"I don't know, I only picked up bits and pieces."

"So, we don't have great lines of communication with reds because no one wants to interact with them, but if one decides to start committing crimes it can be very high stakes. A handful of reds went places they didn't belong in another country and there is now a war with millions dead and a famine with billions hungry or in financial hardship trying to buy food. That could all have been mitigated if everyone had known exactly where the criminal reds had been and what they'd touched. With clean people there's all kinds of normal incentives to get them to report crimes - you can offer them reduced sentences or something. With reds that just doesn't work, we know from experience. So some places are set up to have a way to convince them to answer questions without anybody having to touch them. It's not fun, we don't like it, and we are deeply sorry that a queen was mistaken for a red, but it's just not practical to stand on principle if a red's been arrested for going somewhere they mustn't."

"Okay, except I also heard that someone had the idea to get the reds' side of the story and was told it would be a bad idea."

"Remember how we're not telling everyone about you yet? We definitely can't trust reds with that information. They're not trustworthy in general. We can get you in touch with social workers who interact with reds, if that would help."

"I mean it's up to the queen but that sounds like a terrible idea."

"Why's that?"

"Okay, our species used to have slaves in the grim dark annals of history. If you had shown up on us then and we had assured you that it was fine that they were slaves because they were this particular ethnicity, and when you asked to get their side of the story we had recommended you talk to some overseers, I hope you'd be skeptical."

"We used to have slavery too, and it's been abolished," the green assures them. "The reds are a caste, not an ethnicity - every country has them."

"...That is like the complete opposite of the point."

"The problem isn't that they have red hair. The problem is that they're unclean and that makes them dangerous and they're antisocial and untrustworthy."

"I'd be untrustworthy too if I thought people were going to hit me with brooms and torture me."

"They're left alone as long as they stay where they belong."

"Yeah, and an overseer could say that the slaves only get whipped if they don't do as they're told."

"Escaping slaves don't cause war and famine."

"And it's possible the queen will look at all the facts and declare what happened approximately justified but you do realize how this looks from the outside, right?"

"I have an idea but I really think the problem is rooted in not understanding about reds."

"Okay, but how do you know that the problem is us not understanding and not you being wrong?"

"Well, all of our countries do the same thing - not the details with electrified floors, which we've had removed, but having reds and considering them unclean and requiring them to stay inside. When we had slavery, some people were against slavery even at the time."

"And nobody is against mistreating coroners?"

"People disagree on the details. And there are thirteen billion of us. But you'd have to look very hard to find anyone who thought it was wrong for a startled purple seeing a red where one didn't belong to lash out."

"There's a difference between 'lash out' and what happened."

"The greys should definitely have known better."

"I mean, there's that, and then there's the difference between, 'was startled and alarmed, thwacked someone a few times' and 'literally beat someone until they couldn't stand.'"

"- I reiterate that we are deeply sorry about what happened. But from the purple's perspective she continued to look like a red the whole time and they would only be safe if she couldn't move."

"And from our perspective, it's fucked up that beating a red until they couldn't stand sounds totally reasonable."