"Usually when people realize the definition they're using doesn't actually mesh with their intuitions they retreat to a more pragmatic one. But I guess the retreating can still really suck." Shrug. "I don't suppose it'd be sufficient if you just had personal decontaminating bubbles?"

"...I'm not sure how that would work but maybe it would?"

"Probably the way to do that would be to have someone wish for it - wishes give you what you want, if they go through at all, though how they do it varies a bit - and then we could check what exactly the wish was doing and maybe find a less expensive way to do it. - the Empress does all wishes personally, too risky to delegate it."

"...okay..."

"...so that's not itself a scalable way to do it but it'd be a good way to figure out what exactly we'd be doing, and then find a scalable way."

"Is it generally straightforward to find out what magic is doing and then do it another way?"

"It would be easier to start from, like, a specification of what exactly you'd need the bubbles to do, but it sounds like you don't exactly think about pollution in those terms so, given that, something that we know Amentans will consider adequate is probably the best starting point."

"Not all things even have procedures to decontaminate them."

"Without magic, sure. With magic - like the bubble could just replace anything that comes in its range with something identical but made of newly-generated atoms, if it did that would that be sufficient?"

"...yes."

"So it'd be something like that. I bet there's a way to do that with a more scalable kind of magic but I'm not an expert."

Nod.

"And then Amentans can just go everywhere and be clean and, uh, the being clean is an accommodation we can figure out how best to arrange for you instead of a constraint on other people which will make it wildly more politically palatable."

"...I mean, it's still horrifying if everywhere else is polluted but it's much more tolerable if it would stop being that way as soon as we got close enough."

"And you're not gonna convince tons of aliens to suddenly terrorize their perfectly happy coroners. ...do you think coroners on other planets are also secretly not people or is it just ones here?"

"I suppose if a hyposensitive decided to be a coroner this wouldn't stop them from being a person."

"We could actually check with magic if reds are people. There's a form of mental magic called subtle arts, gets used for therapy, it does mind-reading and affect-reading and memory-reading and it can notice things like how you experience emotions and how you encode memories and how your mental processes work. If there were anyone who looked and acted normal but there was no light on inside, they'd be able to tell. 

If I asked you to bet something that mattered to you on what they'd find if they looked at reds..."

"If I were going to bet on it I'd probably arrange to meet one or something but I'd sooner not."

"Fair enough."

Sigh. "Is there anything you need? Since you don't look like an alien I can send the servants here."

"I will not turn down food and a television or local equivalent."

"Oh, there's a guest computer, I think it's in the nightstand drawer..." It is. "I'll have a servant bring you something to eat, assuming you can eat local stuff."

"Yeah, you all seem like humans except brighter hair colors and less sexual dimorphism and the babies thing."

"...what good is sexual dimorphism in a sapient species?"

"Specialization? I guess? In humans men are taller and stronger and most places they didn't let women study things or be in power until pretty recently. Before I was born, but pretty recently in the grand scheme of things."