I am attending and have a room for WorldCon/Chicon 8.  It's on a quiet floor, so any gatherings there would have to be kabiu,  But I would be willing to play host.

joekc6nlx wrote:

Why didn't the aiji appoint an ateva as a paidhi to the humans?.

"The Human Advantage" is our adaptability, our ability to "go native" with relative ease. Remember, the negotiations to end the War of Landing were being carried out across a fractured and misunderstanding-strewn language interface.  Offering to send in one "harmless" (disarmed) individual is a classic human negotiation tactic, like the cop who lays down his weapons and walks into the bank-robbery-gone-bad full of hostages.  "We send one person" is something that could be communicated across that very very basic initial vocabulary.  The future Mospheirans just wanted to survive, to live and be left alone.

scenario_dave wrote:

The Atevi would never send one Paidhi. One Atevi is unstable. They would have to send an entire household.

Precisely.  This got me thinking about how, on the atevi periodic table, the inert gases that we call "noble" (aloofness and separation being things we associate with nobility) would be "crazy" gases in atevi chemistry textbooks.  Noble elements to them would be highly reactive, mixed in with everything.

scenario_dave wrote:

But an Atevi household who lived with humans would change. Their manchi to the mainland might fracture. They'd go native.

Not so much.  For adaptability to be the human advantage, the atevi have to be less so, for contrast.  Give or take extraordinary individuals like Tabini and Geigi, who took 200 years to arise.  The atevi household would be a point of stability, a clearly demarcated enclave within Mospheira.  There would be challenges, to be sure.