Pelape pitches her tent safely outside Keetim's radius since it might at any moment have a nightmare.

Actually that only happens when Keetim sleeps, though the Amentans haven't bothered to ask about this as of yet.

Eventually a young girl enters the building with Meelia, bearing her softest blanket and a promise that she won't let anyone be mean to her friend Meelia in her town.

And Lucien emerges, heading towards Pelape's tent.

"Are you Pelape?"

"Yes, hello - Lucien?"

"Yeah. Um..."

It's clear from his face he's cried recently. 

"I'm not actually sure where to start. Meelia told me her impression of what happened on Amenta and why she did what she did but I think it's more likely than not that she misunderstood some things and a situation ended up escalating rather than being resolved through less ... dramatic routes. You want to say words about the problems Meelia encountered on Amenta?"

Sigh. "Sure. The story the way I heard it - it was a writeup by her host family, this blue couple who live on a farm, who were looking for escorts who wouldn't give her a hard time about it on the way here - is that she found out about the red district existing and went right in. So far so understandable. Took some insisting to get her to leave through the decontamination exit and also for some reason she put her monster through the conveyor for electronics which must have sucked for him. She went back and did it again though this time she didn't fry the mouse. She finally gets all the way home to her hosts and one of them is sitting up to talk to her about it, but it's very late at night and the conversation doesn't go on too long. She leaves her pocket everything there, walks out, gets questioned by their night security, and when he says it doesn't seem like a good idea to wander alone after dark and he's going to go wake up one of the blues, she jumps him, gives him a head injury, dislocates most of the joints in his body, and stashes him in a corner. Disappears. Pocket everythings can share location, but she didn't bring hers, so the only guess anyone has to go on is that she might be in the red district. The reds have all been on their most presentable behavior, so miraculously no one actually blames them for any of this! But nobody wants Meelia hiding among reds or intimidating them into helping her do more crime or anything, so they have all the reds move out to other districts. That's an operation they've pulled off a few times, as towns modernize - start doing without reds for their traditional share of the work - and the share of the population that is red drops, and they weren't planning to do it to that one any time soon but here was a prompting incident, you see. They don't find her. They go on not finding her, I don't know where she was secreted away. A building in the evacuated district catches fire, but they're not ready to contain a fire so they put it out. This is the push somebody, I don't know who, needs, to decide that the place should be decomissioned now that it's already empty. Torched clean, bulldozed, new stuff built on top. They set that up. Meelia climbs over the fire containment barrier with what's left of her hair dyed red. Once the firefighters reason out that it's her somebody tranquilizes her and they bring her to the hospital to get cleaned up and treated."

"Yeah that sure sounds like Meelia and broadly matches up with what she said she did."

Though it wasn't actually the thing he was worried about...

"Um. She had a bunch of rather worrisome concerns about how people were treating reds which she said motivated her decisions. Do you know anything relevant to that?"

"Yeah, most people hate reds beyond all necessary precautions to keep them physically separated. I'm not sure how comprehensive you want me to get?"

"I think I'd like to know more about what that's like for reds and why things aren't better?"

"Okay. Uh, I'm going to start many inferential steps back, let me know if I'm overexplaining.

Neurotypical Amentans have what is called a 'pollution sense'. This isn't a sense per se, but it makes us very concerned with getting, being, and staying clean, and we're very good at tracking what things in our environment have been identified as suspect and what they have contacted in a way that we aren't even about other things that might be relevant to whether we want to touch stuff, like whether it's hot or whether it's got wet paint on it. We think this evolved as a disease avoidance mechanism. Make sense so far?"

"Yeah, I've encountered that before."

"Historical cultures were not all in perfect agreement about what things were polluted and therefore not to be touched if at all avoidable, but no culture totally avoided identifying any such things, and of course, it was not feasible for everyone in a community to avoid all those things. And back then they had not invented running water and their soap wasn't very good either. If someone got polluted worse than they and the people around them believed could be scrubbed off in the nearest river or whatever, they kind of... stayed... that way. Nobody volunteered to do this, nobody wanted their friends or family members to do this, and yet somehow the dead bodies have to be removed from the area and the waste has to be separated from the drinking water. So they found people they didn't care about. Slaves, sometimes, but ultimately as castes emerged and stabilized, a caste. Reds."

"Reds weren't cared about?"

The concept of not caring about someone is bizarre, much less a whole group of people!

"To begin with they weren't a coherent caste - we didn't just start existing with castes, they're an invention. This kind of work needed doing; anyone who didn't have people caring about them and by extension their health and cleanliness was a candidate to get pushed into it one way or another. And no one started caring about them after that, since this only made them less appealing."

"Huh. The idea that their becoming more polluted would make people care about them less is ... sort of alien feeling. If we were aware of people who became polluted we'd care about them more."

"I'm not sure what to chalk that up to. Maybe just less scarcity. Amentans in ancient technological conditions are at serious risk of starving to death any given winter. If they spend effort and attention on people who are not only unable to ever reciprocate but also actively dangerous and unpleasant to be around, when they could be maintaining their access to food and people who might help them with food, that's just not going to work out well for them, and third parties will notice that doesn't work out well and warn everyone they do care about not to follow that strategy."

"That sounds terrible! I think that amaliens would not follow that strategy either in a hypothetical analogous situation, but we'd feel sad about that. I think one of the things that most shook Meelia was realizing that most clean Amentans didn't even feel sad about what they were doing to reds. I ran into a something like that here with how Amentans treated chickens, but the reds thing seems much worse."

"- wow, chickens? Do you care about chickens? I guess that's not that weird but I wasn't specifically expecting it. Uh, I'm not actually aware of much research indicating either way whether it's remotely healthy for Amentans to not eat meat but clean-meat projects are underway anyhow, probably you just want to find a way to back those."

"I've been working on figuring out funding for that and providing more space for chickens here in the meantime. Plan was to also have an amalien scientist help with the clean-meat research once she's done helping to set up sources of income for us."

