stay?

-traveler

While he's at it, does the internet have anything to say about this?

If they think it's impossible to get anything besides telepathy without access to crafting material that would at least make it plausible, as long as nobody hassles cleans with telepathy anyway.

Ugh.

I think that's likely, but they'll know before I will if I'm wrong.

In any case, do you want some crafting material? I understand that the situation is fraught but it should be your choice.

-traveler

Please don't delegate choices that could get us all killed to the one red who happens to be answering these emails.

Why do these aliens suck so much?!

I understand.

-traveler

Does the internet in fact have anything about this?

There are anxious message board posts about how it's very scary if reds could get magic, even though crafting doesn't seem as dangerous as some magic that could have been available.

Of course. What a mess.

Is there... some blue, maybe, in charge of making decisions about reds. Or something.

No specific blue seems to have that in their portfolio. There is a slapdash website with contact information for the "essential services liaison department" but the headshots of staff members who have managed to provide them for the page are oranges.

Oranges are... which ones, again? ...no, that's almost certainly not what he wants. Is there a blue assigned to crafters, maybe.

Apparently the point person for crafter related matters (as opposed to colonial or Amenta-facing matters, which have their own offices all reporting to the governor's office) is Tahni Kikaumitang. The job name is relatively new and means "boundary treaty".

Oh, good. Can he find anything about what Kikaumitang is like? Maybe some details of projects they've worked on, perhaps before the crafter diplomat made contact?

With some looking he can find Kikaumitang's resume. Under the jobname Faisu (a Tapap corruption of a Cenemi word meaning "neighbor") she served in the office of the ambassador to Cene from Tapa, and before that she was, under the name "Chiak" ("friendly") a policy advisor in the domestic government's department of international cultural and peacetime matters, doing things like coordinating conferences and managing joint space operations and mediating third party conflicts from a position of neutrality. She graduated with honors from the University of Shapto's foreign relations program. There is a picture of her with four grownup children, two small grandkids, and a husband and his other wife all together.

Promising, maybe. Was she in her current position while they were driving the locals out? What stance did she take with that?

She wasn't there yet; she was hired after the city was already well underway. It looks like the governor was the only blue currently holding a colonial office who was also there at that time (though there weren't many, back then, it was mostly exploratory parties).

Okay.

So he has something like a plan, and an idea of where to escalate if that seems like it'll help... can he come up with anything better, before he goes risking peoples lives? (Why do these aliens suck so much. Ugh.)

Oh, actually, yes...

Sorry to bother you again, but it occurs to me that we're accumulating rather a lot of money here without very much to do with it; is there some way we could use that to help?

-traveler

We do have bank accounts, but unfortunately whoever you suggest this to might catch fire

...?...

...oh...

I should probably clarify that I have very little context, here, and if you speak hyperbolically I'm not necessarily going to be able to figure out that you aren't being literal. Could you clarify for me how dangerous it actually is to you for me to try to improve things for you?

-traveler

Sorry. Nobody will catch fire. Uh, basically in any situation it is very, very unlikely that having cleans more involved in anything to do with reds will be good for us. It is almost always at least a little bad, even though sometimes it's just bad in a stupid way like people having to trade names so they can get on the colony ship with their spouse because the social worker didn't ship them. Cleans do kill reds sometimes, but they know that if we start thinking it's not safe to go about business as usual, we'll go down fighting, plus they need us, so they keep it to a pretty low rate, I don't think it's happened on this planet yet. If you spend a lot of time interacting with cleans about reds, especially if it's about anything they find particularly icky or threatening, that is very possible to have backfire.

You might be able to directly send us money at some point without talking to cleans about it but I don't think you can do it yet, some inter-bank stuff isn't fully off the ground in the colony yet and we can only get accounts with a specific bank. We're not allowed to use cash, so you can't send it with a crow, either. If you're serious about this what you could maybe do is pay one of the delivery purples who's relatively trustworthy to bring us stuff; I think that wouldn't come to much attention.

If we started being able to use magic more intimidating than telepathy they really might kill us all though. They really really care about being able to know where we are and what we have access to, and if we could craft stuff, they'd expect us to do something like, I don't know, tunnel through walls to run our hands over their furniture or something. Telepathy isn't threatening that way, it's not even much longer range than shouting, so if the little ones have telepathy but nothing else and they don't grow up to be dumbasses, they'll probably be fine.

All right, that's much less alarming, thank you. Please do let me know if there's anything in particular you need that we can have delivered to you; it doesn't sound like figuring that out is the best use of our time right now, but it's certainly an option.

The next thing I'm planning on doing is pointing out to our green liaison that the way you're being treated is going to make most crafters uninterested in working with Amentans in general; we're arranging to bring some genecrafters in to help people with bad springs and generally learn more about your species, and I expect a good number of them to change their minds about participating when they find out - and it's fairer to them if I make them aware of the situation before they make the trip, since they'll be uprooting themselves to come. I was planning to bring it up by asking if you'd gotten any of the crafting material toys I'd made, but that's obviously a bad idea; do you have a better one? Perhaps something I might have found out about on the internet?

We could also perhaps take over some of the work the social workers are currently doing; do you know how much of that work requires being in the city?

-traveler

What is it about how we're treated crafters are going to object to so much they won't do the springs thing? It doesn't seem bad for us particularly if some random cleans spring less.

Social workers are mostly so they can monitor us and make sure we're behaving; I'm not sure you could do much of it from outside our building.

No, it doesn't hurt anything to help with their springs, it's just that if they're not going to act like civilized people then fewer people are going to want to help them. The way most crafters think of it, the whole point of living in communities is to help make sure that everyone has what they need, and they aren't just not doing that, they're making things worse for you than if they were to just leave you alone.

-traveler