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There are a lot of Amentan countries. Vanda Nossëo representatives are dispatched to all of them. These Elves (two with black hair, one with silver) take a shuttle down from the lightleaper to a country called Calado, and radio ahead to request permission to land at a elegant modern spaceport.
okay by comparison Voa and Tapa look like thriving modern democracies
She is convicted of murder. Lawyer files appropriate requests. She gets a lot more than the babysitting expenses in support for childcare during arrest.
She apportions some of it - about a year of a red plumber's salary - to be distributed among the children of the victim, and writes a little note that is only about 1/3 plagiarized from a soliloquy.
Her lawyer recommends she testify in the sentencing hearing that she will take anger management classes and do her utmost never to be around a red again and that if she were around one she wouldn't attack the red even if the red were late.
There aren't thoughtcrimes.
She gets three Amentan years with a review for parole after one if she completes the anger management class and the restitution and writes an apology that reflects full understanding of the impact of her actions and reads the heartwrenching recently published biography of her victim.
She signs up for the class and figures out how to send the restitution and polishes the apology and is bewildered about the biography but she'll read it.
And she can request transfer between the various prisons of the Vanda Nossëo consortium with a simple web form. They have different architecture and different numbers of people and some of them have maternity facilities and one of them is literally an entire otherwise-uninhabited planet.
The anger management class teaches calming strategies and asks people to brainstorm about times they've acted angrily and what they wish they'd done instead. Most of her classmates are in for domestic abuse. One stabbed his wife and seems to think he and she have a lot in common.
The biography is very well-researched; it traces a red life in Rivik in lots of detail and writes about it just as if it were a person experiencing all that.
She may as well be choosy about prisons.
She doesn't think she has anything in common with the guy who stabbed his wife.
It's an interesting sort of speculative work. She reads the whole thing.
She hadn't even registered what variety of red she stabbed and only knows it now because people keep mentioning it in languages which have gendered pronouns for some reason.
Weird. Well. The dude isn't sorry he stabbed his wife because otherwise he might've ended up on the hook for child support.
"So I'm hitched to this twat but she doesn't work, living off benefits, picked up smoking some shit she got off some other dude she's probably banging, and she's whiny as fuck and I'd leave but I take a hell of a paycut - my work did dependents benefits - so I'm figuring out how to make that work and then she says she's maybe pregnant and Imma be stuck paying for the kid for fucking forever so I stabbed her in the stomach. I didn't actually want her to die, just to lose the baby."
"If you hadn't stabbed the plumber would you have been on the hook for eighteen years of child support payments?"
"Wow, we've got ourselves a judgmental murderer. I'll tell you this, if she'd had the fucking kid I wouldn't have killed her with a kid right there."
Social worker tells him to stop talking to her. He stops.