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starship keetim
Space amaliens find pre-warp Amenta
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It appears in the sky with a burst of energy as it drops out of warp. A ship, right overhead and large enough to be visible to the naked eye for much of the population of Amenta. 

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Wow!

The population of Amenta immediately has a lot to say directly at the ship about that, ranging from the conservative prime numbers from a few places to the ambitious guide-to-Amenta-for-aliens from Cene!

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A video message in a oddly trivial to translate language is broadcast across the globe. The speaker appears to be a young girl with golden hair sitting on a silver chair at the center of what appears to be the command room of the ship.

"Hi! I'm Captain Sierra of Starship Keetim - flagship of the Amalien Expanse. We come with hope for the flourishing of all sentient life, and with a promise to do all we can to help, empower, and advance everyone."

The message is accompanied by detailed instructions specifications for a variety of medical advances that have been found to generalize across most life, including penicillin, broad spectrum antiviral medicines, and omnivalent vaccines.

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...wow, awesome, though they do already have penicillin. Is she on anti-aging tech of some kind that... overshot? Anyway thanks! Do they have terraforming? Will they teach Amentans how to go to other planets?

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No that's just what they look like! They do have terraforming! They'll get back to them about teaching them to get to other planets. 

If there's enough planetwide coordination, can a group (or two) of Amentas be put together to meet with them? And in the meantime, are there any active disasters or conflicts where people involved would like help?

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There is actually at this moment a territory conflict over a farm province that the most populous countries in the world are fighting over pursuant to an issue with food exports. If space food is edible and they happen to have some that would be awesome. Tapa (the injured party wrt the food exports; third-party countries confirm) is happy to put together an international group and will even throw in a Voan green they have under arrest in Tapa if that will make it more suitably international (she didn't do anything, just in the wrong place at the wrong time and they were holding her in anticipation of a prisoner exchange).

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Is Voa okay with this?

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Voa is under a communications blockade and its leadership cannot comment.

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"Lieutenant Commander Lucien, try to figure out the condition of Voa - we might need to know whether this is important enough to press on. Passive scans only."

"In the meantime, let's see if Tapa is willing to lift the blockade."

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It's a condition of the current ceasefire, and they don't really want to figure out alternative ceasefire conditions while they are trying to contact aliens, because doing things to ceasefires sometimes causes the fire to un-cease.

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Would everyone involved be okay with a shuttle touching down in the largest Voan city to check on things?

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That seems reasonable. Uh, it's possible the Voans will be confused and try to shoot them down but they will warn them to minimize the risk of this. Though probably domestic Voan scientists have already noticed.

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He is mostly managing to not focus on the fact that this is his FIRST MISSION and he is so excited and scared and Captain Sierra is looking at him oh he should say things.

"Um. Scans don't show any signs of the use of weapons that could get past our shields. Overall tech-no-logical develop-ment is consis-tent with this as well."

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"Tell Tapa we'd be happy about them telling the Voans of our arrival and that we come in peace, so long as that won't break the cease fire."

"Moira, Isha - take the most recently repaired shuttle and see how we can help."

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Tapa conveys that they have updated Voa.

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And a shuttle descends towards the largest city in Voa, smoothly descending from the sky with just an electric "vrooom" to mark its arrival.

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There is a party there to greet it, blues and greens and a yellow, with some greys holding a perimeter.

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Soon afterwards a tall woman with black hair emerges from the shuttle.

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With an amalien girl walking beside her, dressed in an apron.

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"Welcome to Voa," says the blue in the lead.

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"Hi! I'm Isha and this is Moira. Did you get our captain's video?"

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"No, I'm afraid the channel we have with the Tapai is not high bandwidth enough for video, but we've heard a summary."

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Isha goes over what's in the video, just in case.

"So, we've come here cause Tapa offered to put together a bunch of Amentans to talk to us and we wanted to make sure that was okay with you and you felt included if the person they say they captured was there for you. Also to check if you needed any help and say hi since you didn't see our message."

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"Ah. In peacetime, Tapa would be the obvious choice for a project like that, but of course it's complicated right now. Which captive did they have in mind?"

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Mora repeats the name of the captive.

"- and they are green."

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"If you'll allow me a moment to look that up..." Check check. "...she wouldn't have been a top contender but if they don't want to let us choose a delegate I suppose she's better than nothing."

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"We can also arrange an independent delegation to you if there isn't too much demand for independent delegations, or see about bringing one of you with us."

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"We're using the ceasefire to evacuate civilians from Imde, so jeopardizing it isn't preferable if it would provoke the Tapai."

