Re: Formal Contact Between the Crucible and the Colonial Corps

[The Clans]

Everything Claryse thought about Ziral, she thought of him and more. From her perspective, he was looking down on her just because she was an alien and was being rushed to be accomodated as an afterthought rather than with any real sincerity. This implied that Claryse either wielded great power without the grace of leader and was deliberately treating her poorly as an abuse of power, or whatever position he held was not gained with talent or skill but by appointment. To those who grew up under Mysha's and the Corps' reforms both of these were the cardinal sins of ruinous tyrants.

When he says the word "evil" something clicks in her brain. Something deeply unsettling. "Evil? What do you mean evil? We have risked our own lives and space ships (translated from the common word rig) to protect you from the giant ship insects. We blanketed the surface in emergency broadcasts detailing evacuation routes and real-time points of impact of the crashing ship. We removed radioactives from the wreck so the farmland would not become poisoned. Relations between soldiers and your scientists were amicable, ugh, our translators are the best of friends. What have we done to prove otherwise? Is that... Is that why the uniformed male did not want to be in here? That he thinks I'm evil, that I'm going to just sink my claws into his throat, rip it out, and drink his blood as if from a hatchling's horror story? "

She leans forward with her elbows on her thighs to support her upper body, looking him dead in the eyes with her sudden unblinking ones. "What kind of a staged ambush am I about to walk into? Is there even any possibility that I can undo this sabotage? If a people's leaders cannot convince their people, or have convinced them of the opposite... What are the chances that they will listen to the monster they've been made to fear?"

[Offizier Necro]

The situation was simply getting more and more frustrating for Claryse as it went on, with the mutual relations deteriorating further. Claryse massaged his temples gently before forming a response to it all.

"I am fully aware of what your people did for us. You went above and beyond for a bunch of strangers and saved countless lives. But that doesn't stop the ignorant. This is a problem with having a free society that we cannot really control what people say and think with a simple snap of our fingers. While I think your kind deserves recognition for saving possibly our entire species from the Bugs' possible invasion, hence the parade, that doesn't mean the non-government people owning radio stations and newspapers agree with me, and it doesn't mean the half-literate bum condemning my fair election and wanting the genocidal emperor back will trust my words either. These media corporations... they get money for having people tuning in and consuming their media. People tend to pay closer attention to big groups talk about how there is danger afoot and not when everything is mundane and fine."

"So while I'm not a mind-reading magician, I think the man does think you are some sort of horror story villain because of the media frenzies and the sympathizers of the tyrannical Empire that preceded us that are sabotaging our attempts at cooperation, despite how clearly absurd these people are being. They're thrashing at the firefighters that just dragged them out of a blaze."

"However, a large part of the problem stems from cultural differences as I have been saying. For example, the mounting of sapient skulls on vehicles is considered a big taboo that is considered an overly cliché gimmick of savages and villains of fiction and ancient history. Your kind employs people smaller than your average adult, which implies, whether or not it is true, that you use child labor: something that has been outlawed for our people for being considered cruel and unfair. A more innocent and subtle thing is simple attire. Many of your people wear robes instead of pants, which brings up bad memories of the genocidal emperor in recent history and the fashion of his underlings. The media can smell juicy stories to spin for personal benefit from a mile away, but having a previously-unknown culture that accidentally crosses lines it didn't know existed leaves those potential stories within arms' reach."

"What I want to accomplish today, with the whole world listening, is to have a representative of the Yuxu personally calm everyone down. My supporters will trust me and my detractors won't, but having a representative of the Yuxu will make it so that I'm not just trying to defend the Yuxu on mere hearsay just like 'the enemy'. If this speech goes well, we'll have reassurance from the Yuxu directly and in-quotation without it being able to be spun before it reaches everyone."

"With how important this speech is to ensuring the cooperation of the people, we've been taking every precaution to make this not an ambush, up to and including holding our preliminary conversation inside of a bunker without letting the majority of soldiers here know you specifically are the VIP. They don't know who's just a translator, a servant, or an honor guard, but they need to protect the entourage I'm with no matter what. This ensures that even the craziest xenophobe around can't jump out of a formation and do anything, as even if someone were so crazy to do so, they would not be capable of distinguishing who it is they would be targeting. And that's assuming there is even someone who would be near and able enough to do such a thing, which we have been further preventing. We have many other layers of security in place to ensure that this is not an 'ambush'."

