" - No, I think I don't understand something else. There are not so many farmers who learn to fight that society would be radically different were it illegal for them to do so, at least not in the short term. Why does no one want to be the one to destabilize the standards keeping their purples and so on safe at home?"

"Hm. Imagine Tapa were fighting with another Amentan country, let's say Cene though we have no issues with Cene. And imagine it was going poorly for us, and there were Cenemi troops in Tapa, and we were running out of greys, and so we decided to give a lot of purples weapons and have them fight the Cenemi greys.

"This probably wouldn't work very well, for one thing, because purples aren't good at or trained for war, but it would at least be surprising, so we can suppose it worked well enough to win us the war.

"But that would be just one war. The next time someone was in conflict with Tapa, they'd know that we broke the rules of war. They'd be able to get lots of other countries to join them in allying against us, because none of those countries know for sure if they'll be squaring up with us in another five years and would rather we not have more time to train purples to shoot. If they landed troops in Tapa, they might kill everyone they saw - any caste, any age in case we'd trained toddlers or retirees to make suicide attacks. They'd move in their people and take our land and we'd all be dead.

"And nobody in Tapa wants that. So they won't support a blue who doesn't make it clear that they're against breaking the rules of war we have agreed to."

He frowns as though he's been presented with a koan. "You would prefer that Cene conquer Tapa and enslave your purples and enjoy all your infrastructure, than that you all die?"

"- Cene doesn't practice slavery."

"...What would happen to Tapa's purples if Tapa were conquered? Would they simply pay their taxes to Cene instead?"

"Yes. They'd obey Cenemi law and any state interactions they had to do would go through Cene."

"And you prefer this to their deaths because, what, because no one wants to have to rebuild their infrastructure repeatedly, or because it's hard to keep enough purples around, or out of sheer mercy or generosity toward your purples?"

"- because if we didn't prefer this to their deaths, they wouldn't vote for us."

"Vote for you?"

"Amentan countries today are almost all democracies, not monarchies. Instead of having kings, the people of the country all say who they want to run it, and whoever gets the most of those people to choose them runs it. With some details that vary from place to place, but that's the general idea."

"That sounds very interesting." They're all going to have to learn a whole new set of heuristics for who has power and who would have power if things changed. Maybe it'll be fun.

After some further negotiation and refinement of the translation programs and other minutiae, the Amentans take possession of a played-out copper mine they expect to be able to extract more copper from. The mine will probably operate at a loss, construed solely in the value of the copper, but they don't have to tell anyone that, and it's enormously valuable as a foothold.

They're building a mine, but you can't just build a mine. You need places for your workers to sleep - they build three dorms on the site, one for purples and one for locals and one for non-purple Amentans living on the site. The Amentans are planning to bring their families over. There's plans for a company store and a little mixed-caste school and an onsite copper refinery.

The first batch of Amentan workers appear, ready to teach locals to do the heavy lifting - Amentans appear to be physically weaker than human men - and break ground on the various infrastructure required. There are shuttles bringing arcane equipment of various kinds down on a regular basis when some yellows set up for job interviews.

Several people express tentative interest in working for them, and the person they buy the site from suggests that some of their serfs might be interested and capable.

After they learn about how local serfdom works, that sounds really convenient! They will need to teach all the locals rules like "you are utterly forbidden from coming to work sick" and "showers! use them!", and they would like everyone to pick up Tapap in the long term and attend classes about that. Will serfs accept pay in room, board, and company store scrip?

This one guy's serfs in particular will do that because he's willing to try accepting the scrip as payment. At least for now. Others will need to be sure they can meet or pay other people to meet their obligations back home.

There is some confusion about how they're going to attend classes in Tapap and also work.

Well, they won't be working every waking hour, they need time to like, eat and wash themselves and sleep. They will just also be spending some of that time on learning Tapap. Also the instructions for the use of various Amentan equipment will come with Tapap loanwords rather than making up compounds in Sesati.

Their lord wants it understood that he isn't to be held liable for their failure to learn Tapap in a timely way if they fail, and also that he won't agree to this if they'll be punished in any way that makes them less able to get back to work if they don't succeed.

Oh, they aren't planning to damage the serfs or retaliate against the lord if they don't work out, they'll just dismiss them if it's not coming along as they hope.

That's fine then.

Cool. Welcome to your new jobs, serfs! Watch these purples as they set up all their equipment and build everything they didn't import and help them out as you come to understand what they're up to! Please do not bring or wear babies into hard hat areas. SERIOUSLY, SHOWER. EVERY DAY. MAYBE TWICE. They build the plumbing facilities before anything else; they appear to prefer to sleep in tents than have inadequate water supplies. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner are for the moment packaged Amentan stuff supplemented with local staples for bulk that they're buying with imported Amentan fabric and silver and such, but later they're planning to have a buffet style setup; cook purples will show up when the kitchen is built and then some serfs can be reassigned to that. Sign up for the new jobs that will open up over there and try to get your supe to recommend you if you'd rather bake bread than dig up copper. They should live in their preexisting homes for now till the tents are replaced with the dorms, let's get building!

It transpires that the serfs were expecting to work a lot harder than this and with the several extra hours each day that they weren't expecting to have free they start organizing board game groups and wrestling matches.

Some of them are pretty incompetent at Tapap. Most of them are pretty incompetent at taking sick days; they can tell if they're coughing or feverish but the average level of skill at distinguishing feeling under the weather from feeling sad or sleepy or just the normal misery of existence leaves something to be desired.

If they show up droopy or greenish or whatever to work they will be SENT HOME.

They can import some Tapai board games and use them for extra language practice!

Once they have a classroom set up and some oranges imported the serfs are welcome to send their kids to the school with the Amentan kids, though they will mostly be in separate classes till they catch up on the language.

They will not complain about being sent home unless it gets in the way of earning enough.

Some of the kids are young enough they aren't too useful to send to school, sure.

Some people are excited about imported board games! What are they like?

- you get full pay on sick days, it's just if you start looking like you're unfixably chronically ill or deliberately faking they'll fire you. They should go to the oranges when they're sick, they don't know that much about treating humans yet but this is a fine way to investigate more.

Little human kids get THOROUGHLY BATHED and then turned loose to play and learn Tapap with little purples under the supervision of oranges.

Tapai board games popular among this crowd include:

- a city building game with blocks that nest and snap together, with points awarded for cromulent placements; various complexity levels are possible and you can even score some people according to the small child rules and some according to the more sophisticated rules in the same game as a handicap
- space chess
- a deck building game where you are trying to accumulate animals for your zoo, particularly in breeding pairs, and also zoo amenities that make them more likely to live and reproduce when the die rolls come around
- a storytelling game where you are prompted to imagine the next event in a story based on the questions on cards, locations on the board you have navigated to, and challenge constraints you have been issued by your fellow players

One of those games is vaguely similar to a game they have in Sesat and would be happy to introduce some Amentans to, and the storytelling game is interesting too. The flavor for the city and zoo games is pretty unfamiliar and the mechanics are also alien.

The oranges will get to observe three colds, a hangover, a broken heart, a toothache, a stomachache, an epidemic of lice, and the aftermath of a fight.