instead of Tapa having the prettiest buildings, Calado does
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"How're you gonna just do that?"

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"Tell the robot manufacturers they hand out the robots on our terms or they can't expect their lightleapers to be safe in Amentan airspace, we are the crazy Elves who conquer places and can be believed about this, hand out robots to places only if they let us herd their reds onto ships first."

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"I think you might have a communication problem getting the herding done without any of them running into a cop first."

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Sigh. "That's going to be a problem even if we have a lovely terraformed red planet, isn't it."

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"Yeah."

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"Maybe we can hire orc security to supervise transitions."

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"What would that do?"

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"Uh, if someone killed them it'd be no big deal, orcs are like Elves that way, and if someone attacked them they would react appropriately."

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"Maybe, yeah."

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"If you have ideas I'm all ears."

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"I don't really know what you're working with exactly? You sort of fluctuate between seeming omnipotent and weirdly hapless?"

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"We're aliens. We have lots of resources but Amentans don't make a lot of sense to us, and usually we can just adhere very closely to local best-practices and hire competent people and observe them and do that, but with reds that doesn't work at all because local best-practices are a complete disaster and treating you like poor purples results in - problems like you all concluding we're going to murder you."

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"How do we not make sense?" She snuggles her baby.

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"Uh. Elves are - lower-variance - less mental illness, fewer actually bad people who just hurt people for fun, much more law-abiding, basically no sense of urgency - I've never known an Elf aside from my father to complain that something was taking too long even if it took years - much more generically altruistic and prosocial, harmed by different things, in need of different things - we never had population controls and we're not really going to be able to enforce them here, the idea of taking a child from their parents is just so repellent, but if it were broadly agreed that the right thing to do for population reasons was to have only two children and wait to have them, we'd all do that and it wouldn't be unbearable.

We're very law-abiding for its own sake, if the government outlawed purple as part of a social experiment everyone would meticulously obey, even if there was no penalty.

We pretty much all trust each other - if an Elf I'd never met told me that they needed a few thousand ahk and couldn't tell me why and would repay me in a year I'd just give it to them and they would repay me. 

And back home we could pretty much trust we'd get complaints if we were making a mistake - you could go yell at the King and he'd mostly be concerned that something was so horribly wrong you had to yell at the King about it -"

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"...nobody would go yell at him over the ban on purple?"

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"No! They would write letters describing the costs imposed by the law and asking how the government meant to remedy them. But my point is that we're all accustomed to being - entirely trustworthy and trusted at least as far as 'giving them more information won't make you worse off'."

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"Huh. Sounds nice."

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"It is." Sigh. "And most of us had never met anyone who had died, let alone irretrievably died. It's horrible. People are just miserable all the time. We're doing everything we can but we can't cure death yet and sometimes it's our fault -"

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"I miiiiight have been mean to that Elf lady."

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"I think that is pretty secondary to the fact that someone she liked spent months thinking she meant to have you all murdered and it wasn't even worth arguing with us about and then died forever. It's not like there's a nice way to break that."

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"There's probably nicer ways than 'it's all your fault, genius'."

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"I dunno if I should like, email her that I'm sorry, or anything?"

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"You could help us save everyone else. I think that'd mean more."

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"You can call me if you need to!"

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