They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
They appear in midair, visible out of a few thirtieth-floor apartments.
One starts to fall. The other catches her by the arm, flings out - wing-shapes of light - and slows her, spiraling down until they're at street level.
"One country recently transitioned away from using reds for red jobs and killed almost all the reds except the ones Anitam took in. Another country is in the middle of doing the same thing. Everything else is less obviously horrible but I'd expect you might genuinely have different sensibilities than us - Anitam executes people for serious crimes? Some places do less of that. ...we let people do sex work before their first spring if they're of age? There's some place down south that's been sanctioning us over that for the last twenty years but no one else cares. Different castes have different penalties for the same crime, by law in some cases and in practice in others. There's a province on the coast that's been experimenting with corporal punishment in place of prison."
"Those seem less like - things you could get permanently stuck in - can I fix the red thing -"
"Olvala didn't kill them all. They kicked them out, and there was nowhere for them to go, except the ones we could squeeze in."
" - I don't think so, the situation has kind of escalated to the point where it'd be hard for them to back down. Other places will probably wait on starting."
"They didn't offer any red credits, this spring. The reds figured that was precursor to a massacre - correctly so - and they snuck out of their district and burned a blue district to the ground and attempted the same with less success elsewhere. Government shot a lot of them and then tried to make the rest train their replacements in how to do their jobs. The reds refused. The government took their children hostage and is now holding the children to make the parents train their replacements in exchange for periodic verification that their children are alive and unmutilated."
"I'm unclear on the limitations of your magic system but I think they won't back down on the strength of the information that the alien strongly disapproves, and if you kill a lot of people then you've got a panicked international community and panicked people are stupid."
"Aren't there lots of places you can live and just don't like, that would be fine for a little while?"
"There's unoccupied equator but it still belongs to someone, there's unoccupied poles but they're cold."
"That is too many to teleport out in any reasonable time frame, honestly, but maybe they'd stop wasting our time if she did it a couple times as proof of concept?"
"Send the reds somewhere else. People keep asking me what I want, what do you think would happen if I said I wanted some rainforest?"
"You'd get some rainforest. They might want more than vague goodwill in exchange for substantial amounts of rainforest."
"We're working on a plan to get the resources we'd need to terraform. There are lots of countries. I can do some before others. What do you think would happen if I pointed out that Penumbra can teleport and be invisible, and might be conducting secret inspections of random red neighborhoods to make sure they're okay?"