"Oh, interesting. Untrustworthy how?"

"They'll sometimes work out for a little while and arrest criminal elements in the red neighborhoods and tote them to red prisons - we have those, a lot of places don't even bother - but once there's any serious crackdown they side with the reds, not with their work."

"We could teach you how to manufacture safe and effective stun weapons. Their range is probably inferior to a gun but not by an amount that'd be relevant in city policing."

"That sounds like it would be helpful. We'd have to expand our prison capacity, assuming you don't want us to just execute them for rioting anyway, but that's much less intractable."

"Executing people for rioting does not impress us but it does not raise the same concerns about problem-solving ability and discipline and capacity for non-lethal conflict resolution."

"I can just hear my superiors now asking what the difference is between shooting them while they're rioting and waiting till after... but we'd love access to stun weapons and should be able to resolve much of your hesitation therewith."

"...the difference is that in one case they get a trial. With clean citizens do you recognize a distinction between beating an accused traitor to death while arresting him and having an investigation which finds him guilty?"

"Oh, of course, I'll be able to bring them 'round."

"I'm so glad. Let me know who we should get in touch with with weapon designs."

"It'll probably help to go to them with those in hand."

And he calls someone over to translate and print blueprints (this involves a bit of improvising, as standard Andalite stun weapons also have lethal and melt-through-a-foot-of-steel settings).

The Ceneish ambassador whisks them away home.

He asks Anitam if they think they got lucky with their reds not rioting.

They think he ought to talk to Isel about that, she's kind of the reds... person.

Sure.

"Uh, no, not at all. We prosecuted some crimes against them - police brutality, abusive illegal boyfriends, that kind of thing - and then we did a handful of decontaminations and I hired them personally and they could tell everyone else it was legitimate and we let them pick the first people to go through so they picked ones who'd be really good fits, stay out of trouble, support themselves and earn money to pay for more - Tapa had the social workers pick, they hate the social workers - and when the clean ones get murdered for spooking someone we prosecute, and we let them help set the schedule for training their replacements and showed them we had their decontaminations paid for in advance and we let some of them go blue. I can do it for some other place if they want."

- he lets Cene know that Anitam attributes their non-riots to the following factors and the blue responsible offers to come serve the same role for them if they understandably have no native blues who want to take on such a unpopular and political career-ending role.

...they will consider it. She is welcome to come to Cene their expense and explain what she'd like to do.

She would be delighted to take them up on that.

They fly her to Cene! She is met by a very solemn task force which is working on the problem of impressing the aliens.

This seems like a good thing to have a task force devoted to. So Anitam's first breakthrough was getting in regular online contact with the reds. "We'd never have oranges interface for diplomacy with different countries, because diplomacy's not the same skill as social work, and relations with reds are much more diplomacy. And of course before the internet we didn't really have a choice - not like we'd go see them personally, no matter how useful it is - but once it became technologically possible the internet quickly beat out the social workers as a way of getting straight information from them. I can set up an anonymous feedback form and see if the same thing is true here. Once you have good channels of communication you can lean on your reds' loyalty to their country - they want starships for Cene too. Give them the slightest reason to believe they'll live to see it and I bet they'll happily email the aliens for you explaining that Cene will be great at fighting Yeerks."

Hmmmm an online feedback form seems harmless.

Online feedback form.

Testing testing is this really anonymous PRESIDENT ICALENA IS A DORK.

She's the person reading this and is not going to mention to Cene anything that might encourage them to try to track site visitors.