"Because... you expected that? You could see it coming? It was the natural way of things? Whereas this was a bad surprise?" Ramona ventures.

"We expected it and it was - not perfectly smooth, that kind of thing never is, but within - expected tolerances."

Ramona nods. "That makes sense, I think."

"I can't be sure until we get into it, but my guess about what helps you let go, what helps heal the wound, is to talk about it, and to make some sense of it. And maybe to construct some ritual around it."

Ramona thinks maybe Meelia's values differences were so big that she was never going to be happy following Amentan law, that this family was not meant to be, but it's too soon to say that out loud, and anyway it's better if Tish finds her way there on her own than if Ramona blurts it out.

She gives Tish a moment to respond if she wants to.

Meelia is a bit confused about what families are s'pposed to be like and how children and fostering work most of the time but now doesn't seem like the right time to ask. 

"All right, thank you everyone."

"It seems pretty clear that we need to spend some time on mutual understanding. It looks to me like that fits with all of your goals. And then, when we have a pretty clear picture of what happened here and how you each experienced it, then we can regroup and see what else we need to do to help Tish move through her grief, and to let Haemi and Meelia see if they can find shared ground about what's right. And I'm guessing Tish is not the only one with grief."

"Does anyone have any questions before we get started on the understanding part?"

No one says anything, so Ramona forges ahead.

"All right, let's get started then!"

"I have some rules for how we tell our stories. Here is how it works."

"One person speaks at a time. That person tells a part of the story from their perspective. When you are the one speaking, you can tell about things that you remember happening, things that anyone in the room at the time could clearly see. And you can also talk about your own thoughts and feelings."

"So, for example, you can say, 'When we showed Meelia the bath bombs, she giggled a lot and she stayed in the bath tub for an hour,' if that's true, but you can't say 'When we showed Meelia the bath bombs, she was happy.'  The feeling of 'happy' is inside Meelia in that case and you can't be sure that's what she was feeling. It's probably a good guess, but it's safer just to describe observable facts."

"Does that make sense? Does anyone have any questions about that?"

"What if someone reported their feelings at the time?"

"Great question! If they said out loud that they were scared, then you can say 'And then she told me she was scared.'"

"I might mess up sometimes on acc-ident but I can try my best."

Ramona smiles at Meelia in a way she hopes is reassuring.

"That is okay! People mess it up quite a lot! That's part of why I'm here, to help you do this correctly. I might interrupt if I notice you starting to talk about what someone else thinks or feels, or why they did what they did, or what their intentions or motivations were. I stop you because you don't know that stuff for sure and it's not your part of the story to tell. And figuring out what you actually know and what you were just guessing about is really hard, actually."

"Mhm."

Sounds reasonable to her.

"All right, then, let's start at the very beginning, before you even met each other. And Meelia, let's start with you. What do you remember of when your people first encountered Amenta? How did you hear about it, and what did you hear?"

"The Aurorite, which is an aurora shaped monster came to the Cold Town I was visiting to try to find an amalien who got frozen a while ago. Uh, I'm not sure if you have monsters but they're sorta magical creatures on the amalien planet that are all u-nique, and the frozen amalien isn't very important to this story but his name was Tama."

"So the Aurorite came down and and she told me and the other amaliens that there were new people in the sky using ele-ctronic communication and looking at our planet and that there were a bunch of them on the ground too so I went to talk to some other amaliens in other places and we decided to go meet the new people."

"And the new people were the Amentans and we talked to them and they wanted to move in to our planet - uh, said they wanted to move to our planet, and we talked about it with them and decided that would be good and also I decided I wanted to go and see what their planet was like."

"Is that enough of the story or should I say more?"

"What made you interested to go see the Amentans' planet? What were you hoping would happen?"

Ramona also wonders if the visiting Amentans scrupulously obeyed the local laws while visiting, but that's not the main line to take at the moment. She might come back to it.

"I like going on adventurers and think it's important and going to a new planet seemed like a bigger adventure than any I'd been on in a long time. I was hoping to try new things and help people."

She ended up hurting people too but that wasn't what she'd wanted, even if it happens on adventures sometimes that doesn't make it okay.

"Did you have some idea in mind about how you wanted to help people, before you even went to Amenta? Or was it just general, open-ended good will?"

"The second one - I didn't know what people on Amenta needed help with yet."

"Did you know, before you left, that you'd be placed with a foster family? What did you think about that?"

"I was excited that they were excited - um wait. I was excited when I was told they were excited to meet me. It was nice to know that there were two people I could get to know right away."

"You remembered how to talk about other people's feelings! Thank you!"

It's a tricky rule, and Ramona introduced it and then it was a long time before it mattered, so it's good to reinforce it.

"Are there families on your world? Are new people born, and who takes care of them? Does there come a time when you are too 'grown up' to live with your family any more and you move out?"

"I don't think there're families? No new people are born. Sometimes we take care of each other or of monsters or animals. Only animals grow up and when amaliens care for them it's for their whole lives usually I think."

"So the whole idea of joining a family when you came to Amenta was probably pretty foreign? Like maybe you didn't really know what it was or how it worked?"

'I guess? There were a lot of things that were going to be new and I thought I'd figure them out - that's part of an adventure."

"That makes sense! Thank you for telling this part of your story!"

Ramona turns to the Amentans.

"Now I'd like to hear from Tish about the time when the two cultures first encountered each other. What do you remember about that? What did you hear about the contact, and what did you think about it?"

"Well, we weren't there, neither of us are diplomats, but - Amenta's been hoping to find other habitable planets, other kinds of people, for as long as we've known what stars were. - according to the consensus understanding of the themes of Amentan culture that I could dig up a citation for if necessary, I'm not sure how I'm meant to talk about things like that. At any rate I'm no exception to this trend - it's too late for us to have more children, we're both menopausal, but we could have great-grandchildren settling on new worlds, meeting new neighbors, growing and learning... Anyway, when pictures and news started circulating it was basically the next best thing to a planet full of friendly merpeople who have always dreamed of sharing planets with terrestrials. Immortal ancient children - I know they're not children, not really, but this is how the news initially went and it's not a bad one-word summary of what impressions I expect most Amentans would get from meeting most amaliens naively. Not very many of them and there never will be, adorable, friendly, happy to share space. Magical animals and creatures with all kinds of cool abilities. It was astonishing wonderful news. Haemi and I looked at pictures of amaliens for hours on end."