"We're working on it. We mostly came here seeking insight on how various approaches we might take to that might affect your economy and political stability."

"Why would you bribing them affect that?"

"Easiest way of bribing them is making them lots and lots and lots of food that they don't have complaints about."

"Well, that'll give our export-reliant industry a hard time but we already had that problem, Savo -"

"I know, I know -"

"And we've very pleased that you attempted to do something, however limited, about the appalling treatment of your red citizens, so we'd really rather not have you end up worse off as a result. Do you have ideas on that?"

"I don't suppose you want to buy a lot of grain."

"That's an option. It'd be easier to justify as a use of the crown's resources if you were apart from the war a society with whom we could see ourselves allied."

"Look," says Riado, "having fancy technology is all very well and good for bribing Tapai to get their hands off our farm provinces but I don't like this disrespectful attitude you've got about it."

"Then we will by all means depart and ignore you from here forward," he says. "Finding someone who does want to be an ally will go a lot faster than trying to work with someone who doesn't. Let me know if you reconsider."

"I'm not saying we couldn't work with you, I'm saying you shouldn't be so quick to assume you know it all and just because we haven't invented all the things you have mean you need to teach us how to do everything."

"At the moment I assure you we're kind of reluctant to teach you to do anything."

"Why are we being introduced, Savo?" Riado sighs.

"In case you decide to roll back the food pipeline integration and order me to the Tower of Rainbows?"

"And in this eventuality I need to be condescended to by an alien?"

"I - never mind, I guess -"

"Do you want us to buy your grain?"

"I'd love you to buy our grain, but apparently you don't actually want it and equally apparently you want us to uproot everything to suit you before you'll do that or anything else useful. The Tapai used to buy it without complaining about our gentler population controls or any such thing - it wasn't till the food was affected that they stopped -"

"But they're not liable to start again, having now been persuaded of the advantages of independent food security. We have conditions. We are happy to be forthright about them and happy to have them regarded as accommodating some Elf eccentricity instead of as reflecting some kind of moral judgment."

"Maybe you could be more - specific -" suggests Savo tentatively.

"Yeah, for sure. My father really liked the kid he spoke to who convinced him we should talk to your government before helping the Tapai, and was, to put it mildly, disappointed to learn you'd executed him. Stop executing people. We'll take them, if you don't know what to do with them. Some of your reds want to live abroad and send money back home to their families; we'd like to enable this as an experiment in eventually gently replacing their role in society with robotics, but that'll require a space for us to land a ship somewhere reds are permitted to go. We might give people money, including people who might accordingly decide to quit their jobs, and we hope they won't be forced to keep working."

"That purple kid? He committed treason."

"I am disinterested in debating this point."

"We can't have people committing treason. Is this just never a problem you have?"

"Not often, and we have many avenues of recourse short of murder. It is entirely possible to run a society smoothly without executing people at all."

"Maybe a society of Elves. Traitorous purple teenagers are another matter."

"So give them to us. We will take every person you have decided to kill, and if we can't handle them either then we will apologize for having misjudged the situation."

"They need to be punished and made an example of, not whisked into space."

"How's that working for you? How many people do you execute a year?"