Lucien gives a slight-ly more detailed explanation of what it's like to be red.

With Meelia chiming in with things she knows and saw. Meelia is very full of emotions 'bout all this.

"Pelape, do you want to talk about what sorta things won't work and why it's hard to make things better?"

Does she have to mimic the extremely feelingsy rhetorical style. She Does Not Want To. "So, uh - Meelia tried embedding herself in a red district, that won't work. Trying to make people get over their pollution sensitivity by making it hard to avoid pollution has been tried and also won't work, it started a war. Trying to directly protect reds while they go about their business could work in principle but there aren't enough of you even if we suppose that you all become tactical experts overnight, there are still millions of reds. Uh, the reason it's hard to make things better is because Amentans have an instinct called a pollution sense -" She repeats her explanation of that. "And since reds are polluted, the prospect of a long term integrative solution is pretty slim, unless there's an incredibly convenient monster around or you can... make one or something, I'm not clear on how monsters happen. Some people will still object to reds existing when no one else technically needs them to exist, even if this somehow costs other Amentans absolutely nothing at all, but I think the balance of opinion there might be workable, conceivably, if there were a place to put them."

"Could we have them come here?" asks a boy with ash smudged on his face. 

"Maybe, but it would be really fraught. There's substantial opposition to letting reds 'pollute' a new planet even though officially pollution does not travel to the point where it ought reasonably be an issue if they're on a different continent. It's also really not clear to me if you can support them - reds don't, currently, know how to farm or manufacture most of what they need, even if they did the supplies would have to come from somewhere, and there are, again, millions of them. So unless, say, Esteel Tree can become Esteel Thousands Of Much Bigger Trees and tide them over for years while they work that out and buy their starting materials from wherever, and the public opinion consequences of polluting Esteel Tree were manageable, I don't think it's very likely that's the right angle."

"Vira do you -"

"Yeah! Esteel Tree can be good for starting up but we would have to scale but could def-initly get to a few million in less than an Amentan year if a lot of amaliens worked on it together and I could prolly get it done quicker and with fewer if I worked on it some. Also also Lucien, we get to design irrigation together!"

"Okay so that might be an option but maybe there could be something better that would be easier for reds and also other Amentans. Pelape, you mentioned a pollution-fixing monster could work. Did you have other ideas based on what you know so far? Or questions for us?"

"The best thing for everybody, the one that requires the fewest tradeoffs, would be if land became cheap. If we could terraform lifeless rocks, there are dozens, already discovered. If amaliens, specifically, and not Amentans, could terraform lifeless rocks, you could make giving one of them to reds a condition of terraforming several lifeless rocks. This would also reduce the pressure on Amentans to gradually take over most of the land area on this planet, which they are currently being super gentle about but it is absolutely the direction most of their incentives push."

"I can't think of a way to do that that wouldn't take maybe Aa Amentan decade or something per rock? And we'd have to spend a bunch of time figuring out to make that work. Maybe in half an Amentan century I could figure out something faster, if I had rocks to prac-tice on?"

"The way do it that I can think of is we explode Esteel Tree into orbit by putting plu-to-ni-um and things underneath in the right way! So it lands on a new planet and then it'll do plant things there even if it's hard and 'ventually there will be plants and everything there."

"An Amentan decade is... long enough that there will be fewer reds by then, but they wouldn't, probably, all be dead. But a decade per rock is too much for this to work as I outlined. Honestly the thing we need on the rocks isn't so much plants, plants we can do, we need air and water."

"I think Esteel Tree would do that too, as a by-prod-uct of the plants it makes."

"We could 'splode an ice-berg into space the same way? Prolly. But I don't think it would be safe to drink for while."

"... prolly I could get icebergs places without sploding them but it would still not be enough for a while plan-et I think. And would be slow."

"We can also do water treatment plants! We have lots of ability to put infrastructure in places. It's just that the raw materials, in the case of air and water, are so bulky and needed in such quantities, that we can't just bring them - the transport cost would be prohibitive and also we don't actually have a literally infinite amount of them. I was hoping for a monster that could just make those things ex nihilo but if one doesn't exist it doesn't exist. Unless you can make them. I do not get where monsters come from."

"They've been around for as long as any of us can remember, just like we have."

"I've made sorta monsters but they don't last as long, and I have to be very careful to make ones that are happy."

"A few monsters could make air or water, even really fast, just not fast enough to fill up a planet for a really long time."

"We could search for habit-able planets? But I sorta think you are all ready doing that and prolly we should try other things."

"How fast? Like, could they do... a small moon... in two years? Could they make enough air and water to support extremophile algae that would do more of the work from there? Are there any monsters that could find habitable planets faster than a thousand ships constantly warping to every promising star to survey it?"

"Not nearly that fast, would take way longer than a century for most of em. Esteel tree is the fastest way I thought of. I sorta think that if monsters could change that much that fast they already woulda here, and they haven't."

"Meow might be able to scout faster than that? Though a lot of that would come from search farther away and that would be hard to get you all to."

"Warp ships can go farther than they have so far if they know there's something to hit! They're only out to a ten-day radius for search, last I heard, but there's not actually a reason a ship couldn't stay operative for months to get somewhere if it was a suitable somewhere."

"Maybe Meow could check on places then, if he can go faster than warp?"

"Yeah, that would work well. I can probably get a list of candidate exoplanets that are outside the search radius so far. Is Meow going to be okay if they turn out to be totally unihabitable on inspection?"

"Yes, I think so? We should test shorter jumps first I think."

"For side effects of jumping and how fast it really is. Not for sur-viving. I am pretty sure that will be fine - Meow's a monster."

"I mean, I don't know if he'll be less willing if it sucks a lot, or if it'd impair his ability to teleport, even if he'd for sure survive. How short do you have in mind to start with?"

"I'm going to have Meow and Neh visit the other side of the planet and then the moon and then Amenta, I think. Once they're up."