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Not exactly the most impressive adaptation to unexpected circumstances but at least no one's asked them to intercede on their behalf in the war. Yet.

"We'll have the green act as a representative then, and clear things with you later if relevant."

"Additionally, we'd like to give you a communicator beacon you can use to signal us for help if needed. It might be detectable by Tapa, so please don't use it unless it's an emergency."

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... Moira is making decisions on her own again. Hopefully Sierra accounted for Moira's independent streak, and this is actually a good idea.

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"What kind of emergency do you have in mind?"

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"Something you consider potentially breaking the ceasefire to be worth. We don't want communicating with us to be unilaterally controlled by one side of a conflict."

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"Thank you, I appreciate the offer. Simply owning such an object doesn't violate the terms and we will be happy to accept."

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Moira is satisfied with this!

The Amaliens* depart soon afterwards, after handing over a video player with the same information that was broadcast to the rest of the world.

 

*in this case the nationality, rather than the species. 

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Okay, with that sorted out, the Tapai are putting together a delegation! How big of one can the Amaliens accommodate? What topics do they expect to cover?

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Six would be ideal but up to twenty is fine, though most would have to bunk up if they wanted to stay overnight in that case. They want to discuss the state of tech-nology on Amenta and what sort of issues they need help with and also make friends!

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Okay. They are sending a Tapai blue and a green, the Voan green, and additional greens from Cene, Anitam, Yvalta, Litholee, and Celenta, to represent the most populous countries (Yvalta's not but it is the most presentable example of an Oahksphere country, and Litholee isn't either but it can represent the other 'lees and their cultural sphere, and also these were the greens they happened to have ready to go on short notice who are relevant to this).

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Do they want to be picked up as a group or independently? 

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Tapa has assembled them all in Shapto!

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A shuttle picks them up. The ride is smooth, silent, and rather quick. The pilot appears to be a young boy, with an equally young girl sitting shotgun leaning against what appears to be a pet black bear. The girl's face and what's visible of her body have surgical scars. 

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The blue introduces himself as Pan Pahatun. Would they like the greens' names? What are theirs?

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"I'm Neh and this is Sivil. He probably shouldn't talk too much now cause he's piloting. We'll be there soon."

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Then they will settle in to wait quietly.

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Eventually they land in the docking bay of a massive ship - easily enough space for several hundred passengers. The docking bay itself is cavernous, containing a few other shuttles and one large airplane sized ship.

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They are greeted by the Captain!

"Hello again! I'm Captain Sierra of this ship, from the Amalien Expanse. I'm excited to meet all of you. What are your names?"

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"I'm Pan Pahatun! These are Chi Katme, astronomer and speculative xenologer, from Tapa; Ilun Moka from Anitam, biochemist; Vatri of House Ndakar in Yvalta, physicist; Nidace Sotra from Cene, geologist; Lanut Kei from Celenta, ecologist; Yonde be-Balar de-Zuvad of Voa, metrologist; and Spree Achan of Litholee, linguist. If there's any other specialties we should be recruiting for, please let me know; this was a cross-section of areas of interest among greens fluent in Tapap so we could all communicate and representing a spread of nations."

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Lucien franticly enters the names and specialties into his datapad as they are said, managing to keep up but just barely.

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"And this is Lieutenant Commander Lucien. It's his first first contact just like it's yours if I'm not mistaken. I'm excited for you all to meet him as much as I'm sure he's excited to meet you!"

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Captain Sierra knows* who he is and is introducing him to aliens!!

Lucien graduated top of his class in Operations and so he has the sort of elite training needed to not eep aloud and hide behind his datapad. 

 

*He has been an officer on the bridge with her for about a month now, and yet.

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"Your range of backgrounds sounds great for a first meeting. Our Chief Science Officer Vira might have additional suggestions but she's been distracted by something about how you have very interesting urban planning. I'm sure she'll be along once she realizes you're here."

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"Huh, what's interesting about our urban planning? You're right this is our first first contact, so we haven't a clue how everyone else does it!" says Pahatun.

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"Something to do with it being unusually well optimized for your techno-log-ical level for getting rid of trash and while keeping lots of people in the same place?"

Sierra walks them to a conference room as they continue chatting.

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"Ah! I'll have to tell our city planners we're ahead in that department, then." Walk walk. Spree Achan has a limp and a cane.

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Lucien will write a note to have someone check with Spree privately about whether he wants his leg fixed. He is a bit proud of himself for this idea.

