"Hopefully the Tapai will see it that way."

"Member states have a defense agreement, and it's not unprecedented for people to sign up because of an ongoing conflict, if that'd be of interest to Voa."

"I'd like a look at the details."

"Of course!"

The defense agreement is extraordinarily clear and straightforward - "there had better never ever be a war over a confusion." You can't declare war without approval of a consortium court; you can't have your soldiers killing or threatening people in other countries without a declaration of war either; if you are attacked the victims will be resurrected and the attackers put back in their own territory with steps taken to ensure they do not possess the means to try it again. Within thirty-six hours; usually it's within six. There's a file with examples.

Schools! Health care access! Laws and law enforcement! (They are not as serious as Voa about the 'laws should make sense' thing but they are fairly serious about it. Their laws are all online in every language with interactive examples. They have the principle that people who get arrested should get an appointed legal assistant to make sure they get the exact outcome they'd get if they were a legal expert.) Amentans seem unwilling to relax their population controls entirely given no guarantee of indefinite planets, "and our courts haven't looked closely at population controls yet - no one else needed them - but I expect them to approve two-per-family with whatever distribution scheme on top and give a lot of scrutiny to every other system with which we're familiar."

Avalor reads things. "Are you aware of any respects in which we do not currently meet requirements -"

"Need to raise the minimum age on the death penalty or argue Amentans mature faster than the species in your reference class for which the age was set. The thing with your sanitation engineers is a concern - that's under this page, same laws for everybody unless both groups vote for different laws to apply, I don't know whether to expect they'd vote for the current arrangements."

"...I'm afraid I can't reasonably put whether or not reds are allowed to move about the country unrestricted to a vote. You've observed the fallout of Allocator Savo's stunt with the food. Even if it were a vote of the full population and I could be certain the current arrangement would be voted in, raising the question would further shake already devastated public confidence in the government's interest in keeping our population clean."

"Ah. I'm sorry to hear that."

"Are you getting any traction with that anywhere else? It would surprise me."

"I don't know that anyone else had incentive to move particularly quickly. On other planets comparable situations have been resolved by a vote on membership and an unequal legal arrangement equalized by generous financial compensation for the, uh, pollution risk that sanitation workers incur."

"My understanding is that reds do not have standard pollution sensitivity."

"Then maybe the current arrangement is onerous to them only because of the restrictions on their free movement, and they'd be happy to vote for membership with a special legal status for reasonable compensation."

"Is this vote binding?"

"You could back out of the membership process even after your population voted in favor, and obviously if the red population voted against membership under a given set of terms that would just leave you - not members."

"Does it need to be public with the population who is not voting?"

"If reds get money and non-reds do not get money, then that's also a exception to equality under the law, which the non-red population would need to approve. You'd want a vote from both reds and non-reds. The vote for non-reds presumably wouldn't be that much of a problem, we could source the money from Vanda Nossëo if the budget is too tight for it."

She shakes her head. "There might be some principled objections to paying reds like that but probably not enough to sink it, the problem is as I said that they already perceive the government as misrepresented by Savo to be uninterested in handling pollution adequately. If I could privately offer the reds perks in order to get them to privately vote to retain current pollution handling procedures that might have worked; if I have to tell the entire country that it is on any level being entertained as a question that they might not have to do that - even if as a structural matter that's not a possible end result - then it's a different story."

"Ah.

Can we maybe help in some respect with pollution handling, would it help restore confidence if you were importing lots of - pollution-handling magic solutions or something..."

"The food helps, but Savo's idiocy was fairly catastrophic. I don't know what sorts of pollution-handling magic solutions you may have. It's not that we haven't invented soap."

"...I guess we could bribe everybody, tell most of them it's just aid to recover from the food crisis or anything, and then that's not a legal problem in both directions. Depends how much money the reds want -"

       "Yeah, I don't know where we'd get the budget for a billion ongoing payments -"

"- I mean normally I wouldn't even think about it but Macalaurë took point on this, we're not going to be arguing it with the budget office."

"...may I have context?"

" - how much context would you like?"

"I don't know how much would be reasonable."

"Ah. 

Vanda Nossëo was founded in the aftermath of a particularly destructive war on a now-member world called Elentári, which was ended by the acquisition under desperate circumstances of fairly unfathomable amounts of magic power. The founding nation decided that they wanted to do humanitarian work as many places as they could and that an organization with membership requirements and carefully specified circumstances under which they'd bother non-members was a good way to have unfathomable magic power without being very scary. The founding nation was Elven. Elves are, um. Amentans come in Voa and also in - what's the place that shot down our diplomats and tried to hold them hostage -"

      "Calado."

"Amentans come in Voa and Calado and many other formats. Elves are very low psychological variance, there are lots of planets of Elves at lots of technological stages and every single one hears about Vanda Nossëo and wants to divert a substantial part of the resources of their civilization to working on it. As a result - because we were the founding nation, and because we're a very uniform voting block and don't require any bribes to stick with the program because it's just, inherently, what we want to be doing - we have influence somewhat outsized to our numbers. We're also a monarchy."

      "That's very unfashionable these days."

"Well, it's usually a bad idea. Arguably always a bad idea for mortal species. ...anyway two days ago our Prince Canafinwë Macalaurë decided he wanted to make proper contact with Amenta. Usually contact is just 'who's at the top of the list, give a briefing packet to a team with relevant skills' - and if this were like that, we'd have no hopes of convincing the budget office to give enough bribes to all billion people in Voa that the reds would favor membership without even actually getting any special perks out of it. But it's Prince Canafinwë and so possibly our resources are not all that limited after all...to be clear, he can make contact anywhere in the universe on a whim whatever the priority sheet says, but that doesn't imply he can get bored and drop it, once contact is made there are rules and we follow them."

"I see."