He's not actually sure that that is going to remain at all a priority compared to reds. 

"I think you've sort of explained why things aren't better for reds, but not what it's like for reds on Amenta?"

"Right, so, I'm not one, but I have talked to some online. They're poor. I'm not sure how much that means to you per se. A typical red will have more and higher tech possessions than a randomly selected amalien. They aren't starving. But they're paid inconsistently and poorly for their work and have very limited access to goods and services and they aren't supposed to leave their districts and workplaces without a specific job reason. They mostly manage die of old age like everyone else, but they do have a drastically elevated rate and severity of police violence and disease burden and disability. Most of them pretend to be another caste, typically purple, on the internet, so they can have a broader social life without everyone hating them."

Aaaaah. Meelia was not far off oh no.... 

Lucien has a bit of a lump in his throat but not too much cause he's focusing.

"Would um... would most of them prefer to be another caste in the rest of their life too?"

"...I guess, if you could do it by magic somehow. It'd be an extremely uphill integration project."

"Askin' cause of knowing how bad the situation is, not for how to fix it. Not focusing on that yet."

"You think it'd be obv-iosly better to them to be a different caste if people treated them like that caste?"

"I'm kind of worried you're going to react to a 'yes' by being like 'oh how convenient, I have a monster that does mind control in my pocket'. But, yeah, I'm not aware of advantages to being red besides I guess high levels of caste solidarity."

Arguably he has a monster that does a form of mind alteration on his back, but he doesn't think "wakefulness" is what she meant. 

"Mind controlling people when they really don't want to be mind controlled sounds really bad and I would not, unless it was really absolutely necessary and I had searched for another way and maybe even not then."

"Do you think most reds would take a chance of dying or something really bad to become another caste?"

"- uh, probably depends on how high a chance, but plausibly. Why?"

"I'm um -" Lucien is tearing up a bit at this point despite his best efforts not to " - um. Trying to figure out how bad of an issue it is and whether I should be prioritizing it over other issues."

"...that might depend what you think there is to be done about it. If you have a monster in your pocket that can do, say, terraforming, that's priority one and will help the reds downstream."

"How would terraforming help?"

"I'm not sure how much you have noticed that we really, really, really want more places to live, because we want, very much, to have more children than replacement rate."

"But you found another place to live and both my and Meelia's impression is that there aren't actually any reds here for some reason?"

He thinks for a second.

"Sorry if I sound like I think there's an obvious solution or something - I really don't and know that it's prolly really complicated. I'm trying to figure out the shape of what makes it hard to make things better."

"This is the only place they have found where we can live. They are trying to avoid spooking you, or any of the potentially opinionated monsters, so they're going conservatively on this planet and waiting for buy-in from you guys before expanding, but there is not, ultimately, a limit to how much space we want, and as long as it's scarce -

- then there's no chance they'll let reds have any of it."

"How many planets do we need to terraform before that changes? Also what happens if the reds all come here anyways."

"You are looking at a very ugly situation if the reds come here. People are very opposed to the idea of polluting this lovely planet with adorable natives when we could just build only modernized cities on it. I - have you ever read a comments section on a news article, it's not generally advisable but if you've never done it, it might give you a sense of the ways public opinion splinters and shifts on an internet with billions and billions of people."

"I have not. Do you have a news article you could show me as an example?"

Lucien is confused about why this is relevant and also confused what "very ugly" means in that sentence but is being patient.

stars the poor alien baby what can they be doing to her in there!

we had the WRONG technological order of operations. FIRST clean house THEN get a new house.

Okay so what I don't get is... they rounded up all the reds... and then... the reds are still alive? Guys, we have had plastic for so long?

Hoping for the Good Timeline. Want my grandkiddos to be born in a clean World!

Why did they have the amalien near an oldstyle red district anyway?

guys I know the amaliens are the cutest fuckin things ever but you have to remember they are in point of fact not sweet innocent new babies. she knew what she was doing. she's a redloving greyhater.

have her foster parents even been INTERVIEWED? you foster an alien and lose it in the garbage pit you should at least be sterilized and they're menopausal so just hang them. (&EveryCasteShouldHang&)

if this slows down crediting ONE IOTA I say we kill them all. no more fucking around with polar hypovernal pensions and shit.

Lucien breaks down crying pretty quickly and doesn't manage to calm himself down very fast.

Pretty understandable reaction to internet comments.

Lucien eventually manages to pull himself together enough to get out words.

"You must hurt so much."

"- me specifically?"

"No. Amentans, with your pollution sense that makes reds so bad and and. Being red too."

Lucien is still crying but at least he can get out words. Though he still can't see much through all the tears.

"Reds are mostly hyposensitive. I am told that by and large they don't feel polluted in and of themselves, and don't bother each other. But yeah. Not every evolved trait is pleasant."

"Meant how they feel on account of how other people treat em, not how they feel on their own."

He's put together by now that Meelia was just completely right with her guesses about how the reds were treated and why they were so scared.

"Yeah. So I'd be more optimistic about a plan that makes planets so abundant that we could coordinate an exodus of reds to such a planet, where they could simply not interact with most Amentans."

"I think... "

Lucien wipes the tears from his eyes.

"I think that planning this right here on our own probably isn't the way to do this, and instead I should get a group of amaliens who are good at different things and rep-res-ent lots of us to talk about this with. Do you think that sounds like a good idea? Also, would you be okay with being included in that group if that was wanted?"

"I am fine with being included in that group. Uh, I do have the limitation that I need to earn money to support myself and at least most of it has to be formally grey."

"I'm planning to gather the group now, we can talk while that happens?"

Hm. Probably he should stick with Pelape so they can keep talking and she does not seem like the right person to convince other amaliens that this is important so he thinks he shouldn't gather the group himself. Meelia is the default choice for this sort of thing and she under-stands the sit-uation with the reds at all ... prolly she'd prefer to be included in this now even though she's sad and just home. It's important to her he thinks. 

