"Maintenance reasons?" asks Katme. "Do you deep clean the corridors at night or something?"

"Some of the security measures aboard the ship need time to reset overnight. We have a policy of minimizing information about the details left over from the war. It's possible that policy will be changed at some point in the future, and as needed Captain Sierra or Commander Neh can suspend it."

"All right." And they will go be locked in their rooms.

Any of them who light sleepers might hear thudding and the muted sounds of what might be power tools.

The doors are unlocked in the morning, and an amalien staff member informs each that breakfast is being served in the shipboard cafeteria - though they can have the food brought to their room instead, if they would prefer. Additional Amentans, invited by the amaliens last night, will be joining during the breakfast. 

The Amentans are all happy to eat in the cafeteria! Who else was invited?

They asked for Amentans who were knowledgeable about current societal and systemic problems facing Amenta, so that they could figure out what sort of issues they should be prioritizing providing help with. Aside from the terraforming, of course. The group has someone from a population and eugenics board, some engineers, and some sort of economist or finance expert. They should be arriving shortly.

Meanwhile, there's a nice breakfast set out on a long table with an added nice table cloth for the Amentans - thee food is similar to the (actually quite nice) cafeteria food, but they won't have to stand in line to get it. Various crew members, mostly Amaliens but a few members from other species, are eating at smaller tables around the cafeteria.

Pahatun is curious about all the other species and will ask about them and where they're from while they eat!

Ferdinand is a human, wanted in the Federation for smuggling medicine to pre-warp planets. He joined the Amalian Expanse and was quite helpful in shaping policy on export restrictions. Technically the Federation didn't know he was here, though it was established during negotiations that they would have no obligation to report or penalize people whose actions would be legal had they been part of the Amalien Expanse. Neither side wanted the hassle of dealing with that.

Nupe is the one with the really long tongue. Yes, she does have a second mouth on her tongue. Yes, that second mouth does itself have a tongue. No one knows how many layers deep it goes. Her species was one of the ones given warp by Amaliens during the war.

Kora is a Ferengi - her father organized the financing of the Amalien Expanse war in return for 1% of whatever was left of what he raised after the war. He'd become extremely wealthy, and had been instrumental in modernizing the amalien economy ever since. Of course, he'd taken a small share of the verifiable GDP increase resulting from his expertise. The Amalien Expanse was lucky to have him, and it was hoped his daughter would become just as wealthy in just as mutually beneficial a manner.

The cyborg looking one sitting alone is sort of actually an amalien, just assimilated by the borg. The amalien explaining this looks uncomfortable discussing her.

The man and woman with pink freckled faces sitting silently on opposite sides of a table, alone, are Vranthir. No we don't understand their gender norms either, but they seem to be happy like that.

Their what norms?

"Gender. The norms they have about how their men and women interact. They differ substantially by species."

The Amentans look at each other as though it has only just now occurred to them to check what genders the others are. (As it happens, Spree, Katme, and Pahatun are all men.)

"The gender norms of other species is one of the three most common things reported to be sur-prising by species during their first contact."

"Huh! I suppose it's not that odd that some species would be sexually dimorphic enough to have cultural adaptations on top of that?" ventures Katme.

"It's common for planets to have some sort of cultural adaptations, yes. Places that have none are much more the exception then the norm."

He doesn't mention that there are a few, like parts of the Federation, that claim to have completely egalitarian cultural norms around gender despite that very obviously being false.

"There are sexually dimorphic species on Amenta but we're not one of the moreso ones," Katme says. "Though if there's some difference visible from the outside that we can't notice that would be fascinating, we've obviously never had the opportunity to find that out in the past."

"My impression is that thee most common reason for develop-ing diff-rent gender norms are long and somewhat debilitating pregnancies for the female members of a species. Though amaliens still have weak gen-der norms without that."

"Huh. Our pregnancies last three quarters of a season, most of the time, which is pretty long for an Amentan animal, is it short galactically?"

"That's about median for humanoid species."

"Huh. I wouldn't say it's debilitating either, though of course there are risks one would rather avoid when expecting."

"It's common for species to have emotional effects, as well as temporary physical disability. Is that not true for Amentans?"

"- well, of course it's emotional to be expecting a baby, but that's as true of the father, generally speaking..."

"Ah, I think they're are a bunch of bio-logical things that happen with mothers during pregnancy that affects emotions, I'm not sure ex-actly how it works - you could ask Vira if you'd like."