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It's nice that she doesn't have to speed up to match walking speed with taller aliens.

"It's really impress-ive! Logistical ability is a place where Amaliens have had to do a lot of improvement over the past century. It's cool how Amenta has managed to do great at that on such a large scale!"

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"Thank you!"

"Is that an Amentan century?"

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She'll look to Lucien to answer that.

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Tap tap search - there. Having other operations people with him is great cause it means someone already wrote down the conversions for that.

"The Standard century is 25 Amentan years."

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"Wow," says Pahatun, "did something specific happen then?"

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"Yes, that's when we had our first first contact. It's been a busy time since then and we've grown a bunch to meet new challenges and make our way in the galaxy. As I'm sure you will too!"

She'll have to talk to them about the war at some point but it's compli-cated and she wants to get the hang of talk-ing to them before then.

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"Who was it you first met?"

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"Vulcans, who were part of a group called the United Federation of Planets we've had a really complicated relationship with - though we're currently on better terms than we were for a while."

They arrive at the conference room. Which is nice since she'd really rather not dive into this topic right away.

"Would you all be okay with a biological scan so we can make sure dinner is safe for everyone? The cooks are making a really delicious meal that's broadly consumable by humanoid species but the added precaution would catch any exceptions."

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"Ooh, yes please," says Pahatun, and Moka nods too.

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A junior doctor would like to scan all of them with this device he has, if that's okay. That way they can also check for any rare allergies that someone in the group might have. 

He will also inform them that unless they request otherwise they'll keep the scans on file but only for use in medical emergencies, and even then only with their express consent. 

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"How many details do these scans pick up?" asks Moka.

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"Um. A lot? Most body things. Not so much any-thing not obvious 'bout your brain or detailed hist-ory but. A basic checkup sorta?"

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"That's an amazing technology, I'd love to import some."

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"They are pretty great! We'd be happy to share information on how to make similar devices if that would work for you."

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"Even better! We're going to want to catch up our industrial base to the state of the art."

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"We've been working on that ourselves and would love to help with that as much as we are able!"

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And dinner is served! The chairs alternate between tall ones for amaliens and shorter ones for Amentans, so everyone can get to know one another. Moira is the only exception, already sitting in tall chair when they arrive.

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Isha explains, as the dishes are brought out, what each thing is. There's a variety of comfort foods from across many worlds, modified as needed to be a gentle introduction to alien cuisine. 

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The Amentans are all happy to try alien foods, though not all of them taste everything.

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Moria isn't tasting from any of the dishes that are being carried over, instead she has her own bowl of broth. 

"Enjoying the meal?" she asks the blue sitting next to her.

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"Oh, yes, thank you!" says Pahatun. "I'm beyond pleased to be among the first Amentans to taste alien food, we weren't remotely sure if it'd be biocompatible till you told us but it's so interesting, I like these blue things especially."

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"When I first tasted alien food I particularly enjoyed the orange dish over there. It has a fascinating aftertaste."

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"It really does, doesn't it? A bit tart for me."

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"I found it just close enough to food I had before while being strange in a way I'd never encountered that it excited me."

"Do you encounter a lot of novel things like this through your job?"

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"This is definitely the most novel, but I did go on a state visit to Shi Cubrio once and they had the most fascination with garlic of any cuisine I've ever tried before or since. There was a fish dish with roughly equal amounts of fish and garlic by volume."

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"Sounds like too much garlic to me, but cultures differ I suppose."

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"It was pretty tasty but I wouldn't want it more than once in a great while."

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"Do you find novelty outside of food in your job?"

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"Never so much as today. One learns about all the countries that exist on Amenta in school, you see, and then one goes there and there's a certain excitement to seeing things in real life, participating in their culture, but they're still about what one expects. Where are you from?"

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"Part of the Federation actually. I can't say I'm a fan."

"What sort of schooling did you have?"

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"After I turned five I went to a little academy in Shapto, barely a university, more on a tutoring model, with students on the buddy system and bopping around between various experts and specialists. Full Cenemi language immersion three days of the week and Oahkar on the classroom model as an elective, lots of history and political science, debate, rhetoric, social deduction games."

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"Oh that sounds delightful! I wish I could have gone to such a school - I really liked social deduction games when I was younger and still have a fondness for them."

"Was the school for blues specifically?"

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"Yes, most primary schools and practically all secondary schools are caste-specific, though there are oddballs."

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Moira continues talking to the blue, asking him questions about his schooling and the caste system and offering her own comments on the way various aliens live. She's evasive about her own background.