"I'm going to have Meelia gather the group, I'll be right back. Uh, in the meantime do you think you'd be able to figure out some good articles or things like those comments for showing how bad the situation is for reds? Would be helpful to have for helping you and other amaliens communicate I think."

It'd probably be good both for presenting things to amaliens (okay, only Deet probably) who don't want to leave their jobs and also maybe good for helping Pelape approach things in a way that other amaliens would under-stand better.

"I can do that, if you think they won't take your word for it?"

"One of them is difficult to convince to leave his job, and I also think figuring out how to present the sadder aspects in a way that makes that explains how they're important will prolly be useful for helping you communicate with other amaliens for .... differences in how we think reasons? We're much more likely to see the scary sounding bits of it as important than you seem to be. At least you seem less focused on them then I would have expected."

"...what would you have expected? What do you think I'm here for?"

"I am able to pick up that you care, but at least partially I think that's due to my having spent a lot more time interacting with Amentans than most amaliens have. By amalien standards you.... Hm. If you were an amalien I might guess that you were dissociating in order to be able to pretend you weren't having emotions for some reason?"

"Um. I guess maybe you are doing that and I can't tell?"

"I wouldn't put it that way. I'm - there is no straightforward way to work on this. Not for a grey. I could do some damage trying to be dramatic about it, if I wanted, but that would just get me killed and probably whoever I was dramatic near too. I was trying extremely low-probability strategies for lack of a better way to go but the most likely thing was always that I would fail completely. And I didn't see anything so likely to help that I wanted to be broke or sterile or dead to get it. People who try to get things they want that way don't get them, by and large. While I have been doing all the things that I have been doing, therefore, I have also needed income - grey income and I have a balance disorder and don't fit well in grey culture - and to pace myself so I remain sane. If you have a promising solution I will throw myself at it but I did not have one."

Oh, she is a good.

"I think there are a bunch of possible way amaliens can help solve - among other things there's a hundred thousand of us and about as many monsters and we're going to try our very very best."

"I'm um. Happy to have you as an ally for this."

"Likewise. Finessed right, adorable aliens wanting reds to be okay is the best news for reds we've ever gotten."

Lucien is going to be so good at finessing. 

"I'll be right back."

He returns to Keetim proper to see Meelia.

Meelia is busy getting hugged by Keeta who has missed her and is happy to have her back and is proud of her for doing so well and knows she did as much as she could and is going to keep loving her even if she did mess up and hurt a bunch of people. 

"Everything okay?" she asks Lucien.

"No."

"Want to join the hug pile 'bout it?"

"... for a bit yeah."

Keeta can hug two people at once - it's an important skill for a mayor.

"Meelia, you were right. About everything."

"We're all gonna work together on this and we will try very very hard to solve it. Won't be you alone."

Hugs. Meelia has complicated feelings about being right. Hugs...

"How can I help?"

"I need to gather people here. Same sort of group as during the first contact. Plus Vira."

Hugs.

"Okay."

Meelia has one last big hug with both of them and disentangles herself. 

Lucien takes a bit longer to disentangle himself. He is um. A little bit hug deprived.

... but he has a lot to do so he leaves soon after.

"Sorry um. Where were we?"

"I said something about how cute aliens wanting to help red would be the best thing that ever happened to them if we handled it right?"

"Oh yeah. We were also going to talk about you needing income?"

"Usually what I do is write a blog about sports statistics, with some politics articles and other stuff insofar as I have the wiggle room. I could probably toss off some articles about amalien sports if those exist and coast for a while on that. I'm also getting paid for having escorted Meelia here. But if you have money and wanted to call me your security guard that would be lowest-friction."

"That's exactly what I was thinking. Not sure if Vira is close to getting income set-up, we can ask her while we wait."

Lucien would also like to know if Pelape needs to make more than his rent in the short-term.

"Not in the short term, no, I can pay even the local food prices for weeks if not months."

"Okay. Would you accept a promise of future compensation, with some amount of bonus to make up for the poss-ibility that things go wrong and we can't pay you?"

"Yeah, that will work fine. I'll need a few days to get used to the local cost of living to be any help at coming to a figure."

"We could also provide you with living accommodations outside the city. Might be that's important to you being able to work with us depending on what plan we end up going with."

"Uh, I don't mind doing some amount of camping, as you can see, but in the medium to long term I do need running water to be comfortable."

"Plausible the Esteel Tree can manage that. Keetim definitely can but it's not safe for Amentans to use during the night I think. Might be some other ways to do it that Vira knows about. I'm guessing putting you underwater wouldn't count?"

He thinks for a bit.

"Would a few amalines carrying water and things work?"

"I can manage with using running water only during the day. Putting me underwater wouldn't count."

"Keetim is safe during the day - safer than an Amentan city along some axes - it's only during the night when Keetim sometimes has nightmares. Even then it's basically harmless unless you're moving around enough that it lashes out."

"Yeah, I wasn't sure if the info I had on it was overblown or not. I am willing to sleep in a tent and spend the daytime in Keetim if it'll have me and there's enough food here too. Maybe move in properly if it really is harmless even to Amentans so long as I stay in bed at night."

"Keeta would be the expert on how safe it is, but I'm sure you'd be welcome, night or day."

"I'm guessing there is enough food around and if there isn't we can find more." 

"What's the medical care situation if I turn out to be violently allergic to a local mushroom?"

"Meelia or Vira might be able to help, or there might be an amalien vet in Keetim who can do better than either. We don't have proper Amentan medical supplies but we could see about changing that or... probably the best solution is to have a means of fast transportation to get you to an Amentan hospital in an emergency?"

"Yeah. They have helicopters in Chaspanti and there's some first aid stuff I could get for some possibilities."

"We have some monsters that go much faster than helicopters, but if you think that's fast enough we don't need to find one that's up for being around in emer-gen-cies I guess."

"Faster's better, this is definitely one of the major risks of not living near a civilization that knows how to treat me if I have a problem."

