"Of course there's more than just that, but yes."

She goes back to transcribing the manual, haltingly. Enjoys digressions about tiny robots and science fiction - which is weird but fascinating as a genre-

After a while she determines that nothing is going to blow up if she leaves and she kind of needs a break, so she thinks she'll take a break from this and go on a tour of trying-to-bribe-magic-users. And maybe finally get those botanists their Well-growing supplies to try it on Amenta.

Sounds good to them!

Stoneheart leaves the ruins. Another entrance is found to one of the other ruins, but this one is right on top of a notoriously dangerous Acid Swamp and seems to be heavily infested.

Meanwhile, the tourist city being built has reached a complete enough state to start moving in more people than construction workers and farmers! All the nearby polities are friendly and trading with Tapa; The locals mostly avoid the city itself though.

That's fine! The place fills up with Amentans who want to live in space in various tourism-friendly capacities and think they might be able to season there.

Dwellin will try to sell their handicrafts or tour guide services. Some of them have figured out they can get ad revenue and are trying that, with sports and daredevil stunts and choreographed fights and pretty landscape photos and handicrafting videos. Are there any Amentan babies around?

Dwellin can make money doing all those things! There are babies; some people bring theirs and some are having babies on the planet, though some people are just working there to save up and take in the experience and plan to have their babies back home.

So cute!! Not quite as cute as their own species but definitely cute! Dwellin are exquisitely careful around babies.

(The baby boom is dropping off a fair bit, mostly thanks to condoms. Still a growth rate but a much less immediately alarming one.)

The Amentans will keep the condoms coming while they watch to see if it will drop off on its own.

Several political groups would like to know if the anti-slavery campaign is going to happen or not. Three Bells offers their whole army and fleet if the Amentans will help against opportunity attacks while they're away, as do lots of others. Probably most of the fighting should be between Dwellin.

The Amentans are about ready to stage an anti-slavery campaign now! They can play defense and logistics while Dwellin go fight amongst themselves and free slaves.

Fighting for freedom! Getting helicopter rides to scoop up whole slave convoys! Slipping weapons and agents into a city and leading an escape from within! It's all very heroic. The annual Teeth Mountain War is cancelled in favor of the Great Liberation. They have a slightly disturbing amount of fun, in between all the death.

Well, that seems fine, they're all going to be reincarnated. Slavery is declared OVER. War correspondents have a lot of fun and make many documentaries.

The slavers seem to be fighting more to go out in a blaze of glory than trying to win, at the end. There's lots of political wrangling about former-slaver territories and restitution and whether to have a global enforcement body (but it should be all Dwellin if they do) and tension between pro-Amentan and pro-independence thinking.

The Amentans are mostly not threatening the independence of anyone who isn't keeping slaves. They're happy to run on voluntary trade and keep their footprint safely small. For the time being.

Stoneheart has quietly paid a few people who were wounded and dying or just old to come give up their magic. Some of the underground city comes back online, but not in an especially ordered way. They manage to make it prioritize repairing a few handheld 'siphons', which can be touched to recently-dead magic animals to collect their integration and makes the whole thing a lot easier.

Now it wants antimatter.

Well, uh, they do have some of that, but they would... really like to know why it wants that and what for.

For the reactor room, apparently. To start the fusion reactor again.

...gosh. A fusion reactor. Interesting concept.

They check over the reactor to make sure that's all it does and assuming everything checks out they will feed it some antimatter.

And then the underground city has power again. It can manufacture arbitrary amounts of magic rock from elemental feedstock, now.

...well, that will sure help a lot since lots of Amentans want to be magic! That's awesome!

It is awesome! But- "The more I read the documents here- because I have to, to have a good understanding- I think this whole planet was for tourism, and Dwellin were one of the major attractions," she tells Kiki. "Thus I think it's fair for Dwellin as a whole to capture much of the value created by recovered ancient technology. Perhaps I should talk to some blues about this."

Kiki is happy to kick that question over to some blues.

Some blues think that since Amenta is providing all the antimatter and also bankrolled the entire excavation, they don't see a particular reason for Dwellin in general to get much of a kickback, though they could buy rocks the same as Amentans could and of course will be paid market rate for providing feedstock, and Stoneheart in particular should get a big paycheck for all her help.

Ugh politics.

Amenta was certainly of great ingenuity figuring it out and fixing it and did most of the work. They can have lots of rocks. But as a matter for the future, she doesn't want Dwellin to become - irrelevant. Amentans didn't build this place- Some ancient race who almost certainly engineered her species did. In a way it's their inheritance. Can they see why she is concerned if the vast majority of the underground city's output goes into Amentan pockets.

They're certainly happy to hire Dwellin for various functions if Dwellin want to work in the underground city? And pay them? An inheritance is normally... not the subject of an archaeological dig and involves a conventional legal relationship or a will. They can hold some proceeds in trust till such a will is either found or definitively not going to turn up?

It's not perfectly analogous but if technologically advanced aliens found a galactically rare renewable resource in Amenta's deep seas and set up extraction efforts through various feats of engineering and investment and then decided they'd keep almost all of the resource for themselves-

-Some sort of trust could be a good solution, though.