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are we out of the woods yet
andalite Elves land in Amenta
Permalink Mark Unread

The fight goes badly and they could aim for a disastrous crash landing on the human planet or they could grab the one utterly random jump the computers currently think is stable and then crash-land on the other end of that. 

One of these options involves near-certain death and the end of the covert war on a planet of five billion. 

They take the other one.

 

This place is inhabited too, densely so; the air is breathable, which is such a coincidence that as they hurtle planetward some people are muttering about the Ellimist in a speculative rather than prayerful way.

 

They morph bugs for the impact. They crash in the rainforest.

The ground around them smoulders.

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People who could pass for human except for the hair (mostly assorted shades of red) peer at the ship from beyond the smoldering part.

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For a few minutes while they wait for a damage report from the computer systems (the ongoing absence of such a damage report is itself a damage report, though not the most useful one) nothing happens.

 

Then out of what looked like nothing a bug grows, bulbous and misshappen and monstrous, and then sprouts fur and tentacle eyes, and then bone spurs which the fur grows over. Muscles ripple beneath the surface and then there is - a gazelle-like thing with a human torso and a tail with a sharp blade at the end. The eyes swivel. They settle on the near-humans.

 

Without the computers he doesn't have any translation software. He raises his arms in what is - among species with arms - a peaceful gesture more than eighty percent of the time.

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A humanoid raises her arms back.

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More aliens emerge out of apparently-nothing! Some of them grow full-sized in bug shape and then pinch and twist into blue centaur things; some of them are already mostly centaur-shaped by the time they get visible; some do limbs last. All the transformations are kind of grotesque.

 

Aliens scurry off to their hopelessly destroyed computers. 

 

He observes the smouldering, nods at the assembled humanoids. <Hello. I hope our not-quite-choice of landing sites has done no harm. I do not yet have enough language data to understand you.>

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...humanoids start talking to each other, either helpfully or because this statement produces a flurry of things to say.

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And eventually the computer catches one word in ten and then one word in five and then half of them and then it's adequate - what are they saying -

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"- somebody will take it. We don't have any firepower."

"They might let us tiebreak."

"Only if nobody we have an opinion about is meaningfully in the running, imagine if it's Anitam versus fucking Orvara, or even just Tapa versus Cene -"

"If we really don't want anyone to take it we could go pull some people out of the decontamination center, have them go poke everything."

"If the aliens let us, who knows what they want to do or why they're here. Besides, I think for an alien spaceship they'd figure out how to wash it."

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<I have enough language data to understand you now. I am War-Prince Matirin-Ashal-Nelinfir and it is a pleasure to meet you, though the circumstances are regrettable.>

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"...is there a war?" asks a humanoid. "Or is the title just decorative -"

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<There is a war to which your species is not a party, and I have no reason to expect you will become one.>

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"Oh good."

"Uh, welcome to Amenta."

"Why are you here -"

Whispering: "Should we stop talking to them until somebody qualified shows up -"

"Oh yes our many qualified diplomats and xeno-whatevers -"

"We're not even from the government though!"

"If it wants the government it'll say it wants the government with its brain talking thing!"

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<We suffered incapacitating damage in battle and jumped to the only candidate for a habitable landing environment. If anyone will permit us to make noninvasive physical contact with you we can acquire genetic and morphological information and take forms that resemble your own.>

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For some reason some of the humanoids think this is really funny and most of them offer their hands.

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Oh good. <The sample collection process is harmless but can make you drowsy.>

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"For how long?"

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<A few minutes.>

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Most hands stay extended.

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He touches hands and acquires people and then goes for a nice neutral blend.

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Tail retracts (he feels terribly vulnerable, but the locals seem friendly and his people are not far away) and eyeballs squish and then his spine does something appalling and he only has two legs. He falls facefirst. He gets up again, a bit unsteadily, and by then the fur is all gone.

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"...do you need help?" one asks.

"I have a walking stick -" says another.

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<I should have relevant instincts.> Step step. <Yes, there. Your body plan is very unstable.>

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"...it gets the job done."

"Does it hurt when you do that?"

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<Morphing is painless.>

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"Wow."

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<Is Amenta the name of your planet or your internal political division thereof?>

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"Amenta's the planet. This country is called Miolee."

"It's new. And small. We're lucky. Probably."

"Everybody is going to want to talk to you and take apart your ship. Everybody."

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<Are they likely to be polite about it?>

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"Don't know."

"We can't fend them off if they're not we don't have an army or anything."

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He asks the engineers how badly the ship is damaged. <Is it unusual for a political subunit not to have an army?>

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"Yes. We're new and little. We are like sort of friends with one other country and everyone else thinks we might sort of be useful under some circumstances and nobody's really attached to us and everybody else has armies."

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<That sounds like an awkward position to be in. We will endeavor not to cause you any trouble.>

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"We really can't help if someone comes knocking and wants you all to go with them, everyone'll have noticed that landing."

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<We could probably help ourselves, but I have no particular desire to harm pre-spacefaring peoples who presumably will not be the ones who gave the orders to bother the aliens.>

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Nods all round.

"But it's good you landed here because it means we get to explain things," says one earnestly.

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<I would be delighted to hear an explanation. What's your name?>

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"Quema. Do your kind of aliens have castes?"

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<The word is not translating but that is not conclusive.>

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"Uh, we've got seven - I mean, every country on the planet except this one has seven. They're inherited and you do jobs suited to your caste. Your translator'll probably choke least on the color names - blue green yellow grey orange purple red - most common hair color of each caste."

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<We do not assign careers by heredity.>

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"Good for you! And the red caste is assigned all the dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, dealing with trash and stuff."

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<...all right.>

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"And reds the world over are generally oppressed and hated and brutalized and nobody will touch them, or anything they've touched. Our friend-country, Anitam, invented a thing where they can run somebody through every theoretically hygiene-improving process imaginable and when they come out people will let them sit on the same chairs as them and stuff, though."

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<I see.>

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"But it's expensive and a lot of places are trying to come up with things to do besides 'have reds around doing red jobs' and then things to do with the reds that are cheaper than 'put them through that and then let them have lives'. Like 'shoot them', that's cheap. And a country called Evalee," (some of her companions spit) "was threatening to do that, but we managed to force them to send us through Anitami decontamination and buy us this rainforest where nobody wants to live, instead. And now this is Miolee!"

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<I am glad that you are all all right. Uh - is this an ongoing problem, people shooting reds ->

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"Yeah. Miolee'll take them but people won't always send them."

"Tapa's doing decontamination like Anitam. Not as nicely but it's okay."

"I knew we would sound obviously in the right to aliens."

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<You sound very obviously in the right though I should hear how they tell it before we start shooting at anybody.>

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"We're not asking you to shoot at anybody."

"Although if you did want to swoop in and rescue reds from places where they need it that'd be keen."

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<At the moment I do not have a working ship but if I did and that account is complete and accurate it would be tempting. Maybe they will behave themselves at the mere prospect of alien disapprobation.>

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"You could probably get people to do anything if you dangle decent space travel."

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< - regrettably we cannot offer that.>

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"...is there something wrong with it? Nobody on board knows how it works?"

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<It might be strategic to claim as much but, no, we know how it works. Past sharing with pre-spacefaring civilizations has been disastrous and the policy of the Andalite High Command is to share no technology.>

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"Is that what you're called, Andalites? Pretty name."

"...you don't understand," says Quema, "we really have to get into space. Not even Miolee in particular just the species -"

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<Why is that?>

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"Population crisis - did you not have one?"

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<We have not had a population crisis.>

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"Well, there are thirteen billion people on this planet and they all want an average of five children - that's with perfected birth control - and we have nowhere to go."

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<That does sound like a crisis. The directive from the Andalite High Command is not 'do not start interstellar wars by promoting new peoples to galactic powers unless they're really sympathetic', it's to not do it at all.>

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"In Tapa they literally shoot babies if they aren't authorized."

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<Is that necessary?>

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"Most places they just confiscate the kids, adopt them out. And sterilize the parents."

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<There are not very many habitable uninhabited planets in this sector of the galaxy.>

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"Even one would help, it'd buy us time to look for more."

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<What I mean is that you would end up fighting over inhabited ones.>

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"We've got arcologies, on the moons. They aren't that good but if there were more to work with like any atmosphere at all, more gravity, it'd probably be possible to get them better, then we could move into empty ones with nobody there yet..."

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<You are also not the only species to have invented arcologies.>

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They look at each other sadly.

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<I am sorry.>

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Sad humanoids.

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Some of Matirin's soldiers leap the smouldering and come and join them. They want morphs also.

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Yeah sure sad sad sad.

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<They were hoping they could settle the galaxy.>

           <How original.>

<At least they don't actually intend the colonization to destroy everyone in their way.>

           <I suppose.>

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Andalites morph Amentan!

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A humanoid giggles weakly at one of the morphs.

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<Hmm?>

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"You came out looking kind of like a poster at my little sister's school, is all. Except with red hair."

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<Does your species have ethnic variation ->

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"...I guess? You can tell the difference between... mountain people, and southern hemisphere people, and boat people, if they haven't admixed much."

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<And in other nations hair color communicates - occupation and status?>

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"Yeah. That's the same in every country except Miolee, though. Mountain blue looks more like boat blue than like mountain purple, honestly."

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Matirin wants to know the names of everyone whose name he does not yet know!

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They will all introduce themselves! Seems to be a one-name-only-by-default place.

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<We should perhaps at this time speak with your government.>

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"They're probably already on the way, we're on foot and they'll have broken out the helicopter for this so they'll have an easier time finding us if we don't move."

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<There is a helicopter approaching.>

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<Oh good.>

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<Can we have a summary of the local tech level - what weapons are your wars fought with, recent advances in knowledge of physics ->

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"...we're a cartography and survey team and even that's giving us a lot of credit. Wars are fought with bombs?"

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<Does your world have electricity.>

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"Yes."

"I think that predates helicopters."

"We're actually looking for a good place to put a geothermal plant. Crater might be good for it."

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<Satellites?>

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"We told you we have moon arcologies and you think we maybe don't have satellites -?"

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<I think you are presuming the technological path you took to be more universal than it in fact is.>

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"...well, we have satellites."

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<There's plausibly enough of an industrial base here to rebuild and get home, but not without exposing too much. We should presume we will have to remain.>

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"Or you could let us into space."

"It can't be crowded or you wouldn't be the first ones here."

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He does not comment.

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"Maybe you'll convince everyone else they can't get anywhere and you can live here and we can get tourism money."

"All hail the sweet sweet tourism money."

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<What are your primary industries?>

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"Cheap unskilled labor and, uh, hardwood export?"

"And we did some foreign decontaminations for a while but now Tapa's doing it domestically."

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<And this is superior to being red in any other country.>

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"Anitam's ex-reds are doing all right. And they have seasons I miss seasons -"

"They don't have room for us though."

"Evalee was going to fucking slaughter us. Orvara and Biyan were enough warning, thank you."

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< - what happened there ->

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"Orvara trained some purples to do red jobs and then drove the reds out. Couldn't go anywhere, if they tried they got shot."

"Anitam took a couple hundred. But they couldn't find room for more."

"Biyan started trying to do that and their reds started fighting back and they kidnapped a bunch of kids and tortured them till their parents taught the purples. Someone broke in and shot all the kids and then all the reds committed mass suicide and Biyan sure regretted that."

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Andalites look distressed. Some of the unmorphed ones have tails swishing dangerously.

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"So we - I mean not us personally, some of us - kidnapped six blue kids - blues run shit - and told 'em we were going to Anitam and then here and they were paying for it. And they did."

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<I am mildly surprised that worked.>

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"It was dicey but we had to do something."

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Nods and tail-swishes.

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"We didn't hurt 'em, they all went home safe."

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<Honorable of your enemy to follow through on their commitment, at least.>

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"I'm sure they considered obliterating us! Anitam helped, they sent a bunch of university students and researchers here to do stuff and be kinda shields."

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<How many nations does this world have ->

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"...two hundred fifty ish?"

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<My.>

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"A lot of them are small."

"How many is normal?"

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<We have one. I think it's common to unify around or shortly after encountering other civilizations.>

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"...huh."

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<Not much prospect of that here?>

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"Maybe after the red transition is over with."

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<Why is that essential?>

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"It's just kind of tense. And we won't unify with anyone intent on killing theirs..."

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Tail-swishes of agreement.

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They watch tails nervously.

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<You need not fear accidental injury; we control them very precisely.>

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"...uh."

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<And they are never used to injure the defenseless.>

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"...okay good."

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<It's - I don't know if you have an analogous concept - some kinds of harm occur in war and are terrible the way war is terrible, but sometimes necessary. And some kinds are always without exception forbidden.>

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"There's stuff that'll get a country more or less shit from other countries about it."

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<What do these countries disapprove of most?>

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"We're a cartography and survey team."

"Rape is bad, especially in spring. Perfidy but I don't remember what perfidy means. Uh, drafting a subdued people in short order, I don't remember how short of order. Getting an unpredictable manpower surge by using nongrey soldiers in combat positions."

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Helicopter approaches. Andalites with only two eyes in their present form stagger backwards trying to look at it.

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Helicopter circles a bit, then lands. More local people come out. One of these has purple hair.

"The aliens can talk Mioleen!" calls one of the cartographers-and-surveyors.

"They can shapeshift!" adds another one.

"...Welcome to Miolee," says a helicopter arrival.

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<Thank you! We heard the upsetting but inspiring story of its founding.>

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"...I'm glad you found it inspiring! We're delighted to have you in Miolee but anticipate that other national interests will be able to present more compelling cases for hosting you. In the meantime, would you prefer to stay with your ship or visit our city?"

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<We need some people at the ship for reasons I should discuss with your government. Some of us can accompany you to the city. If the flight time is in excess of two hundred fifty percent of the time since we landed we will require enough space aboard your helicopter to return to our natural forms.>

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"The flight time is a little less than the amount of time since you landed."

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<Then some of us will accompany you to the city.>

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They are ushered into the helicopter!

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Five minutes after the ship lands Aitim is outside the office of the ambassador to Miolee. "Are you in touch with them -"

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"Yeah I know I told them we're probably gonna want it and they said 'you and everyone else, do you want to get into a fight with anyone who's offended we didn't give it to them'."

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"Yes we do. Well, ideally preempt one, but if necessary - 

 

- possession is nine tenths of the game here. Tell them that we appreciate their holding on to it for us and we're flying a team over now equipped to safely secure it and we appreciate their frequent updates -"

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"Will do. They know they can't hold anything anybody else wants, better us than anyone."

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"The frequent updates are important, if the aliens take offense we might need to reassess."

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"They've got a helicopter going to see if there's live aliens right now."

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He nods. He is already dialing the next person who needs to know that Miolee being kind of Anitam's pet project Anitam regards the ship as theirs.

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Updates roll in and the ambassador makes them all available internally.

- Ship was greeted by a cartographer/surveyor team. They have translation technology (receptive) and something telepathylike and acquisitive shapeshifting from natural form. Cartographer/surveyor team seems not to have offended them. [picture] [picture]

- Some Andalites remain with ship, others accepting helicopter ride to city. All are currently shapeshifted into local forms based on Mioleen volunteers.

- Evalee suddenly making desperate bid to call Miolee their colony. Miolee told them Anitami team en route and has dibs.

- Calado trying to find fault with purchase of Mioleen territory and claim it back, Miolee told them the same thing.

- Cene making threatening noises. Tapa making threatening noises. Is our backing still good?!

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Tapa and Cene would have an interesting time trying to get their military reds to cooperate with a war with Miolee and Anitam. It's no longer his job to observe that kind of thing to people who will appreciate it properly so he trusts the diplomats to do their jobs. "Yes, we're committed."

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- Miolee has told Tapa and Cene to back off, Anitam has dibs. What's our team's ETA?

- [picture] [picture]

- Aliens have gotten the Miolee summary of the planet and will probably not be easily led to sympathize with red oppression.

- Leader or diplomat or something alien gave name as War-Prince Matirin-Ashal-Nelinfir. War in question does not involve us, they just crashed.

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Anitami team is twenty minutes out. "I know the reds get skittish around greys - they're armed in case of competition over the the ship, not to bother the locals, but maybe make sure Miolee knows not to test unit discipline -"

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"They know, but if they get rudely gestured at they should pass their unit discipline test."

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"'Should' doesn't have much to do with it, does it. I've told the troops that we're making as favorable a first impression on the aliens as possible given that we're kidnapping them, and that they've never met an unclean red and won't get it yet."

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Nod.

Updates:

- Aliens are being informed that Miolee is not suited to host them and Miolee's friends are coming to say hello and pick them up.

(Meanwhile, in Miolee:)

"So, Miolee doesn't have anything resembling an army. We barely have police. Our Anitami allies are sending some people to move you and your ship and they can handle it if anyone gets trigger happy."

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<Understood. You all won't get in any trouble?>

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"Anitam says they'll handle it and that's our best bet."

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Matirin instructs two people who stayed with the ship to morph local animals and remain in Miolee, preferably well out of the way. Then with a bit more hesitation he orders the destruction of the bioweapons that were to be a last resort on Earth. 

 

Andalites morph back to Andalite.

<Very well. We will look forward to meeting them.>

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Locals fascinatedly snap pictures!

"Is there anything we can get you in the meantime?"

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<A text corpus of what they speak in Anitam would be useful.>

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"In a local format you mean?"

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<We can convert it.>

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They can get a bunch of free Anitami ebooks!

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Then when the Anitami greys arrive they will speak Anitami!

 

 

 

The Anitami government lands six thousand people on the water just outside Miolee.

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They have told everyone in Miolee who doesn't think they can leave the greys alone to stay home. The six thousand people are welcome.

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They so appreciate Miolee's alliance and friendship. Most of them go spaceshipwards. Some come to welcome the Andalites. 

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Here are the Andalites hanging out in a Miolee government building.

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The Andalites asked about a nice grassy field and were told that rainforests don't have lots of those. They are scuffing the carpet with their heels and tail-swishing. They are so appreciative of Anitam's protection and have recommendations on how to safely move their spaceship. They would like to keep living in the dome, so moving it intact would be useful, but if that's impossible maybe Anitam will have more grassy fields than this rainforest?

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Anitam has some grassy fields. Not, like, a lot, but they could repurpose a farm that's currently in a nitrogen fixing period or something.

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They appreciate it so much. Perhaps they should get out of Miolee, since their presence here is so fraught.

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Yep! They should come to Anitam right away! Anitam can send a few bigass helicopters to scoop up the dome ship and bring it back too. So the Andalites can live in it. Yes.

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Tails swish slightly more. The Andalites appreciate their thoughtfulness!

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Do they have a ballpark estimate of how much it weighs? It'll hold itself together fine because it is a spaceship, yes?

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They have a very precise estimate of how much it weighs but less information on local units of measure. The structural damage is substantial but it should not crumble during transport.

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They work out the local units of measure by weighing an Andalite. They send helicopters and dig grabby things in under the edges of the ship and pick it up. Andalites can travel in a separate smaller but still roomy chopper.

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Andalites again explain that they can make noninvasive physical contact and acquire genetic and morphological information for the shapeshifting.

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Would they like to stop having red hair? They can stop having red hair. That would be great. It's not customary in Anitam to have red hair.

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What sort of information is associated with hair color in Anitam?

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Caste! Not everyone has the natural hair color of their caste, but those who don't usually dye it so they'll be presenting informatively to onlookers. Blues are government and landholding types, greens artists and intellectuals, yellows technical and office sorts of jobs, greys military, orange caretaking, purple labor.

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...when they are about to arrive Andalites go Amentan again. All grey, except for Matirin, who goes for steel blue.

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Conveniently the genetics work out so he can do that with a combination of the greys and the one blue in the helicopter with them. ...Somebody squints at Matirin. Somebody else squints at Macarath.

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<Hmmm?>

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"You just look familiar, sorry, probably an effect from blending people."

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<It is possible to do more distinctive features but it defaults to fairly conventional ones and I am not versed in the use of morphing for more detail work.>

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And here is lovely Anitam! A farmy part! They put the dome down on some clover. There is already a military perimeter set up in case anyone gets any ideas.

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The Andalites so appreciate the thoughtful reception. <I regret that we cannot give you the information that Miolee was so hopeful for. We are not ourselves starship engineers.>

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"We understand. But our greens would love a look at the mechanism, maybe they'll figure it out and you'll be able to go home."

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<The ships are not designed to be straightforwardly reverse-engineered, because of the war, but of course you are welcome to look and learn as much as you can.> He can defend that to Andalite High Command on the grounds he can't stop them and they definitely wouldn't accept a polite request.

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Greens are soon swarming the place.

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Greens are so excited. 

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" - do we have anything on the war other than 'don't worry, we're not at war with you' -"

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The Mioleen ambassador shakes his head.

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"Perhaps someone could ask." - he squints at the latest set of pictures. "- well isn't that -"

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"They're blending a bunch of forms," says the military liaison blue who's colleague to the one who went in the helicopter, "but yeah that one's a little spot on."

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"Uncanny. I assume it can also be used for impersonation - are we sure we picked up all the aliens -"

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"They had a while to disappear into the jungle if they wanted."

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"Do we know how telepathic they are."

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"No."

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...nod. "Please do ask about the war, then."

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So the liaison's counterpart asks, "What can you tell us about the war?"

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<A few local decades ago Andalites made contact with a species called Gedds, which were - please ask your engineers not to dissassemble the working computer terminals, we need them - Gedds were by themselves very unintelligent, barely sapient, and had a symbiotic relationship with parasites called Yeerks. Yeerks crawl into a host's brain through the ear, assume control of it, access all the memories and instincts and habits of the host, and can impersonate them perfectly or puppet their body towards the Yeerk's own ends. The Yeerks avowed peaceful intentions - they wanted to spread out and find more planets, the vast majority of them had never had hosts and lived their whole lives blind and deaf and alone in the pools where they can survive without a host. Some particularly foolish and idealistic Andalites believed them, and taught them space travel, and they tore off into the galaxy to enslave every species they could find. We were a peaceful people but retooled to exterminate them. The Yeerk home planet is besieged but it's hard to stamp out a plague that's spacefaring.>

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"...are they likely to come here?" she asks. "It'd also reduce the risk of paraphrased miscommunication if you spoke aloud and we could record you, is that something you can do?"

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<Our intelligence suggests they have not discovered this planet. They would enslave you if they knew of you. In principle it should be possible for me to speak aloud but I have never before assumed a physical form with vocalization and am not confident in how to interpret the instructions from my translator.> "Transaor. Transator. Or. Or. Tran - slate - or."

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...the blue represses giggles. Some greys fail to.

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<That sound I have no idea how to make> he says of the giggling. 

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"...it's not verbal. So that shouldn't be very impairing."

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"Impairing. Ing. Impairing. Impairing impairing impairing." <Perhaps I can practice on my own time and instead mitigate the risk of miscommunications by producing a transcript for you.>

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"That would be great."

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He glances at the computer terminal and a transcript of the previous explanation unfolds after a minute. 

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"That's amazing. So your telepathy is computer-audible. How does it work?"

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<The telepathy is not computer-audible, I separately have an implant. I cannot read your minds, alien thoughts are not relevantly legible.>

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"Can you read each other's?"

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<We send and receive only what we intend to but there is far more casual communication than I imagine would exist among a species that had to verbalize to communicate.>

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"That makes sense."

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Leerans can read minds and he has the morph but he thinks he'll neglect to mention it. <The fleet of which this ship was part was en route to a planet called Earth, population five billion, tech level behind yours, who the Yeerks are currently enslaving. We encountered more resistance than anticipated on entering the star system. Most of the ships were destroyed. This one managed to jump.>

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"Is the jump method one which allows them to potentially follow?"

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<It is not. Jumps can't be traced at all; our people will not be able to find us either.>

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"If we manage to get your ship working are you likely to go back to Earth?"

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<If the Yeerk invasion there has not yet been handled it is my obligation to handle it, but it would surprise me very much if the situation had not changed by the time non-starfaring aliens reverse-engineered the ships.>

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"I see."

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<Anyone anticipating contact with the Yeerks would of course be ignorant of the jump path to get here.>

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"But you did get here while on your way there."

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<Absent reason to look it is vanishingly unlikely someone else would happen across the jump - or bother taking it, most jumps that land you this close to a gravity well just kill you - but it is not impossible. There are some precautions you could take against Yeerk infestation if you saw fit.>

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"Such as?"

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<It sounds like they would need only to infest a vanishingly small fraction of your population before they could order everyone else marched to Yeerk facilities unopposed, is that impression too pessimistic?>

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"...you're suggesting we decentralize our leadership somehow?"

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<Have someone in a bunker somewhere who can countermand sufficiently suspicious directions, keep live streaming video to the bunker. Yeerks cannot survive more than three days without feeding - they have to leave the host and spend several hours in a pool. If you have someone under continual observation from enough people they're safe. Train your soldiers in how to handle the possibility of impersonation in their chain of command - Andalite procedures give the topic a great deal of emphasis. Maybe decentralize the specific forms of authority that would enable swift mass enslavement, if that can be done without impeding your leadership under more usual circumstances.>

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"I'll pass that along."

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<Once I have more information about your society I can describe to you how I expect a Yeerk would arrange its conquest and you can take any protective measures that seem suitable. I emphasize again that it is unlikely they will find you.>

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"That's good."

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<Very.>

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"How many species of sapients are there?"

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<I have no reason to believe it's finite.>

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"How many are you in contact with?"

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<Andalites have diplomatic relations with thirty or forty and are aware of hundreds more.>

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"Are most of them spacefaring?"

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<It's not typical for anyone to bother with one until they become spacefaring or get conquered by someone who is - and most conquerors except Yeerks don't leave survivors - so most of the ones known to us are spacefaring.>

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"What are the other species we might need to worry about if any came here?"

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<- truth be told there are not many it would help to worry about.>

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"...That's ominous."

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<I do apologize. If you ran across - a lovely spacious island that satellites had somehow failed to discover, where the inhabitants were living off migratory birds they shot with bow and arrow, and they asked you how they could protect themselves against all the other cultures you know of, would it help to tell them about specific distinct ones ->

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"We'd probably tell them to make a powerful friend, honestly."