"Huh! I suppose if you did a blinded study it's not like the fathers would know, but no one would... do a blinded study that way, so all the data we have in quantity is about knowing fathers. Interesting."

"Not like the fathers would know?"

"- if you did a blinded study of the effects of having a forthcoming child, you could blind the men but not the women, and then the men would presumably not display any of the emotional changes associated with expecting a baby. But no one would actually do that, because people want to know when they're going to have a baby and would probably not sign up for this study."

"I believe that it's typically for pregnancies to be rather obvious in humanoid species."

Here are some pictures of how various humanoid species have pregnancies. 

"Yes, so the pregnant ones would notice right away, exactly."

"Oh, by blind do you mean actually blind? I was used to that meaning something different in the context of scientific studies."

"- what I mean is that, in normal situations, both parents know they are going to have a baby from around the time of conception. Hypothetically, in an experimental setting, you could mix things up so that the male subjects did not know they were going to have a baby, maybe by swapping around sperm samples or something, not by literally blindfolding them, but the female subjects would still know within a couple of days even if there was also a sham intervention taking the place of insemination. However, no one has ever done this study. Though I guess you could use results from gamete donors... I'm sorry, I didn't realize that would be so confusing to talk about."

"It's not actually a topic amaliens know much about - we don't reproduce."

"Which is itself very interesting! Where did you come from?"

"We don't know - I think Vira's current theory is that we were engin-eered on purpose."

"And then whoever made you just vanished from the scene? Oh no!" It goes quite unquestioned that someone would reasonably want a bunch of permanent children in the first place, of course.

Lucien has no idea whether someone would want permanent children, or what that has to do with amaliens.

"The same happened to most humanoid species we suspect, just with less ob-vious engineering."

"Which implies what about our apparent evolutionary history?"

"Vira has some theory about how there's subtle guidance somehow towards similar humanoid body plans - regardless of whether convergent evolution would make sense. You can ask her about it if you're curious."

"I am, though I don't have much specialist understanding of archaeology," Katme says.

"I believe she's in her work room, figuring out how to terraform Katme. I think she would be happy if you to visited."

"Mr. Achan, could I have a private word?"

"Of course," says Spree, getting up.

"We have advanced medical tech-nology, and if you'd like help with your leg our doctors could prolly fix it easy."

"Oh! That would be amazing. The cartilege is getting a bit worn out in that knee, I'm thirty-eight."

"Of course,  Noofy here can show you the way."

Noofy is a bouncing excited looking amalien girl, with frizzy hair that goes in all sorts of inventive directions. 

"Thank you, Noofy." Follow follow.

Noofy stops outside the med bay.

"Okay this is the med bay. Um. I'm a bit nervous 'round the doctor, will you be okay on your own?"

Prolly she shouldn't be asking for that but maybe it's okay with him.

"- why are you nervous around the doctor?"

"She used to be a friend and then she wasn't cause she became all robot-y so we could talk to some scary people but now she acts different and is scary."

"She's still a really good doctor though!"

"...okay." Spree will go in by himself then.

What appears to be the corpse of a girl, with cyborg augmentations surgically grafted on to it, is standing completely still on one side of the room when Spree enters. After a moment, it turns to look at him and speaks, in a badly synthesized voice.

"Tʜɪs ᴜɴɪᴛ ɪs ᴅᴇsɪɢɴᴀᴛᴇᴅ Xᴇᴇʟɪᴀ, ᴄʜɪᴇғ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴄᴀʟ ᴏғғɪᴄᴇʀ ᴏғ Sᴛᴀʀsʜɪᴘ Kᴇᴇᴛɪᴍ. Yᴏᴜ ᴡɪʟʟ sᴛᴀᴛᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴅɪᴄᴀʟ ᴍᴀʟғᴜɴᴄᴛɪᴏɴ."

AUGH okay no he is going to hobble right out there and NOT state his medical malfunction.

Noofy had just turned to leave.

"What happen-ed?"

"She doesn't look like a robot she looks dead!"

"Oh. Amaliens don't die, so she doesn't look like a dead amalien."

"She is scary though. I could... try to find one of the assistant doctors? They can prolly help you 'nstead."

"Yes please." He shudders. "I'm sorry. Of course she isn't actually dead. It's only that she looks it."

"Doesn't look like any dead people I've seen, but guess those were bigger and more burnt use-lly."

Noofy acquires an assistant doctor, Gogo - an amalien with a stethoscope. 

"Hi, I'm gogo! 'm here to fix you. I'm not as good as Xeelia but I used to be a vet so 'm pretty good at doctor-ing."

