"Escalated how?"

"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."

"You think I can't fix that or you think I shouldn't?"

"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."

"Penumbra can teleport."

"Where're you going to put them?"

"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."

"How many people are we talking about?"

"A hundred thousand."

"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?"

"Stop wasting your time and do what exactly?"

"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?"

"Some people would try with varying degrees of ineptness to make their reds more okay, some would threaten the reds, some would explain to you at length how it's hard not to mistreat your reds, might be an improvement on net - do you want to talk to Anitam's reds person, she would know who in the red communities to ask about this directly -"

"Seems worthwhile."

"I will shoot her a message." He does that.

"Thanks."

"Of course." Sigh. "Do you mind advice on which rainforest to accept if you get it from several places."

"Sounds useful."

"Isel - my friend who does red things - says she'll get on the train."

"It has in fact been a longish day so I don't know how much I'll talk to her today but I appreciate that."

"Of course. Should I let you talk with Penumbra?"

"Yeah, thanks."