Okay, that makes sense.

Orange is interested in the other side of it, though - they took offers from all those people, and her group isn't actually taking all those resources; how are they figuring out what happens to the rest?

Right! So, money is usually stored in banks - that keeps it safe and makes it easy to move around. The governor's office has set up an account in trust for them - some clever yellow's come up with a way to represent little snippets of each color scheme to attach to a set of verbal aliases, to identify the person for whom the account is held in trust for - and they can do bank things with it like withdraw in cash (up to certain limits, until they get the cash supply on the colony in step with demand for physical currency) or transfer it or spend it.

So it's just going to sit in storage forever unless they happen to come back? That doesn't seem very good.

They can give it to charity or something if they prefer, but it's not literally worthless sitting there, the bank can make investments.

Crafters don't usually formalize this, exactly, but the normal crafter-ish thing to do would be to think of it as available surplus for helping out someone who needs it. It might be that the bank thing is better, though, traveler isn't sure what that is.

    (Orange agrees that she'd expect it to hang around as surplus in at least a nebulous sense.)

They could direct it to the fund for reparations?

That's not a bad idea in practice but it looses some impact if the aliens aren't handling that particular thing on their own. Maybe another of the same sort of thing, though, or the diplomat could hold onto it (or he could, until someone better shows up) for similar purposes, or something.

They can assign control of the account wherever they wish.

Orange will talk to the diplomat about it.

It turns out that she's not enthusiastic about the idea of being in charge of it - she's not actually planning on staying permanently either - but between her and indigo they can figure out who should take it over, sure.

Okay! They can also have a list of charities in case they decide they just want to get rid of it, banking can be intimidating even for Amentans.

Sure, they might eventually want to do that.

Here's the list of charities licensed in Tapa! It's very long but it is loosely divided into categories - disaster relief, education, arts, wilderness preservation, individual assistance, counseling, political, foreign aid, science and medical.

It's a couple of days after that that Sun tells lone sassafras that reports of telepathic babies have piled up to the point that the governor's office is now fairly sure they aren't just pranks.

Oh, that's incredible news!

Yep! They are now collecting reports actively, hoping to figure out how long babies have to be here at what age to get the magic and whether longer stays affect anything about how much of it they have, in case that comes in degrees. People will probably want to expose their babies to the planet during whatever period turns out to be necessary, but since by definition this will be people who actively have babies right then, they are wondering if there are any relatively inhospitable places where they wouldn't bother crafters by setting up arcologies? They don't like to live at the poles all the time because of permaspringing, but people with babies won't mind much, and it's not harder than building a moon arcology.

Indigo would know better than she would about this...

Hm - deserts are the most obvious place, crafters have a hard time living where they can't easily get water and there's a huge one over on the other continent; mountaintops; some crafters live on the ocean but that's mostly uninhabited. Some live at the poles, too, it's not popular but they can use crafting for light and heat so it's actually easier than a desert.

Deserts and possibly boats it is! It would be convenient to have more cities this size scattered around to serve the less trivially habitable outposts, warp shipping is really rather expensive for food and such. Some of those can be in mountain ranges, though not exactly perched on a mountain top.

It's rare for crafters to live at high enough altitudes that they can't comfortably spend time outdoors, is the main thing with mountains, and most plants don't do well that high up either. Maybe they could farm in the desert with crafter help?

They do have some desert tolerant crops and crafter help would make it a bit faster to get those going.

He'll think about how to set that up, then.

They'll want to get some crafting-material to have around for the kids, too - little kids start being able to modify it before they figure out how to make it, he's not actually sure they'd figure out conversion without that step.

Okay! Can they buy some?

He has some spare, yeah, lone sassafras is doing fine for it at this point. How many kids are they talking about?

They have reports from forty-four people now and there are probably going to be more eventually.

All right. It's probably not necessary yet but crafter babies are around it constantly and he wouldn't want the aliens' kids to miss something important - he'd guess a pound or two is fine and it should probably be shaped into toys to encourage them to interact with it, he can craft up some balls and blocks and things and copy them out. Are there colors that'd be especially popular? Other features?

Little kids tend to like high contrast bright colors, sometimes with faces on them - here's a picture of little Shian's favorite stuffed animal, a pink and blue Amentan dolphin.