"Hi, Gogo. I'm Spree Achan. I've got a bad knee, the cartilage is wearing out. That seems like probably not the sort of thing that would be very different in animals so maybe it'll be easy but if it does look confusing I'd as soon you leave it be, all right?"

"Oh, um I meant mortals. Used to be that animals were the only things that could get perm-anently hurt easy, and people were all amalies or monsters. It sounds pretty easy to help you!"

Gogo shoos Xeelia out of the med bay before showing Spree in. They promptly go and start poking a screen, bring-ing up a detail-ed rendering of Spree's knee.

"Hm, yuppers. Good to put some new coatings and things in there and you'll be skipping and good again soon. Our technology is really fancy like that!"

"Is this a quick outpatient thing?"

"Mhm, just gotta transport in some cells that are 'bout right. Easy peasy! Won't even hurt a bit. Might swell a tinsy bit for a bit but that'll go away."

"I'll hold on to the cane for now, then. Thank you."

"Oh... kay."

Gogo doesn't know why but also doesn't know having a vetdoctor works for people.

"- in case the swelling makes it hard to walk," Spree clarifies.

"Oh! Okay."

""Good to do it now? Should only take a minute."

"Yep, go ahead!"

Gogo pushes some buttons the monitor for a bit and takes out what looks sorta like an IR Thermometer, and hovers it over Spree's knee, watching the render-ing of the knee's inside on the screen as they do that. The device makes a buzzing sound for bit, and cartilage startings being layered on the knee in the render-ing, as Gogo moves the device around to layer it on right. Takes fifteen seconds to do, and Spree might feel his leg expand-ing a tiny bit as Gogo does that.

"All done!"

Gogo absent mind-ly gives Spree head scritches for doing a good job staying still.

"- excuse me?"

"Oh, sorry. Forgot you're a person and not an animal I was being a vet for."

"- ah, I was about to ask what that meant in your culture."

"Means that the doggy or lamb or deer or bird did a good job staying still. Cept you are not one of those even if you need a vet."

"Um. Amal-iens heal on their own 'ventually and can nap through the healing so we didn't have many doctor's for people. Sometimes monsters are also people but they also heal on their own mostly. But animals wouldn't and so I'd help animals be okay if they were hurt. Was 'usually for pets but not always."

"There was an amalien who got good at helping people continue working and not need to sleep in em-ergencies but she got turned into a borg and now she's scary for a lot of people I guess. Didn't reali-ize she'd be that scary for someone who didn't know her before."

"If she'd been just a robot that would have been fine."

"She sorta seems like just a robot in how she acts and that act-ually seems really scary to me cause she didn't use to."

"That makes sense, I'd be alarmed if someone I knew began acting like a robot."

"Mhm.. She did it for good reasons but. Sorta wish she didn't. Cept that would be worse for a lot more people."

"What were the reasons?"

"Was a planet of people who were all goign to die and we couldn't help nearly most of em cause there were so many and the planet was so bad and messed up and. They pref-erred al-most anything to not dying including being borg mostly. And we wanted the borg to help but need-ed them to agree to not doing really bad things in our part of the galaxy before we brought any of them here and they were really hard to talk to. So Meelia decided we need-ed someone who had all our thoughts on this and knew how to commun-icate with us  to become one of them so she went to them and didn't fight when they tried to assim-ilate her. Took them a while but they did."

"People on the plan-et got assimilated but. Can't un-assim-ilate someone."

"- I don't think I have enough background on what a borg is to fully understand that explanation."

"Borg are a type of thing that converts other people into being borg like Xeelia. They all sorta share the same mind - though Xeelia's cut off from that now - and they try really hard to make everyone into more borg or destroy them if they can't, since they think only borg are okay. They are very violent and have very advanc-ed tech and are very very hard to stop. We let them assim-ilate all of a planet when we were sure they would follow through on a promise not to leave the system."

"Later we let Xeelia come with us when we made a deal for her to be not-evil and be a good doctor and obey rules and not make anyone a borg unless they understood what it meant and were really actually okay with it and would go back to the borg quar-antine system afterwards."

"Do they all look... dead... or is that specific to her having been an amalien before?"

"They all do."

"How unpleasant. I suppose it probably doesn't matter much in that case what the value on offer from joining them is."

"Mhm. They're scary."

Nod nod. "Anyway, thank you." He tests his knee.

It works! A tad bit of swelling but he probably doesn't need the cane for that.

