"All right. This might take a couple hours."

It takes three, as it turns out, and she comes back with a binder full of folders.

"Welcome back!"

"Hi! Green sent me to talk to the Earth management committee, and they're very interested in letting the humans move somewhere else."

"The humans might be attached, but perhaps at least some of them would be happy to move into the Federation. Did you find out how many they are?"

"Mmhmm - ten billion, about. And most of the current generation isn't trained in anything very useful, they don't ask their humans to work. What they'd like to do is change the policies for the next generation, give them more incentives to learn skills that will let them contribute to your society and not let them have children until they leave."

"- no, I don't think that's okay. I don't want my attempt to help these humans used as a bludgeon to force them to abandon their homes or never have children."

She nods. "I'm not sure how much they're going to cooperate with a plan that only gets some of the humans off the planet."

"I don't think there's realistically a plan that gets all the humans off the planet without coercing them, not if there are billions."

"Yeah. Letting them grow up with the idea that they're going to want to go seems like it'll help, though."

"I don't want to cooperate with a coercive relocation plan, even if it involves grooming a generation to go along with it first. A population of billions just isn't going to be that tractable."

"All right. I don't think I trust them not to change their policies anyway, if they notice the humans disappearing."

"I guess I won't sneak any of their humans out at this time, then, not unless I find a way to move a whole planet. Can you do that?"

"Nope."

"Oh well."

...hug? "Sorry."

She does not especially want a hug and is puzzled by the offer. "It would have been lucky for the first concrete idea I had to work but I'm not surprised that it didn't."

No hug, then, all right. "Yeah. I can tell you about situations like that when I find them, lots of places have some kind of trouble."

"I'd appreciate that! The Federation is good at almost everything and it could absorb more people."

Nod. "Will they only take immigrants from worlds with FTL, or are other Earth humans okay? Some worlds' physics don't seem to allow that."

"They don't have a policy on that. The policy as written specifically requires warp drive, actually. But I'm hopeful that if they have incentives to do so they'll resolve the dilemma sensibly when presented with alternate universes."

She nods. "Worlds with space travel tend to all have different ways of doing it, it shouldn't be too hard to give them a reason to be flexible."

"Oh, good."

"Is there anything else you'd like me to watch for?"

"I'm not sure what you're in a position to see. What have you run into the last week or so?"

"Let's see - yesterday there was live music in the evening, and I spent the afternoon practicing algebra with a kid who brought their homework in by accident. The day before that everyone who got a door was from a post-apocalyptic world, and I did magic for some of them. The day before that, the bar was taken up by someone charting out some kind of plan, and the crowd was kind of boring aside from that - we did have someone come in wanting to trade some pretty pottery, though. The day before that... I spent some time with my tribe, so it gets harder to remember, but the last day I spent in Milliways before that I think was the one where the dragon with the shapeshifting magic came through and a bunch of us went flying with them... the day before that was pretty boring, I remember thinking about that while I was flying... I don't think I can remember back farther than that very accurately but the day before that might have been the one where a couple of demigods got into a wrestling match in the backyard."