"Then I guess they'd pay the landowners and the landowners would have to figure out how to get their tenants to break their leases and so on."

"Pay them to move the tenants or pay them for the land?"

"Pay them for the land, presumably - I think if you're buying land with tenants you normally inherit the leases but I'm really not an expert and I sort of expect they'd negotiate it case-by-case -"

Nod.

"Pay them for the land and sell them parcels of the new land," he confirms after a second's pause, "if concerns about maintenance and intangible community resources and so on are adequately handled, and possibly with a vote of the whole population in case the landowners are in favor but there's a substantial contingent who relies on spliced electricity from a purple neighborhood and won't tell us, or something like that."

Nod nod.

"You could tell us something like that but - we've learned our lesson about assuming it's enough to just say that."

Nod.

"Anything else?"

Headshake.

"Thank you for asking."

He bows and goes.

The military budget is entirely so Oahk isn't tempted by the exiled blues muttering at them, they swore off offensives in the binding Elf way and they're not even vaguely tempted to get around that. In wars people die. Elves find death abhorrent. Really. Seriously. 

Orcs don't do any kind of school until they're old enough for university or vocational training, he isn't sure if it's something about orcs that makes that work or if it'd work fine with Amentans but it's another reason they're not sure about public schools. They might do pilot projects of a couple different things but pilot projects don't reliably scale well.

In between meetings he sings. It's almost always sad; it's always deeply felt. The words are in Quenya, usually, though sometimes he'll cover a local pop song and make it somehow transcendent and tragic.

...the tunnel gets crowded.

Rather very crowded. Elf ears might hear.

Elf ears do hear. The first day he ignores it; the second day he asks somebody if he's crazy; the third day he asks somebody to go check it out. 

Extremely irritable security guards enter the tunnel.

Reds shriek and run away!

They get chased!

He hears that too. He grabs a sleek metal doorstop and rips through the plaster on his wall and blinks at the tunnel and then chases shrieking people!

Reds are running running running!

Guards are calling more guards.

"Why are you doing that, it was a red area, they're allowed to be there -"

      "There was, a, a infestation - they might have been planning something - another riot - you should stay here for your safety -"

"They were obviously listening to the singing, none of them had weapons, you wouldn't even need that many - it wouldn't even help to have that many -"

Guards are largely faster than reds.

Some of the reds get cornered in a... corner... and other reds make it around and keep running. Peka is cornered.

Only one of the guards has a stick. That one bats reds farther into the corner. The other one just bristles at them. 

"Stop it."

       "They were probably going to kill you, your grace."

"Yep those sure are a lot of weapons they have. Stop it."

       Guard stops batting them into the corner though perhaps because they are already in the corner. "We're arresting you," he tells the reds.

"For what."

      "Trespass in a government building, conspiracy, resisting arrest, espionage -"

"I was singing."

      "Between meetings, right?"

Peka bites her lip, tries to catch Macalaurë's eye without doing anything that will attract the police's attention.

He looks at her inquiringly. "Between meetings about education policy. Whoever didn't soundproof the tunnel was grossly negligent, but no one who went through it today heard anything confidential, nor do I imagine that was their aim since one person would suffice for that."

          "The courts can pat them on the head and tell them they're cuddly innocent garbage if the courts see fit, our job is to arrest them."

"It's me Peka," she whispers under her breath, trying to avoid guardly notice.