"Okay, I think Flooze is available, and should be able to get to Chispanti faster than a helicopter."

"What's Flooze?"

"Giant fluffball monster with weird very long and fast legs that it produces and retracts. Has space for people in the fluff. He'll be here sometime soon with his amaliens - Meelia is going to invite them."

"Aww, a fluffball."

"He's a very convenient and cozy monster!"

"If he won't mind hanging around that would be great to have as an emergency evac option."

Meelia finds Neh with the help of Keetim pretty easily, waking her up ( "sorry Neh, you can sleep in very long after" ) for a trip with Meow to drop her off at Amyris Cove, a beach of red crystal sand glistening brilliantly in the setting sun.

She flops on to the cove, making a red sand angel for a bit until the sand all starts gathering round her in one big ball of color and the next wave washes her and the sand away-

- and immediately onto a beach in the arctic where she throws the a paper message out into the nearby village before the sand is swept back away by the next wave to the cove. 

Where she angels once again, this time letting herself be left on the thinnest of beaches, just barely above the waterline on the edge of a canyon into which gigantic waterfalls tumble on either side. She screams excitedly as she jumps.

She tries to ride the water down so she doesn't go so fast she won't be able to walk for a while but it's really hard and she's going too fast until, at the last moment, her friend Puff, a cloud, catches her. The ride on his cozy cloudy back is very snug and nice. She gives him a treat she brought from Keetim when he finds Peli's current nest in the canyon and drops her off there.

With the help of Peli she once again zips around the world, collecting the amaliens who she had not already notified. 

"So" says Lucien to Pelape as they wait, "how was your trip here?"

"Boring. Also they had me and her other escort doing twelve hour shifts with pretty limited breaks midstream and that made eating and whatnot awkward, I think they couldn't find a third."

"Why not?"

"Her hosts, this blue couple, hired us - they were worried that if the government just assigned random greys, they'd be mean to her for having wanted to help the reds, greys are not one of the castes with the highest tolerance for reds on average. So they hunted up greys who'd be willing to take the job and could say things like 'I have been internet friends with open reds for several years', in my case. And they had to look pretty far afield, I'm not even Tapai - I don't know if my accent's obvious to a nonnative speaker but I'm actually from Anitam and this job got me a Tapai guest worker card."

"How many greys are there?"

"...in the world? In Tapa? Who speak Tapap? As a percentage?"

"I'm trying to get a feeling for how exceptional you are among Amentans."

"Extremely, but on this specific axis not uniquely - I was just also flexibly employed enough to take advantage, which most Amentans of any caste are not."

"I guess we're lucky to have you."

He's sorta bummed by how few Amentans who think about reds like her there are.

"What other ways are you exceptional?"

"I'm smarter than most greens and have a skillset more like one than a half-orange grey reasonably ought. I arrived at my opinions on reds without being clinically hyposensitive. Also I have a balance disorder but that's not really helping with anything."

Lucien sorta suspects most amaliens would arrive at that opinion like her but he's not sure and it seems rude to say. Also he's not actually sure he would.

"You seem very good at per-suing your goals given all those things making it complicated! And also your goals being hard to do aside from things about you making them hard."

"Thanks. I'd list what I tried but I don't know if any of it would mean anything to you, it was stuff like 'travel to Ereith to try to research polar hypovernal variants' - didn't go very well, they hate foreigners -"

"Polar hypovernal variants?"

Sounds like something Vira would like.

"Some initial attempts at modernizing went badly. In general reds are compliant at a steady background rate of abuse but they sometimes riot destructively when there's a threat that would make them all obsolete because they know that even if someone gentle enough to pension them off wins every election going forward they're not going to get any child credits after that point. Robotics, traditionally, is the thing that sets them off, but also more recently stuff like training purples to do their jobs or touching their credit numbers at all. Tapa has been trying subsidizing red credits for families that will accept having a baby with polar hypovernal syndrome - it's a class of mutations that crops up naturally in Ereith because they're so far north, to help them season closer to the poles than most people can, and people who have it are almost totally normal, except they don't spring. Little to no sex drive, little to no baby drive. A last generation of reds who won't mind, so much, being pensioned off and going extinct."

"I ... am confused about how people deal with having kids and how wanting them works and so I can't really imagine if that is a solution that makes everyone happy? Guessing not since you said you were re-searching variants and also. What you des-cribed sorta sounds like a sad solution to me but I'm not sure why."

"We want children. We care about it a lot. We expect evolved species to be the same unless they're r-selected - having hundreds or thousands of babies and neglecting them, a lot of bugs do that - or something. We want grandchildren. We want nieces and nephews. We want to hold babies and feel like they're going to carry our lines forward and learn from us and eventually become a parent themselves. A hypovernal baby is still cute and cuddly and will still learn and grow and love their parents and then it all ends forty years later. But it soothes the immediate panic about pensioning reds and expecting normally vernal ones to go their whole lives without ever having children."

"What does it mean for babies to carry your lines? Also, what does soothing the immediate panic.. look like? If there was a way to make all new red babies hypovernal, would that be a basically satisfactory solution with only minor drawbacks according to reds?"

He gets a notification informing him Deet has replied, saying "Okay - I'll be there,".

"To be descended from us. A lot of people can sort of fool their instincts with adopted children but not everybody finds that good enough. Uh, I'm not sure you understand that that's in fact what they're trying to do. They're starting relatively slowly so they don't spook the reds, so each change is incremental, but they want all the new red babies to ultimately be hypovernal so they'll go extinct without a violent uprising trying to stop it. This is not a minor drawback but it is plausibly not worth dying to avoid for one's friends and family, which is why they are at present getting away with it."

"Oh, I didn't understand that that was what they are trying. Are the reds aware of the long-term plan around that? Also, why were you researching variants?"

