"So what are you going to do exactly if a few neighboring Houses march their security in here?"

"Turn their weapons into modelling clay and put them back where they came from with little sticky notes saying 'please don't try that again'. One time I did 'please don't try that again, they take it out of my bonus if I have to actually hurt anyone' but I got scolded for being threatening."

"...uh-huh."

"I can demonstrate if that'd be reassuring. And anyone doesn't mind their weapons being modelling clay."

"Why modelling clay?"

"It happens to be particularly easy with the powers I've got, it communicates 'this totally does not need to get violent but if it does you lose' pretty clearly without being all that threatening..."

"What other powers do you have?"

"I've got the standard Mîr suite - healing, minor transmutation, illusions and stuff, I can conjure my weapon, I can change my outfit and appearance around at will - and then I've got the specific thing I wished on, which is that when I'm in a dangerous situation I can suddenly speed up like a thousandfold compared to the rest of the world and I can turn anything I can see into modelling clay and I can move it around. - I was in a car accident. I was trapped and it was horrible. Mîr magic runs on really strong emotions - after I got out I was having nightmares about it and I went through the application for a wish."

"...huh."

"If your House neighbors are likely to launch a missile at us and you haven't got missile-tracking of some kind then you need a precog but for anything short of that you're safe enough."

"A precog. Wow. - I was kind of expecting to have to prove somehow that I didn't set this up as some kind of plot."

"Do you want to prove that? Vanda Nossëo kind of runs on - well, they underplay their firepower a bit, right, and if people decide to try to betray them or take them hostage or manipulate them or whatever, the information is more than worth the inconvenience. We try to be not worth plotting against a lot harder than we try to catch plots."

"...they underplay their firepower?"

"Oh yeah."

"Damn. All right. I'm not plotting anything, this is just the sort of thing that would've looked like a plot to - the sort of person I'm used to."

"Scarcity," she says. "And mortality. People are way better to each other when they know that no matter what nothing really bad can actually happen. Like - you can't die now, you understand that? And your kids can't die, and your grandkids, and anyone else you care about - if something happens in the course of getting membership, when we have guaranteed you security, we will put them right back whether you can afford a resurrection or not. Everyone's gonna be safe. And once people get used to that, then they can go 'oh. okay, what else do I care about? And often enough they care about - passing it on, making more people safe. Or making their country prosperous and happy and thriving and a place that people are desperate to immigrate to, or learning things, or inventing them - all this thought and energy and effort that was getting spent on zero-sum games..."

"Population controls are - really bad for us."

"Oh?"

"They're better than constantly slaughtering each other to take each other's land. But they're bad."

"Because of the zero-sum games thing?"

"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."

"I think Amentans want kids more than pretty much anyone."

"We always expected aliens would be the same way. Evolution."

"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 -"

"...wow. Why do they ever, then -"