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<All Andalite interstellar forces at this point are deployed towards the war effort. If we get found once that is over - and it ends well - we could of course arrange something.>

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"You don't think if we got your ship running again we might be helpful?"

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<In the war effort? - maybe. There are a lot of you and you have the industrial base, but you're easy to subvert. We'd work with it if it came up but it would not be an uncomplicated advantage.>

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"If jumps are impossible to trace, it seems like it might be possible to have an asset no one could learn to find."

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<Only if no one who jumps knows how to get back.>

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"I'm not sure how to work around that, but I wouldn't rule it out in principle. I'd want to talk to some greens about the details of the cryptography or the multi-key system or what have you, of course, I wouldn't go so far as to propose a complete plan myself."

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<We have an arrangement like that - partial keys where four people are required to give the computer enough information to decrypt the jump coordinates - but it primarily works because it is so hard to take an Andalite alive. If you are stranded should anyone die, your strategy helps you very little, and if the capture of one of your ships dooms the secret then the secret is doomed.>

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Nod, nod.

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<But perhaps there are some people who'd take a one-way trip, if we could arrange for them to have the Yeerk planets should we win.>

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"Likely."

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<I will give it some thought. I regret that we can be of no assistance in reverse-engineering our technologies, but it wouldn't do to send off near Yeerks anybody who could.>

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"That sounds very responsible of you, yes."

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<So tell us more about Anitam. The Miolee account of recent events was very troubling, though they spoke well of you.>

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"We're on excellent terms with Miolee, of course, ever since their founding recently. We have about six hundred million people... what else would you like to know?"

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<Andalites evolved from herd animals. We have buildings for sensitive machinery and artwork and we have arcologies where necessary but at home we live out in the open and sleep together in herds on the plains. We do not have cities, though the population density is much higher around the spaceports. Our population density is typically thirty to fifty people per square mile, for a per-planet population of between one and two billion; we have no strong preference against living in polar or equatorial regions. We dislike enclosed spaces, though Andalites in the military have all had extensive desensitization training and can function normally in them.

Andalites absorb nutrients through our hooves. Your grass wouldn't be adequate but we can manufacture a liquid form of the nutrients we require and sprinkle it on the grass so it suffices as normal. Before we were starfaring we permitted two children per family; this troubled us less than it seems to trouble you, though we were pleased to lift the restriction. We have four moons; three are settled, the fourth too small to be worth the bother.>

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"Ah, I see. Following that template - Amentans evolved from mountain-dwelling primates. We prefer to live in buildings even when the weather is nice, which is convenient for population density, a necessity for us and not inherently undesirable except insofar as it makes infrastructure challenging. We don't have a very narrow range of tolerable temperatures keeping us away from poles and the equator but object to living without normal seasons; in environments without them we eventually come to feel like it's spring all the time, but less pleasant than a natural spring and with a few elements of winter and summer mixed in. We eat with... our mouths... and I don't know what we'd do if we found ourselves presented with only grass to eat although some of the things we do cultivate are technically forms of grass. Anitam operates on a child credit system; most do that but some just allow two per family. It does bother people if they can't afford to have children. The survey average of how many people would want if that weren't a concern is five, but some people want more and a few are actually fine with just a couple. We have three moons, all of which have limited arcology populations on them but haven't seen much expansion because we can't season them and they're expensive."

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<Andalites have a single government, which before the war had a fairly restricted role in daily life; communities self-enforce most laws. The Electorate is, as the name suggested, elected, by a vote of all adult citizens of sound mind. Anybody can be nominated as a candidate but nominees are typically in late middle age and have impressive domestic accomplishments - or, lately, military ones - to their name. Most of the current Electorate is made up of gifted scientists and inventors and medical researchers. More than eighty percent of Andalite males of the appropriate age join the military; until recently it was strictly forbidden for females to serve in our forces. They are presently doing a trial run with one -> he gestures at her. <We have a strict military hierarchy that carries over some, but not perfectly, to civilian life.>

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"Anitam has a five-person council, all blue but elected by the general population with caste-weighted votes, usually but not necessarily past fertile age and with political background appropriate to the work of the government. We don't... have... things that only men or women do... except literally get pregnant and feed babies, that only women do... would you be more comfortable if we arranged for the perimeter to be held by male greys...?"

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<I cannot even distinguish gender in your species - in us it is fur color, which I take it here means something else entirely, and we are in any event not deriving particular peace of mind from your soldiers. Please do not worry about it.>

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"Ah, yes, here hair color is a caste marker and not even a consistent one."

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<That sounds like it has vaguely the social role gender has for us but with far more subdivisions.>

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"That could be! Greys are the military, police, dancers, sex workers, that sort of thing."

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<Those would not strike us as a particularly natural category.>

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"Oh... they're all physical tasks. Obviously all of them have secondary skills but they're the sort of thing you're better at if you're in good shape and like moving around, which greys do, as opposed to emotional labor like oranges do or pure creative intellect like greens or something."

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<Ah.>

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"What things are reserved for Andalite females?"

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<Historically medicine and medical research, though that's been relaxed some lately. Impermanent art - dance, song, theatre, musical performance, morph dancing, gardening. Child-rearing until they're of an age to learn to fight.>

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"Morph dancing?"

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<I presume there has by now been video distributed of morphing? It is inelegant. There is an art to it and some people become experts in doing attractive transitions between forms or partial forms - growing beautiful feathered wings without changing anything else, for example, or staying Amentan but shifting facial features and hair color, or shrinking down to palm size while remaining ordinarily featured. It would be grey, here, I think, it requires tremendous physical discipline and is exhausting.> 

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"That would be grey!" she agrees.

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<Some soldiers develop expertise in morphing but of course towards different ends.>

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"Naturally. What else can you turn into?"

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<Anything I have touched and acquired a morphological footprint for. It's typical to have a particularly hardy insect and something that flies well and something that burrows well and miscellaneous species with whom we have diplomatic relations, though of course the species names won't mean anything to you.>

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"Just animals?"

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<Anything with a nervous system.>

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"Is it unpleasant?"

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<Not at all. Slightly effortful.>

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"Does it feel like - anything?"

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<There are associated sensations, just not pain. And you get the instincts of the target species, which can be overwhelming.>

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"How interesting! What are Amentan instincts like from the outside? Does this mean you don't have to learn to fly?"

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<Don't have to learn to fly, do apparently have to learn to talk if I want to do it fluidly. Amentans are slightly less jumpy than Andalites, slightly less inclination to stay near your fellows -> comes with a desire to see what his boyfriend looks like Amentan but he's not going to mention that - <and a few sensations which I think correspond to the desire to consume nutrients with your, ah, mouth.>

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"Is it safe or advisable to eat while morphed?"

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<It is perfectly safe but will not suffice to sustain one indefinitely.>

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"Would you like to try some food?"

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<That sounds very interesting.>

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"The soldiers will just have some sort of mass produced something, serviceable but not really the first thing you'd want to try - I brought a snack, though, my cook makes wonderful nut cookies -" She pulls a little bag of them out of her purse.

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<What exactly do I do with it ->

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She gives him one and then takes one out and demonstrates taking a bite out of it.

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He tries that.

 

 

He is clearly staggered. His eyes roll slightly in his head and he has a bit of a hard time staying on his feet and he clearly takes considerable concentration to not stuff the rest of it into his mouth and to instead hold it rather rigidly at his side. <That is an extraordinarily strong sensory experience,> he manages after a minute.

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"...would you like the rest of them?"

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He looks like he would like the rest of them very badly. <I am not sure that would be advisable.>

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"...no? You could share them out."

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< - it's not addictive or anything?>

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"No, it's food. My cook doesn't drug my food."

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<In that case I suppose there'd be no harm if you do not mind.>

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She hands over the cookies.

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He continues rigidly holding them at arms length and distributes them to the other morphed Andalites.

 

Morphed Andalites squeal and bounce and fall over and roll around on the ground in joy!!!

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...soldiers take pictures.

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Matirin does not himself indulge but he doesn't tell his people to cut it out either. <I think this world would be a popular tourist destination in peacetime.>

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"We'd be delighted to have you."

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<Before we were so delightfully sidetracked I was inquiring about the Mioleen synopsis of recent history ->

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"Oh, yes. I expect their rendition was not inaccurate, though it might have been impolitic; do you just want an independent summary or do you want to corroborate specific points?"

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<I'd love to hear your account of it all.>

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So she goes over the Antiam perspective on the Transition Era.

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Tails swish at the mention of the massacres.

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"Oh, yes, it was horrible and completely avoidable with our procedure, or even just more conservatism."

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<I do not think I understand the problem with the reds. Is it something we'd experience just from the Amentan instincts, if we saw one who hadn't been through your procedure, or is it learned?>

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"I - assume you'd experience direct instinct related to the things reds handle, but knowing that they're associated with reds out of context is I think learned."

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<That makes sense. I should at this time demorph; there is a recommended upper bound on time spent in morph, beyond which there can be complications in demorphing.>

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"Of course."

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Andalites re-Andalite! Some different Andalites morph Amentan. 

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 - one of the greens scurrying around the spaceship turns and blinks at a few of the Andalites.

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The Andalites don't notice.

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...he sends Aitim pictures.

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...he notices.

 

"Uh, Isel -"

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"Yeah?"

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"There is one girl Andalite because apparently they do jobs off gender and grey is male - well, soldiers are male, dance is female - it sounds pretty stupid honestly but - take a look at the one girl Andalite in Amentan form -"

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" - huh."

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"And have a look at the boy Amentans." Picture picture picture picture -

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" - okay. Weird. - you should dye that color for diplomatic conferences it's, uh, demonstrative -"

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"I have no desire to signal 'I am the commander of a people who have been at war a really really long time' and it probably loses some of the effect by not being true."

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"So they claim their morphing thing goes off touching people and getting a morphological - whatever - but actually they are morphing into a specific family of Anitami blues and greens - what do we make of that - in that case why are they touching people -"

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"I have no idea but I think I'll line the pictures up and take it to the council." And he does that.

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The council thinks that is sure weird. Was the one who looks like Isel recognized in Miolee? (The ambassador asks. Yes she was, they didn't think anything of it.) Did anyone recognize the one who looks like Makel, internationally famous pop star? (A soldier blogged about it!)

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"One alone is just weird, not exceptionally noteworthy. I noticed Matirin before and thought I must just have a fairly generic face. It's all of them together which - why lie about how their shapeshifting works, and in a way we'd definitely notice - what is happening when they touch people - they looked like us even when they just had Evaleen reds as source material?"

And then, frowning more, "Matirin. Macarath. Talik. Corbron. Cayaldwin. Ajorod. Ajoril. My brothers are Makel, Telkam, Kantil, Kefin, Amlas, Amel. Same starting sounds, sometimes a shared syllable -"

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"Should we ask them? Nothing happened to the Mioleen person who mentioned the resemblance to Isel..."

"They're telepathic, why do their names even have sounds?"

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" - ask Matirin if he has siblings."

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The military blue conveys to the other military blue and she says, "So with the reduced drive to have children I'd imagine you'd tend to have smaller families than the sort of people here who can afford a lot of child credits - do you have siblings?"

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<Oh, my parents were an exception, had seven. Two before the restrictions were lifted and then five more afterwards. If most Andalites were like them we'd have perhaps encountered some of the difficulties you encounter here.>

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"Brothers or sisters or a mix?"

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<All brothers.>

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"Goodness. Were you before or after they took off the restrictions?"

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<I am the eldest. I think if they'd had Cayaldwin first they would have stopped, truth be told.> Tail-flick.

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<Probably> he says, munching on a cookie.

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"Oh, why's that?"

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<My parents were both brilliant and gifted engineers and inventors. They wanted a child to take after them.>

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"Ah, I see." This is all relayed, of course.

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Aitim is frowning.

 

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"They're lying. Then. Right?"

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"Right."

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"But why?" someone asks.

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"At a guess, military procedures on what information you can give out as a prisoner of aliens of unclear friendliness. And they might not have realized that it'd be found out in this particular way - if they were ten random Amentans it wouldn't have been - but they should also have anticipated their - corresponding numbers - wouldn't be random Amentans, if the resemblance is deeper than superficial."

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"Were they lying about not being able to read minds?"

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"If they can read minds I am sure they would have lied about it."

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" - are we presuming here that they are, via cloning project or social experiment by bored Andalites or some even more powerful third party, us had we been born herd animals grazing on the Andalite homeworld - I have no idea what I would be like under those conditions -"

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"It seems like quite a thing to presume but the alternatives are - admittedly not obvious. Could ask them if there's anyone who would do something like that but it rather tips our hand. And I know what I'd be like under those conditions - he has FTL and he's lying about it, possibly just until he decides what he thinks of us but possibly longer than that if it's Andalite law. He sent some of his people off to hide in the Mioleen rainforest and he had them all morph grey even though Cayaldwin would have quietly had a tantrum over not going green - we could ask if there's Andalite law about technology-sharing -"

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So she asks if there's anything they can explain as non-engineers about their more advanced technology, even things they've heard in passing could be useful to the engineers.

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<It involves Z-space somehow. You go into Z-space and come out of Z-space, and sometimes there's a short path in Z-space that's long outside it, and the computers can find them. I'm sorry I don't know more than that.>

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"The Dome implies artificial gravity, what about that?"

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<It was developed about one hundred seventy of our years ago. There are weapons based on it. Yeerks have it also. Ours is more consistent and lighter? I think?>

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"They took it from the Andalites originally, though, yes? How did you respond to that?"

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<We were horrified. It regrettably represented an end to most Andalite efforts to find and teach primitive societies.>

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"Most?"

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<Well, Earth was going to have to be a special circumstance unless it was too late for that entirely, and this might qualify as a special circumstance and is in any event out of our hands. But policies were changed to prohibit it.>

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"The finding or the teaching?"

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<Teaching. The law permits exploring without displaying advanced technology - if we'd had cloaking and landed in better shape we could have landed, morphed, and tried sourcing parts for repairs...>

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Well, that answers that question, doesn't it. Back in the capitol: "Ah-huh."

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"So they're lying because 'sure, we could give you FTL, but it's not allowed' would go over badly. And he hasn't mentioned that half the soldiers are his immediate family in case, presumably, we're inspired not to leave it at persuasion. - ask Miolee if they told them 'can't do it' or 'won't do it' -"

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Eventually: "Miolee says they know how it works and the policy is share no tech."

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He looks at the council.

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"What are we assuming here - that they're lying about morph and have adopted parallel forms and roles for some reason? That they're your family from alternative circumstances? Something even more ridiculous and science-fictional -?"

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"Easy enough to get other demonstrations of morph - ask them to copy someone in particular, ask them to do a bird, ask them to do one another - I don't see why they'd lie about the mechanics of it though I bet they're lying about some of the constraints on it - as for what they really are I have no idea. Some species seeding lots of planets with clones-but-for-species of the same people is the only mechanism I can think of that even runs on known physics. They might have better guesses, not that we can trust them."

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"But they could definitely build us the starships."

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"Yeah."

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"Well, how would we get you build us starships, then, Aitim."

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"It's more 'how would aliens get me to build them starships if you'd categorically prohibited it' and they wouldn't. - I mean, you could torture me, but he's greyer and one presumes it is a complicated explanation and not just the password to an explanation on their fancy alien computers.

 

 

If the correspondences hold there - might be angles on the other ones -"

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"Oh?"

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"Green, not blue - I know these ones are neither - they'd be tempted just because teaching us would be fun. I wonder what the range is on the telepathy, they'd be easier to manipulate if he isn't there to notice."

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"Since they aren't admitting to mindreading you'd still have to propose it under his nose."

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"And we don't know how much trouble they'd be in back home - I think they'd risk their own lives, honestly, but in a war some places might not leave it at that -"

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Nod.

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He scowls at the possible alternate universe him. "What are the prospects of reverse engineering it without them?"

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Someone consults the engineer report.

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They will probably learn a lot of stuff from taking apart the aliens' stuff but it'll be a year before they've even made sense of half of it (less if they share with other countries, probably). It's too early to guess whether they could get FTL from here. They can't get anything off the aliens' computers. 

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"Mediocre," is the summary.

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Sigh. "Could tell him Miolee told you they can do it, but - if he's not high-ranking enough to have the right to decide what serves the Andalite national interest here, or if he doesn't think helping us does, it'll get nowhere."

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"We're not even sure this is how it works. Maybe this is a trick. Infiltration technique. Match someone and everyone who'd notice the difference, method act a little, replace them..." says someone else.

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" - possible. Why us, though, they're mostly green, they're not that valuable -"

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"You'd probably be the central person."

"Or Isel, since they landed in Miolee, don't know how they'd pick."

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"I would be very hard to impersonate."

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"I might just be looking for it but he does remind me of you a bit -"

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"Oh?"

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"I can't put my finger on it, really."

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"Let's keep them talking."

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The blue talking to Matirin happily keeps him talking!

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Matirin is happy to talk! He's curious about their justice system and statistics on caste differences in aptitudes and Anitami history and his interlocutor's family and interests and hobbies.

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Their judges are blue, and cops gather legwork-y evidence and yellow judicial assistants gather less legwork-y evidence and judges can investigate on their own if they feel moved to do so but they're encouraged to get cases over with in one interview, it makes it more swift and sure. Comparatively few people hit the out of caste income cap, although some people with mixed background awkwardly take after their mothers (and in most countries caste is actually matrilineal) - but mixed backgrounds aren't all that common, people usually self-sort themselves fine. Anitam was once partially conquered by the Oahk Empire, now reduced to a titchy little country yea far that way. His interlocutor has one son and one granddaughter and two great-grandchildren, here are pictures. She likes jogging and patronizing new artists and trying downscale restaurants which are sometimes surprisingly good and strategy board games.

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He seems delighted by all of this. There are, as it happens, Andalite strategy board games! Mostly focused on space battle tactics - <but with enough misleading abstraction that I won't be in trouble for teaching you, if you would like to learn.>

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She would love to.

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They play space strategy board games. The Andalites take turns in morph and take turns pacing the perimeter of their grass and eventually with Matirin's leave set to sparring.

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"Ooh, if they keep that up the soldiers're gonna want to play."

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<...your species does not look very dangerous in melee, am I missing something?>

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"They'd want sticks or something. Or they'd just play defense."

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<They are welcome to join if they'd like. No Andalite warrior is careless enough to harm someone playing.>

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She lets the soldiers know that this is permissible and some of them go get sticks and fence with the tails.

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The Andalites slow it down a little and scrupulously avoid harming any Amentans with tail blades. A couple of them become uncomfortable on realizing they are sparring with girl Amentans.

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"...Do you want me to send the women away? I can have more male soldiers rotated in in their place," the blue offers again.

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<You are aliens, there is no reason to expect your aptitudes to match ours.>

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"We're happy to make adjustments to make you more comfortable regardless."

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<Arethel would be so disappointed in me. It is really quite all right.>

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Girl Amentans continue attempting to thwap Andalites with sticks!

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Andalites mostly get over their reluctance to spar with girls though they maybe go easier on them. Arethel does not go easier on them.

 

An Andalite gets jabbed in an uncomfortable location with a stick and spins around, moving his tail much faster than he had been, and slices the stick in two lengthwise stopping his blade right at the stickholder's hand.

 

Matirin glares at him. He apologizes.

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"Whoaaaaa," laughs the stickholder, "I better watch out!"

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Matirin's eyes slowly swivel back to their normal activity. <If they get upset with you over something and shoot you I can do nothing about it,> he reminds everyone.

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<We were really counting on you to personally catch all the bullets>.

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Glare. Only one-eyed, though, the other one keeps scanning.

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The Andalites will spar until there's a local sunset to witness, and then darkness.

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The soldiers have a shift change. "It's about time I went back into the city," says the blue. "I'll be back tomorrow morning a little after sunrise."

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<Of course. Thank you so much for the time acclimating us.>

 

Andalites sleep in a herd.

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Soldiers take pictures. The internet thinks that's ADORABLE.

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Yes. Adorable. Adorable harmless aliens who don't understand their own starships.

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The blue arrives bright and early the next morning at a jog, changes out of jogging clothes in one of the military tents, and then goes to meet Matirin for the morning.

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"Kalana!" he says out loud. "I practiced. Isstt. Hisssss. I am not perfect but I can talk. Awk."

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Kalana avoids bursting out laughing! She grins instead. "That's amazing! Your translation technology is much better than ours."

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"It has to handle all kinds of languagess. A great technical achievement. Makes diplomacy so much easier, I no longer had to lean on my father."

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"Lean on him for -?"

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"Spoke everything! Dozens and then when we got good implants for information storage hundreds. He developed the chips."

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"Goodness, a polyglot and an inventor."

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"Those are at least to you both green, yes -"

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"Yes, he'd fit right in green. Blues often learn a lot of languages too, though. And translation simple is a yellow job."

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"I think I would have done diplomacy in peacetime. I enjoyed it greatly."

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"That's blue." Grin.

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"Blue is clearly the best one! Except I can't imagine competently conducting a war without having served in the chain of command."

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"I did basic training! It's not a job requirement but I thought it'd make me better at it so I got permission to join a cohort. I think it helped - not because I needed experience being yelled at by drill sergeants who thought it was funny to have a blue in their batch but because I made friends and got a better understanding of grey cultural habits."

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Nod. "The cultural stuff and the - actual constraints on unit discipline under fire and the - it would be intolerable to send people to their deaths without knowing their names -"

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"That seems - cumbersome, the names -"

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"Not especially. I know the people under my command - if we had to kill everyone on Earth I was not going to learn five billion, that's different, but if they're mine it's straightforward -"

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"Kill everyone on Earth?"

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"We can't let the Yeerks have it."

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"Goodness."

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"It was not the first resort. But we were equipped for the possibility."

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Nod.

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"Would you -"

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" - if asked to kill everyone in Tapa just so we could live there I'd resign. But the invading parasites is a - different sort of problem, isn't it - can the weapons on the ships destroy planets, that would take an extraordinary amount of energy wouldn't it -"

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"And leave it uninhabitable that can't be the best way -"

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"Interesting thing to admit to outright. Wouldn't say it if you expected people might be bothered -"

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"Would the planet be uninhabitable, after -?"

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"Last place we had to do that we used bioweapons. Nice and tidy, you can leave all the rest of the ecosystems intact. If we couldn't get to the surface the ship's weapon systems can do it but - less elegantly."

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"So the Yeerks having a planet isn't the problem, it's Yeerks having the inhabitants."

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"Five billion more hosts would represent a substantial increase in their capabilities and humans can have four children in one of your years, it'd be more than five billion very quickly."

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"...they can? They can't actually, right, not habitually, there'd be more than five billion as soon as they had the technology to support even that many. Unless the planet's huge."

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"Lower tech level than you, starvation might've been keeping the population down until very recently in their history. As far as I know nowhere on Earth has population controls but I think they usually prefer to space them more than that. The Yeerks would breed them as quickly as possible, that doesn't mean it's their default."

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Nod.

(At the capital: "There's people who'd make that trade. Fifteen children and helpful parasites to find places to put them and all you have to do...")

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("He's not wrong that they'd take us inside the space of a month if they found us.")

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"Ajoril does anywhere on Earth have population controls -"

     "Yeah, biggest country does, one kid per family, don't recall how they enforce it."

"Oh, all right."

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("A month?")

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("If it's as described, where you get all the skills and knowledge of the hosts, yes. We are utterly unprepared for our housekeepers having alien parasites in their heads and then the council could have essential people called in for interviews -")

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"One kid per family? Why would you aim below replacement -"

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"So you could make lots of exceptions and still hit your target, probably."

        "Earth doesn't even have reliable access to birth control everywhere," Ajoril says. "Population wasn't even mentioned in the summary of social and political issues - they've got a greenhouse gases problem, they've got miscellaneous minor wars and some nuclear standoffs -"

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"...standoffs relating to the middles of atoms, or is that a translation issue -?"

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" - standoffs related to a fairly low-tech way to destroy the world. I hope you'll forgive us for not elaborating further, if your researchers have wisely avoided going there."

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"We don't want to destroy the world," she agrees, "we live here."

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"And yet societies with the technology frequently decide they want to, say, commit to ending the world if something goes sufficiently badly for them."

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"I suppose I can see some people posturing like that. As long as no one else is doing it I don't see any reason to pick up the option."

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"Very wise of you."

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Smile.

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Harmless strategy games!

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And she keeps him engaged in conversation as they play for the benefit of the folks back home.

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Who continue to be not sure what to make of the whole thing. "Though if they - correspond - and their father's dead I can definitely get somewhere with Kefin's counterpart. If they were somehow separated."

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"Just from Matirin or do you need him separated out -"

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"Just from Matirin."

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Would Matirin like to see some more places? He can duplicate someone's form exactly to go unnoticed, right?

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"Yes, though spending more than two hours straight in morph risks complications which here we have no means to remedy."

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"That's enough time to get a look around the city and get back."

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"Then I would be delighted."

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So when he has a fresh morph as one of the soldiers she gets him on a train to go look around downtown and pick out snacks for the Andalites to try when no one's looking.

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And he comes over to talk to the Andalites! Which Andalite in particular has been pointed out to him but he sort of scowled down efforts to give him more specific instructions than that. He wants to know how the translation software works.

The Andalites profess ignorance.

That is okay they can figure it out. Say he starts in on a constructed language, how long does it take the translation software to start picking out words and offering translations, how confident does it have to be in a word meaning to offer a translation, how does it tell which sounds are differentiated in the target language if he is deliberately obscuring that a little with his accent - why do they have sounds associated with their names if they are telepaths - how does telepathy syntax function and why can it be understood as ordinary language -

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"- okay now I'd like to meet Matirin."

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"Kalana has location sharing with me, we can bump into her -"

Here they are.

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"Kalana! Hello!"

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"Good morning! Aitim, Eko, this is Matirin; Matirin, Aitim Neli and Eko Shenla -"

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"Are you enjoying the city?"

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"I am! So many people."

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"Indeed. We'll benefit tremendously from the chance to spread out."