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On the other end of the table:

"What sorta science do you have? Does your hair photo-synth-esize? Do you want it to? Did you know humanoid aliens are really common and that's prolly cause of pan-sperm-ia?"

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"Our hair does not photosynthesize."

"I want mine to, I could just work in the park and not have to break for lunch!"

"We have a solid evolutionary record, how does that accord with a panspermia hypothesis?"

"Why do you pause in the middle of words like that?"

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"Is it green for some other reason or just cause that's how you are?"

"Oh, actually making it so you get energy from it is harder. Also I think that wouldn't be nearly nuff, less you had way way way more hair."

"Vesti-gial genetic information that somehow causes a spe-cif-ic attractor across plan-ets to ev-olve humanoids that sorta look like you, I think!"

"Cause I need to sound em out sometimes. Most species don't once they're big, but Amaliensdon't change sizes like that."

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"Amentan hair comes in most colors, and most of us are green, except Pahatun, he's blue. That's metonymy for the most common natural hair color of our caste but some greens have other natural hair colors and then dye it for signaling reasons," says Chi Katme.

"I do," volunteers Yonde. "It comes in almost yellow - you could call it spring green but people can't confidently tell, so I dye it to be clear."

"Amaliens don't... get bigger, but you also don't get fluent in languages you speak?" asks Spree in fascination.

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"What if you dyed it to be actually clear! What would that mean?"

"Depends what you mean by fluent. Sorta took us a while to get used to other people saying complicated things without thinking em through prop-ly."

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"I don't think we have dye that can do that!

"What do you mean, thinking them through properly?"

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"Mostly you just gotta filter out mel-anin and clean out dead cells that get all scrunched up and make it sorta white after that. Is hard to do without break the hair. Could do it with a really small syr-inge I bet, or maybe a ball with lots of teeny tiny pokey bits."

"Like. How sometimes people use 'um' or 'like' how I did just now when they're thinking. And then sometimes lots of people don't do that and an amalien would sound things out instead but they also don't do that."

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"I'm not sure I follow," says Spree, furrowing his brow.

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"So some words are 'vocal-ized pauses', that you can say in plays when you are pausing to think. 'Um' is one, 'hm' is one, sometimes 'so' or 'like' are them to. Amaliens use sound-ing out compl-icated words to auto-matically add vocalized pauses when talking about more compl-icated things. Does that make sense?"

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"Oh, that's amazing!" enthuses Spree. "I don't think there are any languages on Amenta where that's standard but when you explain it that way it makes perfect sense."

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"I'm not 'xactly sure that that's the reason we do it but it's my best guess."

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"I have a colleague who's studied filler words as one of her special interests, she'd love a corpus to examine if you have one to offer. Though possibly of more linguistic interest is how you're all speaking Tapap so quickly, I was anticipating computer translations but it appears to be coming from your own mouths!"

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"The making the language seem like the hear-ers is actually really cool! So, it turns out that for most species the bit of the brain that understands the con-tent of a speech and the bit of the brain that tells the speak-er what langue it's in are sorta separate. So if you add the right under-lying pho-netic signatures from their native language to audio then their brain automat-ically sorta infers that the language is the native one, even if it's not! That means you can make aud-io that sounds like the na-tive languages of mult-iple different speakers - though it can be harder for lots of speak-ers. If you look at lips or listen really close-ley and just pay attention to the sounds and not to the con-tent then you can notice difference. The brain also some-times hal-lu-cinates an accent to con-vey the inf-or-mation that the speaker is not speaking na-tiv-ley in your language."

"Act-ually doing the trans-lation is much harder, without enough info. Some people use brain wave scanning but we use a sentient-language that people's brains learn really easily instead. The phonetic signat-ure thing does the rest of the work to make list-en-ers think it's their language, so long as we have a little samp-le of their language first to der-ive it from."

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"A sentient language," gasps Spree. "How is that possible?"

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"I think it works by skipping past the translating bit of a brain right to the 'facts about how the lang-uage works' and 'what that means' bits of the brain sorta, but I don't know how. My idea is that it's a localized ideo-graphicly stable form of anti-entropy but it's hard to test that."

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"There's only one of it? What happens if speaking populations are lightyears apart?"

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"It's localized, also least informationally, so they need to be able to comm-unicate with each other, otherwise the bits of the brain that are saying 'this is a language and this is how it works' stop responding to it and the sounds just sound like non-sense."

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"Fascinating - so it could be multiply located provide there were open channels of FTL communications? Do you have that, or only travel?"

