"Certainly! I do not know how much will apply to the plants here, as ours differ, and may benefit from different fertilizers, but we would be more than happy to help you with installing plumbing suitable for, among other things, irrigating your crops."

"That is of interest to me; I have heard praise for your plumbing, and I imagine it would make other things easier as well."

"One thing that plumbing requires is metal. It is expensive to transport things from our landplacething, but it should be possible to find deposits here, if you would give us your leave to mine for what we will need and set up manufacturing for the empty-cylinders and other things needful."

"Perhaps. Do you need different metals than those we already mine, or simply more?"

"Both. The geologists can talk about specific ones and where they will find them," Mashu says. "Mines can be dangerous, so it will be necessary to make sure people do not wander into them."

"Such things are often handled with fences but I can also make sure those of our people who work there with you keep an eye out for anyone seeming lost."

"We usually have fences, security greys, and also signs; how many of your people read?"

"Depends on exactly what you count as being able to read but the skill required to recognize a sign that says 'danger' is more common than not."

"Excellent. Eventually we'll need to work out some details about rights to the land - a mine isn't useful for much else, so I'm not sure whether the owners of the sites the greens track down will be interested in selling and not worrying about that, or prefer to lease for some of the metal extracted and plan on hiring remediators to cover it over again when it's played out..."

"I have no better guess than you until you identify the sites you want. What exactly do remediators do and how long do you expect the mines to remain useful?"

"Mines can last for different lengths of time depending on the size of the deposit, but a remediator would clean up any unpleasant substances in the area and fill in the mine so the ground would be stable and then put a layer of sod or something like that on top."

"Do you expect to be adding a lot of unpleasant substances or merely uncovering them?"

"I'm not a mining expert -" She looks at her accompanying green.

"It's the refining more than the extraction that adds substances, and we have managing that pretty well understood, but uncovering them can be enough to make an area a little iffy for people to live on for a while without proper cleanup," the green says.

"I see. We should return to this topic when your people have assessed sites. In the mean time - are there other techniques of your people which, if we were to adopt them, would help put you at ease while you're here?"

Why yes, there are. Do locals sneeze? Cough? Throw up? Here are best practices on dealing with that which aren't strictly plumbing-dependent. Mashu talks delicately around these things, picking through her translation-prompted words with slightly discomfited diction, but brazens through it anyway. What are their interment practices, cremation is the gold standard but if they're doing burials or something they'll want to account for that. Would they like to accommodate a bunch of doctors and scientists to study how they work biologically and figure out their disease situation as it differs from those of Amentans? Illness is a terrible burden they wouldn't wish on anyone, and at this point in Amentan history it was especially hard on cute tiny babies!

They do sneeze, cough, throw up, and get the runs.

They do bury their dead.

They would be delighted for their guests to teach them about disease and biology and how to figure out how to save more of their children. The Star-of-Stars can assign some doctors to learn from the Amentans.

Awesome, they are really eager to make sure everyone is up to the state of the art on avoiding contamination from all those things.

"Do your people have other knowledge that might further allow us to make you more welcome? For instance, your vessel seems to be made very differently from any homes or ships we make, and if it is more to your comfort then we should perhaps learn to construct things like it."

"The vessel is not exactly like our home! But yes, you should have glassworks as well as metal refineries, and factories for nails and screws. We would be happy to hire many local workers for such things when we have gotten them built."

"Sesat will learn. It would of course be unfair for the entire burden of creating such things to fall on your shoulders, since we all shall benefit."

"We will all benefit! We are so glad to meet you!"

"As are we! Is there anything else we should discuss before we hear back from your surveyors and so on?"

"I would like to offer you some gifts!" She has a little case full of objects, including a battery powered lamp, some jewelry with big honkin' artificial rocks in it, and a potted Amentan plant with pretty flowers.

"They look beautiful," he says with the air of one trying to show polite respect for his inferiors' best attempts at gifts. "I will have someone put in charge of looking after the plant, though they will need to know more of the needs and growth habits of Amentan plants to do a good job of it."

"It will need about this much water once a day and to be put in a window," Mashu says, gesturing a volume of water. "Nothing else."