"The long term plan is pretty obvious though I doubt the relevant decisionmakers have ever said it in as many words to the reds. I was researching variants because some of them could conceivably have been, say, fixable with hormone therapy later, if anything ever changed, and then if I found one of those I could have pushed for that to be the variant they induced, somehow, maybe, it would not actually have worked."

"Why haven't reds respond-ed aggressively over it, given the drawbacks and long-term plans?"

"Uh, so you know why I'm asking about this: I'm trying to figure what pref-ren-ces reds have 'round this stuff. Prolly I should try talking to them on my everything but you seem good at explaining some stuff and are easy to talk to right now."

"They don't think they can realistically get a better deal, and - hypovernal babies are still babies, they're still cute and little and soft, so the ones who are going along with it even now when it isn't required are at this particular moment doing okay even if they won't have grandchildren, and the ones who are insisting on paying for the full price credits have, well, families to worry about, and - you have to understand that when reds riot, over robotics programs or whatever else, they die. In droves. The police just kill any of them who might have twitched wrong and sometimes their families too. The polar hypovernal program offers a sort of... compromise... where no reds necessarily have to be killed, and the cleans still get a world without them soon enough. It's harder for them to coordinate and go to their deaths protesting that than it is for them to die to protest a development that means they'd all get gunned down later anyway."

"That sounds really bad..."

"Yep."

Lucien continues to discuss reds with Pelape until amaliens start arriving. Peli shows up first, though this time he lands much more softly (and farther away) to avoid scaring Pelape. Shortly after he's disgorged his passengers a bundle of amaliens arrives - carried there inside the fluff of Flooze. Keeta shows up once everyone else has arrived, with Fluffeld trailing behind her.

The group is similar to the group that made first contact. The differences:

 - Fika (the girl with leaves in her hair during first contact) is not there. An amalien boy with leaves sewn into his clothes is here as a repre-sent-ative from the Esteel Tree instead.

- The bonus beach girl who first met the Amentans is not there.

- Vira, Keeta, and Flooze are there.

"Hello everyone."

The gathered amaliens are ... on the whole happy to meet her but clearly are a bit nervous about this meeting given the explanation they were given about it.

"Thanks for coming, this is really important and sad and hard but we can help I think." 

He should really have thought what he was gonna say earlier but he was distract-ed by Pelape, oops.

"Some Amentans are called reds, basic-ally cause of the color of their hair though it's a bit more compli-cated. Most other Amentans are really mean to them and don't care too much 'bout that. The reds are really scared of new people and have trouble doing things on their own to fix things and. Are really really hurting and alone and in danger and things aren't going to get better."

The group is paying close attention to Lucien, a few nodding and a few tearing up.

"I... don't think Amentans care like we do. Not always anyways. They get con-fused bout what matters to them when it's hard for them to care and to do the things they have to do at the same time. And then they keep on not caring even when they don't really have to do the things quite that way anymore. It's hard for them and ... I sorta think we're prolly gonna do things that hurt them and make them feel sad or angry. We can try our best to not but. I think the reds are so alone and they need us and we can do our best to help the other Amentans but we gotta help the reds 'specially, cause they need it most I think."

One amalien has clamped her hand over her mouth cause she has questions 'bout this but is trying to wait. She is also crying, quietly.

"I think this might take all of us, in a way we haven't done before. Not just us here but all amaliens. I think we can help and make things better. I'm scared, and sad, and feel sorta lost. But I know I have you all to help and that is the important thing."

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."

"How long do you think this category of solution might take?"

"I'm nooooot at all sure you should have him visit Amenta. For a similar distance from here, without the sovereignty issues, how about Katme, it's a rocky planet in the Amentan system and reasonably Amentalike apart from the lack of air and water."

"Okeydokes!"

"And it really depends on the density of habitable planets compared to uninhabitable ones. So far it looks pretty low. How many can Meow scout in a day?"

"No idea! Gonna have to 'speriment!"

"Then, yeah, I have a ballpark guess of 'probably he will find at least one in a season or two of dedicated searching'."

"My impression is you thought we'd need many planets before helping reds that way was feasible?" 

"I think you will need at least two and a plan to keep them coming - the value of land will respond to expectations almost as much as actualities. If Meow is faster than my ballpark guess, or about at my guess but willing to keep doing this for years, I think it's doable."

"How long do you think it would take to make a very substantial impact on red lives this way?"

"What you should probably do is find a couple of planets, and then offer to a country other than Tapa - currently pouring lots of investment into this planet and liable to be stretched thin trying to deal with more right away - that they can have the one, free and clear, if they will put in some extremely basic infrastructure groundwork down on the second and transport reds there, their own and then everyone else's. Voa is a possible candidate for a good country to do this, but the reds I actually know who I'd be prepared to recommend to put together a government are Anitami; either country could probably outlay the resources necessary. You could try offering the deal to both of them and see if one gives a better bid than the other. Maybe ask Cene too. Play up that you also care about chickens while you're at it, it will come off much better if you sound like you're saying 'we care about lots of weird stuff' than 'reds are moral patients and it's a travesty that you don't already treat them that way'."

"Could we skip parts of that and just find one planet and offer to transport reds there ourselves?"

"If you have capabilities I don't know about relevant to supplying such a population, uh, maybe? It might be wise to have a plan to do that with some reds if their local cleans act jumpy like they might not successfully ship them to their planet, but I don't think you can do it with millions of them without any stuff from Amenta - seeds and tools and drugs and knowhow."

"Vira?"

"I know how warp drives work I think? Gotta make a bubble in sub-space, and then move it around and that way you can bend things round you and there's a bunch of math. We have Neh and also we could use the blowing things into orbit things to get things in space and that is one of the harder parts all done. Some monsters could help with a warp-drive 'm pretty sure? Like mimic or maybe Keetim or the fast blurry one who's name I can't remember. Hm..."

"Hard part is getting all the bits ready and all correct enough to build it up big. If I gotta build one big enough to trans-port whole pop-ulations... couple of Amentan years if we all work together? Prolly faster if we can get lots of info from Amentans on how to do it."

