Well, that’s not very useful for figuring out what is up with this guy. He seems snarkier on the internet. More like someone who will appreciate the video she sent him of her vicious mockery of the idea that talking to him could possibly be useful. She listens to Fifteen Griefs. She converts seven into Earth years. ...That part is maybe a little useful. She talks to some people and then goes to see Nelen again.

If he has been left alone he is back to listening to music on the bed. If the shouty guy is still there he is still prostrate on the floor.

Shouty guy is long gone.

"Hey. Thought of anything I can make you?"

"...I assume eventually someone will feed me, ma'am?"

"Sure, whatcha want?"

This could be a trap but it doesn't seem like one that will go worse in any significant way if he names an actual food he would actually eat. "Egg salad sandwich?"

He can have the very platonic ideal of an egg salad sandwich. On a plate. With a fork. The plate has little cartoon aliens on it. (The aliens are koalas.)

Wow, everything about that is confusing but he will eat his egg salad sandwich. "Thank you ma'am," he says.

"You’re welcome. Do I need to go yell at Maran for you?"

"I don't know the name ma'am."

Shrug. "He said he talked to you and he hates you personally so I'm guessing by 'talked' he means 'acted like a complete asshole' but you never know."

"Ah. As you like ma'am."

"I don't really but you seem all wilty. Anyway, they want, uh," she consults her computer, "a list of recently dead rioters that you get along with who have political opinions, and to know if you've heard back from whoever you were emailing. And they sent me because where I come from we have invented the concept of being nice. Actually they sent me because they were both complaining that you're horrible to talk to and I said 'what the fuck are you talking about'. But I think it's because where I come from they've invented not being an asshole."

"- How recently dead, ma'am?"

"I can ask... uh... recently enough to be useful to talk to."

"Useful for...?"

Shrug.

"What will happen to them, ma'am?"

"Same thing that's happening to you but less cramped and lonely. I will offer them spaceships and let them know that if they want to they can go back to being dead. - You can also die if you want and in your case you're all by yourself in there and there's this lovely window so I would definitely make your body explode in a shower of gore but, like, only if you wanted to die in the first place. Which I guess you do if you ever want the other Amentans to be nice to you. Uh, anyway."

"- I don't know any dead rioters who I want this to happen to."

"...Do you want to die because you kinda implied it a little."

"I imagine for most people that would depend on the life they could expect, ma'am."

"Sooo the thing is, you can expect that at some point you end up on a mostly empty planet with some other reds and a few cities worth of infrastructure and instructions on making magic jewelry, off in another universe where the kind of FTL we just gave Amenta won't let them find you. The thing that could make that not happen is if you say 'that sounds terrible, I want to do something else.' In which case you have choices like going to a crowded planet with different species or getting on a spaceship or joining us and going on adventures. Maybe. I'm not sure if you can manage that last one. Anyway, the thing is, if you die now then you skip the time between now and the new planet. If you don't die now then you hang out here until then. I bet you’d be happy about it if you died today but I bet you’d be fine if you didn’t."

"I... don't know if by infrastructure you mean to include some way to... farm?"

"Maybe. Might do a thing where all the wild plants happen to be edible, I have to check if that actually works for Amentans but it works for species you can usually share food with... hm, it works with Earthly year lengths, too... hang on a sec." Is there prior art on doing a Valian ecology variant for an Amentan colony?