"It's just kind of run down and dead. You saw it. Rent'd go way up if it was nice."

"See, this is why you gotta own your own place, so when you put your sweat into it you're the one who profits."

"I can't afford an apartment building, man."

"Your government should do what America did way back in the day, we said if you went out to frontier and built a house on some land no one was using and defended it and improved it then it was yours."

"Dunno how to build a house. They aren't even space efficient and there wouldn't be trains."

"You've got a planet, you don't have to worry about space efficient."

"Are they just gonna keep giving us more planets? I guess we could do buses."

"I think that they're gonna get cheaper with more demons in play. But seriously, one of them'll last you a while, it's got more land area than here."

"I guess I could farm shit. Farmers cope with not being near everything."

"I could help you put a place together and then we can just teleport into the city whenever."

"Hey, yeah, that's a good reason to want to teleport, you can live someplace with a helluva view and just," he snaps his fingers, "for groceries."

"Yup! It's a great deal all around really. We could hop around the colony planet this weekend, look around."

"Let's do it."

Grin.

Yvalta has adopted a policy of not letting entire families leave the country at the same time; there is still some attrition, but they keep it slow. Other permissions-based countries are either taking this opportunity to force through the next most popular population control policy or wheedling more servants than just the red-replacement golems out of Vanda Nossëo.

Vanda Nossëo is happy to help places manage dwindling populations and can also recommend countries to potential immigrants if the countries will have humane and consistently enforced laws for them.

Yvalta would actually be a really nice place to live if you didn't want any kids. Other countries have issues with "humane" or "consistently enforced" or don't want the cultural dilution.

If they'd rather have servants they get servants. Yvalta gets some cheerful Elf and human immigrants; the Elves mostly wear green silk headscarves and sing and paint and buy up an apartment building and make it absurdly pretty, and the humans do all kinds of things. A particularly successful one organizes redubbing of alien television for Yvalta audiences.

President Sondayo Insho is reelected mostly because nobody else can pull together a large base of support. Ex-senators go home. They are annoyed but not very troublesome.

Dave's impression is that they aren't missed.

They bounce around looking for places for the house.

"People say Calado has nice weather but they're morons," says Cahmro, looking at a snowy slope. "I've never been sledding. I wanna go sledding."

"Sledding's okay. Snowboarding is where it's at. We could do a house here. Great views."

"Hell yeah. Trees and sky and shit."

"D'you know people who know how to build it? I want to help - it's good luck, living in a place you built with your own hands - but you've gotta be learning from people who know how."

"I can find some school friends or whatever, yeah."