"I'm not trying to impugn your ability to construct a warp capable ship. I am seriously dubious of your ability to build enough warp capable ships and other infrastructure that you can transport fifty-five million reds to even a remarkably hospitable alien planet and not have them all promptly die of exposure. I think you are more than capable of raising enough money to just buy a ship from Tapa and then if a district says 'our social worker is acting shifty' evacuating those, specific, reds, while Voa or somebody does all the heavy lifting of all the other reds and their supply needs in exchange for a planet of their own."

"I'm... against on prin-ciple the idea of paying people to let us help with a prob-lem it sounds like they are caus-ing."

"Deet I understand but. I don't actually think you should be pushing your principles to the point where it hurts reds."

Deet does not have a response to that.

"If it helps you can think about it as paying them to demonstrate as a proof of concept that shipping reds out works, and then doing so with the other countries' reds; or think of it as buying their debt to the reds, which you are able to collect on where the reds aren't, on the reds' behalf."

"That second one sort of makes sense I suppose. Though I think..."

Deet is quiet for a bit,

"I think if they thought of it like that I'd be more confi-dent that they would follow through and not act in a way that hurt the reds and ruin-ed this plan?"

"They are extremely unlikely to think of it like that but you can require that they meet some metric - you can't expect literal perfection but you can set the bar high enough that there's not room for intentional top-down malfeasance - before they get the planet. You don't have to tell anyone which planet you've scouted and are offering them. - I guess it's possible that they'd double-cross you once they know which planet you want for the reds and try to take that one, I'm not immediately sure what to do about that..."

"Could ask them to give us the ships and take them ourselves? Might be possible to follow but may-be I can fix that."

"They might be able to trace your warp signature but I'm not sure... it might be that I should enroll in pilot training myself and then I can teach you and also learn more about that kind of thing."

"Would be good to know about all the things!"

"Oh and also it would help us save reds."

"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."

"Might be good enough."

After the discussion is over Lucien takes a few people aside and gives them additional jobs, or directs them to help Deet or Vira or Meelia with various tasks. A few are tasked with find more people from their homes with relevant skills.  Flooze and his three amaliens are asked to stick around for Pelape transport. 

One amaleins is given the job of purchasing pocket everythings for the others with his funds. He messages his landlord that he might not be able to pay rent in a few months, depending on what happens.

Eventually most of the group has dispersed, except for Vira who grabs a bag of doodads from Keetim and sticks around with them till Neh and Meow wake-up in evening.

In the meantime, Vira searches on her everything with Pelape for photos of places for Neh to test her tele-portation with.

Amentan astronomy has a lot of focus on potentially habitable exoplanets near and far, for obvious reasons. Pelape digs up a suitable list that has enough information that she can look up the candidates on a more comprehensive database. But to begin with can Meow get to the night side of Katme based only on knowing which star and orbital?

Yeah, that will work.

Neh is hugged by Meow and they sink into the shadows to go there.

After a minute passes, Lucien is worried.

"I don't think this should be taking that long."

"Her travel time is constant though! I'm confused. Maybe she's distracted by how pretty the view is or something?"

"...could be the teleportation isn't truly instantaneous and the travel time scales with distance at multiple light year gaps even if it's not noticeable on a single planet? - or that Katme lacking air is a problem, in which case we'll need an Amentan ship to land there and bail them out."

"It's definitely not the air thing! And also I don't see why she'd be able to do cross this planet jumps in the same amount of time as any other jump and have an issue with any other dist-ance? Could increase very slowly I guess... Would be weird I think, monsters usually can't just do something big to themselves without feeling like it's gonna happen - like trying to lift something heavy. And Meow would have warned him I think."

"Well, uh, let's give it a few more minutes and then maybe Lucien should tell someblue in Chaspanti that they may need a pickup from the nearest landing-capable ship in the system."

Elsewhere:

Meow appears from the shadows with Neh. A wave of cold hits Neh, like it always does when Meow jumps with him. But instead of just being a fully body small shiver type of cold it's way way colder. He freezes up, his heart stops beating. 

He can't think for a minute, but then he can push her thoughts through the sludge of being frozen. He's so so so cold. It's better, at least, then the lava. His fingers, cracking a lil as he moves them, grip tightly to Meow's fur as he asks to go back please please please.

And Meow and him appear back. His body freezes up even more, and he can't think for a bit.

"- there they are - Neh? Meow?"

Meow is fine, but looking worriedly at his popsicled Neh!

Neh is starting to heat up and can think a tiny bit.

The warmth feels good until it feels hot and then it feels way way too hot cause his body is so cold and he still can't move and it's like being trapped in lava again and Meow can't save him and he'll be here forever and and 

His jaw cracks, frozen skin breaking as he tries to scream.

...Pelape has no idea if her first aid kit will be useful at all but she does have one and she goes for it.

Vira takes a moment to put together what's going on, then she quickly goes over and twists his neck, breaking his brittle spine cause of how he's frozen. 

Neh stops being awake.

Which leaves Pelape holding a roll of gauze in one hand and the kit in the other. "Uh. Will he be okay?"

"Yes, he was just frozen, not enough to kill an amalien. He might need to nap for a couple weeks to be better though."

"Okay. Uh, do you have a guess what went wrong or do we need to wait for her to wake up to find out?"

Poke poke.

"She gets a little cold when she teleports I think? And I guess if it's longer it makes her get even colder. Looks cold all the way through, not just on the outside so it's not just Katme being cold."

"I can prolly help her get better faster? At least making it feel less bad for her by putting her in a room that's only a bit warmer than her, not a lot. And maybe using micro-waves or something to make the heating more even."

Lucien is still here! He is not really certain what to do though, and he has discovered that he is the least useful of the group in an emergency.

Pelape puts the gauze away. "Okay, you know more than I do about treating frozen amaliens...

...I guess this means probably this won't work, unless there's a way to keep him warm in transit?"

