Sigh. "Yeah. You can see how the responsibility thing and the causing fear thing made interacting with reds absolutely fucking wonderful."

"And you couldn't trust our recommendation to not interact with them and let the experts do it because we act like we don't care about them at all and you aren't sure our experts would be any better."

Another tired laugh. "I am going to answer that with a question. Could you even be reassuring that someone wouldn't conceal a gun and shoot the red on sight? Or even something like a suicide bomb instead? Kills one person and a red, but no war."

"You could give us a way to email the red."

"I don't recall this being suggested. But maybe my memory is jostled."

"Can you give us a way to email the red now?"

"And you planning to do what?"

"Give it to Isel."

Thoughtful pause.

"Okay. I am going to reveal you another dreamshape capability. It allows a complicated version of mind-reading. ...One could create a person with the relevant knowledge - you can guess that is less than ideal - or wait a longer time to convert format between thought and writing. It would be a waste of time and energy for everyone involved if it was necessary to resort to that. And if it comes to the point where creating people is preferable - I don't even want to think of that to be honest. Anyway, I repeat. What would you be planning to do with the e-mail?"

"Give it to Isel."

"And while being truthful and forthcoming. In what ways I would disapprove of that?"

"If she can't think of anything either then we're back at square 1. If the council decided to overrule me - which they likely wouldn't, but they have the authority - they could try to trace internet traffic."

"I suppose."

Sigh. "Heh. I am not sure why I was doing this- Uh, I have another piece of news that might concern you."

"Oh?"

He gives him a fake smile. "It's a pleasure to meet you. I don't have a proper name yet, but I my last name should be Dalkaila like Felix's. I am his clone."

" - the making people, I was about to ask if it could be used for resurrection."

"Can't. Tried. Tried a lot. His - or I guess ours - parents are dead, you don't even want to hear that mess. He can make people with knowledge, skills, personality and even built-in relationships, but no actual episodic memories. His immortality is a different mechanism... he tried to cheat the one week requirement to come back. Got me instead."

"But you have his memories, you referenced things from them."

"Something happened with his method of immortality and it gave me his memories but... I am not him. It's so obvious to me that I don't even know how to put it into words. And," he extends a wing that is only half-orange, "I have different greater gift than him. Uh - complicated skymagery details, the important bit is that sometimes our powers come in stronger form. And despite we all being genetically identical, each one of us gets one different randomly selected greater gift. Fenris is flight, Felix is fire, mine is electricity. I am not Felix."

"Okay. So Felix will be back in a week and - equally angry with us? Or moreso?"

"Oh, don't worry about that. He is not going to be angry. He is going to be broken. So fucking utterly broken that you can't understand unless you know how his head work from the inside." His smile is very bitter. "I doubt you have any idea what he is like when his main sources of social interactions are not terrified reds and diplomat blues."

"I'm sure I don't."

"Yeah. I doubt you're going to believe when I say he is an actually good person. But... one of the reasons I can tell I am not him is that I think he got some sort of stronger version of the skymage responsibility thing. He and Fenris, I think Fenris got it worse. His pocket dimension is basically a monument to his god complex."

"I actually think it sounds like he's a very good person. It's surprisingly easy to cause a lot of hurt as a good person, particularly when you're somewhere new, and he did tell us over and over he didn't understand this place."

"Yeah. No time, a lot of pressure, and a lot of suspicious things about your world. Triggers a lot of alarms to anyone that who grew up a magical bisexual person of color in the United States. I can guarantee you that if a red was dropped on Earth they could easily have found someone as smart as that linguistic green but who thought that Felix was disgusting and evil or something and that would find the treatment of reds absolutely shocking."