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"I regret that I cannot be of more help there."

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"I actually expect you can! Not with the technical end perhaps but certainly with shaping relations once we're spacefaring. - Kalana do you mind if we step inside somewhere -"

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"Not at all -" Eko warned her and she has maneuvered them near the building of the education department, where it's pretty easy to commandeer a meeting room.

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"The first aliens to hand us spaceflight will have the enduring allegiance of our people. Yes, even if they're the Yeerks."

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"Fortunate for us then that that's not really the Yeerks' style."

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"Are you winning your war?"

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"We are not confident of winning it."

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"And yet it doesn't really seem like the overriding directive of the Andalite government is to win it at any cost. Some costs, like killing off planets, sure - but other costs, like teaching a people starfaring -"

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"I cannot teach you starfaring. But yes, it's not policy to invite another war in the pursuit of winning this one."

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"I sincerely think that not teaching us risks an eventual war far more than teaching us ever could."

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"You want more planets, desperately. What will you do if they're already taken? It's so easy, you know, when you happen on pre-spacefaring societies, a virus in the water and they're all gone and you can move right in -"

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"How many planets do the Yeerks have?"

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"Ten, twenty."

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"That would keep us a long time. Long enough to carry us well past the point where we'd invent it on our own. Or are you planning to handicap us permanently lest we make trouble in the stars -"

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"I am a stranded military commander, I'm not planning anything except to eat the tasty food and endeavor not to start a war over our presence. But it's not Andalite policy to interfere with technological development in anticipation of a society being hostile. If you start killing off planets of innocents to colonize them then we'd find ourselves at war."

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"Anitam does not do that to our neighbors."

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"It is very common to find it easier to annihilate truly alien societies than familiar ones."

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"Right now," he says, "you are in a position to propose terms. We make starships for the war against the Yeerks, we take our cut of Yeerk planets and look for empty ones and leave all other civilizations alone, we accept the friendship and guidance and protection of your people, and you are adored because you gave us babies. Your war does not sound like it's going well, if you've resorted to destroying civilizations your enemies happen upon because you cannot save them, if five billion hosts will tip the balance and there are planets like us where they could scoop up thirteen billion in the space of a single year. I'm not a soldier. But if I were my understanding of my duty would be first to win and then secondly to arrange after-the-fact permission to have won the way I did."

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"I cannot give you starships."

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"Liar."

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"I think I'd like to head back," he says to Kalana.

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She glances at Aitim.

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"I could check whether they have the information they need from your brother yet. But if they don't you are going to be delayed in going back, and if they do then you are not in a position to propose terms anymore and we will go into space on our own terms and fight the Yeerks only if they happen to menace us."

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" - if you've hurt my people -"

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"No, no, I just sent someone he'll find familiar to be deliriously excited about the translation chip technology and then segue from there. Cayaldwin might get skittish about your absence before they get to starships, which is why I'd really rather work with you. But my loyalty is to my people and I will get them starships."

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"I would feel more comfortable discussing this if I had a more complete picture of your information sources. Telepathy would barely explain it."

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"My father was blue but ran away to a green university because he was appallingly bad at blue and astonishingly good at green. He's obsessed with languages - drinks them up, plays with them, continually delighted by them - and invents things on the side, mostly in computing because it's where our world had the most room to grow. I have six younger brothers. My father's estranged from his half-siblings but I'm dating my half-cousin."

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"You're not me."

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"Oh?"

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"You'd have mentioned their names."

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Aitim pulls a piece of paper out of his pocket. Unfolds it. It's a family tree. He hands it to Matirin. 

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"I have never heard of anything like that."

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"We're pretty confused also."

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"Describe your siblings to me."

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"Makel's a singer and composer and songwriter - I don't know what he'd do grey in a species without a voice, maybe compose instrumental music as a hobby while soaking up the - emotional experience of wartime - as artistic inspiration? He could take care of the rest of them adequately if he had to but it'd be - imitating me, the surface bits without the underlying strengths. Telkam is - I bet yours is happier, actually, he'd love to be grey." He glances at their audience.

"Dyed his hair and enlisted, in the war with Voa - I didn't find out until afterwards but in hindsight I felt foolish for not anticipating it. He was fanatically upset about Evalee's reds - he hates - well, he hates a lot of things about the world but particularly the exercise of power against the defenseless. I bet Talik would teach us starships just on the general principle that then fewer people could push us around but I also bet Talik doesn't know a thing about starships. Telkam's dyslexic. Loves the outdoors - I suppose all Andalites are like that. Kantil dislikes the caste system for being economically inefficient - if someone's born outside their aptitude, see - and rather hates to shut up about it and became an economist and married Isama, a purple business magnate who he liked because she was rich - not because he cared for the money especially, even, but because he thinks it reflects desirable traits in general. He has lots of policy opinions and sometimes I help him talk about them in terms that their intended audience won't find really annoying and then we get better regulatory policy or so on. Kefin takes after our father and takes enormous pride in taking after our father and bounces when he's excited and speaks even more languages because of the benefits of early childhood exposure - uh, in our species language-learning is easiest before we're three. Amlas and Amel like exercising themselves in arenas where our reputations don't precede them and are very diligent and quietly idealistic but not so anyone'd know of it without asking. Amlas wakes up early and Amel never does and it's as if they can read each others' minds - I suppose yours can -"

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He sighs. "And would you ignore the explicit directives of your government to draft ad hoc alliances with aliens about whom all your information has been very heavily filtered?"

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"If I were tasked with winning a war that threatened the very survival of my people, and in a situation where I could not communicate with the council for situationally appropriate advice about their directives, I would win the war and then surrender and explain myself."

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"We do not really do, uh, retroactive leeway."

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"Corbron must grumble a lot about your government's incentives. Well, I think anything worth killing five billion people for had really better be worth dying for."

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"All right."

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"Thank you."

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"I would like to go back now."

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...Aitim nods.

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"Train's this way," says Kalana.

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Andalite follows her.

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There is a train and then they are within walking distance of the farm where the Dome is and within the perimeter.

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Matirin demorphs. 

 

Matirin lopes over to where his brother is talking with Afen Kisantami. 

Matirin circles the perimeter. 

 

Matirin loops back around to Kalana. <I would like an agreement to be specific about the resources Anitam will be providing for the war effort, but I do not presently have enough information about your manufacturing capacity to venture reasonable estimates for that. Who should I talk to?>

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She can get him several email addresses.

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He sends emails. His tail swishes irritably.

 

 

Inside the ship out of immediate view of the guards he has someone morph Leeran and listen for signs that their heavily filtered information about the aliens includes heavy filtering of things they'd really want to know.

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Kalana and soldiers are just as confused about the matching family thing as they are but noticed it first by recognizing the famous members of the family. They really really really wanna go to space, everyone is so excited about going to space.

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<Do you expect your government would hold to an agreement to fight in a war once they could conveniently betray it?>

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"I think so," says Kalana. (It'd be something for the greys to do, always have to find things for the greys to do.)

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<Do you think they'd end up conquering occupied planets?>

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"Some people would probably find it tempting, but the Yeerk planets would keep us for a good while and by then we'll know how to make better use of the space we've got and had more chance to find more empty ones."

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<Or build artificial ones. Will Anitam be the only country to want this deal? Will there be complications in extending the offer to others?>

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"Everyone will want in on it. Relations aren't - perfect, but they're good enough to cooperate on something as straightforward as 'fight disgusting aliens and take their planets'."

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<What are the - concerns with relations?>

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"A few years ago we participated in a war against Voa, on Tapa's behalf, over Voa's contamination of their food exports. Everything's tense over red transition, too, especially with Olvala and Evalee and Biyan."

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<Aliens who care at all will find the conduct towards reds awfully indefensible, you should be aware. Quarantine is one thing.>

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"Maybe that will help encourage everyone to transition more like Anitam has and like Tapa is doing now."

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Tail-swish. <We would be displeased to discover we've been significantly mislead about Anitam's conduct or priorities or plans for after the war.>

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"...Would you rather be talking to Aitim? He'll have more of a big-picture view than I will."

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<I have mixed feelings about Aitim. It'd be useful to talk to someone who'd be involved in the relevant decision-making, though.>

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"I'm confident I'd know about any Anitami military action or planned military action, given my position, but I'm less equipped to describe other plans and conduct."

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<Then perhaps we can talk through how you envision the military side of things, and then perhaps someone can be found to discuss other plans. What kind of resources are you willing to commit to this? How are you planning to protect against Yeerk infiltration?>

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"We can field millions of troops and all their necessary support and supply on a popular cause like this one will be, easily, and it will only be more popular to expand grey child credits so there will be a boom in five years, if the timeline is such that that's a good idea. I've got some of the generals working on protocols based on what you've told us. It's not an especially onerous requirement to oblige people to be watched for three days after engagements; it's similar to decontamination protocol after melee combat, if longer, so I expect that will be easy to integrate into operations."

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<It's also important they not know too much. It's plausible it'll take five years to build everything we'd need, track them down everywhere, and defend newly acquired territory. If you've instead a boom of greys and the war's over, will that be destabilizing?>

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"Need-to-know ops aren't unusual, although usually on a smaller scale. We're doing some creative things with half-greys these days, I'm sure the people who handle child credits can rejigger it so the boom isn't too bad if we don't have much to do with all the grey five-year-olds. Some of them at least we could funnel into piloting more generally, it's conventionally held that space travel is a grey occupation."

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<What's troop discipline like - if they need to take a city with minimal host-species casualties - are there going to be miscellaneous atrocities for which we are continually apologizing ->

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"We should double-check that there aren't things that would be frowned on by the interstellar community which are more customary here, but I think we can have them distinguishing as necessary between civilian hosts and more unambiguous military targets. I think very highly of our troop discipline but it's not literally perfect, of course."

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<Perfect would not be expected. Your decontamination rules, what would those look like and what is needed to abide by them ->

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She can get the military handbook, there's a whole section on it.

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<Andalites would object to decontaminating after melee combat, do you suppose morphing and demorphing would suffice?>

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"Hm, I'd want to run that by some greens, maybe the ones who were involved in coming up with the red decontamination procedure."

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Tail-nod. <It looks hard on the fur, see, and we have our own procedures for the aftermath of tail-to-tail combat.>

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"What are they?"

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<Ancient rituals, with the addition of modern medical practice. We get clean but, ah, not with this particular procession of soaps.>

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"The particular procession is a sort of combination compromise option since the advent of international trade; people used to have different procedures. I'm sure we can work something out."

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Tail-nod. <Is it required after hunting animals also?>

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"Hunting animals is no longer common but no, it isn't, only people's bodies require this level of comprehensiveness."

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<Any kind of people or Amentans in particular?>

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"I think the consensus is that aliens would count, although you're the first ones we've met in practice."

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Tail-nod. <None of the other species on this planet are near-intelligent?>

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"Some are smarter than others, but no, not really."

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<If you were a Yeerk who took some Amentan soldiers captive, what would you do from there?>

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"- as of right now?"

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<I'm thinking ahead to once there are Amentan soldiers involved in the war, but I suppose that question also merits some attention.>

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"I'm not really familiar with Yeerk tactics. I suppose they'd put Yeerks in them and then try to find pretenses to get others alone near - wherever they keep Yeerks who are going to go in people. The protocols we're working on amount to eliminating as much as possible all legitimate excuse to be unsupervised."

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<I appreciate it.>

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"And we appreciate the warning!"

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<Yeerk contact with Amenta would have been disastrous.>

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"I agree completely."

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And he reads about local capabilities a while longer and then asks about someone to talk to about the politics side.

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Kalana asks Aitim to recommend someone.

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Aitim recommends Lisint Asan, who runs the foreign affairs office.  "You've done really nicely, I appreciate it."

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"Thanks!" says Kalana.

She emails Lisint. Lisint appears.

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Matirin wants a sense of under what circumstances Anitam might find itself backing out of their commitment to the war effort, and how that can be avoided.

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"If we find the situation's been misrepresented, that would certainly do it, or if corresponding commitments on which basis we made ours were reneged upon."

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<Those do not worry me. If lots of people are dying? If the Yeerks start destroying planets as they lose them, to deny you your spoils?>

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"We expect a casualty rate. If our troops die at a rate indicating that we're not making any progress we might want to consider falling back to more of an industrial support role, but that would be strategically advisable anyway. Our interest is principally the planets, of course, but even the opportunity to explore for empty ones on our own would be worth an enormous outlay of resources."

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<If they anticipate that they could deter you by destroying the planets they are more likely to do it, so it may be wise to commit your resources in a fashion that is observably-to-any-troops-they-might-enslave not dependent on that.>

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"Of course."

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<If they surrender? I - understand your species to have a fraught relationship with people you consider unclean and disgusting, and Yeerks probably qualify.>

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"I'd leave that to the theologians, but it's possible Yeerks are in fact just inherently unclean. Were you planning to accept surrender?"

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<They're harmless in their pools. We're besieging their home planet rather than destroying it. If it were credible and logistically convenient we'd accept surrender. Better incentives.>

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"We'll need to discuss the disposition of their other planets, in that eventuality."

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<I think we could arrange to relocate them all to the homeworld if they surrendered; no reason to give them more than that.>

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"That shouldn't be a problem."

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<If some of the planets have surviving native species who can be freed from their Yeerks?>

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"Is this likely to apply to more than a few planets? We would be very nearly as enthusiastic about a single habitable planet."

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<At least five come to mind where this would certainly be no concern.>

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"Then this doesn't substantially affect our interest in this alliance."

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Tail-nod. <I don't anticipate the Andalite High Command approving-in-retrospect large-scale sharing of military technology, but I am confident they will honor alliances that followed from it. They'll probably appoint someone as your liaison who thinks we should have kept the secrets. I presume that won't be too much of a problem.>

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"We're familiar with diplomacy."

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<There are societies in which it'd be a grave insult of some kind, and others where it'd at least damage public enthusiasm about the alliance. If you're confident it will be handled then that's very reassuring.>

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"If they're planning to go on international television and say 'we are of the opinion that you should have stayed trapped on your rock desperately suppressing all your natural inclinations to avoid eternal war for land', then we may have a public enthusiasm problem."

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Swish. <No, just 'well it worked out great but the laws on sharing military secrets don't have a 'unless it worked out great' provision.>

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"We might want to coach them before they go on television. Not a serious constraint."

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<It is unclear to me how relevant public opinion even is but I am glad to hear that.>

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"It affects things. A lot of positions are democratically elected."

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<Well, don't build any public relations campaigns off fondness for us personally and I am sure they will be graceful and likable allies.>

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"Understood."

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<We asked the Mioleen emissaries if there were - particular acts of war that were especially unacceptable here. It was not their background and they had only vague ideas.>

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"Some of them wouldn't apply with aliens very much - ah, using non-greys in combat positions is forbidden because it allows sudden unanticipable multiplication of force and things can get ugly with unsuited soldiers on the field. The same problem applies to drafting a conquered people - in any capacity - shortly after achieving control of their area. Rape by occupying force. Perfidy, which includes violating truce terms, feigning noncombatant status, pretending to be a member of the Unaligned Orange League, that sort of thing."

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<That makes sense. Common ones galactically include - well, what Yeerks do, which Andalites could of course also do with morphing technology but wouldn't, torturing captives - under Andalite law you cannot deny a captive a means of suicide, though that is fairly particular to us and other places just set minimum standards for how to treat them - targeting civilian populations - we do that but one should expect it's career-ending and regarded as dishonorable and will mean living out your days in exile while your superiors deny giving the order, which is hypocritical and silly but at least means it is never done lightly.>

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"Oh, we also don't torture people, although that's forbidden more generally than as a war crime. We're allowed to target civilians, although it's usually not wise and definitely escalates - the opponent assumes you're clearing the space out to move in and won't stop for lesser concessions."

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<I can see how on a crowded planet that would become a norm. No one considers any Yeerks relevantly civilians, or any Yeerk hosts.>

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"That seems practical. Oh, and the deliberate use of reds to actively spread pollution is forbidden but would be - awkward to translate to interstellar warfare."

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< - sounds it, yes. No one else would really care. Most species have taboos around contagion that are restricted to the actual contagious materials and which seem to mostly fade out with modern medical knowledge. I think it's because you had a caste for it that the disgust reaction generalized in your case. Some peoples might try to make things disgusting-to-Amentans if they thought it would deter you from advancing, I suppose.>

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"We've drifted into Kalana's area of expertise from mine."

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Tail-nod. <Kalana was tremendously helpful but could not really comment on potential political barriers to cooperation or places to expect an agreement to be fragile.>

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"A drawback of democracy is that if there's ever a sufficient upset then our successors can change course, although there are reasons to obey longstanding commitments."

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<Our elections are timed such that turnover is slow enough that there'd be a few years before a shift in sentiments was reflected in a shift in policy. Are the seats all up simultaneously, here?>

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"Yes, though normally incumbents have a considerable advantage."

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<How common is it for a change of course like that to occur?>

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"Not, but an unpopular war is certainly one of the things that can do it."

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<If we get you a planet early - pick off a less-defended Yeerk colony world first or something - will that help with public enthusiasm for the war or feed the sentiment that you got yours and may as well stop now?>

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"It will help enormously. Everyone knows that no finite number of planets is indefinitely suitable, even if one additional planet could allow us a good long spell of breathing room."

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<Then we can probably arrange that. - a frustrating amount of this depends who gets assigned on our end, but if you're prepared to emphatically make the recommendation to them it does not particularly trade off against military goals of ours and I wouldn't expect it to be hard to keep an arrangement to get you a planet close to up-front in exchange.>

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"That's very useful."

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<If some Amentans get Yeerked and the Yeerks controlling them turn on us, we'll kill them. Ideally there'd be plenty of documentation that this was the case; in war often there isn't.>

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"I understand. That's not an unreasonable policy if you don't have the luxury to capture and - empty."

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<It is fiendishly difficult to capture a starship. Even a craft that's near wholly disabled can usually blow a hole in your side if you're close enough to board them.>

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Nod.

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<Those are the concerns that come to mind on our end; how about yours?>

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"Do the Andalites have any other allies whose PR and strategy we will need to manage?"

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<We are working with several of the species who the Yeerks have attempted to conquer, but I don't anticipate major concerns of PR or competition for resources - Leerans, for example, are amphibious and would not be competing with you for space. They are also all telepathic, which obviates lots of PR concerns; there are diplomatic teams specialized for relations with them. Hork Bajir are all very stupid. Humans are presently ignorant of us. - countries that are still murdering or effectively enslaving their red populations might find themselves unpopular intergalactically, but I take it Anitam's found an alternative to that.>

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"We have, we're very proud of it."

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<It is very commendable. This is not an alliance I would feel confident in offering some countries who've shown less wisdom.>

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"I might tell them you said that."

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< I trust you to know better than I what will be a - useful nudge towards being less of a PR liability and what will be regarded as interference.>

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"Modulated for the audience, yes."

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Tail-swish. <All right. Get an engineering team in here and we'll teach them starships.>

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There is pretty much already an engineering team there. It includes Amentan Matirin's Dad.

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Matirin was not on the greatest of terms with his father when he died. He ignores Amentan Dad. 

 

Andalites can translate papers on z-space and on weapons systems and on artificial gravity and ship blueprints and ship manufacture. It becomes fairly obvious that any Andalite crew could more or less get an arbitrary post-industrial species up to starfaring in the space of a few years if they wanted to and with Matirin's permission they want to. They know how to build the ships by hand - for repairs - and they know exactly how z-space works and the computers have the rest. 

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Amentans are so so happy starships starships starships!!!

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"And then a war with slug aliens, presuming we're not being misled about that and presuming the main Andalites don't decide to rectify the dissemination of military secrets."

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Kalana says, "I can't wait to tell a general take that planet and you can have fifty grandchildren on it."

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"And take it from disgusting slug aliens, too, it's a very convenient arrangement."

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"Is everyone else going to be stressed if we start Andalite weapons maufacture, bump the grey credits, maybe bump all the credits -"

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"I mean I'm sure they'll be on edge but we've explained that we're allying with the aliens against some other aliens in exchange for some planets, and the aliens are willing to talk with them too, it's not like doing it out of nowhere."

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"Everyone's pestering for access."

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"What a surprise. I'd like a head start in case anyone does get ambitious closer to home while we're getting ready for the war but I'm sure everyone else wants us not to have a head start for the same reason. Maybe make a list of trade concessions we've wanted forever and let everybody buy access and then let the Andalites be less cooperative with people they disapprove of."

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A list is compiled.

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Oh good.

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Some people make the concessions, or offer some but not all. Rivik prefers to harass Miolee for any aliens they're hiding.

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They're hiding two but they don't know it; the aliens have stayed out of the way except when in morph as unremarkable Mioleen citizens getting onto a public computer to read about the aliens. 

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Miolee asks Anitam to chase away those Rivikni boats please.

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Anitam would be delighted.

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Rivik wasn't bothering THEM. Back off.

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Miolee and Anitam are friends, as evidenced by Miolee helpfully giving Anitam the alien spaceship, and Anitam can return the favor with some naval exercises in the ocean right here. 

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Rivik lingers resentfully.

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Anitam can keep the naval exercises up a while!

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And Matirin can meet aliens from other countries.

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All of them want to know how to spaceships. Every single one.

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Andalites will share with countries with a suitable record of competent and professional handling of internal matters and an interest in an alliance for war against the Yeerks and a willingness to commit not to conquer inhabited planets except for Yeerk ones.

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...so, Biyani guy is sent packing?

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Biyan does not have a record of competent and professional handling of internal matters at all.

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Can he convince the aliens that that was an anomaly.

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They are open to being so persuaded. What sort of protections are in place against similar stupidity in the future, what happened to the architects of the stupidity, have reparations been made.

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Mumble mumble.

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Andalites are not convinced at this time that an alliance with Biyan is to their advantage.

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Tapa makes a better case for it. Voa still has reds under the traditional arrangement because they want to see how Tapa's decontamination goes before emulating it and Anitam.

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They both seem competent. He does some online reading that more or less confirms this. Voa maybe had some past mishandled internal matters; do they have a good answer to 'what protections are in place to prevent it from occurring again, what happened to the people responsible, have reparations been made?'

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Allocators and some other jobs that can be obtained without solid track records now have better oversight and peer review of their actions. Allocator Savo is now a stay at home dad. Tapa made off with Imde province and they have not attempted to take it back.

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And do they want an alliance with the Andalites to destroy the Yeerks, after which the Andalites would be delighted to aid them in claiming and defending a claim to the Yeerk planets?

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Yes, and they're happy to work out with other allying nations how to divvy up the planets.

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Andalites will give Voa and Tapa a tech talk too!

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Hurray!

(Tapa wants a large fraction of the first planet and is willing to take smaller ones of subsequent planets to get it. Voa's allocation means that they will have an awkward time booming the grey population without doing the same to all the other castes, so whether they want to contest that or go along with it depends on how likely it is they should allow a boom before they get a planet.)

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Matirin expects Amentan forces to be bottlenecked by producing starships rather than by producing crews for them and therefore does not think a grey boom is necessary though casualties will probably be substantial enough that it'd be warranted given certain preferences about caste balance.

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In the long run they probably have too many greys leftover from a more violent time in history and it wouldn't actually be that bad if they had half as many afterwards and the remainder grew at the same rate as the other castes.

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The incentive to have more greys around than you have grey jobs is quite apparent. He'll let them decide all of that.

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Other, smaller countries also want in. Everybody wants in. BABIES.

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What a peculiar species. Smaller countries are less assets and more complications but if they've got a sparkling domestic record he'll discuss it. 

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How do they feel about Orvara.

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Uh the Andalite understanding of a sparkling domestic record involves not herding any of your loyal citizens off to their deaths but perhaps the government can offer more insight.

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They weren't technically citizens, reds were their own class of thing exempt from many of the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.

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...aliens are also their own class of thing and a country being incompetent with peaceful and law-abiding people who are in their power is precisely the thing that bodes poorly for their competence at handling interstellar relations.

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They were highly competent! They managed a complete transition without any clean casualties!

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It seems likely that was only because they went first, and that if they'd gone second their reds would have rioted like everyone else's.

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They did a test city and even after that they didn't have problems with that. People don't appreciate that about them but it's true!

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It was very commendable to do a test city first. How're they planning to handle surrendering Yeerks, surrendering hosts who are probably unclean because they just had Yeerks in them, etcetera -

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Orvaran theologians are working on whether it is possible to decontaminate a host. It seems like it might be hard without opening up the skull.

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And what will they do if they conclude it can't be done?

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Well, then it'll be like those people are red. Although it probably won't be hereditary unless they've been Yeerk slaves for generations, so not that bad. Orvara drove its reds away, it didn't specifically want them to be dead.

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But it, uh, caused them to be dead. If he had friends who might be rendered red by Yeerks he would not necessarily want them in the hands of Orvaran allies, do they see the concern there?

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What do captured Andalites do?

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Well, it hasn't come up because Andalites have a hard-to-rob-them-of means of suicide but if an Andalite were captured then once the Yeerk was starved out of them they'd be fine and welcomed back among their fellow warriors.

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So, they can send polluted aliens home to their alien buddies.

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And polluted Orvarans? Drive them out to die?

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They might skip the starving them out step. Seems like a lot of hassle for not much ROI.

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Matirin anticipates headaches when his allies insist on killing their own people. He will not teach Orvara starships at this time.

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What if they make their soldiers sign things asserting they'd rather die than hang out for three days containing a Yeerk.

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Andalites would also rather that but often Yeerks can be coerced out faster than that and it seems like they'd also drive out to their deaths soldiers who had contained a Yeerk but were rescued from a pool, say.

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...they will lean on their theologians.

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He eagerly awaits the results.

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Orvara's theologians have a fair amount of international respect.

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Then perhaps pressuring them not to conclude that former Yeerk hosts are all unclean is worth having Orvara as an ally.

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It will help if they know more about how Yeerks work.

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They are slugs like so and they go in through the ear canal and spread out to intercept all electrical activity in the brain like so.

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Orvara's theologians conclude that it may be possible to decontaminate an ex-host with extremely thorough lavaging of the ears and electroshock therapy.