"I'm pretty sure I can improve on what just happened by inventing things... but I don't know how I could get it to be fast enough it'll be faster then thousands of your ships can search. Maybe if I spend a long time trying but that'll take long all on its own."

"Keeping her warm would slow them down? - Meow looks okay, is there a chance Meow could go alone?"

"I think each jump would drain more heat, so keeping her warm would have to keep up with that."

"I don't think Meow knows how to target places? He was able to find Neh but other than that I don't know of him jumping on his own. I don't think he's smart enough. Also I don't think he'd go places without Neh all that much even if he could."

"If I take your durability to its logical conclusion Neh could... swallow... radioactive metals??"

"Yeah. Prolly the way to do it would be to implant a bunch of things like that 'round her body. Maybe in a way that circ-ulates things through her blood after heating her up, I don't know. It would help but I think she'd need to do definitely more than one jump every ten minutes to keep up with a thousand starships that can scout new places in ten days each. And getting it so something e-venly heats her up enough to un-do a freezing solid like this amount of cold in less than ten minutes .... sounds really hard."

"Yeah. Uh, the starships will in fact slow down as they check all the nearest systems, warp still takes amounts of time proportional to distance and they don't have anything managing past warp factor three yet, but if it gets worse the farther he jumps then - yeah. Fuck."

Hrm.

"If he's frozen solid presumably wrapping him up in insulation won't help at all?"

"Yeah..."

She is wondering if she could beat warp three and probably but not for a lot of years she thinks.

"If... if we do the orignal plan, with the disguising the warp signature, maybe we could sneak them onto a hidden spot on our planet, without the rest of Amenta finding out?"

"People will notice them going missing and amalien action will be an obvious guess."

"I meant we say there's a planet like you said, and say we're disguising our warp signature so they can't be followed or found, and so on. And then instead of going to a new planet, we bring them here."

"...they would probably notice that sooner or later, they do have, like, satellites around this planet now. And even if you have a way to build them an underwater megametropolis or something Amentans need sunlight to season."

"Hrm, do you think it's infeasible to manage the other Amentans knowing the reds are here?"

"Also um. Could you say more words bout seasoning?"

"I don't know if it's impossible but it would be assigning ourselves a difficult task with no end date, whereas if we find them their own planet they will probably eventually be self-sustaining. Seasoning is a thing Amentans do, starting when we're four or five, in Amentan years - some people are doing it here too, some people aren't, the ones who aren't are mostly going back home because we don't like being without it. When our bodies are convinced it's spring or don't know what's going on because we've recently changed hemispheres or planets or something, we're fertile; we want babies all the time but it's especially intense around then."

"What sorta things are need-ed to convince a body it's season-ing?"

"We're not sure we've pinned down all the factors but suspect sun angle. Anyway I don't know if it's literally impossible to keep Amentans from noticing reds here on this planet we are busily colonizing and surrounding with satellites and so on but I'm not sure you could even be confident of no reds leaking it, let alone cleans noticing."

"Don't need to tell em till they're here?... guess that means we'd have to keep em from leaving..."

"Yeah. You'd wind up keeping them prisoner with no Internet. I'm sure some of them would prefer this to having hypovernal grandkids and dying at home of old age but I'm not sure what percentage."

"How's the plan differ from putting them on another planet in that way?"

"If they're on another planet and the Amentans know that they are on a planet somewhere, they can have the run of the place - admittedly they can't have their own warp ships any time soon - and subspace internet."

"We might be able to set up subspace internet here, maybe with a relay to somewhere else so it looks like it's coming from far away. Also there's a lot of room in the caverns."

"It's not as good as a whole planet though."

"And, again, they won't season in caverns. Plus they will, unless you stop them somehow, reproduce, and ultimately need more space - a planet will take them a while, caverns while they're all permaspringing won't."

"I'm pretty sure I could do things with light to fix that? There's a monster that can sorta infuse light into things that might work. And it would give us a lot of time to solve the other problems."

"All this still sounds really risky to me. One nice thing about a planet is that it's really easy to verify that all the pollution is staying in the one place. Hiding them in caverns - if it does leak, and I think it would be very likely to, it would be way harder to be sure that Chaspanti hadn't gotten polluted somehow in the process. Nobody's going to trust you on it, you don't appear to natively have the concept and hosting reds would all by itself call into question whether you respect anyone else having it."

"Hrm. Do you have a better idea then? Could try to think of other things."

"If we can possibly patch the planet scouting option it has a lot, a lot, of advantages. It lets reds be relocated as a one-time cost and then it's easy for everyone else to ignore them, which is basically what most people want. It directs lots of energy at colonizing the planets, and accordingly away from paving over this one or making red-related trouble. It makes billions of people dramatically happier because they can have more babies. Is Meow the only plausible candidate monster? Mind that we don't necessarily have to physically travel to planets to narrow them down - an atmosphere sample would go a long way."

"There's a monster that could prolly multiply the speed of a single ship by a bunch. Maybe we could have Neh look at the most promising places within a hundred lightyears, which is maybe easier to find a good place in, and then use the monster to get people there in less than a year?"

"Something to speed up one survey ship might turn up something suitable, though I wouldn't like to count on it. I don't suppose there are any monsters that specifically do warmth we could add to the search party?"

"I was thinking of speeding up a col-ony ship, and using Neh for survey."

"Issue is finding a way to heat Neh up even-ly and fast enough when she gets keeping heat sucked out of her by jumps. There are a bunch of heat monsters that I don't think can do that and a few other interest-in monsters that do transport, though not as fast as Meow at all, or other weird things that are hard to rep-licate with techno-logy?"

Vira lists a bunch of interesting monsters and what they do, with Lucien occ-asionally adding suggestions.

