"I suppose. On Earth the history of religion involves a lot of people doing unpleasant things to try to win converts to theirs. Norms against it arose. I'm not sure what if any contribution the other members may have had."

"...we can ban them from buying billboards if it makes the aliens happy."

"I wouldn't expect billboards to be the thing, just legal requirements or substantial coercion."

"That one's not a problem, then. Rule of law, yes, all right, gender equality - gender equality - do they mean the numbers have to come out even, I think statistically there are slightly more men -"

"Oh, no, they mean some people, instead of having a caste system, have a gender system where the genders are treated differently, usually to somebody's detriment. Ferengi fail that one hard, apparently."

"- might make sense if there were aptitude differences. Amentans there aren't, but I'd feel bad for some poor species with, say, as much sexual dimorphism as some birds have -"

      "Anyway, we qualify for that one."

"Yes we do."

     "Why do they not mandate consistent and humane population control -"

"Because they don't want kids enough for it to be important -"

"And everyone they're dealing with at all has warp."

"I really don't like that one. If we meet another species like us -"

        "We trade with them, yes."

        "There's another kind of FTL, right? The kind Elves have?"

"Yes."

"So, before we have a warp signature and are under scrutiny, we find some nearby uninhabited stars and put planets at the right distance and terraform them and arrange for them to be competently administered. We have a species-wide government whose job it is to call for and host conferences at which binding agreements are negotiated among the federated states of our species-wide government. We - look into magic options for the reds. We keep daeva a very closely held secret. Some astronomers will be baffled if every nearby star just turns out to have a perfectly habitable planet but they won't leap to interdimensional magic.

We don't mention lightleapers have no range limit; they're slower than warp at short distances. We announce warp as an upgrade to the tech. And now our neighbors can meet us and find an established interstellar civilization."

        "Uh huh."

        "If one of the red options work."

"If they don't then we have a problem, yes. With this much magic there's got to be something."

"Having lightleapers in the picture at all will destabilize things like crazy if you do get into some kind of conflict."

"Only if anyone learns they don't have a range limit."

"Even having them in reserve means you can take risks you wouldn't otherwise."

"We're not really risk-taking by nature or nurture."

"And we still have them in our back pocket if we never use them," someone else says, "because we have Milliways in our back pocket. Building an institution that's responsible with potentially destabilizing power seems superior to throwing out all the power."

"I suppose."

"How hard are lightleapers to develop, how long before someone stumbles on them anyway -"

"I don't really know. I got there after they were invented."

They set to discussing allocation of authority over terraforming projects. They seem to plan on giving many other countries a colony planet and then having some open for immigrants from the countries they don't think can handle one competently. One will be legally casteless, presuming robots can be developed.

Could be worse.

They're pretty pleased with themselves. Someone wants to get a couple reds to see if angeling them works; Aitim bites his lip consideringly and then starts offering suggestions on how to evaluate whether this works. After a few minutes of discussion she asks Cam how to summon an angel.

"I can do most of the circle for you and you can fill it in and let someone else do the talking till you're ready to agree on a task and payment. Learning to do it properly is more time-consuming. Do you want a medical angel? Do you want me to look over a mindless Amentan body and see if you're humanlike enough that the expertise would transfer?"

"That sounds like a good start."

"I will go do an exam. You probably don't want to supervise, mindless bodies are disconcerting."