“They are!” says the delegate wearing vantablack and gemstones cut to look like flowers in an elaborate structural garment. “They’re a delight. Although that one comment I made about them to Dath Ilan was sarcastic, I was implying that they should have started dating us before they started making threats.”

“I s’pose we also would’ve been charmed if they’d actually brought flowers,” says the woman cosplaying as a songbird.

“That too.”

"Oh! Well, these are intended as a diplomatic gift and not as an overture but I'm really glad you like them. All your outfits are fabulous, by the way, I've already seen most of them on fashion blogs before I even read the news."

“Thank you so much!” beams the delegate wearing a dress seemingly made out of faintly glowing stained-glass. “They’re not as perfect as we’d like, for something this important, but they’re still so pretty!”

”I wish I could wear this all of the time,” muses the songbird cosplayer. “And I still love your outfit so much, Kalu, it’s something I never would’ve thought of.”

“I’ve never seen anything exactly like it, it’s marvelous.”

”I have seen a few pieces exactly like it and they were delightful too,” pipes in the woman in vantablack.

"Thank you! I made it myself, I had to learn to knit so I could be sure it would be just right. Let's see, do you all have any agenda items for this delegation -?"

“Well, we wanted to learn more about all the other universes and figure out mutually beneficial things that we could do!” says the vantablack!Bobbiversian. “We’re happy to share our media and our art for free, and to freely share technology that’s useful for basic humanitarian interventions, and we’re willing to do lots of mutually beneficial exchanges of other unspecified things. I don’t think we have a more specific agenda than that.”

"That's broadly our media and art policy too! I think back home the big worry is the infanticide thing but it sounds like that'll be really hard to get a grip on till there's more common knowledge?"

“It’ll eventually change when everything’s public, we’re not stuck like this, but it’s going to be on the scale of years, maybe a decade or two, not in a couple weeks,” says the songbird!Bobbiversian.

“If we do in fact end up wanting to change our entire civilization, which is not guaranteed,” says the vantablack!Bobbiversian, a bit pointedly.

"We've been trying to think about ways to reduce hassle on your end and it seems like the dath ilani would be willing to front basically all the labor and logistics, though it did seem like you weren't getting along with them. I am curious what method of gradual disclosure takes years? Is any individual person in danger of mental health issues if it's sprung on them faster than that or does it just take time to get to each one?"

“If you tell someone something like this all at once they’re gonna think you’re lying, and then if you prove it to them they’re going to think they’re hallucinating, and that stresses people out enough that sometimes they prove themselves right. It’s not very plausible, this whole thing with an interdimensional cave, it’s not how the world has ever worked. So we’re telling everyone a little bit at a time, making it seamless, and then people should mostly go ‘wow that’s surprising’ and not ‘guess I’ve been hallucinating the past five years’,” says the songbird!Bobbiversian.

"Huh. And there aren't levers on creche policy that - whatever process sent you here - has access to?"

“Not enough to make a dent, not quickly.”

"It wouldn't have to be a very big dent to do some proof of concept on the dath ilani ability to integrate the kids - for example - or to demonstrate broad interest in applying some ingenuity, even if it doesn't scale right away."