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He inquires of Anitam and Tapa and Voa whether this is their planned handling of anyone who has been captured and whether this may tempt Yeerks to briefly infest lots of Amentans just so they turn on each other in pollution hysteria or get distracted from the war electroshocking themselves.

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They haven't even gotten as far as declaring Yeerks unclean yet. Like, they sound gross, but so are like, actual slugs, which are not technically unclean.

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Oh good.

 

Matirin would like to talk to a red. And a Mioleen.

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Like a still-red-red or will an Anitami ex-red do to supplement the Mioleen "clean casteless person".

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Anitami ex-red will do for now because that sure is a face they are making.

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They send him Shasali Aven! He should be impressed because they let some ex-reds be blues.

"Hello," says Shasali Aven, an ex-red who is now a blue.

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He is not clear on why that is impressive. 

"Hello. I've become aware that theological rulings about uncleanliness of Yeerks and current and former hosts of Yeerks are going to be relevant to Amentan involvement in the war, and everyone sounds rather stupid when they try to explain things so I asked to speak to a red in case they sound less so. And was dissuaded because apparently it would be a logistical nightmare."

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"Both you and reds are awkward to transport," she says. "If a phone or online conversation would suffice that would be much easier to arrange, if I can't answer your questions - which I may not be able to, I'm a judge, not a theologian."

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"I am supposed to be very impressed with Anitam about you being a judge but I am not sure what background facts make it impressive."

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"The original plan was for all ex-reds to be purple. Anitam allows arbitrary recasteing. Tapa was convinced not to limit ex-reds to purple, but doesn't allow blue in particular."

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"Why not?"

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"Blue is aristocracy. It seems likely they felt threatened by the idea of a disenfranchised population being entitled to a chance at positions like 'judge' - not that it's an especially sought-after role; I chose it for other reasons."

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" - the system as explained to me was that your species displays strong heritable tendencies in aptitude, which means you can gain from specialization by tracking people into training for careers for which they can with high confidence be anticipated to have an aptitude. Is the disagreement over whether there exist, uh, unclean persons with an aptitude for careers that are designated blue, or whether given that they exist the - specialization benefits - are outweighed by costs to the - credibility of the ruling caste - or..."

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"- oh, no, I think it's mostly that ex-red blues would push policy in a direction the current blues wouldn't like. With of course a strong backing expectation that none of their ex-reds would be qualified, though they haven't checked or done any statistical predictions. Some of our blue ex-reds had to do blinded interviews to check if they were capable; I got in first, as a test case, and the ambassador to Miolee was also able to skip that step."

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"In what direction would ex-red blues be expected to push policy?"

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"I'm not sure what Tapa's specific reservations, if they are specific, might be. Blues are... cliquey, and privileged, and have tended to make choices that reflect that."

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"I want starships to throw at a galactic menace, I don't need ideological purity, but I think I would benefit from a more detailed picture of what you mean by that."

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"...Most blues have very little idea of what it is like to not be blue."

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"Andalites would find among the strangest of the local eccentricities the tendency to have wars ordered by people who have never fought in them and whose children do not go off to fight in them."

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"I am sure there are some blues who marry grey, but it does create certain - tension, yes."

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"But this is a bit afield from - precedents set now with respect to pollution seem likely to be somewhat enduring. It is not clear to me what those precedents ought to be, or how - flexible for pragmatic reasons - they are."

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"They are not totally inflexible but they need to be able to create a path of logic. Defying the premises outright will accomplish nothing."

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"With aliens it seems like many paths of logic are available, I just don't know which of those paths it would be wise to encourage people to explore down."

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"I have no theological background whatever, I'm sorry."

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"I don't know what outcomes would be desirable."

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"It will presumably be most convenient if Yeerks are declared nonpollutants or at least easily washed off."

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Nod. " - it seems likely Amentans are going to be a significant force in the galaxy eventually and I would like to see the societies you create be humane, well-governed and flourishing ones. The uncleanliness thing is - not helpful."

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"Tapa following Anitami example seems likely to be a powerful role model for the rest of the world, even if Miolee doesn't succeed as a state."

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"It is not obvious to me if I have leverage over Mioleen flourishing. Aitim presumably but I don't want to make too many assumptions about what he does with his powers when he's not trying to coax aliens into treason in a way that doesn't imply to observers he can be so tempted."

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"It has been implied to me that he was instrumental in some of the advances for reds, although Isel is the public face of it. He helped me personally get started when I came out of decontamination. I'm married to his cousin Inlad, incidentally."

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He purses his lips and then nods as if this makes perfect sense.

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"I take it you've derived a correspondence. Is yours here?"

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"Different ship. It is unlikely he survived."

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"Ah."

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"I can take my questions about - where to lean - to Aitim with a little more confidence, though. - and you can tell Aitim he didn't hurt them, actually, if you don't mind."

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"- didn't hurt who?"

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"My brothers."

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"I can let him know." She emails him; it's short.

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Thank you. What were you talking about?

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Ex-reds, blues, theology, which of his cousins corresponds to Inlad, should I have been recording?

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He runs into her in the coffee shop the next morning. "Doesn't recording not even work, they spend most of their time in the -" he makes swiveling stalk eyes with his fingers.

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"He spoke aloud to me from his shape that looks like a desaturated you."

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"About what everyone is on about with cleanliness?"

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"About how influenceable people are in the details of what they are on about."

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"I'll go talk to him. Thank you for the message."

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"You're welcome."

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"I should kind of have asked him myself." He orders a coffee. 

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She picks up her usual without having to ask for it.

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"Is his Inlad around?"

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"He said he was on a different ship and likely did not survive."

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"He's one I have a hard time imagining grey."

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Nod.

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"Isel, on the other hand, is very pleased to be the only sort of cross-caste Andalite. She's doing more important things, of course, but if there weren't more important things apparently it'd be a great deal of fun. Did Matirin give you much sense of which direction he wants to lean?"

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"He seemed inclined to ask you, or - more so. I would not have anticipated you'd be the sort of person who would not get along with yourself."

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"I really should have just asked him about his brothers. I think it's only partially that and partially that he's been getting his information from sources he expects couldn't get a lie past him, though."

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"...am I meant to parse coded brother-related messages..."

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" - oh, I don't think it was particularly coded? He's sharing Andalite military secrets against an explicit directive about doing that. I said maybe his government would be pragmatic if it won them the war and he said they would most certainly not be pragmatic on those grounds and I said that if he was prepared to kill five billion people to win the war but not prepared to die for it than something was very wrong. But I didn't ask - avoided asking - if it'd be treason for all of them, or -

- it doesn't change the math but it'd change how I felt, about doing that to him. Or cornering him into it."

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"- ah."

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"Stupid way to run a justice system, really."

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"Ours is very good at incentives."

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"The tech differential's still going to be significant enough that we can't really refuse to give him back and I'm not sure he'd even want that. And it seems like it might be hard to sell them on having anything to learn from us. But I am fond of serving a country that would probably not go 'that was the greatest service anyone has ever done us and still treason'."

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Nod.

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And he goes to meet Matirin. "Figuring us out?"

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"Organizing all the military agreements has occupied most of my time, really. I've wondered about it in free moments, maybe."

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"Yeerks aren't unclean, just kinda gross. They're alive and sewage and garbage don't come into it."

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"I see the pragmatic case for that but Yeerks are the closest thing we have to something that provokes the - disgust you feel for your sanitation workers."

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"Yeah, I bet. Nonetheless. It won't help anything. We'd fight them just over the planets, honestly."

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"That's one of the things that concerns me."

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"Are there species which aren't like that?"

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"Lots. I think you are unusually - rigged to be trouble, what with the necessary expansionism. Do you suppose you'd ever collectively agree to genetic engineering to spring less intensely or find other peoples' babies adequate or not spring until you're ten or something."

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"Some people might go for it. As a society? No."

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"Then maybe I should have considered this too high a price for the end of the war."

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"We can learn to build artificial living environments we can expand as necessary. We can restrain ourselves to picking fights with bad guys."

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"Yep. How can I help you achieve that?"

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"Yeerks are clean."

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"I am not very credible on the topic but I'll try."

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"And I'd kind of rather you didn't give Olvala spaceships but I guess if it's as part of their theologians declaring that Yeerks are clean -"

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"Because they murdered all those people, you mean? I am not sure that actually reflects unusual-for-your-species attitudes or readiness to violence on the part of their leadership."

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" - sure but they actually did it."

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"So I should avenge the dead? I think everyone understands that if they try a red transition and the reds die then Andalites are not going to be starships-kinds of impressed with their competence."

Permalink Mark Unread

"They might think you'd be impressed if they successfully dispose of them without clean casualties but disapproving if they let it get out of hand."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Sigh. "I will be very clear on that."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I think some of the colony planets, once we have several, will be more liberal."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Andalites are very conservative. I'm not sure 'liberal' is the axis of concern to me, more - governed in a way conducive to your flourishing and being good citizens and not a scourge on the galaxy or an embarrassing backwater of internal problems - Shasali thinks most blues have no idea what it is like to be - not blue -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Do Andalite leaders know what it's like to be a poor Andalite? Are there poor Andalites? Ones who work in the factories?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Factories are all automated. I suppose you have disincentive to develop that kind of technology. Our leaders' children play and learn alongside all the other children."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, some blues let their nannies take their own children with them to work."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"That was humor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It was. Good job."

Permalink Mark Unread

"You deliberately had unusually few expressive cues to it being humor."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Guilty. I was testing a theory."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - that I asked for other interlocutors because I've gotten adequate at parsing your species for reactions and wanted to draft the agreements with people whose dishonestly I expected to notice? Yes, that's correct."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Bet you're worse at it than me."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I bet I am better at it than you are at parsing Andalite body language!"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Perhaps I should pick it up for when we have less friendly ambassadors."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - 'unfriendly' is not the exact concern I have about potential replacements."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Suppose you could maneuver into not getting arrested until the war's over? - the story of how the Amentans ended up with all this technology is need-to-know lest it fall into Yeerk hands -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"At the cost of the court being very very unamused when I do explain myself. I suppose steering power earlier is worth trading for whatever satisfaction I'd derive from coming off very righteous at court-martial."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you're sure enough they won't drag anyone else into it, yeah."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The whole thing's going to be a national embarrassment, they won't want to drag it out with forty times the fuss and a weaker argument - my soldiers aren't supposed to commit atrocities on my orders and they're supposed to be very sure I'm not Yeerked but there's no precedent for expecting them to know whether I'm authorized to declare new national allies. And I'm not sure we even have the prison capacity."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...to hold an extra forty people for a week?"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - to hold an extra forty people indefinitely - oh, we don't have the death penalty. That's barbaric. Though you're supposed to suicide for some things - not this, desertion or treason."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

 

"- huh. Supposed to suicide with how much encouragement -"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - I think Andalites might take our honor more seriously than Amentans do. The honorable thing is suicide and then they'll let your family pretend it's an accident and it'll be less of an - appalling stain on your family and your memory - and that's enough incentive that nearly anybody would. You wouldn't be assisted, if that's what you mean."

Permalink Mark Unread

"There're no Andalites without tails?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"- morph fixes injuries. Very rarely or before we had it - there'd be something - and they'd stay out of civilized society because ugh."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - taillessness is ugh?"

Permalink Mark Unread

" - any kind of physical infirmity - do you not have that - I wonder if it's a herd animal impulse, that someone who walks funny or is visibly injured or is otherwise impaired - psychologically, through less visible brain injury, anything - you can't have them around, they should just stay out of the way or kill themselves honorably -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"We very much do not have that and I advise against expressing it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"All right."

Permalink Mark Unread

"People have disabled relatives and they love them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not about worthiness of love it's that they shouldn't be. If you could cure them all it'd be much much better - you at least agree on that, right -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure, of course, but given that you can't you do the best you can - and I think there are some deaf people who don't want a cure, say that it's great how they can get cheap housing near the airport and the parts of the brain that parse audio have been repurposed to give them more acute other senses and that sign language is far more convenient for things like a group dissolving into smaller groups for discussion -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Well, people'll make the best of anything. One presumes you wouldn't let them deafen people."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If someone of sound mind wanted to deafen themself and wasn't going to end up on social programs meant for the needy then I don't think we'd care. Of course you can't deafen other people but you can't go around giving them hearing aid implants either."

Permalink Mark Unread

" - but it's - then there's something wrong with them."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I have six hundred million citizens, if I fussed at all the ones making life choices I disapprove of I'd never do anything else. It doesn't hurt anyone else."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The people who have to take care of them -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"If they can take care of themself, I mean, which they usually can because we have, like, captions and blinky train warning signs and speech-to-text apps."

Permalink Mark Unread

 

"Huh."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We were discussing -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Outrageously misleading implications that you extracted the starship information from us without our cooperation, so I can stay liaison until the war's over and try getting you all pushed in a direction that doesn't set you up for inevitable violent expansionism. And getting it agreed that Yeerks are clean."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I appreciate anything you can do on that, it's important."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Of course."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can tell you everything I know about the people you'll be talking to -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Ooooh!"

Permalink Mark Unread

And he does.

Permalink Mark Unread

And he writes Orvara saying that he thinks perhaps there was a misunderstanding that might produce more encouraging avenues of theological speculation. Andalites think Yeerks are horrible and like a plague but they do not come into contact with sewage or garbage or corpses - their pools are silty but not inherently germ-infested in the way that seems to be uncleanliness relevant and lots of other species live in silty water and it'd have very unwanted implications to draw conclusions about that. Maybe they could consult with Anitam and Tapa and Voa's theologians and see if the evidence justifies a consensus that Yeerks suck but do not meet any of the standards of uncleanliness per se. 

 

And he writes for general consumption some comments to the effect that the Mioleens were delightful and all the Andalites charmed, and Anitam's commitment to and evident pride in their decontamination program speaks so well of them, and Tapa's doing the same and Voa means to if it goes well and this makes Andalites very enthusiastic about working with them, and while Andalites might overlook massacres before they arrive if the countries responsible seem committed to good conduct going forward they are certainly not going to overlook massacres henceforth.

Permalink Mark Unread

People are also not supposed to be generally messy, but if Yeerks are only messy and not unclean then they can just wash out their ears in some relatively unintrusive fashion.

Anyway, look, sometimes massacres just happen. They're reds.

Permalink Mark Unread

He will select his allies from among the countries fortunate enough not to have a massacre just happen to them, then.

Permalink Mark Unread

Unlucky people need planets too!

Permalink Mark Unread

He can't win a war with troops so undisciplined that they have massacres by accident. The planets are not a charity service.

Permalink Mark Unread

...they could not let anyone who did any massacring enlist?

Permalink Mark Unread

When Andalite soldiers fuck up the people who trained them and the people who commanded them get in trouble because they should have trained them better, noticed that they weren't trained properly, and avoided putting them in a situation where they could accidentally have a massacre. If places have a massacre and then completely reform their training procedures, and discipline everyone involved and everyone who commanded or trained everyone involved then he can revisit the question. 

Permalink Mark Unread

It'd be more a cop problem than a military problem.

Permalink Mark Unread

He does not have useful proxies for how they train their troops beyond how they train everyone they issue a weapon in the service of the state.

Permalink Mark Unread

The military are much more carefully trained! Cops run the gamut from traffic law to homicide detectives.

Permalink Mark Unread

Then maybe avoiding massacres is as simple as training cops better!

Permalink Mark Unread

No see soldiers have to work alongside reds, losing a military red because someone got spooked is a big deal, you have to reshuffle a lot of things for that. Cops on the other hand, apart from the handful who have to talk to the autopsy red, do not normally need to deal with reds except to discipline them. Sometimes fatally.

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'm not clear on why this means that improving police training would not help with massacres."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It'd involve training huge numbers of personnel for things that are almost never relevant to their jobs, and we don't have a standardized handling the way we do for military training on how to deal with unit reds," says the diplomat from Cene. "We can't even just adapt the process for teaching detectives to talk to autopsy reds; that's a volunteer position and only involves meeting the reds under controlled circumstances."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Under what circumstances do massacres tend to just uncontrollably happen?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"When reds step out of line and start polluting things or initiating violence, which is likely to happen in a transition period. Anitam was very lucky, if their reds hadn't believed the thing about decontaminating them they would have had just as much of a catastrophe on their hands as anyone could."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I wonder if they were more confident in their grey discipline."

Permalink Mark Unread

"The way I understand it they barely involved greys in the process at all, which means they probably were trying pretty hard to avoid it. And a negligible fraction of their ex-reds decided to be grey - they let them decide, there wasn't even an aptitude test - and those are all dancers and porn stars, no, I don't think their reds liked the police more than anyone else's."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Have people asked them whether they took measures to prevent riots?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Apparently they got rid of social workers, which really seems the opposite of helpful, they dodged a bullet."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Hmm."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Obviously no one wants hundreds of red bodies littering the streets, we're communicating a genuine challenge here that won't apply in space combat."

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not that I think the specific challenge will apply, it's that it's - highly unusual that it's entirely luck whether you end up killing hundreds or thousands of your people. And there are obvious measures a state highly motivated to avoid that could take, and I do think the attitude of total helplessness about it reflects poor institutional problem-solving skills."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I mean, we could refrain from having police respond at all to red uprisings but that hardly seems like an improvement. My understanding is that Andalites don't have similar instincts about pollution, but..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We have instincts about different things. Do you not have nonlethal means of crowd control?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"By and large they require those controlling the crowd to touch the people they're controlling at some stage. Police reds beyond the autopsy ones have actually been tried but they're consistently untrustworthy."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Oh, interesting. Untrustworthy how?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

"...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?"

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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).

Permalink Mark Unread

The Ceneish ambassador whisks them away home.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

Sure.

Permalink Mark Unread

"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."

Permalink Mark Unread

- 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.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

She would be delighted to take them up on that.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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."

Permalink Mark Unread

Hmmmm an online feedback form seems harmless.

Permalink Mark Unread

Online feedback form.

Permalink Mark Unread

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

Permalink Mark Unread

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. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...President Icalena is a dork.

Uh. This one neighborhood is running out of red dye and hasn't got a straight answer about when to expect more and it is super illegal for them not to dye if they don't have naturally obviously red. Boo social workers. No except this one this one place likes theirs she brings them presents and tells them when the mean cops are on certain beats.

Permalink Mark Unread

She tells Cene that this district is running out of red dye, what's the problem there?

Permalink Mark Unread

Some issue with the purple deliveryperson probably.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, since it's super important that reds look red maybe there should be multiple delivery options. What do they think of a package chute so reds can order things from normal online retailers and they can be dropped off into the chute without the delivery person having to decontaminate? 

Permalink Mark Unread

Normal online retailers don't actually sell red dye but that sounds great for other reasons!

Permalink Mark Unread

Oh good. Does someone want to follow up on setting that up while she tries to figure out their dye shortage?

Permalink Mark Unread

...sure, they can have chutes. How big do the chutes need to be?

Permalink Mark Unread

Seems like if they're sizable then more stuff can get ordered that way and fewer people have to interact with the reds.

Permalink Mark Unread

Yes but there's "Assemble furniture boxes" and "enormous novelty stuffed animals".

Permalink Mark Unread

She bets the reds won't order enormous novelty stuffed animals and does not think the chutes need to be sized for that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Okay, they can be big enough for a boxed sofa. They get underway on that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Who's supposed to deliver the dye in that neighborhood and what's the holdup?

Permalink Mark Unread

There's this one purple who supplies nonfood things to their stores. She just keeps forgetting.

Permalink Mark Unread

Does purple have a location or contact information.

Permalink Mark Unread

She has a home address.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's a little bit of a rude thing to do to someone. Maybe if she forgets again.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Yup.

Permalink Mark Unread

Isel stops by her house.

Permalink Mark Unread

She lives with her husband's parents and has a one-year-old.

Permalink Mark Unread

The dye thing is a real problem, can Isel help her out any with getting that delivered reliably?

Permalink Mark Unread

What? Why does it matter if they can dye their hair shades of red they think are prettier?

Permalink Mark Unread

...no, see, lots of them don't have red hair naturally, or have a shade that could be mistaken for purple or orange. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...but they're reds. They don't even interbreed with other castes so it's not like her yellow-haired great great grandma.

Permalink Mark Unread

Has she seen pictures of Mioleens Isel can show her some.

Permalink Mark Unread

She figured they were people who moved there or something.

Permalink Mark Unread

Nope. Reds. Why's the dye so hard to remember?

Permalink Mark Unread

She forgot it one time and then they kept being assholes about it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Because it's the law and they want to be able to follow it.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well she didn't KNOW that.

Permalink Mark Unread

Isel is glad it's cleared up now.

Permalink Mark Unread

Why is a blue with an accent doing this.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's Anitami and the aliens in Anitami custody are giving starships to countries they're impressed with and Cene asked her to come help fix up some stuff to impress the aliens. 

Permalink Mark Unread

...what does that have to do with dye for reds.

Permalink Mark Unread

One of the things aliens are impressed by is reds being handled appropriately, which includes getting their supplies delivered so they can dye themselves properly. No one wants to worry about reds who don't look red.

Permalink Mark Unread

Why is that impressive to aliens?

Permalink Mark Unread

Well, it's objectively kind of embarrassing to have reds with other hair colors, isn't it.

Permalink Mark Unread

...to aliens? The aliens don't even have hair.

Permalink Mark Unread

They still get the concept of 'we made a law that reds have to have red hair and then we didn't give them any red hair dye for months'.

Permalink Mark Unread

Well fine next delivery will include some.

Permalink Mark Unread

She's so glad.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

Next delivery includes some and the reds complain that it's all bright scarlet and some of them wanted darker or lighter or something.

Permalink Mark Unread

Does the store mind firing their supplier and hiring a different one.

Permalink Mark Unread

They can't do that themselves but if it happened somehow that'd be great.

Permalink Mark Unread

...why can't they do that themselves?

Permalink Mark Unread

...they aren't authorized to pick their own social workers or suppliers or anything they just show up and they have to pay them for the stuff.

Permalink Mark Unread

She asks her diplomatic contacts who she should talk to to get a supplier fired.

Permalink Mark Unread

Uh, there's a centralized distributor coordinator.

Permalink Mark Unread

She talks to the centralized distributor coordinator.

Permalink Mark Unread

The personnel lady wants to know what's wrong with that deliveryperson?

Permalink Mark Unread

"'Forgot' deliveries for months, causing a bunch of problems, and when talked to about that went for an obnoxious malicious-compliance thing. If I end up having to personally bring a concern to some purple's attention they had better do better than the bare minimum from there forward, you know?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't really hold with that kind of casteist nonsense. You have your jobs and purples have theirs but that's no call to assume that all purples should jump when you snap your fingers. You're not even from Cene."

Permalink Mark Unread

"My role here is as a consultant to help Cene check some boxes the aliens want handled for starship access. This purple is terrible at her job - appallingly bad at her job - and I assure you I would aggressively pursue a blue that bad at their job too. Are you having trouble finding suppliers who can actually deliver supplies?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It's not a popular job posting. It's only I don't like the some purple phrasing, I don't think you'd talk that way about a blue."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Not in public, yeah, that's fair. I'm sorry. I am trying to get you starships and Cene understandably doesn't want a whole Anitami team running around taking space on your trains so I have been doing all the following up on things personally. If I follow up on a supply problem that was right near turning into a big national embarrassment and what's going on is the supplier forgot for several months, and can't get it right even once she knows it's a box we've got to check for starships -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"I can pay someone overtime to cover her area while we look for a replacement."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Thank you. How much does that come to -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Depends how long it takes. About a thousand southies a week."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I'll cover a month."

Permalink Mark Unread

"- goodness. Thank you."

Permalink Mark Unread

She sends her the money. "Not fair to tell people it's important if I'm not the one who ends up dipping into the kid's account, is it. I do appreciate it."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Where do I return the remainder if it takes less than a month?"

Permalink Mark Unread

She gives her her account ID.

Permalink Mark Unread

The personnel manager makes a note.

Permalink Mark Unread

She lets the reds know that there will be a new delivery person.

Permalink Mark Unread

That's good.

Permalink Mark Unread

Uh huh. Cene maybe wants to transition, she welcomes comments.

Permalink Mark Unread

AAAAAAAAAAH.

Permalink Mark Unread

They want to do it without anyone dying so they can impress the aliens.

Permalink Mark Unread

...aahh?

Uh, they have a lot of people who like seasons a whole heckuva lot. Anitam's thing was nice.

Permalink Mark Unread

She will see what she can do. 

 

How do people in Cene feel about decontaminating and integrating their reds like Anitam and Tapa.

Permalink Mark Unread

The thing where Anitam lets them be blue is weird. Also that would be very expensive.

Permalink Mark Unread

Gets them starships. And they don't have to let them be blue though Anitam's have been model blues.

Permalink Mark Unread

Do they have to let them be green?

Permalink Mark Unread

"Could make them take the university entrance exams. Maybe a token handful will pass, you get the symbolic effect without most people knowing one."

Permalink Mark Unread

Can they make the reds pay for it.

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you're not letting them be blue you can maybe auction the land and pay for it with that. If you run a competitive auction it'll be a lot of money."

Permalink Mark Unread

"But will it be enough?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Depends how well you plan the auction, at least in part. You get starships out of it, I bet you can find the difference."

Permalink Mark Unread

"We'd really appreciate a clear, definite relationship between the two things."

Permalink Mark Unread

Isel does nonviolent red transitions. She can testify to anyone who cares that she thinks pulling off a nonviolent red transition is an impressive show of institutional flexibility and competence. She is not an alien diplomat.

Permalink Mark Unread

Somebody goes to ask the aliens.

Permalink Mark Unread

He has in fact heard that pulling off a successful red transition is quite an institutional competence thing! And it makes them less of a PR liability, always appreciated. He feels like if he tried to draft an agreement conditional on peaceful transition with Cene he will end up arbitrating endless disputes about whether this-or-that catastrophe was their fault or just inevitable but broadly if they pull it off, yes, sure, Andalite alliance for you.

Permalink Mark Unread

 

How sure is Isel that she can shepherd the reds without them getting violent provided Cene is willing to decontaminate them and let them be clean castes (not blue, green if they pass exams).

