Not really. Sorry.

She writes the reds explaining the delivery problem and soliciting brainstorming on the issue.

They don't know either. It normally works by clean stuff being delivered in batches per neighborhood so it can just be taken out of the normal supply chain.

Ugh.

Yep.

Considering offering a monetary reward for good ideas and tabling the issue, good idea or bad? she asks Peka.

Offering who a reward?

Anyone who comes up with a good idea? ...The polar reds.

That seems fine.

She tells the polar reds there is a reward for good ideas and goes back to studying things and doing food.

Foooooooood~

Meanwhile Illia keeps corresponding with theologians re:the ability to clean reds. (She's not going to start doing any actual experiments until she has a better idea of where to start, she explains if anyone asks.)

It sort of depends on why you want to clean them! When they die, they are only as polluted as a normal corpse that died under otherwise polluting circumstances, and natural processes attenuate that over time, but presumably she doesn't just want to kill them and have them eventually clean that way.

That is the opposite of what she wants! She wants them to be able to integrate into society so she can teach people magic without worrying that this will get them killed.

Integrating them sounds hard because they are very stupid.

How do they know?

Everyone knows that.

And how did they find out in the first place?

Reds aren't under much selection pressure for intellect, they're badly educated, and they're either mentally disabled or under constant pollution stress.

She hired a random Tapai red to interface with the polar reds and she hasn't struck her as particularly unintelligent. Anyway, she suspects people in general will object to having stupid people around than unclean ones.

Oh, sure, they just won't be able to find jobs.

If they consistently fail to find jobs she can figure something out for that. First she needs to get a workable decontamination procedure.

The theologians get on that. She gets routine updates in the form of impenetrably academic papers about pollution heredity and whether any non-instantaneous process would be undone by the self-renewing pollution and so on.

Her father is a university professor; academic language is less impenetrable to her than to some. But she does take a while and a lot of research to slog through each one.

The theologians at least seem to be having fun.