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"We have FTL comm-un-ication but it's not always fast enough for Cryptophasia to be in two places at once."

Vira is a bit fidgety about this subject.

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"Huh, what do you do when it can't cover a conversation? Is there an ordinary lingua franca?"

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"Oh, we can set-up translation later that uses machines. Cryptophasia just helps when we're first meeting. There isn't really a comm-on language cause of all the translating being easy."

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"That makes sense! You should let us know if you need more of a corpus for the Amentan languages."

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"We don't, but I'd be happy to have more things that you all wrote!"

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Meanwhile, in another part of the room, Captain Sierra is discussing what sort of help might impact the lives of everyday Amentans.

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Amentans live very densely, but would like more room to spread out! At the moment there's some tightness in the food supply due to a problem with unverifiable exports from a major producer (Voa) but that's not a typical problem, normally they have their population controlled to the point that nobody needs to go hungry.

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"Hm. Could you elaborate on how the food is unverifiable exactly? Also on what is the preventing you from having more people on Amenta."

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"A bad actor in Voa decided to contaminate unspecified food production bottlenecks," Pahatun explains. "Any given product from Voa is almost certainly fine, but we can't tell, and neither can the Voans - or if they can they're keeping it quiet. There isn't a current limiting factor - if we suddenly discovered a lost colony of Amentans living in an undersea city and their undersea city was then destroyed, there would be space and food for millions of refugees, though there'd be arguing about who had to take them. But right now we're aiming for a low, sustainable growth rate, rather than pushing to the point where a natural disaster or some such problem could push carrying capacity to the breaking point."

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"How would it break exactly? I'm wondering if we can help your carrying capacity be higher on Amenta."

"Also, would you like some of our scientists and medical personnel to see if we can help with the contaminated food?"

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"I think most projections suggest that food would be the first thing to be a problem, though some extractive industries would also wind up with issues - we do have some asteroid mining but it's not cost-effective yet, it's purely R&D budget at this point.

"I'm not sure your scientists and medical personnel will be able to help; it's not a conventional microbe or chemical, it's just polluted."

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Sierra thinks she should probably focus on one thing at a time, and helping more people live there seems like a thing Pahatun is more excited about. She can figure out what pollution is later.

"We can definitely help with the asteroid mining, and help with food replicators that can do fairly efficient food crea-tion from raw materials, I think. We don't have them set-up ourselves because we don't need to eat enough for it to be worth it. And our cooks are great, though I'm told there's some really neat food you can make with the repli-cators."

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"Wow, if the replicators have enough throughput that would be a particularly timely intervention for Tapa, everyone is already fed up with the rationing system."

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"We don't actually have any here. We might be able to import a few from other planets. I think we can help you learn how to build them but it'll take a while to do that and then make a bunch."

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"Do you eat less frequently than an Amentan adult your size?" asks Lanut Kei.

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"My guess is we eat just often but not as large portions. We're an out-lier among humanoids in that way."

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"Huh! Well, we'd love to know how to build replicators even if we won't have them in time to cut it out with the rationing till midsummer."

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"I'll put our scientists on it! We'll reach out to you soon, I'm sure."

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A waiter tries to add a new soupey dish to the table but accidentally spills a bunch of it on Pahatun.

"Oh no!"

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"Whoops! Have you got a place I can wash off and a spare outfit that'll fit me - big cloth rectangle'll do, I know how to tie those on twelve ways -"

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"Um. Um. Sorry. I could get a cleaner wand?"

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"If you'd prefer a place to wash-up and change there's a bathroom over there and we can have someone bring clothes there right away."

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"I'm curious to try a cleaner wand, actually, though I might still want the shower depending on how thorough it is!" says Pahatun.

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Niola gets a cleaner wand and waves it over the spill - it makes a soft humming noise and shines a light, the mess disappearing in the process. Pahatun might still feel the slightest layer of mess still left under his clothes if he's very sensitive.

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"Well, that'll probably save the outfit, but I'd just as soon still have a rinse and a change if it's no trouble, thank you."

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"Of course."

And he can be directed to a nearby bathroom with a shower.

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He rinses off quick enough and pops out to put on a supplied rectangle in a fetching manner and rejoins the dinner table.

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Where Commander Neh is being questioned by her neighbor.

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"What's your role on the ship?" Nidace Sotra is asking him.

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"I'm the Head of Security, and also the Chief Tactical Officer. Also I'm First Officer but that doesn't come up much."

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"That's a lot of hats, how'd you come by that many jobs?"

