"Penumbra is stolen. I can steal more, if I can be sufficiently surprising."

"Well. We spend a big chunk of our unimaginable wealth on creative ways to do violence, you landed in the right place."

"It would have been nice if you had invented a way to stop that instead but less useful for this."

"Yeah."

"I'd rather not kill anybody over it but the humans will die eventually anyway and if I don't figure something out the elementals will be like this forever."

"Yeah. First thing they taught you in school is that you're not ready to order military operations if you're only okay with them given that no one dies. But also, you can and should work really hard to make sure no one dies."

"My school is not like that. I am not sure there are human schools like that."

"There are a lot of things wrong with the way we raise blues but we sure do teach them young the things we think they need to know to run a country."

"I think kings' children -" Dictionary - "princes and princesses have tutors, not whole schools."

"There are three million Anitami blues. Not all of 'em on a politics track, of course, but - a schoolful."

"So, so many people - and more as soon as you have planets, wow -"

"It must be so overwhelming. You're taking it really well."

"Thanks."

"Anything else I can do for you before I get in touch with the reds?"

"How did you start doing reds things?"

"Aitim wants to win an election someday and if you do reds stuff you just - can't, you're radioactive, no one will work with you or acknowledge they ever met you. So he asked if I'd do it - I don't really want a political career. And I looked into it and - yeah, someone was needed. So."

Nod.

"I'll get back to you when I hear from them."

"Thank you. I would also like - advice about how to talk about it without being - 'radioactive'. What is that -"

" - really complicated to explain. Uh. Poisonous. You have a lot of latitude, you're an alien, but - people don't even like thinking about it, they just get stupid on the topic even if they're generally sensible...I think you could definitely get away with 'one consideration as we decide in what order to terraform planets is who has humane policies towards their reds and plans to humanely transition away from using them. Bids to be the first to get a terraformed planet should include a discussion of how your reds are treated, rates of police violence against reds, red mortality rates, and legal protections reds in your country enjoy and routinely are able to exercise.'"

Maurabel needs some of that repeated so she can look things up.

She repeats it several times and rephrases where it's still confusing with a dictionary.

"Yeah, that sounds okay," Maurabel agrees when she understands it.

"Great!"

And she writes the reds:

As I imagine you heard on the news, there are aliens. They're upset about the treatment of reds and want to bribe people with planets to get better about that. Can you think of simple, concrete reforms that are worth demanding and that'll be a good idea in other countries as well as here? We're discussing getting somewhere to put Biyan's reds - a rainforest now, a planet later. Suggestions are welcome there, too.

Why are they upset about us?

Everywhere should do our social worker replacement scheme and the cameras.

Delivery chutes.

The aliens can do planets? That's the first I heard of that for sure besides just guessing because aliens