"It's a substantial time investment but they're doing expenses-paid courses if you commit to a couple months of survey and conveniently ship piloting is grey. It'd really limit my ability to come to in-person meetings with you guys, but we could stay in touch over the subspace internet if you're in wifi range of Chaspanti or get satellite subscriptions."

"Hm. I'd prefer to have you closer to help with diplomatic type things."

"Could we buy a small ship to pract-ice with?"

"Maybe, I don't know what the market in ships presently looks like, they're still fairly new."

"We could try rec-ruiting a pilot? Or rely on Vira figuring out how to fly it on her own once we have it."

"Warp-speed mishaps can be very bad, I don't think self-taught piloting is a risk worth taking."

"I think I have more conf-idence of Vira's ability to fly the ship then I do of my ability to manage the amalien/Amentan diplomacy with the ten-sion I expect to come from this? Um. Asking amaliens to not say that they care about people a lot and think they matter is really really hard. Lots of amaliens will be really sad about doing that. They can do it if they have to I think? But it might be by avoiding Amentas a lot and even then I'm worried."

"Has Vira tried, say, operating a forklift or a helicopter with no training? That's a lower-stakes thing to try and I still wouldn't be thrilled about her attempting to replicate success as that on a warping ship but it'd be at least less doomy. Uh, I think the diplomacy is probably less unmanageable than you seem to but maybe I'm just expecting too much of amalien social adaptability and too little of amalien capacity to figure out unfamiliar controls where pushing the wrong buttons will kill everyone aboard."

"Amaliens are willing to try very very hard and not give up at things they think are important like this, but there are some things they might fail at anyways and. Amaliens are bad at hiding emotions, and really really bad at hiding emotions about helping people. It feels... really really wrong."

"I was assuming Vira and other amaliens would spend a while study-ing the ship and figuring out how all the bits work and what they do. It's much easier than building a ship I think?"

"Much easier than building a really big rel-iable ship I think. I could prolly do it on my own but there are lots of other amaliens who can help. Lots and lots and lots."

"Doing a test to see if we can do it with a heli-copter or truck or somethin sounds like a good idea even if I'm pretty sure I can, just in case."

"Let me try to explain why I think it'll go worse if you have a lot of feelings at people about reds... it's not even that you can't have the feelings necessarily, just, like, frame them - but like, Amentans are used to each other. You're the first aliens we've met. There's been lots of science fiction, of course, but you're the first real ones. So all our understanding of how negotiating with people works is based on a model that is based on Amentans. Amentans do have feelings! We even have them about helping people sometimes! But bringing them up at people comes across as manipulative, or - worse - like you are advertising that you are dangerously unstable. Like you are trying to harm the person you're talking to and who they represent with implicit threats, or make them make bad decisions by trying to hijack their emotions. If you imagine that we're playing a board game and I start crying whenever you capture one of my pieces it kind of feels like I don't even really want to play, right? And of course nobody is thrilled to have to play the game Do Diplomacy For The Welfare Of Millions but, also, the default outcome when the welfare of millions is on the line and nobody does diplomacy about it is worse... except for people who are terrible at diplomacy and will lose everything they care about working that way. So if you act like diplomacy is a horrible burden or something you suck at it looks like you're a whisper away from invading cities and putting their populations to death so that you, or in this case reds, can live there. This helps nobody, not even reds."

"I think amaliens would, once we decided that it was important to win a board game and worth people being sad, be sad about the other person crying but also still keep trying to win. It's really important to be able to do the right thing even if it makes you or other people sad. But, we don't ignore the sadness to be able to do that, we just do things even though there's sadness. Like, there's an amalien who because of a monster is hard to hug and so his friends don't always hug him as much as he'd like and this makes him cry and this makes them sad but. They're not gonna do the wrong thing just cause of that?"

"That's why I think that if amaliens needed to pretend to not be as sad as they are or frame it differently then they would normally, they would do that. Cause it's important to do. But it's not something we're used to cause it's not how being us normally works so we would find it very hard and maybe some of us might mess-up, even if they were trying their very best to do it."

"If an amalien breaks down crying during diplomatic negotiations they should probably excuse themselves, calm down privately, and then resume, but - minding that I've never done diplomatic negotiations myself - I would not expect that to be itself very frightening. The thing that would be frightening would be - behaving as though your counterparty ought to be moved by your feelings. Or, uh, behaving in ways that in Amentans would correlate with expecting that your counterparty ought to be moved by your feelings. We could maybe do practice sessions where I pretend to be some blue and you argue with me about chickens, since I don't care about chickens myself."

"Mhm. This is basically why I'd pre-fer you to stay around here so you can help with this sort of thing that sort of way. It's not a thing that we have lots of practice with already."

"Yeah. I can maybe do part of the piloting course remotely and then go in for the practicals later if it seems like a good idea then, I'll look into that."

"If you can do that, maybe Vira or the like can listen in on those parts as well."

"Yeah, I'll see how it lends itself to that."

"Okay, it sounds like the priority is Meow testing, but we can also start figuring out how to get Pelape to learn piloting and get started on getting enough money to acquire a heli-copter for Vira to see if she can learn it from that. I think we should also start trying to get a broader in-dust-rial base orga-nized for future funding and also cause it's use-ful in lots of alternate plans - though prolly you shouldn't be the one leading that Vira cause you are needed for the other things. I can work on that I think, and Deet you can organize workers and people to help. Meelia you should work on getting monsters to help with the money making and indus-trializing I think."

"Keeta you provide housing and I'll talk to you others later about your bits."

"Does that sound good to everyone?"

"I'll need to get Meow's list of places to test before I work on ship piloting. What kind of information about a place is necessary?"

"Photo or detailed description of the appearance of a shadowy place, you could work with Vira and Neh on the testing if you'd like."

"I want to learn to fly a ship and a helicopter too. I bet I'd be really good at it."

"Probably true, we'll see if we can do that without adding complexity or risk. Can't hurt to have more pilots."

"The photos are all going to be incredibly indistinct and out of date, since these are of necessity places that have only been observed from lightyears away. Is that prohibitive?"

"I don't believe so, we can ask Neh. She was able to go into Chaspanti without more than a general concept of where it was, so maybe pictures aren't even needed."

"I can point out the stars in question in the sky and indicate which orbital we're looking at, at least."