"Until you go right back to dragging their kids out of their arms to ship off to a different plantation like the last people in charge, maybe."

"Maybe it will help that none of them will be having children due to their owners raping them anymore."

"Look, if we put it to a vote and people voted to keep Amentans in charge, fine. I am pretty sure that that'll lose a vote. Resoundingly."

"I think this is because people vote emotionally and ill-informedly - I would know, I track election statistics - and because at the point you can issue that vote credibly, you have the option to keep a lot of what we did without keeping us. If hypothetically I were in charge of the planet I'd be willing to back off a lot more than we have been but you do need a certain amount of investment to do anything comprehensive like 'end slavery' or 'stop wars' or 'convince other Amentan countries that the humans aren't going to overrun the entire galaxy and they don't have to immediately attack for violation of the population control treaties'."

" - I feel like there's still a missing acknowledgement that, if everyone hates you and desperately wants to be ruled by not-you people, then that matters and it means something besides 'silly people, don't know what's good for them' and it means, other things equal, it is really good to bring that about. I know other things aren't equal, but I feel like you don't even think the fact that lots of people are miserable about being conquered is an independent reason that conquering them is horrible and freeing them good!"

"Did you have this opinion about any intrahuman rebellions or secession movements or anything or is it just Amentan-specific?"

"I did say that I think once we're free we should grant every single secession movement whatever it asks for and just make it easy for people to move between them. And colonialism was evil when it was human Muggles getting up to it too."

"Were you extorting any human rulers about it?"

"No. Illegal."

"I don't think it has become meaningfully less illegal since we showed up."

"Stakes were higher. And we started out doing it the Statute-abiding way, just, once we were sure of Aitim not telling anyone we stopped that."

Sigh.

"It's not that we want things to work out badly for you. Just, if what people want is not to be conquered, is not to have their fates in the hands of aliens who don't understand anything about them, we can just... ignore that and hope that that preference dies out eventually along with the memory of independence. Or we can. Not."

"Anyway, if I were running the place I wouldn't mind humans taking over most issues less important than 'stop drinking feces, you will die' and 'don't own other people', but I'd probably want to be dug in enough everywhere because I have individualist opinions like 'if children decide they'd rather stop being hit in exchange for having to take a lot of showers, that is their prerogative' and things like that."

"That'd probably work."

"And doesn't require kicking them all off the planet or giving up the introduced gains."

"Yeah. Bet Aitim has some objection but it'd be good if there were a way to make it happen."

"I fucking hate being grey," Pelape mutters.

" - would he care? Because that's really stupid."

"It means I'd have to do it under the table. I suppose following the political experiments he's backed I can at least surmise that he thinks I should have been allowed to do orange jobs."

"It'd have to be pretty under-the-table anyway what with 'there are wizards' being a consideration."

"Yes."

"Political experiments?"

"Most changes to policy are rolled out in a few places first. Greys with non-grey moms born in a certain city where a certain experiment was implemented are being allowed to do matrilineal work, but I can't get in on that because the point of having it be a small scale experiment is that you can't let everybody move there, it'll distort the results you'd get if you expanded it."

"Just greys? Why?"