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There are a lot of Amentan countries. Vanda Nossëo representatives are dispatched to all of them. These Elves (two with black hair, one with silver) take a shuttle down from the lightleaper to a country called Calado, and radio ahead to request permission to land at a elegant modern spaceport.
okay by comparison Voa and Tapa look like thriving modern democracies
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"And they just mean - everybody's feeling horrible a lot of the time. Even if you have fifteen kids you can't arrange for them all to have fifteen kids, nobody can sustain that, so then you have sad kids."
"Luster humans hadn't even invented birth control yet when Mîr came to say hi. With it people average, like, two. Orcs are like you but they're not evolved, this asshole designed them that way so he'd have more slaves. Some species don't have high investment in their offspring and don't actually care whether they have any - Yeerks literally disintegrate to make their kids and I think are happy enough to not do that -"
"...I think until recently they didn't really get a choice about it, if their superiors said 'I want a million more Yeerks' then, well, you're dead either way, right? But also I guess some are suicidal? Or really want kids of theirs to exist even if they won't get to see them."
"I mean, once you have one, you'd die to save them, if you had to, but you wouldn't die to have them."
"Makes sense. Well, luckily for you all most places don't want kids as much as you and if you end up chewing through disproportionately many colony planets that'll be fine. It's too bad you're not near Mîr, by now they'd have wished on some sort of infinite-space solution for you all."
"I guess. I was born into it, I can't really imagine what it was like for the people who went from a normal life to a - safe and vast and magic one."
"Oh, most of the day to day is delegated and aliens landing is a good excuse to put off anything else."
Shrug. "People stuff? More magic? The screening for wishes? I'm kind of curious what kind of plot people would suspect this of being, it doesn't seem spectacularly conducive to any plots but I might not have the cultural upbringing to be properly imaginative."
"How did you decide to come here? How long have you known about us? - uh, you've told me a lot of stuff you didn't say on TV, I could be gathering information or could conceivably have been planning to take you hostage."
"Anyone who was sufficient as security against all the other Houses would probably be pretty hard to take hostage. Plus, like, it's Fëanorians running Vanda Nossëo - I guess you wouldn't have known that.
I think we'd added you to a list like ten years ago, you're not high-priority because you wouldn't substantially benefit from any cheap resources and you haven't invented various low-tech ways to destroy yourselves and there'd have been substantial justified resistance to external governance and the reds thing is horrible and hard to fix. You haven't moved up the list much but one of the Elf princes decided to do it anyway, I think because Tapa had a girl he had determined with magic was the girl he wanted to marry. - uh, he can make contact on a whim but that doesn't mean things would get yanked out from under you if he got bored, once it's in motion we always follow through."
"...on my planet until recently homosexuality was considered disgusting, some places would kill people for it and some just made you - pretend... I've done security on a planet where disabled people were considered disgusting and if you were injured in an accident or in a war then the decent thing to do was to kill yourself and if you didn't do that everyone would just quietly loathe you - I've been to one where they murdered people in all kinds of horrifying ways for being heretics, by which they meant believing a slightly different variant of the local religion - look, everybody hates somebody. It's practically universal that if we land on a planet there'll be people who, to the outside eye, look no better and no worse than all the rest, but who the locals will tell us just need to die.
So when you say that about reds, we're just kind of like 'okay, listening to those other people would have been a terrible mistake, the correct thing to do was to tell them 'uh, no, you don't have to like them but the law will be enforced for them too' and wait two generations for minds and hearts to change'.
And maybe that's not true here. But so far you haven't said anything that sounds different than what literally everyone says about the people they hate."