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"Head of Security and Chief Tactical Off-icer are combined a lot of the time, since they cover similar things. First officer usually has some other job they do most of the time - since it just means you're the person who's in charge after the captain."

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"I assume you'd have to have a security protocol either way, but does it come up much in your adventures?"

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"Security or First Officer?"

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"Security; you already said First Officer doesn't."

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"Came up a lot for a while, hasn't come up so recent-ly. Though I was on your shuttle here just in case, didn't 'spect it to matter."

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"Oh, that would have been embarrassing if we'd managed to cause an incident right off the bat, though I'm admittedly not sure where they got the Voan."

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"Tapa had them, I think."

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"Well, I hope they screened her." Shrug.

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"For what?"

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"Not being likely to cause a security incident."

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"Ah. I assume they did."

Neh should. Probably say things without specific prompting or something.

"Amenta has been a lot calmer than I'm used to."

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"Oh, what are you used to?"

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"War."

Neh is not very good at conversations.

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"- with whom?"

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Neh glances to Sierra for help. Sierra is busy in a different conversation.

"The Federation."

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"What was the quarrel about?"

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Sierra should really be able to read her mind and come rescue her. Why can't they be linked like Borg.

"We wanted to help people and they weren't happy about how we did it."

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"Huh, did it turn out they were fine after all, or was the cure just worse than the condition?"

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"People liked it. Federation didn't. We're at peace now though."

Sierra....

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Sierra finally notices her friend is having A Time, and heads over the join the conversation.

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"So they were a third party to the whole - hello there!"

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"Sorry don't stop on account of me, just making rounds to see how people are doing and answer any questions. What were you discussing?"

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"Apparently there was a war!"

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"Ah. Yeah. I'm beginning to think that this would be better addressed sooner rather than later. It's a somewhat delicate subject and I didn't want to drop it on you all right away."

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"It's sad but hardly surprising that there would still be war among people who travel the stars," says Pahatun. "But I'd like to be able to tell the folks back home what interests and norms we need to be on the lookout for ourselves, at least."

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"Mhm. I'll give a presentation on it when we finish dinner if you'd like."

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"I think we'd all appreciate that, thank you."

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Sierra sends a message to Lucien to prepare a few visuals, and goes to check to make sure everyone else is enjoying the dinner too.

 

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Spree is having by far the best time, though Chi Katme is also enjoying finding out what star the amaliens came from and so on.

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After dinner winds down, Captain Sierra stands up at her seat.

"I'd like to thank everyone for coming. It's meetings like this that really em-body the goals of the Amalien Expanse and the progress we hope to encourage, between all species."

The lights dim as she's saying this.

"A few times today questions about Amalien history and experience with other cultures and warp have come up - sensitive topics I'd hope to save for when we had a better understanding of each other to help us communicate about a delicate situation. However, I think this was an error - and onee I apologize for. Being evasive is not a good way to open dip-lomacy. Amaliens are still new to this, and this is in fact the first major first contact we've had since the end of a dark period in our history - one we are still learning how to address and communicate about."

"In the interest of transparency, I'd like to talk to you now about the Federation, the history of the Amalien Expanse, and the Prime War."

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A globe appears in the center of the room, hovering over the table.

"Amaliens, about a quarter of one of your centuries ago, were not very ad-vanced - we didn't have a very clear gov-erment or eveen mass pro-duction. We knew things, but didn't really use them. We don't repro-duce, we don't age, need little, are coop-eratively in-clined, and are really really hard to hurt. But, somee of us still re-searched science things for fun, and Vira - " she gestures towards her " - was attempted to test a theory she had, using a cobbled to-gether craft she had built up all the parts to make. Her idea was that if she was right, it would go fas-ter then light, us-ing something called a warp drive."

The hologram zooms in on vira traveling in a ship - details of the ship are blurred and impossible to make out.

"It worked, and a scouting alien ship - detecting this - made first contact with Vira. They welcomed us to the greater universe, and opened dialogue about our interest in joining the United Federation of Planets. They also gave us access to much of their technology, so that we might improve ourselves and ally with others who had reached a similar stage of development."

The holograms zooms out, to reveal the many systems of the Federation.

 

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"During this time, their were some difficulties between us and Federation, but we were optimistic and hopeful about eventually joining."

The hologram zooms in, to a ship passing by a remnant of a shattered planet. 

