"How long is very long? Could Amentans live on Doheem one day?"

"At the rate at which it was going when we left, it would have taken hundreds of thousands of years, but it's quite possible things have been sped up since; that's an area where new scientific or engineering advancements can make a lot of things possible. It'd probably be possible for some Amentans to live there even before we finished with that work, though."

"Does it have years the right length? Is it possible to send unmanned probes to look for habitable worlds or do you have to do a lot of work while you're flying around?"

"Our years are much shorter than yours! It might be possible to make it work anyways by doing something clever, which is something we'll want to research. We want to be able to talk to people when we find them, which is why we send crews on our probes. We shut down to conserve power when we're travelling in between solar systems, so from our point of view it doesn't actually take that long!"

"How long did it feel like to you before you found us?"

"Less than a season! This is only the second system we visited."

"Wow! Was there anything good in the first one?"

"There was a huge asteroid belt where we'd hoped to find planets! We think they collided with each-other soon after we departed, based on the distribution of the asteroids. There was also some pretty gas giants." <pictures of some pretty gas giants>

"Those are beautiful, wow! Is it okay to put these online?"

"Sure!"

space-ourselves: Awww, I really like her.
hopelessly-entangled: Me too!
light-and-wonder: Yeah, she's pretty great.
light-and-wonder: I can't wait until we can get more online and talk to more Amentans!
light-and-wonder: I know it's primarily important for humanitarian reasons
life-should-flourish: But there's a whole planet full of people down there and you're dying to talk to them?
light-and-wonder: Awww, Penji, you know me so well 💙
life-should-flourish: 💙 
void-your-warranty: I cooked up designs for a compact receiver and weak transmitter, it shouldn't be too long.
hopelessly-entangled: oooh. Good work!
space-ourselves: Great job, babe 💙

"Awesome! I have a blog I can put them on - I don't know if you have time to read blogs, you must be super busy -"

"We are definitely pretty busy, especially right now, and there's a lot of internet, but we are also very good at reading quickly! If you send us the link, one of us will find some time to come by and check it out sooner or later."

"Here it is!" She links them to a blog titled "failed step one".

"Cool! We'll definitely check it out at some point. I have some other stuff I need to get to, but it was really nice talking to you!" 

"It was super cool to get to meet you guys! I'm so glad you found us, it's the most exciting thing that has ever happened!"

"Likewise! We're all so incredibly excited about this!"

"I'll let you get to your thousands of very important things, bye! <3"

void-your-warranty: Okay, just finished talking to Shipping Logistics Guy.
void-your-warranty: He's amazing, really fun to work with and talk to, good at what he does.
void-your-warranty: If we're ok with spending the money (it'll be pretty expensive, understandably) we can have our freight line in a local season
space-ourselves: Excellent work, babe! 💙
light-and-wonder: If you think it's worth the cost, I'm fine with it. 
light-and-wonder: All our major costs are going to be things you're best at optimizing, so...
void-your-warranty: Yeah, it's a good deal. It'll save us at least that much on the cost of importing raw materials before we start mining in bulk.
void-your-warranty: And more on exporting our products afterwards.
space-ourselves: And even more importantly
space-ourselves: We get a TRAIN!!!
space-ourselves: :D Good job, babe 💙 
life-should-flourish: Yeah, nice work 💙
light-and-wonder: ^^ 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: ^^^ 💙 
void-your-warranty: Thanks everyone!
light-and-wonder: Alright, let's go do some more interviews.

Avaker talks to the Assemble employee working on the building prototype and works out a deal to purchase building components on a schedule where they'll be available once the train is ready to run.
The crew interviews the rest of the candidates, thanks them all for their time, and decides to hire the ex-Yvaltan yellow (Kaevy), given her work experience and how well she gets along with Avaker and Zanmi.
Over the next few days, Avaker works with Kaevy to get a quick-and-dirty communication relay setup online while the others do research, translate more Azurifice fiction to sell and share, and talk to various Amentans on request; Zanmi does a few preliminary interviews with some purples and yellows with the qualifications Avaker has given her for initial gruntwork and such. And then the internet access is available!