"So candidate solutions are - find a way to keep Neh warm, or get him warmed up comfortably and quickly enough after freezing that he's willing to tolerate it to scout, or another amalien who has more tolerance in that department who can accompany Meow who Meow will tolerate. Find a monster or combination that allows us to remotely view, or collect samples from, planets, without any persons visiting them. Find a monster or combination of monsters that does terraforming, so correctly orbiting planets can just be rendered livable - this could be incredibly minimalistic terraforming, almost any situation where it won't hospitalize someone to be outside for an hour will cut it with enough support. I want to make a multidimensional spreadsheet of all these monsters, can you list them again from the top, slowly so I don't accidentally write them down in Cryptophasia and render myself unable to understand my notes later..."

Vira is happy to help!

Lucien leaves for a bit to go and see if there are monsters Monument remembers that might be relevant. He comes back with more suggestions for the spreadsheet.

Pelape considers it a perfectly good use of her time for the next week at least to come up with heaps of stupid monster combinations and drill down into the ones that aren't facially absurd as they come up. Can Esteel Tree grow custom seeds? Could Aurorite hold in an atmosphere on a planet without a magnetic field of its own to help while it was getting started? The triceratops that shows far-off locations, how does that steer? Is the pufferfish creating the substances it puffs up with ex nihilo, does that scale? Do any of these monsters duplicate other monsters, even temporarily? What if you injected Neh with antifreeze? If you gave Meow a subspace transponder and taught it Cryptophasia could Neh steer teleports from home? This heat monster probably won't keep Neh warm well but could it warm up an iceball planet sustainably, turning it into a mostly-ocean planet? This one that eats rocks sounds useful for later stages even if it can't kick things off. Does that one secretly teleport? Does that one? Why does teleporting involve being cold, anyway?

The Esteel Tree can grow seeds that are close to the sort of seeds that could exist normally.

Aurorite could do that, yeah.

That triceratops let's you see alternative worlds, not far ones she's pretty sure. It's easy to steer to find worlds with things you want just by sorta looking for them, but the more specific the thing the stranger everything besides that thing gets.

It's actually more like a newt or salamander than a fish, and yes the things are created out of nowhere and she's pretty sure it doesn't scale. Maybe if you made the monster itself bigger but she doesn't know how to do that.

Yeah, Mimic can duplicate most things, though by default it's bad at that, but it can do lots the things with coaching. The things fall apart when it leaves.

She doesn't think antifreeze would do enough for it to help too much.

Meow isn't smart enough to learn Cryptophasia, and communication needs to pretty fast for Cryptophasia to be in two places at once? Hm. Aurorite is smart enough to learn Cryptophasia - maybe she could direct Meow? And maybe possibly they could manage to make her not freeze more easily then Neh? Though if she froze all the way through she would maybe die, unlike Neh, so they'd have to be more careful.

Maybe that monster could heat the place up, it does belch enough lava that it might work. Would be hard to transport since it's mountain sized but did she mention she could blow things up into space if they needed that?? 

Rock one is important for the Volcano Watchers, but maybe they can replace it with Amentan mining stuff for that.

Yes, the Amyris Tide does teleport, but only to shores part of the same contiguous body of water.

No, Mimic is actually incorporeal, the copies are just things it ~puppets sorta.

Teleporting involves being cold cause of zero space transfusion energy. ... Okay she just made that up cause she had no idea and it sounded cool.... Maybe the actual reason has to do with lower entropy colder states being better able to survive stably in whatever dimensional bubble Meow is accessing? It shouldn't go below absolute zero though.

Could Mimic mimic Meow and send the puppet copy scouting? Meow himself doesn't freeze, right, could he... swallow... Neh??? Even blowing a lava monster into space would leave the issue of getting it to where it needs to go, though if there's an icy rock in this system that might help, is there? How many things can you hold constant about an alternative world at once, can they just look for one where they already have lots of star charts of habitable planets?

Hm... Mimic's Meow, even if it could teleport (which Vira isn't sure of at all), wouldn't be able to teleport Mimic itself, so it would fall apart right after it went away. Probably the puppet wouldn't even be able to teleport, since transit still takes con-stant time and it'd fall apart then.

He could swallow Neh but Neh would still freeze.

There is an icy rock in this system! It's mostly frozen ocean, with some mountains poking out. No atmosphere or magnetosphere though.

You have to be able to sorta imagine or keep in mind all the things at once, and maybe the star charts would work without it getting really really weird and brain melty. Might be different stars but might not be.

Right, so, can they decide that one of the things they're trying to hold constant is the... galaxy?

What is keeping Meow from freezing?

Does the icy rock look seasonable?

She's pretty sure that you can only hold constant things you know and are thinking about - prolly the galaxy is too abstract but they can manage to keep constant the night sky looking roughly the same as one they visualize?

She's not sure what's keeping meow from freezing, but the fact that he's ~shadowy just like the shadows he teleports between might have something to do with it. Prolly is cause he's made in a way that's easier to teleport like he does somehow.

Yeah, it does! A bit small but it would work.

Does Meow have, like, a circulatory system, that could be hooked up to Neh's - this is all thoroughly horrifying and she wishes to clarify she's aware of that but they quite reasonably seem to have a different relationship to their physical integrity than Amentans do - is the prismatic triceratops friendly enough that it'll tolerate many attempts -

She doesn't think that would work for Neh but it's not impossible - it depends on how weird Meow's thing is. Prolly it wouldn't effect Neh enough to matter, it's hard to do things to amaliens.

The prismatic triceratops would definitely be okay with many attempts. It's very friendly. You might get a headache or a bit woozy but that goes away pretty fast.

...maybe just in case she should not try it and only amaliens should in case what's going on is brain damage they can heal off and she can't.

She's pretty sure it's not, but okay.

Maybe someone will be up for trying it eventually but not Pelape.

Okeydokes. Should Vira go and try that or one of the other things?

Vira's personal expertise is probably most relevant to star chart cross-checking, maybe other amaliens can run other experiments?

Sure, Meelia and Lucien and her and others can help. 

Lucien has specific rec-o-mmendations for the others.

[Continued in trading places]