"A small Federation vessel, ferrying a few Amaliens to a meeting with the Federation about our application to join, discovered the Ranthir. The Ranthir had segregated themselves by sex into two separate hemispheres of their home planet. Less than a decade of your time prior, a rogue black hole had passed nearby, tearing their planet in two, flinging the members of the two sexes apart. They were facing extinct-ion, with space flight nowhere near fast enough to connect the two groups."

A hologram illustrates this process, before returning to the prior view of the remnant.

"The Federation's Prime Directive forbade inter-ference in pre-warp cultures, opt-ing instead for a policy of letting civilizat-ions develop on their own, for good or bad, on their own. Thus, the Federation re-fused to do anything."

The hologram zooms in on the ship, displaying the faces of a few Amaliens next to it.

"The amaliens on the ship decided this wasn't okay. They mut-ineed, taking over and making contact. Handing the Ranthir plans from Fed-eration archives on how to construct warp cap-able ships, and offering their help in building them. The Feder-ation came to try to stop this. Ama-liens came too, to defend the Ranthir."

The hologram illustrates the battle - it's clear their are federation and Ranthir casualties. Eventually, a single lone amalien is flung by an explosion into the rogue black hole.

"Everyone lost some-one. We tried, after that, to make peace with the Fed-eration. They wanted that too."

A recording of talks are shown. Both sides appear tense.

"It didn't work."

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The hologram zooms in towards a ship, labeled as belonging to a Ranthir criminal syndicate.

"Us-ing warp, some Ranthir's be-came pirates, and stole more Fed-eration technology. A pol-itical faction within the Fed-eration, previously not the most powerful one, be-came pop-ular enough to force a cond-ition of peace that the Ranthir, who they said weren't 'mature' enough as a civ-ilization, would have to give up warp. The Ranthir didn't want to and we told them we would help protect them."

The recordings talk show people becoming annoyed, and then go dark.

"War broke out."

A montage of images - showing battles, broken ships, explosions.

"We advanced ourselves, built ind-ustries, and attempted to make allies along the way, finding people who were left behind by the Federation, and finding new species as well - many of whom were will-ing to risk joining the war to rec-ieve warp from us. We did not make it a cond-ition to help us in the war, but many did."

Different species and groups are shown. A species with dolphin heads, a species of humanoids with four ears, a cybernetically upgraded person, Moira, and a species that look like unusually fit humans.

"The war was bad, and accidents and attempts to gain adv-antages on both sides meant a lot of people died."

A planet is consumed by metal in a timelapse, a ship crashes at warp into a space station, bombings occur on primitive planets.

"Even-tually, we were able to comp-romise. To prevent more blood-shed and to avoid the risk of even great-er disasters. Systems we gave warp too were allowed to keep it, and even join the Federation. How-ever, we promised to never again give out warp, or any related tech-nology. We are allowed to help, this was some-thing we could not com-promise on, but we are not allowed to help in that way. Not again."

The holograms fades. A moment later the lights come back on in the room.

"You are the first major civ-ilization we've made contact with since then, and we're still figur-ing out how to talk about this with new people."

"If any of you have questions I'll do my best to answer them now."

 

 

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"Why is it that the Federation is so opposed to the distribution of warp?" says Pahatun, suppressing some alarm.

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"They think that species that aren't ad-vanced enough to discover warp on their own aren't ma-ture enough to handle it respons-ibly, and that giving it out is like play-ing god and per-verting the nat-ural growth of a civi-lization, which they think is very important."

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"That's - disappointing in the extreme," says Pahatun faintly. "We don't know how close our people are to the key insight - do you have a guess?"

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Sierra grimaces.

"I can't say. Sorry."

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"Did many of the systems you gave warp to choose to join the Federation even after they started this war?" asks Pahatun.

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"Not many as of now - three of the twenty four. Mainly for the eco-nomic benefits the free trade brings I think."

"And only after the war - none were allowed to join during."

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"Of course." Pahatun takes a moment to collect himself. "Obviously we can't expect that you'd want to violate a treaty compromised on at such a high cost. What kinds of help are you able to distribute? I believe you've already mentioned food replicators?"

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"We can provide any technologies that are unconnected to warp, and in many cases we can even find ways to replicate technolo-gies that involve some warp similar principles with non-warp methods."

"Food replicators are one thing - they need raw material or energy but that's all. We can teach very fast travel that's still much slower than light. We can share lots of medical advancements. We can share holograms and scanners and some advanced computing. We can share how to make robots that can do manual labor and things. We can share some cheap clean power source things. I think we can share some terraforming things. Lots more I think, we have a doc we can send over of things we know we can share - though it might not yet be complete."

"We can also intervene personally I'm things like natural disasters and stuff."