"While we haven't received any indication that there would even be a attempt, we have ensured that there cannot be one. We have everyone attending patted down and checked, and have undercover people in the crowds doubly ensuring protection, and we further have people in position for detecting and countering snipers even if they did somehow breach the checkpoints. You're officially receiving better protection than me today, and I was the leader of all known life before our kinds met."

[The Clans]

Ziral lowers her head and massages her own temples out of frustration at what her translator is telling her. "Everyone in the crowd is to be disarmed for my safety, as if my safety is any more important than anyone else in the audience. And the media, you do not know the media on a first name basis?" She lets out a long exhausted sigh. "I feel like I am about to speak to a crowd of disarmed Sleepers/slaves (human translation could go either way). Even the lowest of our society are permitted arms... I'm not understanding how a leader becomes a leader without a supermajority of support or why active resistance is allowed to persist without being shot."

She pauses for a moment before speaking again. "On Yuxun or on any of our colonies, we would speak to an audience where anyone who wanted to carry arms would and the only people who would be searched and disarmed would be adolescents. The media would only state the facts of the meeting and joke publications would be understood as satire... These comparisons to the previous regime are taken seriously? Do they not understand how statistically unlikely it is for aliens to have the exact same style of dress and government as the previous regime? Are these superficial comparisons? I cannot i.agine that side by side we are the exact same consideri g how little information about each others' cultures exist between us. That was the secondary purpose of this meeting.. I used to keep several clans and city-states cooperating without killing each other, each with their own customs and laws and what ai am heari g sounds so foreign and... alien that it does not make sense. It sounds as if you do not rely on each other for your own survival, but surely you do? You've formed a complex planet spanning government without cooperating?"

[Offizier Necro]

The human translator fed his superior the translation of "Sleeper" meaning "slave", as "Sleeper" wouldn't be interpreted correctly due to Claryse not having the preexisting cultural understanding that it wasn't literal. The implication of slavery didn't do much to help relieve tension. On the bright side, at least Ziral seemed to be a bit selfless in her consideration for the common man. He decided to move from the point about guns to just discuss the media and public support instead of gun licenses.

"We determine our leaders through whoever has the most votes from the represented area, and given that there are several candidates vying for the positions, this means that no one has a majority. We don't allow murdering people, regardless of social standing, but being vocal against leaders or policies is allowed as we view freedom of speech as a vital right to allow an informed voting populace and to prevent tyranny. There are thousands of major news companies of wildly varying standards, so I cannot personally visit every last one and ensure they're supporting my views when all of the other parties, interest groups, activists, and politicians are trying to do the same for their own. They are merely speculating and discussing rumors, so no laws are being violated, and thus there isn't much I can personally do outside of hosting events such as this. Some publications side with cooperation and learning, others support isolationism and xenophobia. I cannot do my job and simultaneously negotiate with thousands of publishers individually, which is why I pay people to do the job of handling public relations and negotiating with the media. Every other politician on Haven does this as well."

"I agree that it is very unlikely that your culture and the Empire's are the same given that you have had no interaction, but as I said, speculation and rumors exist in spite of the extreme odds against this. The public is still in a sort of 'first impressions' phase right now, which again is part of the purpose of this event."

"So because of this freedom, low amount of government control, and nonviolent dissent, I guess you could say that we don't directly rely on each other for survival and we work without cooperating. But we write strongly worded articles and boycott industries instead of having clans or city-states 'killing each other', and we use competing private actors trying to use anything they can to succeed to create a balance like prey and predators reaching an equilibrium, so in a way our lack of cooperation is what lets us be a 'complex planet spanning government'."

[The Clans]

Ziral waves her hand in front of her face to signal Claryse to stop. Everything she was hearing was complete nonsense to her, it was almost as if humans still used 'first past the post voting'. If that was the case she did not realize just how advanced her badlands dwelling people were by comparison. "Please, no more. We do not kill each other, it was a phrase meant to save time. No one in my position kills, conflict is a military matter. My job is to ensure diplomatic matters do not turn into military ones. Let us leave cultural understanding to our scientists or to a time when we do not have speeches to prepare. Let us rehearse."

