"I'm pretty confused about how you decide to spend your resources, to be honest."

"Hm?"

"All of the - unconditional offers of help. It confused Linus too, he mentioned."

"Oh, hm."

"The things we are able to offer un-conditionally now are things that we can sorta do in bulk and don't require lots of sciences and engineers to help each time. Things like seeds and vaccines and pre-made tutorials on how to do engineering are really cheap for us. If you needed a team of scientists to solve a hard problem than we'd be forced to prioritize - our main constraint is how many scientists and engineers we have since almost all of us are from societies that are pretty new to technology as advanced as we are. We didn't actually offer your planet anything that was costly for us to make or get."

"Normally a planet would get less attention than yours - when we met the Palelle we stayed for three days, and left two people and a standard package of goods and things. A cargo ship dropped off some bigger things a year or so later. Our visit their was the only one after that and that was only cause it was con-venient. Most of how we helped them was with the knowledge of how to build their way up to better tech-nolgoy and some tools to make that go faster and help have better lives in the meantime. In your case we invited you out here because of the re-levance of your planet to the war."

"Uh, also pretty often once a planet is up to a certain level of stable govern-ance and size the Ferengi and some people from the Amalien Alliance will invest in them, which means giving them lots of resources in the present in return for a share of the wealth they produce in the future. A lot of people have gotten rich that way, including the Alliance itself, since planets pretty reliably benefit from the investment and grow a bunch afterwards. Though uh, we turn around and spend all that money on helping other people."

"So offering us stuff was very inexpensive, and might have turned us into resources later on even without a deal to make it that way for sure?"

"That's.... an explanation of why it's not lower on our priority list than it is I guess but not the reason we really do it?"

"The reason we do it is because we want to help people. I don't really know how to say it in a way that's con-vincing."

"Uh, if everyone was doing really well and happy most of my species would just be off ... playing and having fun with their friends and making art? Not all of them, but even the ones who did science mostly did it as a hobby before this. Instead ba-sically all of us are part of the Amalien Alliance. I'd be a part of this even if everyone was happy I think, I like organizing things and log-istics and am ambitious sometimes, but most of my species is diff-er-ent. We just really want to help people and make things better and give people everything they need and want cause that's good and makes the world better."

"How'd you get mixed up in all this war, then?"

"Uh, the first one was cause the Federation, who we met and got a lot of our technology from, has a policy about not giving tech-nology or things to places that don't have warp, the tech-nology that lets us travel to other stars. We found planets where people were dying of disease or famine or needed to be able to find a new planet to live on and we gave them technology to help them. A lot of the technology was copied from the Fed-eration and they took it badly and tried taking the technology back and were willing to fight to prevent us from continuing to do this."

"The second war was cause the Borg showed up out a wormhole and assimilated billions of people before we knew what was going on, and we've been trying to stop them from doing this ever since. It ended the first war, since the Amalien Alliance and the Federation agree that the Borg are really bad and worth sac-rificing our values for. We stopped contacting as many people and giving them our technology and devoted most of our resources towards stopping the Borg and the Federation stopped trying to stop us from doing the amount we do now. We try not to do it where it'll be too obvious to them since their are still factions within the Fed-eration which might try to stop if it they had the chance."

"- why do they have a policy about not giving technology to places that don't have warp?"

"They think it's their re-sponsibility not to... interfere?"

"Uh, I personally don't think much of their reasoning on this, but I could see if the Federation has anyone around who'd talk to you about it?"

"Why would it be their responsibility to stop you from - yes, that probably makes more sense."

"I think us copying their tech made them feel responsible, but yeah I'll set you up with a meeting."

Could the Federation have someone meet with Isabella? Isabella is from an isolationist post-warp civilization with important war related technology. The Amalien Alliance is hoping diplomatic progress can be made on establishing mutually beneficial sharing of technology.

(Lucien asks an Amalien diplomat to make sure this gets routed to someone who is good at dealing with complex situations - Samaria is only technically post-warp and hides most of its tech from its citizens.)

Of course the Federation has people available on the station for whatever consultation is required.

Lucien accompanies Isabella to the meeting  - he's a bit worried about culture clash between Samarian and Vulcan culture but he'll trust the Amalien diplomat's recommendation on this. Diplomacy between very different people can still work out after all.

What becomes obvious when they are all in the same room is that the two Isabellas have the same face.

"Um."

"You're T'Mir? A Vulcan?" And not some mimic shapeshifting species that he didn't know existed?

"I'm half-human, but yes."

"Huh."

"Do you have any idea why..."

"I am quite as baffled as you are."

"You two don't already know each other?"

"I only occasionally visit this station and they're aren't a lot of people here, I've never met most of the Federation people stationed here."

"Well. At any rate. You'd wanted to discuss the erstwhile Prime Directive?"

"Is that what it's called, the policy against sharing technology?"

"With pre-warp civilizations, yes. Warp signatures are detectable; there's no realistic ability to protect a civilization from its neighbors bothering with it once they've produced one. Of course with the Borg threat they're far too thorough to miss a planet simply because they're in the Stone Age."