"You're welcome!"

Meanwhile in the cafeteria, Captain Sierra has joined to meet the new Amentans that have just arrived.

The blue introduces herself as Kei Afeen, from the eugenics and population board of Tapa, and her assistant Sasashu Nuan (yellow), and two purples who work in spaceships and engineered ecology respectively as Makuns Tahai and Shian Jasha, and a yellow from the department of the treasury called Appi Oan.

"I'm happy to welcome you all here, and I hope we'll be able to help you with many of the issue's you've encountered. I'm Captain Sierra, and I'll be trying to meet with each of you today for at least a short time - though I expect some of you will find the best meet-ings to be had with other Amaliens on our starships who are really good at things relevant to your skills."

Lucien hands out schedules to everyone, showing what meetings they have scheduled and when meals will be. The schedules are color coded and hand drawn even though he has fancy computers that could help. They are really detailed and crisp and he had lots of fun figuring out how to make them all snap together nicely into one big seq-ence of meetings for everyone, but he's not saying that aloud.

"Oh, how fancy," says Oan.

"Thank you very much, captain!" says Afeen.

First up for Tahai, Jasha, and Katme is a meeting with Vira about terraforming.

Vira can be found in her lab, which is also an elaborate treehouse* in a giant warmly lit cavern in Keetim.

*tree not included

"The decor up here is so cool," says Tahai. "It's not economical to decorate moon shuttles and so on for us."

"Keetim is real easy to dec-or-ate. Also Fora point-ed out that my work-ing even a little better or find-ing it less annoy-ing was prolly worth a lot since very few Am-al-iens can do what I do."

Vira is poking around an as-big-as-her sized model of Katme that seems to be made outa mat-erials similar to what Katme's made outa. Its floating over a platform so she can get underneath it or ro-tate if she wants to.

"What's your specialty?" asks Jasha.

"What'd you mean?"

"The thing you're irreplaceably good at?"

"Figuring out stuff?"

"Like, science and math and things."

"So you're like a polymath?" asks Katme.

"Guess so?"

"S'easier to know more things once you know one that's kinda similar I think."

"Some Amentans study a lot of different subjects but most people at the apex of a field are specialists," says Afeen. "Leaning on an underlying talent that could have bent in other directions, but focusing their time and energy on whatever presented the best opportunity."

"Oh! I have way more of those then Amentans I think."

"I thought you only had this level of technology relatively recently?" says Oan.

"I figured out lots spe-cific things beforehand, just didn't build them."

Vira almost starts talking about how she knew things about subspace for a while before real-izing she could make a warp drive with it but manages to catch herself. Sierra made her practice not saying things about warp drive science soooo much before coming here.

"So you did a lot of theory but didn't have the industry for it?" guesses Tahai.

"Yeah! That."

Vira gets a chunk of the Katme model removed so she can stick her arm into the mantle and poke at it to see how the rest of the planet changes. It's a very messy process. 

Katme peers over her shoulder.

There is dull clay like rock.

"It's a scaled prop-erty model, so the stiffer the mantle is on this the stiffer it is on the plan-et, cept the sca-ling is so that diff-erences are feel-able."

"That's such an interesting way to do it, is it better than computer models for some purpose?"

"I can feel it! And touch bunches at once and take it apart and feel things and stuff."

"Easier to know that hotter bits are actually hotter in real life then to keep track of lots of num-bers."

"How is the model made?"

"Replicators, sorta like for food!"

"And the heat and other properties don't dissipate at this scale?"

"Have to be crea-tive, isn't really the same sub-stance as the planet is made of and in-stead is something that stays warm longer, and never gets too hot or cold. And the mant-le is much harder then this in real life but it's still more stretchy than the crust like it is here."

"What's the likely relevance of the mantle to terraforming the surface?"

"Gotta heat up the core and also the mantle a lil I think to get a mag-net-o-sphere!"

Amentans are as supportive as possible with the terraforming effort. They get all their researchers off Katme so a meteor can helpfully crash into the north pole. They plan great big geodesic domes to put around oxygen converters for initial habs while the algae does its work. They screen workers and colonists for the first and second planned waves of immigration.

And Vira gets to heat up a core and crash a mete-ora for more raw materials and drop some clean fusion bombs on places to vap-orate the rest of the water and car-bon di-ox-ide in the ice caps! It's really really fun but 'vntually algae is put down and Amentans are there so all the new prob-lems are figured out and she can't do big exciting things there anymore.

[Continued in the adventure of the empty city]