"...sure." Pancake.

She smiles at them and goes back to frying the pancakes. There is a regatta. Behind the food carts someone empties a overflowing garbage can into a more-overflowing garbage cart, sets the cart on some rails, sends it off, and comes over to collect a potato pancake.

Blues retreat expeditiously.

They are ignored. Children race down the beach giggling and flying a kite.

They go back to the cheese place to wait for emails.

The Noldor document all the embezzlement and fraud and tax evasion that left-behind papers provide evidence of and confiscate the funds they can recover and spend them on medical clinics. They import more people to fill positions for which there's unexpectedly high demand, and train yellows for them. There's going to be more demand for healthcare if they let everyone access healthcare, so they consult with the oranges on their miscellaneous councils and then make it known they'll take doctor and nurse immigrants. 

They agree with some countries on acceptable definitions of military aggression and acceptable responses to conduct they perceive as violating agreements against military aggression. They invite those countries' greens to come to physics lessons and those countries' purples to come observe factory construction and procedures and they let places share a lightleaper to take apart and explore with. They train a grey flight crew to fly a lightleaper and it goes off searching for planets. 

Colse Tower hikes to the office once a day to ask one question or make one comment per day and then run off.

1) can they confirm the pronunciation of some Elf names?

2) does the child allocation apply to them?

3) it looks like rain.

4) do they need the reds to standardize their toponyms or is what they have been doing all right?

5) they have already reported the collapsed tunnel by usual channels but just so you know, collapsed tunnel.

6) a dog wandered into their neighborhood and they have herded it into the decontamination building someone should go wash it and feed it he promises they didn't feed it.

The completely baffled Elf administrator dutifully confirms pronunciation and confirms the child allocation applies to them and agrees about the weather and does not need the reds to change their names and diligently notes the tunnel and has people go get the dog. 

Once they have agreements with Tapa and Voa and Anitam about what counts as aggression and they've merrily headed for lightleapers he looks at the administrator's reports and is very very confused and asks if he can sit in for her when Colse is expected. She happily skips off to do green constituent services instead.

Maitimo does other work until Colse arrives.

Colse as usual goes to the end of the tunnel and stops nervously. More nervously than usual because this is a new person.

"Hi. I'm Maitimo. Wilindë's covering for someone over in green constituent services. What can I do for you?"

"I... came to say that... we noticed the purple apartment building north of us has a broken gutter... and were not sure if they would mention it."

" - okay. Thank you. Did your community uh, select you to bring concerns to us?"

"........yes."

" - it seems like you are terrified and miserable about it. Were there not any - people interested in the role - who wouldn't be terrified and miserable."

"...no?"

"Why does talking to a help desk make you terrified and miserable?"

"It's hard to figure out what you want."

"It's, uh, also hard to figure out what you want, but I'm not terrified and miserable about it."

"...we're fine?" says Colse, not very convincingly.

"There are no broken gutters in red apartment buildings and no crimes and no hunger and no confusion about the law and no employers trying to cheat you."

Now he is maybe going to cry again and he had been improving so much at that.

"I'm not mad at you. But - we set this thing up because those things do exist and we have to know about them to fix them. And I have a hard time believing they don't exist in red neighborhoods, but we cannot get reds to tell us about them."

Wibble.

"Sit down, please." There is a chair on the red side of the glass. It's outrageously pretty glass, frosted except for the part where people need to be able to see each other, and it has an opening more than large enough for someone to lunge through if for some reason they wanted to.