Permalink Mark Unread

"They need to believe that if you were going to kill them I'd know. That was easy at home, I had important family and I achieved some things that were obviously only achievable given significant string-pulling ability so when I said 'you're safe as long as you don't riot' that settled it. Here I don't have string-pulling ability, I can only do things to establish credibility insofar as someone else is willing to put up the political capital. If you want a guarantee then I need to be able to arrange arresting people who murder them and quietly recompensing them losses and selecting who gets decontaminated first. If I have that much, yep, they'll stay in line."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Why does it matter who gets decontaminated first?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"First ones need to be exemplary. People with strong suitability for the caste they're going to be sorted as, who'll find employment quickly and be diligent and not commit any crimes and not slip up and remind anyone they're ex-red. Helps with establishing public buy-in: you've done some, and no one has had to think about them, and everyone is really excited about never having to think about any reds."

Permalink Mark Unread

"So you're saying even if we like the initial results it'll get worse."

Permalink Mark Unread

"If you were expecting a perfect employment rate and a crime rate of zero then you'll be disappointed eventually, but I still think it makes more sense to have the first cohort be highly employable meticulously law-abiding citizens than to have it be a random sample."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Can you elaborate on 'arresting people who murder them' -"

Permalink Mark Unread

"Sure! So Anitam had someone find out his coworker was ex-red and drown her in a hot tub in their workplace. We hung him and that was the end of it. Tapa had someone put an ex-red bakery worker through a plate glass window when he noticed an eyebrow root showing. They went, you know, kind of an understandable reaction even if they are clean, gave the guy a ticket. So then the guy started stalking ex-reds, tracked one down and broke into her apartment and tried to kill her, she fought back and killed him, his family burned down the entire red district, disrupting essential services for an entire city. Once they're clean, if people try to kill them you've got to enforce the law, or your citizens will lose confidence that you actually believe they're clean. There's some room for leniency - it'd have been enough for Tapa's lunatic to spend a year in jail - but if I can't do that then I expect some idiot will go around hunting down ex-reds or actual reds and then your reds will riot. Tapa's didn't, but Tapa got really lucky and also expended tons of resources and money shuffling all their reds and enforcing curfews and jamming their internet and heightening security. Sending the one guy to jail would have saved his life and saved them tens of millions."

Permalink Mark Unread

Faces are made.

Permalink Mark Unread

"Were you under the impression that you were going to be able to get credit with the aliens with how you did something tremendously difficult and demanding of clear institutional vision and discipline and competence without actually doing anything difficult and demanding of vision and discipline and competence?"

Permalink Mark Unread

"It'll play really badly with everyone else."

Permalink Mark Unread

"Yep. Maybe ask the aliens for some shiny non-starship toys to distract the populace with in the meantime."

Permalink Mark Unread

"What have they got? We got stun weapon plans, the greys'll like that, enough to make up for having to switch to nonlethals, but everyone else..."

Permalink Mark Unread

"I don't know. Faster computers, faster internet, everybody likes faster internet. Maybe they can improve the trains despite I think not even having trains where they're from. They're decades ahead of us, I'm sure there're lots of things even if none of them matter the way planets do. - also Anitam suppressed the news stories, about violence against ex-reds, it might be worth doing that."

Permalink Mark Unread

They mutter and ask the aliens about that.

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...morph? Would their populace be excited about morph? It's pretty useful and may as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, in local idiom.

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...wait, is that not just something they can do because they're aliens?

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Nah it's technology. Very advanced technology, way more impressive than the starships. Lots of people have starships but only Andalites have morph.

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Morph would be pretty cool!

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If they want to screen ten people for responsibility with morph (it, uh, makes assassinations rather trivial, and might not be wise to hand out like candy) he'll go ahead and make them morph-capable.

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It seems like it probably makes assassinations less trivial if you don't have a lethal weapon growing out of your butt but sure they'll screen people. Buncha greens, one President's granddaughter.

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They can acquire species with lethal weapons, that being how morph works.

 

 

He gets the cube and enters an excruciatingly long series of passcodes (none of which matter) and then lets them touch it, which does.

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And they go home and fly around and study creatures and publish interesting papers and it's all very exciting.

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Yay. How're the delivery chutes coming along?

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They're all set up! The reds like 'em.

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Cene is maybe considering sending them to Anitam for decontamination. Can community leaders maybe start thinking about who'd be a good first cohort of people to do this with. Qualifications for a job once they're clean are a plus, law-abiding and zero chance of ending up in the news for anything are absolute musts.

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Are they allowed to be any caste?

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Greens need to pass university entrance exams and no blues.

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Are they likely to budge on the blues thing, or should people whose first choice would be blue but can meet the requirements for exemplary first batch as something else go ahead and be in the first batch?

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She would not bet on them budging on the blues thing. 

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How much not.

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If there's some reason it's really important rather than just being nice because being blue is nice, she can go back and raise it again, but she kind of figures she has limited amounts she can pester them and was going to save it for not-overreacting-to-problems and arresting-people-who-hurt-them stuff.

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Some people really want it but mostly for personal life satisfaction reasons not because they were planning to do specific accomplishmenty things.

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She'll save it. 

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Nertel writes Matirin asking what happens if you just stay in morph forever. He explains that you get stuck. She asks what the bodies are assembled from. He says they're assembled from matter in z-space.

 

She writes that she thinks reds who morph not-red and stay that way until they are stuck really ought to be clean, being entirely made out of clean matter.

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The Cene morphers and some other people consider this. It does not seem unreasonable.

Some reds are upset about the idea of losing their genes and having children who are instead related to whoever they morph and not being related to their families any more. Others think the prospect of a two-hour decontamination procedure is great.

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Maybe Matirin could be asked about the prospect of a blended morph that is still you but, because of being made out of clean matter, clean, and with the hair appropriate to their new caste?

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They're not going to get that on the first try but it's absolutely a thing that's possible in principle.

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People are uncertain about still-contaminated reds spending periods of time with morph power and not being stuck.

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In case they try to morph insects and fly away or something? It would not be hard to kill them if they grew four legs and giant fragmented eyes and the whole thing could be done in a sealed building so they couldn't get very far. 

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Hrmmmmm. And if it would take expertise to accomplish the thing, how do they know if a red has morphed with unclean matter as opposed to all new material.

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...it would be really weird if any of the matter in z-space were unclean, because in z-space matter is just kind of an evenly distributed film of atoms. If you didn't make them change their hair color there could conceivably be confusion about whether they'd morphed at all.

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But they're using their original body as a template. That won't mean that they're partially demorphed, hair morphed?

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That takes years and years of practice but perhaps the best way to eliminate uncertainty would be to dip them in dye or something before they morph.

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Hmmm yes all right.

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Cene has to be really pleased that now it's free!

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Well, it will still need processing staff and dye and things, but yep, as long as they can borrow the box and the box won't be damaged by being washed off after!

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The box would be very hard to damage. It won't work for them, though, Matirin is presently the only person keyed to it with a contingency Andalite should something happen to him.

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...well then this is a complete nonstarter.

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...why?

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Because they have a lot of reds and marching them all by him personally after hauling them all the way to Anitam is probably presuming a bit much on Anitam's willingness to let Cene visit their aliens. Right?

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Anitam does not want Cene's reds but miiiight let Cene have Matirin for decontamination purposes if Matirin'll give them morph, he'll ask the council.

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That would be very nice of him. What are the prospects for using this for small children and pregnant people, will they need to time relative to season carefully?

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Should not be used on pregnant people (it's safe for them to morph, but when they get stuck they'll lose the baby.) Sufficiently small children might not be able to concentrate on a morph properly. 

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How small?

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...he does not know very much about the developmental stages of Amentan children.

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What are some tasks of comparable difficulty?

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Uh, solving a twenty-piece puzzle, doing simple math problems while distracted for example by being in the water with someone splashing you, performing a short musical piece in front of an audience.

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The government of Cene would like Isel to sell reds on no child credits next spring so that their kids can all decontaminate by morph in one shot.

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Isel bets they'll be sold if she can also tell them that since the money doesn't need to be spent on decontamination they can keep all the property they own.

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...um.

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Cene is totally still coming out ahead since the land sales weren't going to fully cover decontamination costs. And they'll be hard to sell on it otherwise, can you imagine all the families who were saving up to finally have a desperately wanted baby come spring?

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It's never really occurred to them to think of reds in those terms to be honest.

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Yeah that's why they literally flew in a consultant on it. 

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She's been very helpful. They can't own that much individually, though, since they're not going to be blue.

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They can divvy it up! ...though if some Cene blue wanted to own big chunks of Cene's major cities she has an idea and they could maybe come talk to her.

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A few people express interest.

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Are they men or women it matters.

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Some of both?

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All right. Her recommendation is that they decide exactly what genes they'd want their future spouse and source of giant chunks of downtown to have, and then she finds them a suitable candidate and arranges internally among the reds for that suitable candidate to in fact have giant chunks of downtown. People who are horrified can leave now, the rest is details about how to pull that off if anyone wants it.

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Married ones, horrified ones, and the men who in Cene can't pass on their caste leave, though one sends a grandkid.

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If any of the unmarried men seem awfully disappointed and want to agitate for maybe allowing a couple people to blue as long as they pick perfectly blue genes, they could maybe do that!!

 

Everyone else can have a yellow or green spouse, please give Isel spousal desiderata so she can find rich property-owners to match them with.

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They do that. One guy is maybe a little disappointed but doesn't really have the pull.

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And Isel writes the reds.

So, Cene agreed on using morphing to decontaminate you into mostly exactly your current bodies but with caste-appropriate hair. Bad news first: they want no babies this spring since pregnant people and small kids can't get decontaminated that way. Then the good news: Got them to agree that since this costs them practically nothing they can't recoup the costs by stealing all your land, so it's yours. If people still wanna be blue, I couldn't quite swing it but I can arrange for you to marry blue and have blue kids, here's the deal -

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...they want to be able to put money down for a red credit and get a credit for their new caste free, if they are going to all have to skip a spring.

Some people are still interested in being blue under these conditions if their possible wives are not awful. One guy's second choice is orange, is that still viable.

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She can ask if any blues are okay marrying orange but honestly they might not be she doesn't know any blues who've married orange.

 

She asks Cene about letting them carry a credit over.

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Outrageous. Red credits are dirt cheap and rumor has it some of them will be having blue children.

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Yeah, that's fair. No carrying credits over. Here are potential spouses and her subjective impressions of them. Did any of them seem like they might put up with an orange spouse.

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No not really.

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Sorry orange guy people who want to be blue should really aim to test into green and if they can't manage that definitely need to go yellow.

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He'll try for green and blue girl #3.

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Great. Has Matirin managed to bribe Anitam into letting him leave.

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It helps that they're still mostly pretending they're not holding him prisoner in the first place. Would Anitam like some tech in exchange for facilitating Cene's rapid-fire decontamination.

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Are they going to want to do this with every country.

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It seems pretty convenient and then the world won't have any more reds in it which he takes it will delight everybody.

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...Anitam will take the tech. They're working on turning over manufacturing capacity to ships but they can spare some for other stuff.

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Anitam can get lectures on the translation and computer interface chips! And some people screened for morph. 

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Aitim drops by. "Can I have morph? As, ah, being-you-in-a-sense privileges?"

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<Yes.>

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Oh good he appreciates it so much. He touches Matirin and then copies him. 

 

<I have telepathy in this form, right?>

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<Yes. What is it?>

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<That obvious?>

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<Very obvious. What is it.>

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<I want to get a couple people morph. I can't think how to sneak them in, or your box out, but ->

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<Red and pretending?>

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<Yeah.>

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<Perhaps your family could be invited here to meet their counterparts?>

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<Perfect. Thank you.>

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Matirin extends his alt-family an invitation to come meet their counterparts. They should bring food. Andalites are really pleased about food.

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"It is so weird to think about a you who has no mouth," Peka says, packing berries.

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"He must be so unhappy! The Telkam is happier. Think he's the only one. Not that Aitim would be an incompetent general but it just doesn't really seem his thing."

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"Not really. Hmmmm I could bring the bonbons but they're Ana's favorites."

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"Andalites are not reputed to be discriminating in their enjoyment of food. Leave Ana's bonbons."

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She leaves the bonbons.

Everyone congregates for a rather expanded family dinner!

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Andalites morph Amentan and are So. Happy. About Food. Food! Food! Food!!

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"Your species is great!!!"

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"They're all right. Food, though - food is great. Your foodmakers will be deservedly renowned the galaxy over."

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"Yep, saving interspecies relations, very purple," says Isama.

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"I forget, which one's purple?"

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"The one with the most people," she says. "Farming, transport, cooking, basically everything involved in the food supply chain."

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" - yep okay that's the best one - why haven't we met any except you -"

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"I think they do not really believe their own assertions about the valued status of all their castes."

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" - sometimes we sorta believe it."

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"Kantil believes it, anyhow. We're the ones who could make it fine on our own, anybody else'd be fucked."

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Kantil leans against her.

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"The reds are pretty much making it on their own! - with some help from manufacturing industry, though, I suppose."

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"And greens played a very essential role in their societal development."

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"The essential role of being more trouble than it was worth to murder!"

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"The Mioleen are doing a pretty good job of picking everything up but they needed purple products to get past day one," Isama says.

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"It's a very interesting way to structure a society."

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"I'm not surprised it's not universal but I'm surprised it's so rare. Is the Andalite - male/female thing - common?"

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"Not our specific division but gender serving that social function is pretty common among species that bear live young and nearly universal among ones with substantial physiological and psychological differences among the sexes. And not everyone has sexes at all, let alone two of them, but if one does they probably have at least a mild form."

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"I wonder why we don't! We do bear live young. I remember, I was there." She pats Ana.

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"Andalites have to walk within an hour or so of being born, I wonder if that makes our pregnancies more physically demanding."

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"Humans have a vaguely Amentan body plan and I think they have gender roles, though."

        "Yes," Ajoran says. "They have shorter lives than Amentans and have kids spaced much closer, though, such that a female was pregnant or nursing for most of her adulthood until they invented birth control, that'd make a difference."

"I bet it would - no reason to educate someone who's never really going to enter the workforce - how unpleasant, though -"

       "Well, I think they got over it when they invented birth control."

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"What's likely to happen to the humans since you didn't get there -"

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"We'll send a followup fleet - when depends on when we have the resources - it's less likely they'll be able to prevent Yeerks from claiming the planet and likelier they'll resort to destroying it."

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"Do we change that?"

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"I'd like to, but realistically unless we have ships rolling off factory lines inside a year it's likely to be too late to protect the humans. Can free some and give them their planet back but - I'd much rather it never have happened - we're just stretched too thin -"

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"But we'll change that?"

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"You'll be a tremendous asset. Just perhaps not in time for Earth specifically. Though who knows, the Yeerks could encounter complications."

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"Like what?"

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"Ecosystem and contamination things come up - maybe there's an Earth mold that's really aggressive and that Yeerks have the Yeerk equivalent of an autoimmune response to. Maybe Earth has a solar flare - Yeerks're vulnerable to that - maybe their leadership goes with a stealth approach and accordingly a slow one, to avoid losing all five billion hosts by triggering a nuclear war. Earth governments can't order their militaries to drag their populations in for infestation, I think if I were a Yeerk Visser I could have Amenta inside a season but Earth's trickier."

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"How would you get Amenta?" asks Isama.

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"Pick a country where the leaders live in private homes - Anitam works. Get a couple random grey hosts and have them drop in on your ruling council's housekeepers and gardeners and cooks, investigating a noise complaint. Have the housekeepers arrange to have a bathroom or private pool or storage room in the council's houses be a Yeerk pool. Take the council. Keep a thousand Yeerks in the pool and have them invite essential people over for house parties. Those people can take Yeerks home, get their own staff, set up a pool themselves. Once you have enough blues, which sounds like it'd be a matter of a month or two of dinner parties, order construction of a bunch of proper Yeerk pools with good security. Yeerks breed outrageously fast when they want to, you could start with a couple hundred and have a couple million shortly. Rotate the greys through. Have them round everyone else up."

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"...ah-huh. Wow. I'm not even sure how you fix any of that, getting blues to stop having dinner parties is probably like... getting purples to stop having park fests or whatever."

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"Yes. I did try to describe to them some appropriate precautions but there are unavoidably a lot of tradeoffs involved in making your society resilient against Yeerk infestation."

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"Isn't there some way of checking? Are Yeerks, I don't know, heavy, could you distinguish between 'has a Yeerk' and 'large breakfast', or for that matter 'lacks a Yeerk' and 'skipped breakfast'."

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"They show up on brain scans but weighing people wouldn't do it."

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"Why's Earth more resilient -"

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"In most Earth societies it'd be much less feasible to conduct mass arrests - it'd attract dramatically more media and international scrutiny, there are far fewer explanations that'd be considered sufficient - we are largely discussing societies where you cannot enter someone's home without an order from a judge and where police constitute an order of magnitude smaller a share of the population than greys do here -" says Ajoran.

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"Most greys aren't cops, it would be a little weird to be giving strippers guns and sending them to arrest people," Peka points out.

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"The kind of weird where you'd refuse to go along with them, though?"

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"I mean, I'd probably go along with a yellow who showed up and looked like they'd otherwise shoot me, so I'm not sure what the proportion of greys has to do with it!"

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"We don't have that many guns. Enough to do sweeping mass arrests but not enough to just hand every grey one or anything. The problem is that you don't really want to cripple your own ability to do mass arrests, could kind of need that -"

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"Or at least don't want to make it obvious that if it were needed it wouldn't happen."

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" - we do not maintain at home the capacity to conduct sweeping mass arrests and I am not sure under what circumstances we'd need to."

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"Attempted coup, war that's both desperate and has a sizable faction against it - it's not likely but it could be quite sudden, if - I don't know- someone with important blue family shot one of our ex-reds on camera -"

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"Ah."

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"Are people with important blue family shooting folks all the time and I'm not hearing about it because it disappears?" wonders Isama.

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"That one I would disappear but no, blue criminal's mostly people who have heard it all and are hard to buy and blues have a very low violent crime rate. White-collar nonsense gets covered up some. Treason prosecutions are pretty political."

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"In our society it would be an appalling mortal insult to try to bribe a judge."

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"That sounds nice but I've no idea how to get there from here."

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"I wonder if people try to bribe Shasali."

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"Does she strike you as very bribable?"

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"I don't really know what that looks like!"

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"I suppose if you're good at it it doesn't really look like anything. - there's leaning on a judge to keep something in mind during sentencing, everyone does that and it hardly even counts."

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"I just had a price sheet, back when I was working, it was very clearly itemized, I learned to say 'ooh that'll be an extra fifty' very flirtily."

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"I'm sure Shasali doesn't take bribes for money."

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"This really seems dreadful for deterring crimes!"

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"It's not great but you can't exactly just order people to stop. They might get less overt about it, maybe."

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"Besides, if they just did whatever they thought was right then ones who thought it was right to let off people who were undermining the ex-red thing wouldn't have to do whatever Aitim told them to."

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"I don't have that much leverage. Litif was mostly doing that, before she retired, and I think more out of general fondness for law and order than any specific interest in our social experiment."

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Giggle.

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Ladah waits until Alien Dad is done swooning over a melon slice to ask, "Do you have the thing Dad has where reading is annoying?"

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" - I required some chip adjustments but we got them done very discreetly -"

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" - what, it's, like, a secret?"

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"Well, people shouldn't have to think about it.

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" - about the existence of dyslexic people?"

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" - yes?"

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"...why?" asks Ladah.

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" - do you not -"

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"They do not."

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"Well I dunno how to explain it."

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"If there's something wrong with someone - can't read, walks or talks funny, injured irrecoverably somehow, infirm, funny - then it's just horribly unpleasant to be reminded of them and everyone else'll be on edge in their presence and the decent thing to do if you can't fix it is to not bother people."

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- Isama slaps him. And immediately looks sort of appalled at herself.

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- he starts to demorph. Matirin puts a hand on his shoulder and he stops. 

 

"We," he says when he has a mouth back, "haven't given you a hard time about obsessively loathing your sanitation workers."

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"You don't get to insult my family because our species also has an irrational and horribly hurtful aversion to some of its people."

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"And we're working on fixing that!"

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"We work very hard on curing all manner of illness and disability!"

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"My sister was real excited about aliens," Isama mutters.

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"Not something your technology can fix," he says curtly to his alt. 

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Matirin sighs. 

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"I'm sorry I slapped you," Isama adds after a moment.

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"Are you? Why?"

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"It's not a responsible way of dealing with vile things people say."

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Andalites are maybe having a private thought-speak conversation. 

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"It would have been much more responsible to loudly announce that her name is Klimati and she almost came with me today but had a prior commitment going out to a public place with a friend of hers," says Isama loudly.

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"And if apparently no one minds then I suppose that's fine and well."

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"It's a good thing I didn't bring her along you would have broken her fucking heart -"

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"It is a good thing you didn't bring her along, yes."

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Scowl.

"I'm leaving."

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"It was nice meeting you."

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She makes a rude gesture at the Andalites generally and stomps out.

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Sigh.

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"Is that actually what the thing about reds looks like to aliens," wonders Katin.

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"Yep."

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"Huh." Pause. "If your disabled people are lonely they could come live with us."

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"I don't know if they'd want to - and there really aren't many, we work very hard on fixing things - but I'll see if there's a discreet way to let people know it's an option."

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"I have -" - pause. "Oh, uh, not talking about it."

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Sigh.

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"- I mean, not me personally, the next word was 'friends'. Sorry."

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"Perhaps some day everyone can live on a planet where no one finds it viscerally upsetting to be in the same room as them."

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"That'd be nice."

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"Your taboo is stupid. I think ours is too, so I'm allowed to say that. Reds don't think reds are gross, I bet if Andalites weren't raised thinking that an Andalite with a limp is the worst thing they've ever heard of then they wouldn't. You could end it in one generation if you wanted to."

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"I will attempt that with the copious leverage and political influence one accumulates on trial for sharing military secrets."

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"I guess Andalites wouldn't want to move here," says Ladah, "because there aren't a lot of fields?"

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"Not a lot of fields, not a lot of space - we get claustrophobic, soldiers have desensitization training but it's rather horrible and most disabled Andalites wouldn't have had it - we do better around lots of other Andalites, there's a sort of - background space of shared thoughts which it's unpleasant to be extendedly separate from - your internet and media are less appealing to our sensibilities -"

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"Do you let them in on the shared thought thing?" says Katin. "That doesn't mean thinking about them?"

"What are your sensibilities?" wonders Ladah.

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"Accessing communal thoughts is not like interacting directly with someone. When we used to shun people for crimes you'd cut them out but that'd be for murder or something, and specifically as a punishment rather than as an accommodation of everyone else. Andalite media features Andalites and less conflict driven by trying to afford children and less conflict driven by - dishonesty and scheming and corruption - you'd never have an Andalite protagonist who broke their word - there's tail-dueling and body language that's actually legible to us and technologies we're familiar with and other species that actually exist -"

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"I mean, some of that will catch up once we've met more people. And have more space so kids are less expensive."

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"Then we might find your media more relatable!"

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"You lied about not knowing FTL."

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"That's not the same as breaking your word. If you'd asked me to swear to it I'd have been stuck."

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"Is that how to keep the judges honest, just establish that the social penalties for having demonstrably broken your word ever in any context are unbearable and then have people pledge to do their jobs uninfluenced -"

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"The causation might run the other way but that's part of the picture."

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"That seems really weird, you can't have two things you never do if they might bump into each other."

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"- I mean, the most honorable, if fairly useless, course of action would be to truthfully tell Anitam that we could help them but are forbidden from so doing and will turn off our translators if the topic is raised again. You shouldn't arrange your obligations such that they compete."

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"Everybody would've been sooooo mad."

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"Whereas 'do your soldiers know how to build their ships?' would've been wholly convincing if someone hadn't noticed the correspondences and gone 'wait one second, there is not much chance that Kefin as an alien would not know how to build a starship starting if necessary from rocks and charcoal.'"

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Giggle. "It's really weird that you look like them!"

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"It is really really weird."

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"You need to learn to sing!" she tells the Andalite version of her husband.

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"I tried," Macarath says. "It was very confusing. Perhaps with practice it becomes less so."

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"Well, what do you do instead? I wanna hear."

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"Perhaps you and Makel can stay after dinner," Matirin says cheerfully. <And the children, if they need to be morphed-magically-acceptable also.>

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"Ladah is musical too. Piano."

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"Ladah is welcome also!"

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"There isn't a piano here," Ladah says.

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"I think Peka thought you'd be interested in our music."

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"I guess. Dad are we staying -"

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" - yeah, let's."

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"Okay."

"Does singing sound pretty to Andalites?" wonders Peka.

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"It sounds interesting but I doubt we're getting the full experience."

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Giggle.

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And after dinner they can stay and Macarath can set up the computer to play Andalite instrumental compositions and he can go get the box.

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"Ooh, pretty."

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He comes back! With box! "All right, who wants to be morph-capable."

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"- I assume it's not really for -"

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"Not really but I don't mind if you have it."

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"Why didn't you bring it when everybody was here?" asks Ladah.

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"Aitim requested I give people of potentially dangerous-to-them heritage the means to fix it. The rest of them should be fine and in some cases would have a hard time resisting using it."

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Ladah is confused.

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"He doesn't know. I didn't actually realize Peka knew - I smuggled you out of Olvala because you needed a hospital very badly. The paintings were your mom's, and everything, but she was red."

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"Makel told me but it was kind of obvious from the timing."

"I - but -" says Ladah.

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"Sorry, if I'd gotten a heads-up I'd have explained in private. You're fine, and all the paperwork is airtight, even if someone were looking very closely they'd never learn, so I wasn't afraid for you. But now that it's super convenient it's good you can have the choice if you want."

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"What about my grandfather -"

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"He's really your grandfather. Went through decontamination. Your mother really died giving birth to you - your grandmother really did die the same day in the violence over the expulsion of reds from Olvala, just -"

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"Oh," says Ladah softly.

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Hug.

