Bella finds Suze, gives her the letter, confirms that, yep, they have nothing in common really, but are vaguely in favor of each other's survival, nods at a New Orleans senior, and proceeds to grind her teeth only a little bit before setting about mingling. Hello, people she's locked in here with for the next four years.
"There's more of them, half the year, and they'll come straight for you even if you're in a crowd of mundies. They can't even keep them out of the enclave sometimes. But it's kind of a petty complaint, at least where they don't lay you out with West Nile in the process, I know I've had it very nice."
"I need to learn more about it first. I mean, it seems really obvious to me that if you want to get rid of something you have a few options and those are likely to look similar at the high level of granularity in deer or ants or magical beasties, but as far as I know no one tries giving mals birth control or poisoning them, why not? Would it not work? I might do horrible things to agglos for a while and try to figure it out."
"I don't want to get too specific yet and cut off useful avenues with preconceptions. But: lots of people have spent their lives improving the general situation, and I hardly think they should've skipped out on building this place and whatnot but instead I'd like to find a way to actually get at the root of the problem. Disrupting ecosystems does look really promising."
"It'd cost a lot of mana, but the stuff we're about to enjoy for breakfast lunch and dinner as long as we're in here isn't exactly cooked by five star chefs, and they would be able to cut down enormously on defensive and offensive mana expenditures. I do think we'd have heard about it if someone tried it in the last couple hundred years but maybe there is an ancient offshoot of humanity from Tibet still floating around."
He whistles. "Well, I wish you luck with that as well."
(See look, he is totally capable of mustering genuine positive emotions and therefore social reactions even about people who he is maybe possibly someday in the distant future going to mass murder. It's so distant and in the future! Not even really relevant at this stage, is it, especially since he'll probably die before then. He still wants people to have the best possible lives in the meantime; he hasn't lost sight of that and he's not going to. And maybe her idea will even work and then he might not even have to mass murder anyone, wouldn't that be grand, and the chances of that increase if he's helping and the chances of him being able to help increase if he smiles. It only looks a little strained.)