All five of them immediately start drinking in as much of the publicly available Amentan internet as they can. Most of them are looking for how people are reacting to the news of aliens in general (both on an individual level and on an announced government policy level).

Muroti stops by Klimati's blog to say hi and that Avaker loved the Explore Up soundtrack (her favorite song is the ice level's theme).

Makoki specifically is looking for: red communities, red reactions to the news about aliens, people talking about reds online in general and especially recently.

Kaevy sets up a web portal for filtering requests to interact with Azurifice and hires some people to help sift through things - there's a lot of volume once the word is out that they're friendly and sometimes like talking to random people. The portal has all the fiction hosted there, and the pictures of space, and the Rasikan history.

Klimati agrees that the ice level theme is very good, her third favorite after the storm level and the meteor level.

Red communities are -

- usually password protected.

People talking about reds online are mostly remarking on having encountered them at all ever and this being very unpleasant, or blaming them all for the Voan food crisis, or wondering if they have subjective experiences at all, or (in the case of items out of Doet), talking about them as useful experimental models for testing out all kinds of things before you try them on people.

Makoki fumes, takes notes, and looks at any unpassworded red communities she can find, and looks for sites that allow anonymous posts that looks like that includes reds.

Unpassworded red communities, on inspection, mostly turn out to be clean roleplayers who kink on it or like being edgy or something. Lots of websites allow anonymous posting in ways that don't obviously exclude reds (at least in practice), but the reds aren't telling that they're reds on those, they're just posting memes with everyone else.

hopelessly-entangled: so who has fun exciting internet facts to share?
hopelessly-entangled: I'll go first!!!
life-should-flourish: oh no.
hopelessly-entangled: I've been researching reds!
light-and-wonder: how bad? :c
hopelessly-entangled: Well, to start, most mentions of reds by non-reds are "Augh I saw a red and it ruined my day."
space-ourselves: ...
hopelessly-entangled: Fun fact: Voan reds are to blame for the recent food contamination scare.
void-your-warranty: Wasn't that orchestrated by, uh, that one blue?
hopelessly-entangled: Well, you see, the reds touched it, so.
life-should-flourish: *hugs*
hopelessly-entangled: It is debated whether or not they have subjective experiences.
space-ourselves: Wow!
space-ourselves: Horrible!
hopelessly-entangled: Doet uses them as test subjects for product safety, before trying new products on clean people.
hopelessly-entangled: Honestly the worst part of it is
hopelessly-entangled: I keep trying to think of solutions
hopelessly-entangled: And the one that keeps popping to mind when I'm stuck.
hopelessly-entangled: is that it would sure be fucking convenient.
hopelessly-entangled: if we could upload them. 
hopelessly-entangled: 😱😭😠
space-ourselves: Augh
hopelessly-entangled: I know!

light-and-wonder: Makoki, what do you need?
hopelessly-entangled: I'd like access to red communities? They're all password protected.
light-and-wonder: Avaker, Muroti, can you try and get her in somehow?
space-ourselves: ...You could patch precise spyware into our in our music file format decoder?
void-your-warranty: Target a specific list of red communities (perceived 15 most popular) and only upload data on match.
space-ourselves: Small offsets in update check times for data output?
void-your-warranty: Ooooh I like that. Gimme a bit. I'll add a fancy visualizer and weave it in there.
hopelessly-entangled: Zanmi and Penjaga, can you help me look for stuff like, uh. Radical/(Edgy?) academics who seem to think it's obvious reds are people and are angry about it online? Blues who ever appear to do things that aren't terrible to reds? 
life-should-flourish: Think we'll find much?
light-and-wonder: It's a big world!
hopelessly-entangled: ...yeah. 
space-ourselves: I'll take a shift answering upvoted questions. 
hopelessly-entangled: oh, that reminds me.
hopelessly-entangled: Someone search through those for any mention of "red", "trash", or "garbage" ☹️
life-should-flourish: On it. 💙  
space-ourselves: good work Makoki 💙
light-and-wonder: yeah good work kid 💙 
void-your-warranty: Should be able to get you some passwords 💙
hopelessly-entangled: thanks 💙 
hopelessly-entangled: good luck everyone