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"Can you explain it real carefully for Ana -"

"Am I gonna turn into a birdy," says Ana.

"- no we're doing something else. We're going to make it so we don't have to - wash your hair so much."

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"You can't acquire yourself by touching your own arm, it's not configured for that, I think Cene's planning a blood sample. If she wants it white she needs someone with white to acquire - if she wants green then same thing -"

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"I did not plan ahead for that part. - There's also my sister but she didn't come today she doesn't usually come to these sort of things."

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"Well, if she can manufacture an excuse to drop by that'd be great. I can give you morph now and you can do the rest at home with no time pressure and no chance the soldiers will bother us - they don't frequently or anything but they haven't tried to leave the impression they never would -"

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Nod. "How does it work exactly?"

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"It's a very intuitive interface. Touch someone and concentrate and they'll get a bit drowsy for a few minutes and then you can morph them by concentrating on it for a few minutes. It looks weird - less so if you're shifting among Amentan forms - but it's painless. Andalites can do three, maybe four a day before we get exhausted but the Cene Amentans who got it reported being able to do ten or so before the exhaustion caught up with them. Stay in a form longer than two hours and you're stuck. If you do animals you'll get very strong instincts off them, to avoid predators or to eat bugs or to defend your territory or whatever. To do a combination of forms just collect lots of samples of the right species and then focus on the morphological features you want the blend to have. Cene is dipping people in ink to make sure they fully morph but that's not actually necessary."

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"So to fix our hair we can't actually keep it," Peka sighs.

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"I mean, you could keep having morph and then if you're ever in an emergency situation where it is important to be able to demonstrate you got it fixed stick then, but I take it this is a horrible violation of the taboo on living a normal life while being descended from sanitation workers."

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"I mean - will our dye stick -"

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"If you morph with dyed hair it'll be the same color when you demorph, for the same reason you'll have the same haircut. It doesn't just go off genetic material or it would be fairly useless for impersonation, which was the original military use."

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"My hair grows in purple," says Ladah, "I'm not sure what good having secretly done this does - I guess when I want kids, but I'd have to be fixing stuff I can't see or check -"

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"It does alter DNA but I wouldn't know how to check if it altered it in a way that makes you unable to have red-haired kids."

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"I mean I could get a test but then there'd be a record trail."

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"This taboo sounds really very silly."

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"My hair's naturally like this too," says Katin, "my birth father's some orange guy."

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"If you'd like you could wait to settle on a form until there's information out of Cene about whether babies are being born with red hair."

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"...yeah. Even Ana, maybe," says Katin, "since once she's stuck she can't fix it, right?"

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"That's correct. And if you get morph now future experimentation won't require arranging to be alone with me."

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Nods all around.

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Morph.

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Morph all around.

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Would they like to acquire an Andalite.

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Sure why not.

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And then they can all go home.

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Peka comes by later with Apef.

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Who can also get morph.

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"Thank you," says Apef. "For this and the spaceships thing."

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<You are welcome.>

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Cene is ready to begin decontamination-by-morph, in stages. Families with small children will be waiting till their kids are old enough to get them right.

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Matirin goes to Cene. 

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They set him up in a nice botanical garden which is undergoing enough construction to be closed to visitors and not overmuch inconvenienced by an alien in the most open section, although for logistical reasons they wish to have him handle the cube for the reds in a different location.

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Yep, they agreed on something airtight for that so no one could morph and flee. He is appreciative of the botanical garden.

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They have an airtight building and valve-style construction so no one is ever in an environment the wrong level of cleanliness for them! They have volunteers of various hair colors who will be providing small blood samples for people who want those colors, batched appropriately.

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Then Matirin can activate the cube for reds who are sent by for activating!

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They shuffle in. The first batch is mostly single young people. They do not particularly know that they are supposed to conceal it from Matirin if they can't walk very well or something. (That one is going yellow.)

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Hopefully morph will fix that one. His tail might swish more but he certainly isn't going to comment.

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It does. The hair color donors are all healthy and people are borrowing from them as needed to turn up capable and younger and appropriately morphed.

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Oh good. And Cene's all set up to provide them with new artificial skin which isn't contaminated and so forth.

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Yup. Off they go into the world!

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Isel thinks personally hosting them would go over badly - she can't pick her staff, here - but she arranged them temporary housing and dropped off groceries.

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They appreciate it! They hit the job market. They take a while (some people seem oddly prejudiced against Anyone Looking For A Job Right Now) but eventually acquire paychecks and move out.

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Oh good. She writes the red community regular updates about the Cene government's attitude towards their plan (they are still committed to going through with it; they have mostly barely paid the results any attention; one of the blues who wants to own a big chunk of the capitol asked about their candidates for future fiancé, the facilities are adequate to decontaminate everyone, they are safe.)

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The arranged-marriage candidates interact online a bit, determine if they want to go through with it. Some of them do.

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Reds can get decontaminated.

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Cene is pretty big but the facility is very efficient.

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And he can read and review manufacturing progress and people-watch while he works so it's only a bit tedious.

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The people are very watchable! They chat and shepherd children and talk about what they want to do clean and make jokes at the expense of the replacements they've been training.

And then Cene is done.

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Congratulations Cene!

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They can send some people over to Anitam for a starships talk!

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Oh good!

There is some squabbling over who gets Isel next.

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They can send applications on which they answer 1) whether they're willing to prosecute crimes against new clean citizens 2) whether they're willing to let the real estate owners go blue 3) whether they will pay her quite a lot of money (this is an easier sell than 'pay her expenses in sorting out red problems while she's there', for some reason) and then she'll go to whoever looks best equipped to set her up for a successful transition. 

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Voa wins. (Tapa's fine with its previous process, which continues steadily and carefully.)

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Voan reds get an anonymous feedback form and an explanation that she's here to help get them all decontaminated and resettled at a pace that feels comfortable for them and keeps them safe.

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Gosh. That's very nice of her.

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.At this point she finds it personally embarrassing that everyone else is so bad at it. What do they need accomplished to be comfortable in the short run while they come up with a decontamination plan?

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They want similar things to most reds, although they seem on the whole to have higher baseline happiness.

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She writes Aitim that she thinks 'first kid free' would be a super popular and also pretty good policy. Maybe even 'first two kids free' what with space travel to anticipate. She solves miscellaneous problems. Is Voa copying Cene on the procedural side. Is Voa letting anyone go blue.

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They'd like to supplement with some conventional decontamination in parallel - they're big and morph is fast but the box is a bottleneck. They are cautiously willing to allow a small number of blues if and only if they can find blue families to marry into.

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Great. Are there current blues who'd like some real estate holdings and want to be matched to potential candidates for blueing?

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Responses include 1) only if they morph really hot, 2) maybe but if I do that my grandma will cut me off, 3) do I get a third child award for it somehow? 4) I bet reds are not jerks like blues of insert relevant sex are, they're probably very subservient and sweet, right, 5) yes but we won't be having any sex, 6) maybe if it's a LOT of real estate, 7) yes I have been secretly in love with my garbageman from afar for three seasons now what do you mean he's married already, 8) if they meet this exhausting list of criteria.

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Voan reds, if you wanna be blue here are your candidates.

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Wow, why are blues like that.

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In partial defense of blues most of them were probably just like 'no I don't think that'd work for me' and those ones she doesn't have messages from. But yeah. Sorry.

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A few of them manage to agree with relevant blues on what "really hot" means. Somebody takes up #5 on his offer. Somebody scrapes together enough space for #6. One person manages to pass a #8-style list.

Somebody tells Isel that she doesn't particularly mind being subservient and sweet per se if that's #4's kink but if that's code for 'also I am planning to smack around my wife and belittle her in front of people' is there an exit strategy? What if it turns into that post-kids?

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...Isel's friends who keep track of these things actually think pretty highly of Voa's court system but it's proooobably not actually good enough to handle 'Real Blue abusing Technical Blue Who's Kinda Red You Know'. If she keeps the land in her own name she would definitely not be impeded in leaving him and moving into it. Isel's also not going to vouch for Voan courts on handling of custody.

 

Is Aitim free to meet the guy and be uncannily good at guessing whether this'll be a problem.

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"I can visit you and go to parties. I, uh, confess confusion about how you pick your priorities, on the work you do -"

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" - it's - I guess maybe pushing invisibly a lot for some reform to red payment procedures helps them more, but it doesn't feel like having someone on your side the same way, and I think what actually reassures them isn't anything about objective material conditions, it's feeling like in whatever circles their fates are getting decided there's someone who is theirs. You go ahead and figure out policy adjustments to help them, my thing is working for them."

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"Sure, I'll come to parties in Voa."

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Oh good, can #4 be at a party while Aitim's here?

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Yeah, sure?

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She appreciates it so much!

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So does Aitim he just really likes meeting people, how's Voa, are their greys as madly excited about the war as Anitam's, they should be so excited about being red-free it improves the cities tremendously and he really recommends it.

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Their greys are really excited about getting to be everybody's heroes, taking planets from evil aliens to colonize! Being red-free will be great.

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Anitam's military has been flooded with applicants, it seems like every grey three or older wants to go be a space warrior. He has an ex-red cousin-in law, she's lovely, it's convenient how well they fit in once they're clean. 

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How's the marriage doing?

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They seem very happy! Little blue son and another planned for spring and maybe they'll get a third, what with all this planetary adventuring. Her husband adores her and everyone has been at least courteous.

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Good for them.

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"My poor grandfather isn't quite sure what to make of us, one grandson married ex-red and Isel doing - her thing - and my father run away playing green. But he was charmed by Shasali when he met her."

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"'My thing' is very generously remunerated these days, haven't you heard?"

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"I have. You are certainly less expensive than a riot and we're all grateful to avoid all that."

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"Voa's easy to work with, they weren't super tempted to try the massacres route in the first place and I don't have to worry some loon'll wake up in the middle of the night one day and go 'hmm why not though'."

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"We're pretty conservative for the most part," agrees #4, whose name is Orevo.

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It worked out so badly when they weren't! She doesn't say that.

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"And I think size helps - Anitam and Voa are both too large for massacres to really have been a solution even if I wanted my new relatives to have instead been murdered. Word would get out and you'd have utter chaos in places. Biyan and Orvara and Evalee were smaller."

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"And it still didn't really go very well."

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"And that. Poor Biyan. Evalee's bleeding financially but at least you can walk down the streets without fearing pollution."

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"Don't know how they're going to make up the cost though. Maybe Biyan'll pay them to help them out."

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"Biyan tried hiring Mioleens to do the work. Mioleens turned them down. I don't think Biyan could very credibly ensure their safety."

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"Or their cleanliness. I guess they'd know something about handling that without help though."

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"What astounds me is that the people involved still haven't resigned. If there are two obligations we have to our people, it's to keep them safe and clean, and you could hardly fail more catastrophically - how they expect to have public confidence -"

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"Also they tortured children."

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"They deny that."

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"Mmhmm."

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"It was a red who killed 'em, though. That's a little scary, you don't like to think about reds with the capacity to kill people. Ours're better at staying where they're put, I think."

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"I think killing someone who is being tortured is a - different sort of thing - than killing someone in anger, which is again different from killing in self-defense. But they're really peaceful long as self-defense isn't necessary, or there'd have been problems long ago."

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He grunts noncommittally.

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Isel does not think that somebody should marry him. She asks Aitim later if he agrees.

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" - I don't think he's on the hunt for a victim, but a bit of a controlling bent and some 'I made you I own you' stuff, yeah. would marry him to be blue, expect I could steer him away from it, but I wouldn't recommend it."

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"You want to be blue badly enough to marry some controlling guy who might get abusive?"

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"...obviously?"

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"Weird." She writes the red with this character assessment.

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...she's on the fence.

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I was gonna just say 'nope I don't like him don't do it' but my cousin said he'd do it in a heartbeat so I figured I'd just give you the facts to go off. Maybe you could arrange to get a vacation home in Anitam?

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I'm not mostly worried for myself, I just wouldn't want it to spill onto the kids.

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Blues don't really do much parenting. 

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Even this one?

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I don't know, I can ask him.

 

And she writes Orevo to say that a lovely red girl very timidly reached out to her to ask if she might be honored with an introduction which Isel is inclined to grant her but Isel wants to make sure they've compatible plans for children before she wastes his time, are they going to hire tutors or send the kids to school, does he mind if their mother being a very sweet and nurturing person does most of the caretaking...

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He's an alumnus of this one place, boarding school out east, he wants to send the kids there. Side tutors on vacations for whatever they're doing that the school doesn't cover. He'll want to trot the kids out at formal events and a red won't know how to teach them to behave.

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She forwards this.

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This gives the red in question his email address, and there is a brief flurry of messages which concludes with Orevo announcing their engagement to Isel for-her-information.

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She's so pleased for him. 

 

Okay, Voan reds, here is the Voan government's planned decontamination arrangement, there are engagements planned and they've negotiated with Anitam for Matirin and morph, how do people feel about training replacements.

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...okay.

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She gives the government the go-ahead. 

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They go ahead.

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And she frets but reds do not riot and government does not attempt to massacre them and there's transitional housing and she's waiting there to greet the first people out.

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They hug her!

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Hug!!

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Can she come somewhere else now? Calado, the place that sold Miolee the rainforest, wants her.

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Compensation? Blue ex-reds? Prosecuting crimes against new clean citizens?

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They will pay her. They would like to send all the cleaned up reds to Miolee, which used to be theirs to begin with.

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Miolee okay taking them?

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...they are committed to accepting clean reds who need a place to go but under ideal conditions they would get some money to home them with.

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She sends Calado a bill for that and for consultant services and then she'd be delighted to go visit them.

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That seems expensive.

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They can probably pay for it by auctioning the red districts!

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She's not going to insist that they have to let the reds keep them? Cene was originally going to do it that way too.

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Well, if the reds aren't staying at all then owning the land doesn't do much for them. They could, instead of paying for Mioleen resettlement, let the reds keep their property and then auction it themselves. That way they don't have to pay anything, just let the property holders make normal property sales.

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What if they didn't sell it though.

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...okay, what if Isel buys all the red districts now, and then sells them once the reds are moved out, so there aren't reds awkwardly owning clean land and then she can square with Miolee after she sells it to Calado developers.

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That suits Calado fine. It makes their reds nervous. She is informed that the senators are maniacs and will find some way to fuck it up at some point in that process.

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...good to know. Okay. Isel buys the land and insures it with a reputable foreign investment company which will give Calado hell if they start stealing from foreign blues. The insurance is expensive because apparently the actuaries also think poorly of Calado's senators but financial losses are not really the point here. Are the reds similarly concerned that the senators will find a way to fuck up the transition itself.

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Yep.

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Is Calado doing standard decontamination or Andalite decontamination.

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Standard. They don't want to have to wait for him to be done in Voa.

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Their own facilities? Can she check out the facilities?

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They were hoping for Miolee's. Since they're sending 'em to Miolee.

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How are they getting them there?

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They can drive to the border in their various unclean vehicles and walk the rest of the way it's right there.

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...can Miolee do trucks at the border with layered interiors for moving contaminated peoples?

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Uh yes as long as they don't all come at once.

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No, she thinks the right approach here is really small slivers so that at no point does the government have anything to gain from suddenly deciding to be stupid, not that this is guaranteed to stop them from being stupid. 

 

Since local reds are worried about their government being Real Stupid she tentatively suggests they start by sending the children and elderly people, now or early in the training of replacements, how do they feel about that.

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What about the children's parents are they just going with their great-great-great-grandparents or what.

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Uh, if they want to figure out a skeleton crew of people to maintain essential services during transition without separating children from their parents she will definitely work with that but she was assuming sending all children and parents would not leave enough people to train replacements and do services. 

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They are unhappy about splitting up families, they were anticipating neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

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Then they can do that.

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There is some argument internally. They are also nervous about having replacements trained in a place because then the replacements can train more.

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What about doing job-by-job? Train garbage people, move the garbage people. Train undertakers, move the undertakers. Train plumbers, move the plumbers. Save autopsy and medical dissection for last because there aren't many of those and not skillsets a country is likely to want to leave itself without.

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This breaks up some families but fewer than evacuating all the kids, okay.

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And not for very long, hopefully. Is this a place where private security firms are legal?

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Yes, but they can't have guns.

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She doesn't need them to have guns. She wants to meet with them and explain that she's looking for private security to get reds out of the country without hiccups, are any of them going to have a vaguely promising reaction to that?

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Will this be before or after they're clean?

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Calado doesn't want to clean them so Miolee's doing it, they'll still be red. Security won't have to go particularly near them, obviously.

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They will want a lot of money and the promise of more if they do wind up near any reds.

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If anyone ends up touched by a red and manages not to murder the red she will fucking buy them a child.

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Oh, Calado is still working on a permissions system similar to the Oahk Empire which used to rule them, but the sentiment is appreciated.

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They can work out a contract. She tells the reds that she hired security to escort trucks and supervise the stages of the process where tension might be expected and they are outrageously bribed not to bother the reds even if touched and it's obviously a bit much to expect the reds to feel reassured by their presence but she hopes they at least won't add stress and she thinks they might deter it!

 

She tells the government that the reds are prepared to train garbage truck workers and that she's gone to the trouble of hiring private security to make sure reds get escorted out of the country safely once their jobs are obviated and she's so pleased to tell them that they can sit back and do absolutely nothing and inside a season all the trainings and replacements will be done.

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Wow, cool. They like doing nothing and having things happen.

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She figured. 

 

Purples can learn to drive garbage trucks. 

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It is surprisingly complicated!

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Biyan learned this lesson unpleasantly! Calado can learn it more pleasantly.

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So much more pleasantly. The senators find excuses to credit their great-grandchildren with the plan and award them child permissions.

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As one does. 


Garbage-truck drivers and their children and great-great-grandparents and some reds in internal roles can head out to the border! Security can stay well away and make sure no one bothers them until they're on Mioleen soil and loaded into trucks.

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Several security people claim to have been touched! They want money!

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They were wearing cameras, right?

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Did she say to wear cameras?

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She highly recommended it! It's okay, disputes can be cleared up anyway because she has an in with the mindreading aliens and they can just verify the story for her and then she'll pay them.

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That seems like a lot of trouble to go to over some miscreant reds!

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Yeah it's such a shame they weren't wearing cameras. She thinks it's worth the trouble, though. She has found the key to success is being very meticulous about followup with incidents of reds randomly lunging out of their trucks on their way to the border and touching people. 

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Some of these greys may have misremembered.

Not this one! This one is really sure!

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Can Aitim produce aliens with mindreading abilities and if not is Aitim willing to substitute for such.

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He goes to visit Matirin in Voa. "Can you in fact read minds."

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<Not in this form. I can morph Leeran.>

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"Can any of your people? Would they mind so that Isel can get out of paying security?"

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<I suppose Arethel might do that for her.>

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"I will let Isel know."

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Arethel writes Isel. Anitam seems likely to object to Arethel travelling but if Isel wants to pick up the Andalites hanging out secretly in Miolee in case Matirin decides that he doesn't like being a well-treated kinda-prisoner then she could do that.

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Of course that's a thing. How does she get in touch with them.

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Arethel can email them. Arethel does that. 

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Isel can produce a mindreading alien to help the grey verify his story and identify the red responsible! Mindreading alien is hanging out in this river in the form of an amphibious froggish thing, aliens, who can even say with those. 

<Hello> says the alien. <To confirm everything is working correctly, please think of a number between 1 and 100.>

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...seven and a half.

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<Seven point five> reports the alien.

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"No it was seven and a half."

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"Those are the same thing."

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"Oh."

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<Can you describe for me what happened?>

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"He touched me! And I told him not to do that and go back in the truck." It just felt like a hand. Weird. She dared him to but he still actually did it.

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Oh for fuck's sake. Okay. She pays her a ridiculous amount of money. She commends her for not overreacting.

She tells the reds that given how she promised the security wouldn't hurt them she can understand why someone was tempted to touch a grey on a dare, but the money goes to helping them get resettled if she doesn't have to spend it on bonuses for the greys so now that it's been established that you can touch them and they won't murder you please don't do that again.

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Somebody did that? For fuck's sake.

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Kind of dumb but no one got hurt because she is really committed to making sure no one gets hurt. Please let's not have it happen again.

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It doesn't.

A senator who has failed to credit his great-great-grandchildren with enough things to finagle them permissions winds up with a couple of said great-great-grandchildren trying to actually do things; they order a neighborhood torn down before it is actually empty, leaving reds all alive except one who got hit by a bulldozer but with nowhere to go in a city that still needs them for plumbing and handling dead folks.

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She told them that literally all they had to do was nothing at all!

She files a civil suit for bulldozing her property without her permission and buys them tents.

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They live in tents. They are unhappy. The suit will need to go through three rounds of appeal.

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Of fucking course it will. Can she at least get injunctions on further bulldozing of her property without her permission.

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She could talk individually to everyone in Calado who owns a bulldozer? People are pretty inclined to do what random local blues say; that's how you get permissions.

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Fucking permissions systems. She will just remind all the local blues that this will go off without a hitch as long as they actually sit back and do nothing and anyone who does a nice job of thwarting other people from attempting to do anything at all will be invited to Anitam to try to convince the aliens that Calado should get starships, which is a much better angle on children, isn't it.

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Good to know! She starts receiving reports of heroic thwarting.

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Great! If everything else goes totally smoothly then all these people who have reported heroic thwarting get to come talk to the aliens. Of course if anything goes wrong then the aliens won't be very impressed to hear that these people heroically thwarted more things going wrong but if everything goes smoothly they will totally be impressed to hear that.

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This is kind of a lot of people reporting heroic thwarting.

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Matirin is supposed to be Aitim he won't even mind how much she's wasting his time. The point is that that's all those people who now have an interest in making sure everyone does nothing while she gets their reds out.

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Everyone is thwarting everyone else! All the time! They are stopping them from setting things on fire and publishing foolish op-eds and personally going out to use reds as target practice! Thwarting!!!! They are so successful at it that it's kind of impressive when someone manages to demand property back taxes from some reds and blockade their convoy to enforce that.

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She will call up all her heroic thwarters in order and ask if they want to heroically thwart that idiot.

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Some of them try! He will not be thwarted. He wants those back taxes.

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She owns the property. He can sue her in civil court. Why is he preventing reds from leaving the country, doesn't the country want its reds gone.

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They charge separately for land and structures and a company he owns a controlling share in built some structures when the district expanded a few years ago! They owe him money! He does not want to wait for three rounds of appeals to get it!

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Isel and her security company will go to the site of the blockade. Is blockading roads considered a legitimate way to handle civil disputes in this country?

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It is if you own the road! Yeah those are all privatized.

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And this guy owns this road? Is there another route to the border which the reds can take.

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Yeah they can go around.

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Security is going to escort her reds onto a different road now. She will try to distract the guy from interfering with that by asking him how much taxes, the reds don't have any money they're reds but maybe she accidentally took on the liability when she took on the land, does he have the paperwork?

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So much paperwork.

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Oh good! She will hem and haw over the paperwork until her security says the reds have reached the border.

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Does she give him his back taxes.

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It looks to her like liability for the structures tax does not transfer with the land deeds and like this subsection implies that he's seriously overestimating the amount owed and these fees he's tacked on don't seem to have gone through this described oversight process but he can have sixteen tap if he wants, she happens to have that much on her.

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...that won't even be anything after currency exchange.

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She'd be happy to take home the paperwork to have a tax yellow look over it and figure out if she owes him more than that.

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HIS yellow says he is owed THIS much.

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And if her yellow agrees she will totally pay him that much! Or he can sue her. 

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He sues her. And challenges her to a duel.

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Is that a thing.

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Not a legal thing.

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She replies that her choice of weapons is 'Andalite morphs'. 

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He doesn't have morph.

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She can have it arranged.

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Cool.

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Is Matirin still in Voa?

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Yes.

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Does he want to facilitate a duel. 

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Sure.

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And does Arethel want to fight for her.

 

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No, she can't do that, it would be dishonorable.

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"Would not. You're me."

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If you wouldn't tell your opponent about it it's dishonorable. She can teach Isel to tail-fight but it takes years.

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She doesn't have that kind of time.

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...Arethel has an idea.

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Do you care to be more specific.

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Not over email, Matirin can read ours and he'd be mad at me.

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She will head back to Anitam once the plumbers are all in training and nothing seems to be on fire.

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"Yeerks can tail-fight like the person they're controlling. They get the instincts."

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"And that helps us how?"

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"Computer has a sample. Just in case. I wouldn't let anyone else but - you're me."

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" -for the record I'm not doing this for a good reason or anything I'm just frustrated and snarked back when someone challenged me."

      Arethel tail-shrugs. <If you want life advice ask your Matirin. If you want tail-fighting advice without doing any work ->

"I do work, just not grey work."

      <Well. I'm not even sure Matirin will give the guy morph. If he does, here's your plan.>     

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Matirin will totally speak to this guy from Calado on Isel's recommendation. Why does he want morph?

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Uh, that was her choice of dueling weapons and it sounds neat for after.

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What is he likely to do with it if he wins the duel?

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Uh, not a duel to the death, so that isn't an if. Fly? Prank his dog?

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What is it a duel to, exactly?

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Subdual.

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Inexperienced parties with tail blades sometimes do worse than that, does the law understand that?

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Uh this would not be a legal duel.

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He has no objections to facilitating duels but is not very inclined to facilitate illegal duels. Particularly not ones that might end with murder trials. 

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Sigh. Oh well.

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She goes back to Calado. How are the plumbers doing.

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They're going. Uh, one purple has decided that Miolee is probably awful and trying to coordinate a purple strike so reds won't have to go there.

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...that's sort of sweet of them. Can she find this purple to talk with them.

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She's over there waving a sign around.

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"Hi, I'm Isel. I heard you're organizing to protect the reds?"

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"There are no seasons there! Poison frogs! Madness! They mustn't go!"

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"Have you been?"

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"Our senate sold that land because it was CURSED!"

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"It's really sweet of you to want to protect the reds from that."

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"Their ghosts will haunt us forever!"

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Are people being persuaded to strike.

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No.

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Then Isel will leave her to it.

