"We can bill Vanda Nossëo and they have a discretionary budget in the sextillions."

"What's a sextillion?"

"...so a thousand trillion is a quadrillion and a thousand quadrillion is a quintillion and a thousand quintillion is a sextillion. I would never dishonestly bill Vanda Nosseëo but emergency consulting is usually really expensive for a reason and you can ask for what you're worth."

"But I have no idea."

"I can look up what someone got paid in a comparable situation?" She does that. She offers her eight thousand local money.

"Okay. Thank you."

"You're welcome. Do you need anything else from us?"

"I don't think so.

Uh, you should email them instead of bothering them in person whenever you can."

Nod. "Thank you."

"You're welcome."

Peka gets a bead atop a plate of snacks.

Nom. Squeeze.

Mountain range somewhere! It's - it's sort of unfathomably pretty, the kind of pretty place you would get if an extraordinarily gifted and obsessive artist with planet-shaping abilities shaped the whole planet to their personal tastes. And they had good taste. She is looking out on some rivers and a valley and a meadow and there is not another living soul in sight.

Ooooooh.

Birds chirp in the distance.

She goes running around whooping for a bit before she squeezes the bead again.

The bead takes her back home.

What good beads. She adds it to her hair with the others.

Vanda Nossëo delivers cleaned Tapai reds with all colors of hair.

Tapa thinks it's a bit much that one of them wanted to be blue.

"My understanding was that property ownership is blue, and they own the area that used to be the red district? Do you want help cleaning that up, by the way, it sounds like the kind of job angels would be perfect for."

"We'd love angel help with that. Blue is - not quite just a matter of owning property, technically anyone can do that, it's collecting rent that's blue -"

"We told them to do the caste where they'd most easily get a job, so they'd integrate fastest, and I suppose collecting rent is the easiest way to get a job if you own a lot of property."

Tapai blues look uncomfortably at each other.

"It's so good of you to be going ahead with this. Everyone at headquarters who was apprised of the situation was tremendously relieved that local leadership was stepping up. Maybe you can show him off to galactics who have heard nothing about Tapa except the reds thing, call it a diplomatic job."