Ziral lines out that the Freemen will parade through the city while playing their anthem while the Corps marines follow behind just far enough so their anthem does not drown out or interfere with the Freemen's. At the end the soldiers will fill out in front of a stage where she and Claryse will give their speeches. She places a rectangle with an illuminated piece of glass on the table and scrolls through it to view each individual speech card with a click of a notched scroll wheel on the side of the device. She opens by saying that her species has only been in space for a few decades and has never come across another intelligent species except for the crew of an unknown ship and the crews of, she then lists the name of every vessel part of the Herald's fleet, who they became fast friends with through the sharing of music and mathematical principles. She goes on to detail the battle with the uncommunicative bugs in space and its eventual crippling just before it reached Haven. She then goes on to highlight the few friendships made vetween the translators and the scientists at the bug ship crash site, who she calls by name, as examples that their species can live together as friends and in light of the known hostile insects and the unknown ship, the Corps and the Yuxu people will allow unrestricted access to their technology for scientific research to better bootstrap Haven's spaceborne military to hannot external threats. She concludes by describing the wondets that space flight has brought to her own people and hopes that they will rewards. to reap the same rewards.

"Have I mispoken and said anything offensive to your people?"

[Offizier Necro]

Claryse didn't mind the sudden topic change. In fact, he had wanted this to be the topic for approximately the entire time, and the awkward discussions and failed attempts at explanation escalating to the point they did only personally validated his mindset of getting down to business. "I apologize again for my misunderstanding. Let's."

After Ziral's plans and rehearsal, Claryse nodded and approve of it. "No, that was perfect. Thank you."

Once Ziral's speech was covered, Claryse then proceeded to go over his own speech in kind that was to follow hers, but he used a physical, literal deck of flashcards instead of a digital one. He started off by thanking the joint Freeman-Corps forces for their valiant defense of Haven against the insectoids, and thanking the Corps for their selfless help of strangers. However, the Yuxu would be considered galactic strangers no more, as the Crucible of Freemen declares a formal friendship with the Colonial Corps. Claryse then finishes off by saying that, to celebrate the friendship and cooperation, the Herald is on his way to the Corps world of Suxur to meet with the unifier of the Yuxu, Awakener Mysha.

"Was that fine as well? Nothing taboo to your own people, assuming this gets broadcasted to Corps worlds as well?"

[The Clans]

Ziral clicks her tongue softly in affirmation as she puts her device into a pocket on her robe. "Yes, it will be. At this moment only the ship crews that have entered this star system and a few select leaders even know of your existence. The happenings with the insect ship have yet to be declassified to the population at large. It is my understanding that we had no idea how the events with the insect ship could have played out, or if we would even be welcome within this system or not. It would be a discredit to our youth to make them paranoid of space and to inspire them to become soldiers in a war against a threat already dealt with or may never surface again. We are working to pacify millenia worth of blood feuds and would be best to not inadvertantly cause one in space," she says hinting at the tendency of the youth to glorify and romanticize the victories of their elders and seek to be like them, and the same tendency to foster bitter hatred at defeats.

Ziral adjusts herself in her seat to take some pressure off of her tail, leaning slightly forward. "In case it has not been explained to you, the Corps is offering a gift to Haven. Gift giving among my people has very serious connotations. And individual, a clan, an institution, a government, invest themselves into the success of their professional equals. The acceptance of a gift is an acknowledgement of wishing to pursue a stronger professional relationship, it is not acceptable to present a return gift until a minimum of ten days has passed. These relationships may be ended amicably by accepting and offering the same gift back to the giver, to return at a later date. Instant refusal of a gift is to show that you want nothing under any circumstance to do with the other party. I am pleased to see that, as unintentional as it may be, that you are not immediately offering the same technological access back to us in the same event. In the meantime, the scientists that collaborate with yours will likely as for schematics based on independent research inspired by our own technology. These requests will be expected to be honored after ten days which, given how slow technology develops, is not expected to happen months after the grace period. These requests will, of course, stop once a gift is offered to the Corps and the burden shifts back to us, giving room for your own requests."

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