Basically all the Savannah Guard does is fighting. If it were a merchant group or something it would be different.

That makes sense. Who do they fight? Are they at war now?

Animals, mostly. And road thieves. Sometimes the Barkbiters from the east will try a raid to steal stuff.

What leads people to become thieves, around here?

"...Thinking that they can get away with it, mrr?"

Well, presumably, but like, are they hungry, are they greedy, are they unskilled...

"Greed for things and for feeling strong, mrr?"

"Not because they're hungry. Finding plants and animals to eat is not so hard. If a village says to go away maybe, it is not so safe on your own."

So it might mainly be a shelter issue? (Crime rates on Amenta are very low partly because of strong social services.)

Yeah, they don't really know. It's not like anyone goes around interviewing bandits. Good for Amentans, though.

Maybe Amentans will interview some bandits at some point. Though it seems like they might be hard to catch, ha ha.

Haha. A shuttle would be pretty good at catching bandits, though.

Maybe Amentans could pay the Savannah Guard to turn over bandits for interviewing or science experiments.

They could! What does the Guard usually do with bandits?

It's a judgement call based on how bad they were. A beating and lecture and sending them home, or exile, or execution (after letting them visit the Well one last time of course).

Huh, it seems like it might be a bad idea to let criminal tendencies into their soul pool.

Everyone gets to visit the Well, no exceptions. If they're terrible enough it won't spit them back out again, but even then they still exist and that is very important. They hope there's some way to make it accept Amentans.

Huh. How does it decide not to spit somebody back out?

Well, they have lots of anecdotes about how a forest village got people who were carpenters and a place dealing with too many packhunting omnivores got great trappers and the Black Emperor never returned and so on.

Huh, cool.

They think castes are a bit strange. People mostly take the same job they had in past lives but they still figure out what they want themselves the first time around.

(They've been talking for a while by now, mostly the time-consuming pointing at things and charades at the start. The Dwellin will have to go home for dinner and chores many of them have neglected to come meet the aliens soon.)

That makes sense, the aliens need to go in their shuttle and eat and rest themselves.

Will they still be here tomorrow?

Yup! Though after a while they might want to go meet more people on other parts of this planet.

Just remember that Suusvu wants to buy metal! Good night!

If the greens look at the twig from the Well tree, they'll probably notice that it seems really weird.

They do look at it! Weird how?

The leaf and limb have neurons in them, as well as bacteria-sized metal nodules, and lots of different cell types. The genome is extremely long and it seems like each leaf has a different but related one. Also, none of the telltale signs you use to track an organism's evolutionary history are there, at least on a first glance.