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She punctures the tires of the reds' vehicles.

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...presumably she is arrested for disrupting essential services and property damage?

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The cops get in a custody dispute with the mental health workers. She disappears in the confusion.

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She replaces the tires.

 

Aitim have we considered conquering Calado we'd be doing them a favor.

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Ah huh. Hundred thousand people dead and half a million committed to occupation and pacification, if all goes well. Were you planning to handpick which blues we kill or just wipe the slate clean of them? Or there's Oahk style, I suppose. 

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I know I know but have you considered as a counterargument: the entire nation of Calado.

 

Did police or mental health services find the lady?

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She popped up again in another city. She was trying to hug reds so they'd be arrested and not sent to Miolee. Mental health got her.

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And no reds are in trouble?

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The ones she hugged are. You can't just let mad purples hug you.

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How in the world do you prevent mad purples from hugging you?

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Running away! Possibly telling them you are not going to Miolee after all! Calling mental health services!

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All of those sound like things that are hard to do fast enough to prevent someone hellbent on touching you from touching you! Send them to Miolee.

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They are guilty of pollution violation. Super guilty.

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Then change the sentence for that to exile and send them to Miolee.

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Exile hasn't been a usable sentence in forty years, there's nowhere to go. Even before that it was never for reds.

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But on this occasion there is somewhere to go, and they're trying to avoid riots, and murdering reds who have done nothing wrong is the kind of thing that causes riots, so perhaps one of the people who have been Thwarting So Many Things can thwart this and get them sent the fuck to Miolee.

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Somebody thwarts it. The reds are rushed to the border.

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Isel likes that person and they are at the top of the list to go talk with aliens and also not on the list to get shot if Anitam conquers Calado not that she shares this last bit.

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Crazy purple gets on TV. There is public concern! Is Miolee a hellhole? Is it ethical to buy things from there? People attempt to organize boycotts.

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Maybe the TV people could go to Miolee and do some investigative journalism. 

 

You could probably do it with a smaller occupying force than that, she writes Aitim.

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Nope that's the heuristic, if you don't leave enough people there are always problems later. You can skimp a bit if you're just shooting everyone who steps out of line, is that what you want?

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I'm just venting. Mostly. 

 

Are they having trouble recruiting enough plumbers.

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A little. The amount of money the red plumbers were charging varied a lot town to town, so some places they're having trouble finding purples who'll put up with the lower wage.

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Well, if you can't find people at a given wage you raise the wage, that is how wages work.

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But why are they so different?

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Why are the wages different city to city? She'll look into that. She asks the reds.

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Oh, the reds know that one. In permission based cultures red child permissions are allocated by the social workers. Some of the social workers were lazy, corrupt, or responsive to pleading, and just sold some or all of them; reds don't have a lot of control over how much money they make, but it's not zero, and in neighborhoods where money was flowing out to the corrupt social workers like that they schemed a lot harder to get cash.

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...Aitim pleeeeeeeease?

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I don't even have that kind of authority and you know it.

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She explains to the people who are confused that some red communities had higher expenses and so looked for opportunities to make more money so they could make ends meet.

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They are troubled by the need to force the towns where wages were historically lower to cope with a sudden jump.

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State could subsidize it.

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They're suddenly very good at doing nothing.

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Hopefully those towns will consider the higher costs well worth it for the benefits of never having to see a red again.

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But it's a big jump! Marginal businesses will go bankrupt!

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Isel does peaceful cheap red transitions, she does not fix your economy. Unless they want to appoint her their Queen, in which case she will give them starships and also fix the fuck out of their economy.

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Ummmmm.

...

No.

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Then too bad for the marginal businesses. 

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The original Mioleens are finding their new citizens a little... weird.

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What's the problem?

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It's not just that they don't speak the language, they're also kind of kooky and seem even more stressed out than baseline for transitioning reds.

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Do they want her to hop over to their decontamination facilities and translate and see if it's anything she can help with?

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It's not like a huge deal, they were just wondering if she knew what was up with that.

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Their country is a complete disaster run by a cowardly and incompetent flock of vultures with no redeeming traits beyond their occasional capacity for pursuing their own self-interest so maybe it's just that. 

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That might do it!

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When the plumbers are out they can start on the undertakers.

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This exhibits a wage differential problem too and it hits hospitals and nursing homes especially.

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Are there barriers to the state appropriately funding hospitals and nursing homes?

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They're privatized, most things are.

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Does the state of Calado actually do anything other than population controls.

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They maintain a standing army and police force and they do legislation and the fire department and certain compulsory insurances.

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Kantil's college girlfriend who was a libertarian stands refuted, in Isel's opinion. Sorry, hospitals and nursing homes. If this country were competently run you'd get subsidies to help with the transition.

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Aieeeeeeeeee.

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Luckily they can repurpose all the access space that the reds were using?

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Only if they pay to clean it.

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She will look into getting them subsidies. What does Calado's budget look like.

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They pay their military and police pensions; there's a lot of that. A lot of money disappears into various private charity. There's the fire department. They pay the senators a lot.

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Do some of those private charities fund hospitals and nursing homes?

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Ostensibly.

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She can't order an audit of foreign charities while she's there advising their red transition. She focuses on the red transition. Not that many of them left now. She should go home and kiss the ruling council. 

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And eventually Calado is red-free!

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Yay! The following long list of people get to talk to Matirin. Isel wants to spend the next month in a hot tub.

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There are hot tubs in Anitam. There are also other countries clamoring for help. Has she considered training people.

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She should totally train people are there any young blues and yellows who want to interview and maybe shadow her on the next place and see if they can pick up the skillset. 

 

Interviews will happen from her hot tub.

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She makes good money. There are people interested.

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She perfects an interview talk. "The secret is that you have to actually sincerely want all the reds to make it safe. All of them. It has to feel like a personal failure when anything happens to any of them. If you're tempted to write off five or ten here or there because it's not worth making a fuss and being embarrassing, they can tell the difference, and they get scared and then if anything goes unluckily you get a riot. The job qualification is literally sincerely wanting all the reds to be safe. You either can do that or you can't."

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"How do they tell?" a yellow asks.

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" - some mentally ill purple in Calado hugged a bunch of reds so they'd be arrested instead of going to Miolee. What would you do if that happened?"

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"...make sure the crazy purple got help I guess?"

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"Uh huh. And then?"

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"Assuming the reds weren't like, yeah, hug me, woo, they shouldn't be kept out of Miolee for it, they're going to be all huggable soon enough."

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"Calado says they're guilty of pollution violations, sorry, there's nothing in the law about 'it wasn't actually their fault'."

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"...I'm not sure what you do about that in a consultant capacity."

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"Called every blue who'd at any point in the project offered to be helpful or claimed they were being helpful, said blah blah diplomacy send them the fuck to Miolee until someone did. That's how the reds tell. That's a lot of hassle over three people, but they were three innocent people and they write their families and post about it on the internet and the other ones go - okay, that's not something you do if you're in this to collect a consulting fee from the government, that's something you do if you actually want them to be safe."

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"How do the three people know how many blues you called?"

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"They know they got arrested, and that should have been it, no one has ever cared about their actual guilt or innocence and never will. And then they got to Miolee safely after all. And that means that someone bothered. They don't know whether it cost us a hundred favors or just one but they know that we thought it was worthwhile to call in favors for their lives. And nobody ever thinks that."

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...nod.

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"Think you can do that?"

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"If people listen to me."

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Nod. 

 

Okay, who has an appealing application to be next.

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Buncha people. Rivik is going to try to do it itself if she doesn't help.

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Rivik's tiny, maybe it'll be quick. What do they want to do with the reds.

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They kind of want to kill them but since that's not the done thing nowadays Miolee is fine.

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Okay. Are they all right with selling her the red property so she can resell it and send Miolee the money to cover their decontaminations and resettlement.

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What will she do if Miolee doesn't charge her as much as it would take to make her sell all the land?

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Sell the rest of it and take the money home, she doesn't want to manage real estate in Rivik and the foreign title insurance premiums are kind of steep.

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Fine.

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Okay. Assistant, come to Rivik with me. Red landowners, here is the plan. 

 

(The land in Calado should get bulldozed and cleaned and then auctioned. How are her civil suits proceeding.)

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They are on their second and first appeal rounds. Assistant comes to Rivik with her.

Red landowners are PRETTY sure the government wants them super dead.

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...okay. Hmmm. Rivik is tiny. It'll be more expensive but maybe instead of training replacements they can import Anitami ex-reds to do the jobs until Rivik reds are out of the country, and then the Anitami ex-reds can train local replacements. How do local reds feel about that.

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Will that help?

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The idea is that if Rivik massacres people the Anitami ex-reds will pack up and go home and Rivik will drown in garbage like Biyan. Is their government good enough at incentives that this will suffice.

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The reds are not sure.

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How does the government feel about this proposal.

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Sounds expensive. Also they have different equipment and fixtures than Anitam.

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Uh huh, the idea is that local reds train Anitami ex-reds and then Anitami ex-reds take over the roles and then train locals as soon as the reds are safe. Because, see, the reds currently don't trust their government not to massacre them and accordingly can't be persuaded to train anyone. This is an expensive situation to be in and maybe the government can think of another way of credibly signalling they won't hurt the reds, like giving Miolee tons of money to hold in escrow or something.

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What if Miolee didn't give it back?

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Then Rivik, which has more of an army than Miolee, could make them. If Miolee were in the right they'd have Anitam's backing but if Rivik fulfilled the conditions and Miolee refused the money back anyway Anitam would stay out of it.

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Wrinkle: Anitami ex-reds don't super trust Rivik either.

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They just need to trust Rivik's government as far as 'won't actually start a war with Anitam'. Because Anitam has all these fancy new toys rolling out of factories and if someone decides to kill clean Anitami citizens then that someone will get to be a demonstration that the new toys aren't just shiny.

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They'd still be dead if somebody thought their government would let it slide.

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Yeah. Hey, government, everyone thinks you'll probably risk a war just to randomly murder them and it's damaging prospects of a transition, why do they think that.

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Well, reds are terrible.

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...no, see, no reds anywhere else think that, the explanation has to be somehow specific to Rivik.

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Reds are really, really terrible?

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By specific to Rivik she meant that the explanation should somewhere contain 'in Rivik' or something specific to local conditions. 

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They're not sure how other countries deal with them.

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They hire Isel! But she usually doesn't have a hard time convincing trainees that the government won't start a war with Anitam by having them killed for no reason, usually people are reasonably confident their governments won't do that, why do they think the Rivikni government might.

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They don't know what they do differently from everyone else! Everybody hates reds, that's not different.

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Yeah, that doesn't seem to be it. Can they make a formal commitment to Anitam that Anitami citizens helping with their reds transition will be safe and honored guests?

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They do have a criminal element, they can't guarantee that all of them will be deterred by starting a war.

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If one or two of the trainees is killed in random violence and the perpetrators promptly dealt with that wouldn't start a war; that could happen to them at home too.

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Assistant figures it out by asking Anitami ex-reds why they don't trust the Rivikni government; it is because the Rivikni reds sound constantly terrified and tell stories on red forums like "the local speedskating team lost and took it out on my cousin" and "I was late to work and they mixed me up with our only doctor and now we don't have one" and "I got stopped at the municipal border on my way to the hazmats landfill and they thought I looked shifty and made my son stay with them till I came back and he won't tell me what happened" and "they made a clerical error and gave us too many child credits and killed six random pregnant women".

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The fuck, Rivik. 

 

...does the box actually only work for you or were you lying about that so you could keep control of things.

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Why?

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Because I need to smuggle the entire red population of Rivik out and for that I am going to need morph.

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I could maybe arrange something.

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She flies back to Anitam to try to make arrangements for training. 

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<Your commitment to this is commendable.>

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"We were horrible to them but not - not like this."

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<What are you going to do for the children?>

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"I'm going to have to ship them out first. I think I can get away with it."

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Box. <It should work for you now. Consider maintaining custody of it an important priority.>

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"Uh huh."

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The next day a bird lands in a Rivikni red district. <Hey> says the bird. <This is Isel. I apologize for scaring you like this, but I'm worried about planning this over the internet.>

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Reds are frightened!

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Bird bobs its head apologetically. <There isn't a good way to do a transition here. Your government is horrible. Like, most governments are pretty horrible to their reds but yours is significantly worse than anyone else. So the only way to get you out of here safely is by using alien technology to smuggle you out. And my job is to get you out safely no matter what it takes, so alien technology it is. Can you do me a favor and go get people who should be here for this conversation?>

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...they go get some people.

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<I want to smuggle you all out and onto a boat to Miolee. It's the only way I can think of to get you all there safely. I got the morph technology from the aliens and I can teach you how to morph. Do you have questions so far ->

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"...what about the other neighborhoods -"

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<I'm going to get them too, we're going to coordinate it, we're not doing it right now. I don't even have a boat lined up yet. We will coordinate to do it everywhere simultaneously.>

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"Weren't we supposed to stay till we'd trained people."

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<Yes. If you want we can still try that, but my priority is your lives, not Rivik's garbage delivery. If we don't see a safe way to train people then we leave without training people.>

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"But then no one else will hire you."

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<Yeah. It'd be great if we can think of something. But letting you die isn't something.>

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"...thank you. How do we do it?"

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<I have a box. Everyone who touches the box gets morphing ability. Kids can't do it, I'm going to tell the government I'm sending the kids to Miolee in advance to get your cooperation with training. If you want, anyone else who doesn't have outward-facing jobs can sneak out then too, keep the kids company. They should only be separated from you for a month, and I'l make sure you can video call every night. Then, if you think you're safe during training, we start training. Do you expect you'd know if they were imminently going to kill you?>

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"Not necessarily."

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<So then whenever you want - which can be 'right away' or 'wait until training is done, if we think they'll kill us all at once afterwards', you all morph something small - it'd probably be easiest to do cockroaches or something and then get carried to the boat, but I'd understand if it felt safer to do birds and try to fly to the boat - and then we head out to Miolee. And probably leave the districts on fire so Rivik isn't quite sure what happened.>

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"Why is roaches easier -"

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<Don't have to worry about people getting lost in flight or eaten by actual birds or losing track of time and taking more than their two hours to reach us.>

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"...we don't actually know how the alien thing works."

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<-  right, sorry. You can turn into anyone you've touched and 'acquired', including people and animals and aliens but not plants. While you're morphed you are clean. If you stay that way for more than two hours you get stuck and can't change back. If you're a bird, you'll know how to fly. When you're in morph you get supplemental telepathy - like this - so you can communicate with people. The range is pretty short, though I think the aliens can stretch it. If you die in morph you die, but if you're merely injured you can change back and will be wholly healthy.>

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"We don't have any birds..."

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<If you want to be birds I will look up the best species of bird for it and then go get one and bring it to you.>

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"They might notice a lot of birds leaving here -"

"I don't think roaches can travel long distances easily though -"

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<They can't, the idea with that one would be that you all get into a suitcase and I carry it to the boat. If the birds leave at night would anyone notice?>

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"Maybe not."

"I don't want to be a cockroach."

"The children'll be so scared."

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<Yeah. If you've got a better plan I'm all ears.>

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"I could maybe catch a mouse. They bite though."

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<Some people could morph clean Amentan and take the train to the shore but probably not that many of you, maybe just ones who'll be particularly ill-equipped to escape in morph.>

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"You said we'd have to touch people."

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<Uh huh. You can get a blend of two people by touching both of them and then trying to morph a mix, you should be able to get purple off me and one of your friends.>

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"...but we'd have to touch you."

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<And then I fly home in morph and demorph in my shower, it's no big deal.>

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They don't look sure about that.

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<I've been doing this for years, the only reason I don't touch reds is because they'd get in trouble. If you really want I can figure out how to do a blood sample instead but it's not a concern for me.>

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"We should probably do roaches," someone says. "Kids and everyone else we can spare out, roaches for everyone else."

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<Okay. You can practice and make sure it's tolerable and no one gets claustrophobic or anything, and we can come up with a backup plan for anyone who does. Do you want to try to train replacements and escape before the government moves, or to just get out right away? The advantage to training replacements is that I can be in a position to help other people, but the disadvantage is of course that they might try to kill you sooner than we're ready.>

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"Can you make them hire us Anitami security or something?"

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<- I can definitely look into that. Anitami greys are, like, better than your greys but not fantastic. ...maybe if I tell them we're hiring Anitami greys to protect everyone during the training and transition, and then when the transition is done the greys'll leave for Anitam and you'll be escorted to the docks to wait for your boat, that'd be enough for them to become convinced the most convenient time to kill you is once you're done with training.>

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Nod nod.

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<All right. So you get morph now, and you practice so that if you need to leave sooner we can do it on short notice, but we try to make the training happen. I can leave the morph cube in the garbage for you, it's the most convenient way to smuggle things here, but it'd be a disaster if it got lost so the garbage people need to know where to look. Does that work?>

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"It's easy to lose things in garbage."

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<Want to do it some other way?>

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"I don't know how else..."

"You can fly, could you drop it on a grave?"

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<I don't know how I'd get a bird big enough to carry it but maybe there's a petting zoo or something. I'll look into it.>

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"And you'd have to get it to all the neighborhoods - traveling is dangerous -"

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<Yeah, we heard some of the stories. Do you have any way to just receive packages - ordered online or anything ->

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"No."

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Bird makes a bird face. <Then I think I'll put it in the garbage right outside my hotel in a big blue bag and personally stand there watching over it until the trucks come.>

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"Okay."

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<Anything else while I'm here?>

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"Will the children have places to stay in Miolee, if we don't make it -"

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<Of course they will. Places to stay and lots of people who are proud and safe and happy and red.>

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Nervous sniffly reds.

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Isel flies back to her hotel suite. Isel seeks bids from Anitami security companies to come hang out in Rivik and make sure everyone leaves the reds alone. Have to wear cameras, crazy bonuses as usual if they touch you and you don't hurt them.

 

Isel tells the Rivikni government that she's secured the agreement of their reds to train replacements, on the condition that Anitami security supervise and that the children all go to Miolee now. Anitami security will leave as soon as the replacements are trained - "but at that point all that's left is taking the reds to the docks to wait for their boat, and I'm sure we can manage that part without bloodshed."

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"Sounds simple enough. Why are we sending the little reds separately?"

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"They won't make trouble for me while I have their kids."

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"But Miolee'll have them. Unless you're actually diverting them somewhere else?"

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"They can take a long route to get there, make sure there's no trouble. Storms are common at sea this time of year. I won't actually divert the boat unless there's trouble. And I am not expecting trouble."

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"Yeah, all right. Long as they don't take anyone we need for training and do take enough to keep the brats with their hands to themselves."

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"Yeah, they're sending their internal staff - storeowners and red teachers and so on. No one who serves the city. My security team'll escort once they're here."

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"They have teachers?" somebody wonders.

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"They have teachers! They have daycare workers! They used to have doctors. They have community coordinators."

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"Not real doctors."

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"The Anitami ones went orange and got real medical degrees right quick."

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Scoff.

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Does she have bids from security companies.

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Yeah, a couple. One of them advertises a willingness to hire ex-red although there is no evidence they have actually done that, possibly for lack of opportunity.

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Not many ex-reds went grey. Yeah, sure, they're hired. First job is escorting kids and nonessentials to a boat.

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They have versions of the sticks with shepherd-crook-like attachments to sort of herd kids along, if necessary. They manage to avoid thwacking any children with them.

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She is so proud of them. Kids go on boats. Boats go straight for Miolee.

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Miolee puts 'em in the decontamination center. They could use some of the money a little earlier, given that.

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She can auction her property in Calado.

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Meanwhile, reds pick up the cube from its blue bag.

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Great. Isel goes over there in bird form in case complications arise.

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They get everyone morph. Some of them and their security take it to the next neighborhood and the next (Rivik has only five). They all acquire cockroaches. One of them has an accident with broadcast thoughtspeak and the local cops are soon in a shoving match with the Anitami security.

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...she hurries there. What's the problem exactly?

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Confused noise complaint.

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So write 'em a fine.

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They're supposed to go identify who caused the problem and these foreign greys aren't letting them in!!

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Yeah, this is the security team preventing riots during transition, good job security team, the Rivikni government specifically paid for external consulting to avoid riots during transition. How were they even going to figure out who caused the problem?

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...that's none of her business!

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She needs to know to make sure it doesn't increase community tensions, which are her responsibility as transition manager.

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Well they need to go find who was making noise and shut them up, which is their responsibility as cops!

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She doesn't hear any noise, perhaps they have already succeeded.

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That's not good enough.

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Have they never investigated a noise complaint in a building with private security before? Do they usually get into shoving matches with the private security?

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This is not a building it is a red neighborhood.

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The same procedures should apply. If she describes how they meant to identify the guilty party Isel can perhaps arrange for that person to come on out and accept their ticket and fine.

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That's none of her business she has to let them in.

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Her obligation is to ensure a peaceful red transition and she doesn't have enough information to evaluate whether this is going to impede that so she is in fact obliged not to let them in.

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They're the cops and they're doing their jobs and they will force their way past her security if they have to.

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If they try that she has to pay them a whole lot extra. Do the cops want to just skip that part and take a big bonus for their diligence and go solve other crimes more important than noise complaints.

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Is she trying to bribe them to not do their jobs?! They are INSULTED.

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Three thousand tap apiece.

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INSULTED.

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Then she will just have to offer it to her security staff as a bonus for preventing transition problems tonight. She calls the non-emergency police number.

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"Rivik City police department," says the voice on the phone as her security and the cops square off.

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"This is Isel. My security team is preventing hiccups in the transition, and the police are serving a noise complaint but have failed to specify the target of the complaint or the scope of the investigation. We need that information in order to ensure the training and replacement of reds proceeds smoothly and safely. Can you send someone down to mediate?"

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"My location data indicates that there are already officers on the scene."

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"Yes, that's the problem. They aren't able to specify the target or the scope, and I need that information for complaints served on my property."

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"They should be in the process of identifying those facts now. I'm getting some reports of obstruction."

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"Yes, my security team cannot let them onto my property without information about the process, the scope of the investigation, and their intended resolution. They were unable to provide that information, which is why I am calling."

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"I assume they were planning to enter the neighborhood and question people until they were satisfied that the complaint had been appropriately delivered."

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"Oh good! Are there any procedural concerns with escorting them and with videotaping them on my property in the process of delivering the complaint."

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"Yes, that's disrespectful to the police process."

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"I regret to inform you that they will not be permitted to enter the district at all, in that case."

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"Ma'am, they're police, not solicitors. You can't just decide not to let them in."

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"I was invited here by the Rivikni government to ensure a stable red transition. It is my obligation to the Rivikni government to give you a stable transition and your described procedures are absolutely incompatible with that. Please escalate this to someone with the authority to order the police to adapt their procedures or drop the noise complaint."

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"I'll put you through to the commissioner. Please hold."

(The cops have drawn guns. The security have drawn shredders.)

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Isel turns away from them and her face changes into someone else's and <if you need to leave the district at this time, will that be possible?>

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<We've all got roach morphs now.>

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<Can you go up a wall to the roof of that big grey purple building, looks like a warehouse of some kind?>

 

"Hello commissioner. There's been a noise complaint in one of my districts. My very forceful recommendation as your consultant is that you permit my security to escort the police while they investigate. I cannot emphasize enough that if you disregard this recommendation and the police beat some reds to death, I expect the collapse of a successful and peaceful transition effort. The reds are not done training people yet. Please delay your officers in killing the reds until the training is over."

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<It's hard to find things like this and we all really want to hide. We can try.>

"You're not my consultant," says the police commissioner.

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<I'm going to try to buy you some time. It's safe right now for a few people to demorph and direct everybody, I will let you know if it stops being safe.>

"I am Rivik's consultant. If you beat people to death over a noise complaint I cannot give you a stable transition. All that you need is to let my people video the police. This call is being recorded for later evidentiary purposes. If you beat people to death over a noise complaint I cannot give you a stable transition. I am not accountable for the consequences of sudden destabilizing police brutality incidents mid-transition."

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"You can't disrupt police procedure willy-nilly over some blue project. There's standards and practices."

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"By all means please tell me how I can comply with those standards and practices without anybody being beaten to death over a noise complaint tonight."

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"They're just going to find out who was bothering their betters and make sure they know to cut it out, is all."

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"I don't think I understand why we cannot escort them for that and video this process."

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"It's disrespectful. Do people record you at work?"

(A shot is fired. Shredders go off. A few of her security people are winged; most of the cops are stunned except the ones behind cover.)

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She hangs up. <How are we doing on evacuation?>

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<I got a box of all the roaches to the base of the building and we're all going up it now but it's really hard to be out in the open.>

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<I understand.> 

One last phone call. "This is Isel. I need police action in the red districts over trivial complaints operating on special procedures for three days. They can obviously still investigate complaints of pollution violations and serious crimes as normal, but noise complaints and rudeness need to happen according to deescalating procedures for the next three days. Please tell the police commissioner that I can organize that."

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"Why?"

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"Because standard police procedures are likely to cause unrest."

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"They don't usually."

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"Transitions are an unusual fraught time and situation, riots occur more easily than usual."

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"Look, our cops do a hard, complicated job and we don't like to change things around on them."

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"I respect that but I cannot serve you further in the transition if the police are going to be beating the reds to death with impunity over noise complaints. Tell the commissioner that these are exceptional circumstances or accept my resignation."

<Everyone up?>

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<We think so. It's hard to see.>

"Who says they'd be beaten to death?"

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<If you're all out I'm going to have my security light the place on fire so it's less obvious that you vanished into thin air, but if anyone's still stuck then that doesn't work. There aren't cops here now, someone can safely demorph and check if you're on the roof of the right building.>

 

"That was the conclusion I drew from background reading on handling of similar cases and the police have been unwilling to agree to measures that would be more moderate."

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<What if somebody sees us?>

<I don't know how to make sure I don't fall off the roof or squish someone ->

"Anything can happen, but not wanting your people leaning over them with cameras doesn't mean they're going to do whatever you're thinking."

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"I apologize if I have been excessively pessimistic. Please tell the commissioner that in this case we're going to handle things conservatively in order to ensure a successful transition." 

