"Mhm, we can find a good place I think."

Pelape breaks character. "So, land is really valuable and you can get a lot of stuff in exchange for it, but if there are a lot of things you might want, you might want to ration how much of it you offer for each one."

"Hm. I don't know how to tell how valuable things are is I think an issue."

"Could you put a bunch of things you might want in a list and then rearrange it by which ones you'd want if you could only get some of them?"

"Oh, yes!"

Lucien enjoys making this list. It discusses various animal rights things, things about reds, amalien-Amentan inte-gration, and Amentans having lots of space. He organizes it very thoroughly and then re-organizes it a few times and comes up with a detailed flowchart that has lots of space to add information to. It's also color coded, like his schedule!

"And some of these could come in amounts, like amounts of space for Amentans and number of chickens in good rather than bad conditions and stuff, so you could also figure out how much you'd trade those for partial improvements in others, and then you could figure out the actual monetary cost of a few things, and propagate that."

Lucien does not have enough room in his chart for this but he can fix that! He gets Keetim to make a really big white wall he can write on with his colored pencils, and also has keetim add some stairs round the edges so he can get to all the bits. Then he starts making the bestest most thorough flowchart ever, with annotations and abbreviations and a few variab-les per node and some nodes are them-selves pie charts. It's very very fun!

And 'ventually he has some final numbers. 

He's so cute but she is going to try not to make everything about that. Practice for when she starts reseasoning, any day now. "Awesome. You can pull out that kind of thing when you're talking to blues, estimate that you'd value thus and such at so many tap, especially when you have that many in hand, and then they can tot up their costs and see what those look like in comparison."

Lucien takes a picture of it on his pocket everything just in case. And also adds some abbr-eviated charts to his schedule book on the extra blank page for notes.

"That seems really handy and good! Money is really cool and I'm happy Amentans invented it."

"It's useful stuff."

"Yeah! It lets you think about lots of different things in such a neat way and you can write all the things down and comp-are things that are really diff-rent!"

"I'm glad it helped. Uh, one effect to have in mind in the background is that if you turn over more land, the price of land here might go down, because there's more of it, but it can also go up, because more land means all the other land is now near more stuff people might want to be near. Even if it's not adjacent to Chaspanti it's cheaper to get halfway around the world, in fuel and in time, than to get back to Amenta - though it's currently happening much less often because we don't have airfields and stuff set up so it'd be trading against more trips to Amenta where most of our stuff is."

"Huh! Cept for our 'bility to get things from it being more 'spensive, should we want it to become differently priced in one direction or another?"

"I think it's possible what you most want is for it to be steady? If it gets much more valuable then they'll be more aggressive about trying to get ahold of it, if it gets less so that might be fine but it'd be hard to do sustainably."

"Oh...kay"

"Actually I'm con-fused. Is them being aggressive not good cause we can get more things for it? Isn't that how money's s'pposed to work?"

"Ehh... ish. They're currently construing you as having the right to grant or not grant them land. If it got much more valuable, they might... stop. I think they're reluctant to be as aggressive with you guys as they might with a species of giant bugs or something, because the PR will be absolutely awful if they hurt you when you look similar to Amentan children, but they will take more risks in that direction if they want the land enough. They are not realistically going to stop wanting land to the point where it's no longer possible to trade it for stuff, though, so the price going down is not, I think, an issue - even if we found twelve more habitable empty planets tomorrow this one is already developed on and has cool monsters and stuff, people want to live here."

"hm... Um. Why do they want land so much they'd do means things if we looked?"

"Room to have babies in."

"Ah."

"Hm. Do I have to worry that, even if we provide enough habitable planets, Amentans will still end up wanting to expand more on this planet and will e-ventually become aggressive here?"

"I think there is probably some number of habitable planets, plausibly even a number under a hundred, where our expansion rate will not overwhelm them before we figure out how to mitigate springs. But I can't be certain of any of the inputs into that expectation."

"Oh I was mostly thinking about an issue from Amentans specific-ly wanting to live on our planet even if there are others, like you said would happen."

"Right now the things that are appealing about this planet are that it has cute aliens on it, that it has interesting monsters on it, and that it is the only one on offer. The last one is by far the most important. If Chaspanti becomes a specific hub of some kind of industry, which it could, people will want to live there for jobs in and supporting that industry, but that'd be localized pretty much to the city."

"Okay, that's good to hear."

"I guess it might be important if all the other planets are farther away from Amenta, especially if this one is on the way to some of them. But I think for a lot of purposes relating to that an orbital station would work about as well."

"That's good, I guess. We can find a lot of planets prob-ably if that helps."

"Will do that anyways just to help Amentans, including reds, though - helping us isn't the most important of that."