"What problems might be stickier?"

"Crime in general? Some people have kids and aren't nice to them so clearly not having kids isn't their problem. Greys won't have enough things to do if we step down from a posture of readiness for warfare."

"The government's well-run aside from the implementation of child restrictions?"

"Calado's mostly pretty hands-off, most things are privatized - I know less about other countries - the permissions are how they throw their weight around, maybe they'd just find new ways to do it."

"And in day to day life, the thing people'd want changed is the permissions -"

"I think so?"

"What do you expect you'll all need to be happy here? Beyond the children?"

"We'll need ways to make money obviously so we can buy things - and to live somewhere with seasons and to get lucky about whether the years are similar enough length that we can snap to - and we may be able to have all the kids we want but in the longer run our kids will want a larger pool of options than just who we happened to be able to grab -"

"I think there are plans underway to have a sizable Amentan population in a little bit. Assuming they fit in all right."

"...what if we don't?"

"Then we might direct future refugees to Endorë, which is more flexible. We won't exile present citizens except perhaps for serious crimes."

"Which would be..."

" - incorrigible tendency to violently assault people or destroy their property? There's pretty much nothing where we're harsh on the first offense - murder of Amentans I suppose will have to be such a thing, since it's much much worse than murder of Elves - torturing children would do it on a first offense -"

"Well, I don't know anybody along who isn't related to me, but my family's very well-behaved."

"I am not especially worried. We'll need to sort something out, since we do it all with the chips, but hopefully Amentans will be happy and not terrorize the locals and then we can take a million."

"...and all of them can have four kids and so on and so on? That will add up."

"- not very quickly. Valinor slows people down, relative to Endorë, it'll take each generation twenty local years to come of age and start in on their children, and I take it people don't always start their first spring and they certainly don't have them all that age - given a doubling time of thirty local years, that's sixteen million people in a hundred twenty of our years - which is three hundred of your years. A hundred twenty years ago we'd yet to invent electricity. I think technologies that distant in the future are hard to imagine, let alone plan present child policy around."

"All right."

"And if we have to throttle it eventually it seems like there might be ways to make that less unpleasant - does living with other families help, does knowing there are children out there of your genetic descent help, do pets help - maybe there are some Maiar who'd like to be permanent babies -"

"Back home a lot of daycares make extra money letting people who don't think they're going to get kids play with the little ones. Pets help some people but not most. Living together can help but it's usually not practical for other reasons, most people just visit their nieces and nephews and little siblings and so on frequently. Just knowing the children exist doesn't help at all, that's what happens if people have them without permission, they get taken away and put up for adoption, that's worse than not having them or it wouldn't be a very effective deterrent - I guess it might feel better up until that point if for some reason you weren't expecting it, you'd get to be all glowy and expecting? - but not worth it. I'm not sure what a Maiar is... it would be weird to have a baby that just stayed that way, the point is they're supposed to grow up and be your kids..."

"Interesting. Elves do not have anywhere near as strong a desire to have children - we want them, but we can delay it indefinitely without much regret. Why isn't living together usually practical -"

"You wind up needing a lot of bedrooms and the number of them is less predictable. Like, if my husband and I got two permissions, we could move into a three bedroom place, maybe a four if we could afford it and have a guest room, and that would do. If we moved in with some other people not only would we have to deal with all their roommate habits - what if they leave wrappers on the floor or use bug spray I'm allergic to or are always shouting across the house or I hate their dad who's around all the time or we can't agree on how to handle the dishes or something - but also we'd need space for them and for however many kids they might get and we'd altogether have more total guests and might not coordinate very well so we'd need more rooms for that and all our stuff would get mixed up - there's people who make it work, especially if they're a matched set of gay couples or all polyamorous or something going in together on the same set of kids, but it's not standard."

Nod. "If there are problems with having you all here under what circumstances would you expect those to arise -"

"Just this batch? Yellows are pretty peaceful I think, the greys might get rowdy..."

"We don't, ah, segregate our plumbers and sanitation workers, though of course they shower. Is anyone going to react badly to them -"