<Okay, I won't suggest a fire until I've picked you all up.> She starts heading towards the relevant building.

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"I can't tell him how to do his job."

"Ma'am? What should we do with these cops?" asks one of her security people who isn't busy patching up a hole in another security person. The cops are all stunned.

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She hangs up. "I am trying to convince the government that I acted in their interests. In the meantime keep them stunned and out of the way. I know the aliens, I will get you morph so you can heal injuries when we're back. You can consider yourselves off duty for the night and I encourage you to disperse before more cops arrive."

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They disperse. Would she like a shredder to keep cops stunned if this drags on or should one of them stay behind or what?

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She would love a shredder. They earned their hazard pay and she commends them - how does this shredder work -

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Point and shoot. Should be fairly simple even for a blue.

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She thanks them. The building is locked at this hour; she goes up the fire escape.

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There are cockroaches up there. They run away from her.

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Back into morph. <It's me. Everyone is going to have to go in my purse or jacket pockets, I'm sorry. I'm setting the purse down now - can you see in this form - it's right here - smells vaguely like toffee ->

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...roaches swarm into her purse. There are stragglers but eventually they are all in. <How long has it been?>

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- checking her everything - <thirty-five minutes. I'll hurry.> 

 

And down the fire escape at a run and stun all the cops whether they fucking need it or not and into the red district, first house she sees, she doesn't really know how to use a stove but she thinks if you turn on all the burners and pour cooking oil all over them you will start a fire so she does that and then she shifts back as she leaves the red district so it's only the morph that's contaminated (the clothes are a problem, but what can you do) and she runs for the train. 

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The house catches fire. The train is on time.

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She gets on the train and calls the morons back. "Notifying you that, as expected, one red district panicked. My security team prevented them from leaving and they lit their own houses on fire. I trust the fire department can make sure nothing outside the red district is damaged? The other districts which were not targeted by police will continue to cooperate with transition, as long as it doesn't happen again we can just double up some of the training purples."

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"They lit their houses on fire? Why did they do that?"

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"Reds! They get really panicked during the transition and when cops are shouting outside they figure they're all going to die and they do stupid things! That's why I wanted us to use different procedures. Oh well, there are still enough of them for training."

 

(And she emails the other districts to say that she apologizes for the brevity of this email, it'd be longer but she stepped in an anthill and has all these bugs in her clothes and needs to go change clothes, please do not panic, there was a problem in the other district and they may read that it burned down with no survivors and no bodies and it did in fact burn down and there sure aren't any reds or bodies there now. Isel will come by to reassure them and update plans once she has changed these clothes that have a lot of bugs in them.)

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"Are you sure the others are going to behave?"

(The other reds hope that she manages to get all the bugs out in a timely fashion.)

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"Are the police going to hassle them?"

 

Yep, she got them all out, every last one.

 

An hour and ten minutes.

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"If they disturb people. If we announce we're not going to investigate noise complaints they'll probably have a party or something."

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"That makes sense. So you can secretly relax it a bit  on the noise complaints? Or let us escort?"

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"I'm not going to tell my hardworking police force that they have to have people supervising their every move, it's insulting."

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"In that case I will have to think about how to ensure it doesn't happen again."

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"Let us know when you've got it sussed out."

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"Of course."

At an hour thirty she gets to the pier. She gets aboard, morphs again - <okay you're safe aboard let me spread you out so you can demorph without squishing each other - >

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Roaches are docile in her hands with some frightened twitching and have tickly little legs.

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She has a lot of practice at ignoring being grossed out. Roaches get set down evenly spaced about the room. <Okay. All set.>

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They demorph. It is gross. They didn't have the hang of bringing clothes.

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<I think the ship has clothes and food and first aid kits and everything, it's supposed to keep you until Miolee. You can touch stuff here, it's supposed to be for red transport. I probably need to go manage the fallout from stunning the cops, do you need anything ->

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"- food and clothes should do. Is the boat going to leave - is it crewed -"

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<Yeah. Separate section. We were gonna have you all at once but maybe we will just get you guys to Miolee right away and I will arrange another boat.>

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Nod.

They go find clothes and food.

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She arranges for another boat and tells this one to go to Miolee and checks how much trouble there is going to be about the cops.

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The cops are confused and upset. The fire department is containing the fire just fine though.

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...Isel goes home to her hotel. Showers. Showers more. Showers so much. Leaves her volume up, collapses on her couch, stares at the wall itching imaginary insects off her calves. 

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Her assistant wants to know what happened.

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"Police wanted to go murder a couple people to make a point about a possible noise complaint. Security stopped them. I called everyone trying to get someone willing to say "yeah don't murder them over nothing mid-transition" and Rivik has none of those."

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"- don't you usually tell them to not make trouble, in the first place, like noises -"

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"Yeah. Someone made a noise accidentally."

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"Is everybody okay?"

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"Yes."

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"Is this going to make it harder to get the other districts?"

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"Probably a little bit harder. The other districts will be on their best behavior but if anything does go wrong it'll be harder to pull the same trick twice."

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"What did you do?"

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" - this is not standard practice, because most countries aren't as bad with their reds as Rivik. But here - the government's going to kill them when they're done. They're sure, and they're right. And if we send in intermediate trainees, Anitami ex-reds, the government will probably kill them anyway and might kill those too. So the way I got them to train was I developed a contingency plan. They train right up until the government gets set to massacre them, and then they - fly away. To the boat, which has taken them straight to Miolee. They're all accounted for."

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"Does this mean you're going to leave them to drown in shit -"

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"Not if we can help it. There are four more districts, and they're sticking it out. But if Rivik decides to go in and murder some people they're gonna find the districts empty. I don't want it to come to that. I have called everyone I can, I would love to get them through training before the reds get out. But the way for them to avoid this would have been to operate in good faith. They're not. They are planning a massacre. I have been meticulously documenting all of this - not my solution with the reds flying away, it's a state secret that Andalite tech works without Matirin shepherding it - so everyone else doesn't have to worry that they'll try in good faith and get fucked over. They won't."

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...nod.

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"Next place can be somewhere nice and typical where they're honestly planning to let their reds go and I can honestly plan to get the reds on board and it will be so relaxing. At least Rivik is better run than Calado - the imperial credit system is so horrible -"

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"What's wrong with it?"

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"You earn them. Sounds neat but - there are waaay more people than can come to the attention of anyone who gives them out and Calado doesn't even reliably have a systemic way of earning them - so you get - a blue can just walk into the street in a grey neighborhood and say 'light that person on fire and you get kids' and - if it's your only way to get kids -"

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"...did that happen?"

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"I expect it happens as often as there are blues who get their kicks by ordering people set on fire. You know the stuff the Oahk Empire did, right -"

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"Some. They don't push history in yellow school."

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"Oahk Empire had three million blues, around Anitam's numbers. At its peak more like six but that includes areas they weren't holding very tightly or for very long, which changes it. Emperor awarded blue credits personally, which meant that if you didn't manage to get his personal attention, no kids. - he had three wives, himself, and a baby by each every year - so people'd try to get his attention by thwarting rebellions that never were - just have two hundred people dragged out of their beds and beheaded and call them rebels, why not - generals would start stupid wars that honestly just weakened the empire, because that was how to earn a credit - I don't know if the Emperor realized precisely the incentives he'd created, I don't know if he believed that hundreds of people were coming to him with bloodily suppressed rebellions and evidence of treasonous schemes and foreign spies and so on because they had to get his attention somehow or if he thought he was just surrounded by threats - it'd make anybody paranoid -

 - yellow I think was awarded by extended service to a sufficiently important blue, which is significantly less horrible but did mean people couldn't quit a job that was their only chance at kids, no matter what their boss did to them or had them doing - and even if you had an appalling record of disposing of your subordinates in plots for intrigue or Imperial attention you could always find more - and it was a terrible place for the software industry, because everyone was throwing their energy into the yellow service industries -"

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"- what about the other castes?"

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"Green got 'em for doctorates and academic awards and so on, the ones with any aptitude would just stay in school racking up degrees. I think the universities changed their procedures such that this allowed at least some actual work to get done. Grey got them for killing lots of enemies of the empire and boy were there enemies of the empire everywhere. Orange and purple there were organizations that handed out awards for this and that and also corrupt people who'd sell them or trade them for favors. Reds they have the social workers award them and most of those are corrupt too and just sell them. Same problems everywhere with whole industries shriveling because there was no good way to earn a child through them."

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"People didn't go into those lines of work after they were twenty?"

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"I mean, some, but it's not trivial to retrain from a secretary into a programmer or from a person-who-got-six-doctorates into a documentary filmmaker and you want to arrange the grandkids too."

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"These were transferable?"

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"No, no, then you might have had a functioning market for them. But connections were still the way to get them - in Calado all the senators were scrambling to declare their great-grandchildren responsible for everything I did -"

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"Oh."

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"Our way sucks less. Though it'll be much better once there are starships and we can loosen up."

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"What about the thing Voa does?"

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"It makes everyone real happy, I'll give Voa that. I do think there's something to be said for eugenics and a lot to be said for Anitam's very low intracaste wealth inequality but honestly if I were in charge I'd at least give everybody one for free."

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Nod.

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"I should sleep. Let me know if you need anything?"

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"Yeah."

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Isel sleeps.

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The other red districts manage to avoid provoking noise complaints. Her private security guards them through the night.

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In the morning if nothing is on fire she'll go out flying.

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Nothing is on fire.

A purple writes her; her family needs money and there's ads for taking over red work but she doesn't want to get murdered. Will she get murdered.

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No. It's safe to take over red work; if the government messes up they could find themselves without enough people trained, like Biyan, but there won't be violence against purples like Evalee.

 

And she goes out flying. Lands in a district.

<Hey! It's Isel. Just checking in, and I have some revisions to our evacuation plans based on how the evacuation of the downtown district went.>

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"...hi," says the nearest red. "You're, um, you're touching the railing, there."

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<In morph, doesn't count. There was all sorts of theological wrangling.>

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"Oh. What do we need to know?"

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<Just in case all four districts need to evacuate at once and I can't get to all of them, I think the best plan is to have the meeting location at the edge of your district, have almost everybody go roach, and have one person go clean caste and take them. I can leave clean clothes in a plastic bag and a clean briefcase for them, if you pick a location.>

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"How are we going to explain being clean and leaving here -"

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<I am imagining, like, find an empty building nearby, toss the briefcase, fly in a window, leave the clean building.>

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"- can you give me that from the beginning step by step I'm confused -"

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<Yes, sorry. We find an empty building adjacent to this district. Near that building, but in the red district, we put a case for cockroaches. Everyone goes there and turns into cockroaches and climbs in, except one person. That person flies - with the briefcase, if they can carry it, with a clothesline or something from which to reel it in if they can't carry it - to the clean building. In the clean building they demorph, morph clean, put on clean clothes, and walk away with the briefcase.>

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"Okay. I don't think any buildings by us are empty."

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<None of the apartments are currently vacant?>

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"I don't know. Maybe."

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<If there's nowhere accessible from here where you won't be disturbed then it's harder, but maybe there's something. I'll look around.>


She does. Vacant apartments? Office buildings with unused space? Buildings with accessible roofs? Anywhere she could buy space, like a hotel or a warehouse?

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There are offices that aren't used at night. The only unoccupied apartment is the show apartment. There's a shopping tower with a place undergoing renovations.

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Which of these do the reds want to use.

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Show apartment looks easiest to get out of.

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Sounds good. She buys a change of clothes and puts it in show dresser drawers and tells them where it is and gets them a briefcase with sturdy string attached and puts it on several layers of plastic in a corresponding spot in the district so there's at least an argument that it's clean and this whole operation involves no pollution. She encourages them to practice at being cockroaches. 

 

She goes to the other districts to do the same.

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They all pick spots. They practice.

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And Isel writes on her consulting site that Rivik has repeatedly failed to comply with advice such as 1) do not send ten police officers to go beat reds to death over a possible noise complaint which no one else can hear and 2) establish a clear plan for the safe transfer of your reds out of your territory after they are done training replacements and 3) cut back as recommended on other activities which will increase tensions in red communities and that while she is optimistic about a positive outcome for them, due to these repeated compliance failures she cannot guarantee it. Other countries are encouraged to consider whether they are capable of sending maybe two officers to write tickets for noise complaints, in which case results remain guaranteed.

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Somebody in Rivik's offices notices this update and objects that she has no evidence the cops were going to beat any reds to death.

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She has her assistant mail them the list of recent Rivik police brutality incidents.

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They don't do that every time.

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She'd love to see records of handling of a complaint without inappropriate uses of force!

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They don't keep records of that sort of thing in red neighborhoods.

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Uh huh. Isel stands by her statement that Rivik has repeatedly failed to comply with their consultant's recommendations and that she should not be considered responsible for corresponding failures at a peaceful transition. 

 

(Isel needs her box back. Can they maybe put it in a bag she can lever out of the last district into their escape apartment, and then she will take it home and decontaminate it.)

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(Yes.)

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Isel dutifully scrubs the box. Isel checks on the status of the boat going to Miolee and the boat that's supposed to come wait in the harbor for her next batch of charges.

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Boat to Miolee is halfway there. New boat nearly there.

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Okay. She idly checks whether Rivik is horrible to people other than their reds.

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They're really shitty to homeless people and the mentally ill whose families can't personally keep them under control.

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Charming. 

 

She looks at candidates for the next place.

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Bunches of middling places. Some places are trying on their own.

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Maybe they won't fuck up. 

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They're copying the Tapa model, more or less.

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And Tapa didn't fuck up but Tapa's also more competent than a lot of places.

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They pick their way along. There's a riot in a southern hemisphere country and they kill everyone in that district but attempt to go forward with the others.

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People.

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Progressively fewer of them unclean!

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Uh huh. Rivik making progress on training?

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Yep.

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Are there, like, obvious signs they're setting up to kill them afterwards?

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They're being pretty discreet about that!

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Okay but if one is a fly on the wall?

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Oh, making sure nearby buildings are up to fire code, relocating a regatta that's supposed to be near that pier.

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Uh huh. 

 

Isel documents this even though those are defensible given worrying the reds might riot. 

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What, are they supposed to not?

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They are supposed to just let her shepherd her reds onto boats. 

 

Sigh.

 

She tells the reds she's pretty sure they mean to do it at the docks. The reds can have fled during the night.

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Okay.

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Training concludes.

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Reds flee during the night.

Rivik seeks security footage of the fleeing so they can clean the streets but can't find anything.

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Weird. Isel is delighted to have guided them through a safe transition.

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Yes, thank you Isel.

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She asks her assistant if she thinks she can do it herself.

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Uh maybe if it were not like Rivik. She can do the line of communication and calling people thing but the sneaking in the middle of the night is over her head.

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Some of these places look not at all Rivik-like, Isel will recommend her to one of them.

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They'll take her. She goes.

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And Isel goes to a different one.

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It is neither a dumpster fire like Calado nor a seething pit of hatred like Rivik. Its main quirk is that it never had social workers and instead has historically kept in touch with reds through anthropologists who are allowed to use them for social experiments. The reds' opinion of this depends principally on what experiments have been conducted on them lately.

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Fascinating. At least once she has their reds out she will have no lingering urge to conquer them.

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Some of the social experiments are pretty horrible.

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Of fucking course they are but once the reds are out there will not be ongoing victims of horrible. Isel pretty much thinks of the whole population of Calado as ongoing victims of horrible. Poor reds.

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Can the anthropologists maybe leave them alone while they're transitioning.

(No! The anthropologists want to watch!)

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Anthropologists who have not done anything appalling can observe.

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Uh, what counts as appalling.

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Would they have been able to recruit clean castes if it were reasonably well remunerated.

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They don't know!

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...they can describe the experiments to her individually and she will decide.

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They told this district they could have all the kids they wanted one spring to see how many did and how it affected marriage patterns and what the kids with so many agemates were like and spent fifteen years throttling credits to compensate. They got all the blind reds to move to one district to see how they'd arrange accommodations with more of them but there weren't very many so they blinded some and the resulting insights have improved accessibility the world around so they repeated it with deaf people! They swapped reds with a neighbor to watch children form a pidgin. They made them paint everything in the neighborhood black and wear all black clothes to see if anything happened. They euthanized sick old folks and studied the grieving process versus controls. They did interesting brain lesions! They made everyone in a neighborhood study Tapap for one week and then cut the internet and enforced full immersion to see how they got along until the city demanded they stop because it was affecting work-related communications. They stopped letting them have refined sugar. They made them be nocturnal.

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- yes, no, no, yes, no, no, no, yes, yes, yes. "Not that you aren't all terrible people but the ones with scientific merit which didn't involve torture or murder are probably still an improvement on social workers."

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"What's wrong with painting things black?" asks Painting Things Black Guy indignantly.

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"I'm not green but that's not science! Science requires, like, hypotheses and things! 'paint everything and sees what happens' adds no value to the world and it is dumb."

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"But things did happen! I wrote papers!"

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"What things happened?"

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"Some of them decorated with things that I couldn't reasonably oblige them to turn black, like by putting in windowboxes for flowers, and some of them sprayed that marker chalk on their clothes, and they wore fewer accessories, and dyed their hair multiple shades per head fifty times more often than control populations, and used the fact that I could expense the project to get higher-quality items in black than they'd previously had and kept those even after the project was over, and put on music more often, and did photography very differently!"

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"I will ask the reds what they thought of it."

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The reds liked that guy, on the whole. He bought them nice black things and nobody died or anything.

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Uh huh. Painting Things Black Guy is in.

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"Thank you," says Painting Things Black Guy.

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"It was probably the most ethical experiment, even if I'm still not convinced it was an important one. And they like you. That counts for a lot."

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"I had to think of something to do with them or I wouldn't have gotten to study them! I was also the control group anthropologist for a couple of the other studies but that just requires observational skills."

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Nod. "Does spending lots of time observing them lessen the disgust reaction -"

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"Yes! I tried to write a paper on that but nobody would take it."

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"How surprising."

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"It really is, they take all kinds of papers about the reds themselves reacting to experiments."

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"Well, imagine if research demonstrated that the reaction to reds fades with exposure and isn't present in children who aren't raised with it! Then what would that say about us all."

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"Oh, I'm not sure how you could get one with children not being raised with that past an ethics board and the red children are sort of confounded."

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"Anitami children pretty much are raised that way these days, since we're all clean."

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"That'll probably let me coast till the end of my career. That and following up on what they do re-casted! And they'll have much higher rates of mixed-caste families!"

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"Uh huh! I know a new blue with a orange boyfriend and purple and yellow family. - of course, I also know a born blue with purple and grey and orange in-laws -"

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"Goodness, how?"

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"They hit it rich, had seven kids, practically all married out."

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"Why's that?"

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"Uh, respectively, ran away to pretend to be green, hired a girl and fell for her, had an unintended pregnancy, was an economist who got super enamored of the way the CEO of Assemble ran her business..."

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He laughs.

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"When Aitim - that's the blue I know - was running for office they debated featuring everybody in election ads and decided yellows would have hurt feelings that no one'd married one of them!"

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"And none of them ran out and did it? Just to complete the set?"

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"Come to think of it I don't know why not! Maybe if my assistant does a good job in Lintholee I can introduce her to one of the single ones."

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"It'll play well for reelection."

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"Not gonna be a very competitive election, what with alien technology and a war with Yeerks to get excited about - and it hasn't cost nearly enough money yet to be an unpopular war - but yes, he'd probably be flattered to scoop up larger margins."

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"Anyway, I think our reds will probably cooperate pretty well with you, they think it's sort of like another experiment and we don't let random nonsense get between us and our experiments."

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"Oooh, do you have a lower rate of police murders of reds? Rivik had it through the roof - someone made a clerical error and allowed a few extra red credits and instead of just cutting the allocation the next year they murdered a bunch of pregnant women, I bet that'd mess with an experiment -"

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"It'd fuck terribly with one, especially if it had anything to do with the credits or the kids - I'm not sure what the usual rates are - I did have a mental case run off and get into some trouble a while ago but my students were doing side observations on substance abuse and demanded him back -"

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"Good for you. I think it also helps that you're integrating them, has more reassuring milestones than shipping them off to the equator."

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"Like what?"

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"Like, someone lines up a job in advance, or pays a deposit on an apartment, or arranges a marriage, or gets accepted to a university, those are all - signs that we're not secretly going to kill them like Rivik tried to. If they're leaving there aren't really signs."

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"Rivik must not have tried very hard, I heard they all landed safe."

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"They were going to shoot them at the docks, so i had them leave the night before. No big deal, saves face for everybody, but I do sort of wish they'd gotten in some trouble for planning it. Dishonorable, to say you'll give them safe passage and then quietly arrange to have them gunned down."

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"Why would they even do that? They weren't going to be their problem any more."

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"They really obsessively hate them. It's bizarre. They were going to bludgeon several people to death over a noise complaint that no one else even heard, I'd love to do a study on what gets people that - that."

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"I'm not sure how you conduct one of those, but maybe one of my colleagues will have an idea."

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"Let me know!" 

 

And local reds get peaceably decontaminated!

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They do! Litholee manages too. Then they try to keep Matirin and his box.

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Uh.

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They're being very nice about it, considering, it's just they have this building sealed against morphed escapees that they used for decontamination and they would like to keep the box and the alien who makes it work.

Assistant says this is above her pay grade but her notes on who's who are available to whom it may concern.

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It concerns the entire ruling council of Anitam. If they let people kidnap their aliens then everyone will do that. They send a very strongly worded demand for the return of their alien and their box.

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Litholee would prefer to keep them.

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Would Litholee like to go to war over them.

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That doesn't seem like it would be very good for this alien.

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That doesn't seem like it would be very good for anybody making policy decisions in Litholee.

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Anitam has all the other aliens.

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And the aliens live together they're a big alien family.

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Matirin's second-in-command, an unassuming quiet Andalite who isn't one of his siblings, says to Kalana that, uh, if they're trying to get Matirin out alive - which is not at all what an Andalite operation under the circumstances would prioritize - someone could go in morph to within range of Matirin and tip him off and he could morph insect and then they'd have two hours to try to take control of the area while Litholee tried stomping and bug spray.

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"What would an Andalite operation prioritize?"

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<The Escafil device. The best way to avoid hostage situations is to categorically as a matter of policy ignore them. If anything important were at stake Matirin would have killed himself.>

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"We've only got so many aliens. We'll do our best to get him back in one piece."

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He thinks they are missing the point but does not find himself highly motivated to argue it.

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The Anitami military awaits the go-ahead.

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<They are rescuing you.>

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<Awww. Now?>

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<Next time you think you can morph unnoticed.>

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<I am sure I am being monitored> Matirin says, but he curls up on the ground and wraps his tail around him and concentrates on a rushed bug morph.

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<Now.>

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There is a brief fight and they take the area and land an armored helicopter.

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If the bug is informed he should unbug he will do so.

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Now works.

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Unbug. <Do you have the box.>

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"Yeah, over here." Box.

They are flanked by other helicopters as decoys, some of which provide cover fire, and zoom away.

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<It is not even obvious to me what they wanted morph for>, Matirin says disapprovingly.

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"Maybe they didn't want to tell you," Kalana suggests, when he is back on Anitami soil.

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<Well, of course not. It might have been obvious to me anyway. You are getting - more legible. Not perfectly so but tolerably so.>

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"Practice!" she says. "I can figure out some of the tail swishes now."

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Pleased tail-swish! <When we arrived we made the Mioleens so nervous with that.>

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"I bet, it's kind of intimidating."

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<You should see a Hork-Bajir. Terrifying and if they are not infested with a Yeerk totally harmless.>

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"Have you got pictures?"

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He does! On the computer.

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"Wow, spiky. What're the spikes for if they're sweethearts?"

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<Stripping the bark off herbaceous vegetation on their home planet.>

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"...seems excessive, but all right."

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<They are a designed species. An evolved one would likely have found it a bad tradeoff.>

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"Designed? By whom?"

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<Another species on their planet, called the Arn. They designed an ecosystem they liked and then a species to take care of it.>

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"What kind of trees need their bark spiked off?"

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<I have never been to the Hork Bajir homeworld. Analogizing from the sort of Andalites who would design sapients to maintain their genetically engineered gardens, they might have been showing off.>

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"Are the Arn a figure in the war?"

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<They are not. They are isolationist and, ah, angry with us because we released a biological weapon that killed nearly all the Hork-Bajir, after the planet had been lost to the Yeerks.>

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"...to deprive Yeerks of hosts?"

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<Yes.>

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Nod. "Yeerks don't want the Arn themselves? Or their species-designing tools?"

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<The Arn redesigned themselves when they first became aware of the Yeerks to be impossible to command in that manner. The Yeerks of course attempted to wipe them out or coerce them some other way but found themselves outgunned and decided that isolationist Arn were better than unwillingly involved Arn.>

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"Hmm. Any chance they'd be more receptive to us than to Andalites? We could use ecosystem-designers anyway."

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<I can imagine they might be receptive to an offer to implement one of their ecosystems somewhere and take good care of it.>

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"Lovely."

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<And once you're caught up with starships and can defend yourselves lots of societies will be open to trading with you.>

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"What a time to be alive."

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...mixed-feelings tail-swish.

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"I'm sorry, I know it's not nearly so convenient for you."

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<I am looking forward to seeing the Yeerks defeated.>

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"I will do my very best to deliver you that outcome."

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Places clean and integrate or send to Miolee their reds. She sells land and sends Miolee resettlement and decontamination money. Some places she comes out a bit ahead and some places quite a bit behind, depending how much hazard pay her security needs. She sends Miolee detailed expense accounts so they know she isn't cheating them.

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Miolee appreciates that.

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And Anitami factories make the pieces of a starship, and Anitami rockets take them into space for assembly.

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So exciting!!!

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It is time to start training people in space tactics. Andalites do that.

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Space tactics are fascinating and they have very well attended lessons.

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The Andalites are really charmed by Anitami greys. 

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Anitami greys like Andalites too! Glorious space combat over planets versus evil aliens: best kind.

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The Andalites so very much agree. They start planning for the return to Earth.