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"All right. Of those I think we can get the most mileage out of terraforming - there are a couple potentially usable planets and moons here in our system - and robots, which among other things would free up more of the workforce to attend to settling - for example - Katme." He nods at Chi Katme when he says this.

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"Oh, is somewhere named after you??"

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"No, I'm named after somewhere. I'm an astronomer and it's a cultural convention to have a job name emblematic of your career and what about it interests you," says Katme. "I'd love to hear more about the prospects of terraforming Katme."

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Vira brings out her datapad.

"Which one's Katme, Katme?"

She giggles a bit.

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"The purplish-grey one, one orbital sunward from us!"

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"Hm... has carbon di-oxide and frozen water round poles. 'nuff ice to make an atmo-sphere if it was heated up. We can do that from the ship in bout a month I think? Also tractor in some ast-eroids with more water if we need to. Might need to get some things from Refuge, but not much... No magnet-o-sphere but we can solve that with ... science I maybe can't talk 'bout but will let us re-heat the core. Plop down some very fast growing al-ge that use-s water and carbon di-oxide to make ox-ygen with lim-ited population gen-etics to keep it from be-ing in-vasive and it should work out fast. Could add an in-dustrial replicator maybe but those are hard and not sure if we can give you all the tech for those - but can have one if there are elements missing? Could be completely habit-able in may-be two of their years, and could have it liv-able within very big flimsy domes with oxy-gen converters in may-be a quarter of one?"

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This is almost exciting enough to make up for the ban on warp! Greens are grinning and Katme is actually crying with happiness.

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Pretty understand-able reaction to new science.

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"Is there anything you need from us to get started on that?" Pahatun asks.

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"Would be good to know how good you are at transport-ing things there?"

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"There are currently some research stations on Katme and they get supply runs every few months, but we can step that up a lot if there's a prospect of the place being possible to breathe and farm on."

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"Prolly you should move people off? If you want us to move sooner asteroids to crash into there for having more things there, should prolly do that first. Maybe also put them in places you're okay about not sett-ling at first, so volcanoes can calm down."

"I was more thinking about how easy it is for you to move plants and people and machines you need there. Also would be good to know whether you can con-struct a large dome to put people in with glass panels or something - doesn't need to be super duper strong. And won't be needed once the at-mosphere is better in two years."

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"We can absolutely have the stations evacuated. We won't want to settle the equator or the poles any time soon, as they're not seasonable. We know how to build arcologies; the ones on the moons are larger than ones on Katme because the transportation logistics are much easier on the moon, but, again, with the prospect of a truly habitable Katme we can redirect a lot of the economy toward this."

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"K! Domes are only so the oxygen gen-erated my the oxygen con-verters we put there doesn't escape too fast. But the at-mosphere will be a sim-ilar density outside, just less oxygen, so it shouldn't matter too much if there are leaks. Temperature and stuff should be reas-onable I think."

"We can also help with some transport but might be better for you to learn how to so you can do it yourselves. Can help teach some-things if you want."

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"I expect when I bring this news home I'll be told that our bottleneck is fuel; I don't know if you can help there."

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"You can make sails that catch sunlight is one way to help with that once you're out of the at-mosphere. It's slow but cheap."

"For getting to space you can use really big explosios to blow things into space!! Prolly you'll want to use cold start fusion bombs to avoid side effects and things. You can blow whole cities up there if you try hard at it!"

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"- wow, I don't think we have the prerequisites for that second thing but if solar sails work then we can put some people on figuring that out, I think it's so far been relegated to science fiction."

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"We can, definitely!"

"Can tell you bout all the pieces needed to blow things into space if you'd like!"

Vira really liked blowing up things into space. It's so fun and good and she finally got to do it during the war and eeeeee. It was just as cool as she thought it would be.

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"I'm not sure our cities have the structural integrity to tolerate being blown into space, but a long trip to Katme is fine anyway," Pahatun assures her.

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"Oh. Could show you how to build them so they do?"

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"Vira, maybe you could leave the blowing things into space for another time? I don't think these nice Amentans are interested right now."

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Spoilsport. 

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"I'm sure sooner or later we will want to blow something into space," Pahatun assures her.

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"Yay!! I'm so happy we met you!"

"Uh, also cause of the being able to help you things. Not just that you're the blowing things into space sort of friends."

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"We're glad you met us too!"

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As the evening winds down, a few of the guests are invited to stay overnight for meetings the next day.

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And Moira leaves with the departing diplomats, to investigate the front of the Tapa-Voa war.