I Am Not Being Obtuse. You Are

If This Goes Badly And I Make A Crater, I Want It Named After Me!

I Enjoy It Too Much - Even If I Knew I'd Never Get A Book Published, I Would Still Write. I Enjoy The Experience Of Getting Thoughts And Ideas And Plots And Characters Organised Into This Narrative Framework.

It Looks Perverted And Wasteful To Us, But Then One Thing That Empires Are Not About Is The Efficient Use Of Resources And The Spread Of Happiness; Both Are Typically Accomplished Despite The Economic Short-circuiting - Corruption And Favoritism, Mostly- Endemic To The System.

...[changers] Were A Threat To Identity, A Challenge To The Individualism Even Of Those They Were Never Likely To Impersonate. It Had Nothing To Do With Souls Or Physical Or Spiritual Possession; It Was, As The Idirans Well Understood, The Behavouristic Copying Of Another Which Revolted. Individuality, The Thing Which Most Humans Held More Precious Than Anything Else About Themselves, Was Somehow Cheapened By The Ease With Which A Changer Could Ignore It As A Limitation And Use It As A Disguise.

Oh, They Never Lie. They Dissemble, Evade, Prevaricate, Confound, Confuse, Distract, Obscure, Subtly Misrepresent And Willfully Misunderstand With What Often Appears To Be A Positively Gleeful Relish And Are Generally Perfectly Capable Of Contriving To Give One An Utterly Unambiguous Impression Of Their Future Course Of Action While In Fact Intending To Do Exactly The Opposite, But They Never Lie. Perish The Thought.