"Every red death is a horrible tragedy we will remember and regret until all the stars burn out. I - don't think we've done nearly enough to prove it but it's true."

"But it's not of course. If you think you're being normal somebody might think you will actually act normal."

Nod.

"Anything else you want to ask?" Pet pet pet shaved baby pet pet.

Elf restrains himself from being upset about that, it's none of his business. "I don't think so. I - we're really upset that people are coerced into rioting, is there anything we can usefully do about that -"

"Uh? It's usually not - do this or we'll do that - it's - they're gonna kill us and you drew the short straw time to go do some heroics and if you feel like venting now's the time? You have to have a reason not to, but if you have a reason - I mean, I don't know about here, I don't speak the language and they skipped me because baby."

"Okay. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

He leaves.

She goes back down the tunnel and gets in her van and drives back to the rainforest development. Has dinner. Feeds the baby.

Phones the prince.

Gets put through right away. "Hi, Peka."

"Hi! Your previous red constitutenty person was a careless moron but she seems really sorry about that."

"Yes, I heard, everyone heard. Maitimo said the initial mistake was excusable but she should've done something about her constituent not talking subsequently, we'll do it over email until we have anyone sure they can safely talk to reds. She was really really good at the problem-solving side." Sigh.

"I mean, they did keep bringing her stuff to do, so I bet she was, yeah."

"But she didn't say 'I don't know what's wrong but I apologize if it's something I did' and why bother asking, I'm sure, maybe then you lose the problem-solving too."

"Yeah."

"Anyway. Thank you."

"You're welcome!"

"We were thinking maybe we could round up some volunteers to go live on Endorë and then they could testify to the indifference of the people of Endorë about you all being red and then at least one of the proposed solutions would be credible."

"Bonus points for fucking up attempts to establish trade relations with Endorë, it'll make it real hard to buy robots."

"Unfortunately within an hour of being aware this is a problem there'll be Dwarf agencies certifying the manufacture of Dwarf goods meets Amentan standards - probably, ironically, they'll achieve that by just having all the manufacturing done by robots. But Endorë is behind us in tech, I would expect it to be developed in Valinor first."

"Oh."

"We're gonna keep you all safe."

"Well, you're gonna try."

"If necessary we can just dump you all on Iverin in Valinor, it's not a good fallback plan but nobody dies."