"That must have been scary."

"We thought - you might be doing it already, put something in the water, sterilize everyone before they even know it - and we didn't want to hurt anyone who wasn't blue so we just spread out waiting for someone to throw a stick or a punch so we could get a glimpse of the judge who'd sentence them to death for it and then go from there."

"And you got Shasali Aven." Sigh.

"Paralysis and Veritaserum aren't harmful to pregnant people, I did check that first."

"I didn't actually know she was pregnant again but that's good."

"Yeah, two-per-family is for humans."

"Voan system's conventionally considered nicer than an auction. And some people get three under a Voan setup too."

"And I didn't mean it was nice she's pregnant, I don't really have an opinion on that, I meant it was nice you didn't hurt her baby."

"It would have sucked to spend another week waiting to stumble across another desperate father of hungry children whose shop you shut down while you might be poisoning our water supply but we really didn't want to hurt anyone who wasn't at fault."

Sigh.

"Shasali Aven is probably pretty much the only qualified blue, though."

"I didn't hurt her."

"The only qualified blue?"

"Like, if you want to say that, in general, when a blue sentences the father of hungry children to death for assaulting someone, they have no idea about the hungry children, wouldn't care if they did know, have never been hungry in their life, and cannot fathom what would drive someone to take a swing at an authority figure even knowing they will die for it - well. You'd be right about literally all of the blues except her."

"There's like a dozen of them. Her and the property ones and the ambassador to Miolee."

"Sure, but not judging."

"Well. She asked like four questions, ordered him executed, did the next one."

"I don't actually know anything about her professionally except that it's not very controversial, the documentary kept a pretty personal focus."

"Well, the kind of person who thinks 'on the one hand I'm executing innocent people, on the other hand I will be enabled in stealing Ireland and I can have so many babies in it' is not exactly my favorite even if they have a very tragic backstory. Though I do appreciate how nightmarish it must have been to be red."

"I'm not sure you do."

"I'll email you some memoirs."

"So one of the things that makes this so upsetting - and I realize this is sort of unfair, because if you were all evil individually I would certainly be complaining about that - but one thing that I still find deeply unsettling is that you're not deficient in empathy, you want people to have good lives - I could find a million Muggles who'd have conquered a country or executed an innocent with no real thought but they'd all have - thought that people with dark skin aren't people, or thought that they were sending them to Heaven, or thought that might makes right, or thought that the locals were savages and probably started it anyway - but you do those things and there's no monster anywhere to be found, and that makes the prospect of Amentan assimilation all the more terrifying because it's assimilation into a system where good people become diligent and willing instruments of horrible wrongs and it's not even obvious that they should have done anything differently."

"Plenty of Amentans do genuinely bad things. Our systems make a lot of tradeoffs trying to be robust against that."

Nod. 

"I might just dislike knowing I'd be a mass murderer if that were the pathway to power and respect and there were sufficiently elaborate insulation built up around it."