"What ones are maybe stupid but less obviously stupid than 'operating machinery will make major organs exit you'?"

"Has anyone explained to you yet that it's sinful to make loans with an interest rate? We're trying to figure out if that is doing a caste-like thing by creating a specialized allowed-to-make-loans class of people but it seems like if it's doing that it's mostly incidental."

"How odd. Doesn't that throttle access to credit terribly -"

"Yeah. I think it's probably a terrible idea but, you know, finding something totally inexplicable is at least a warning sign that you shouldn't remove it just yet."

"The complicated thing is that many of these legal systems are accrued precedent, not laws, and you lose a lot in predictability if you start from scratch but also the current system is inaccessible and completely mysterious to the vast majority of people."

"Is there much allowance for keeping local laws even when they're good and popular?"

"I can figure out how much allowance for that we want to push for once it's obvious how many local laws there are that are important to people and not terrible."

"BWEH," says Sisheka,

"Is that so!" says Isama. "Is it? Well bweh to you too, darling, bweh to you too."

Amentans coo adoringly over babies.

And eventually they go to bed.

He foxes the windows and muffles the room and stuns them and wakes Aitim paralyzed under Veritaserum. "We're in your room, you've been unconscious about fifteen seconds, what is the likeliest way that would be discovered in the next hour."

"Someone in the house wakes up -"

"Next most likely."

"You were noticed coming in. I get an urgent phone call. We are overheard."

"Is there anything you think I would want to know."

"Kids are across the hall. My brother and sister-in-law and their youngest are downstairs. Sisheka doesn't sleep through the night very reliably. Their other kids are in a different timezone and might call at odd hours. Whatever you want I do not expect it will help you to hurt any of them."

"Thank you. Okay." He reverses the memory charm.

Aitim relaxes slightly. 

"So I consulted with my people and we'd like to work out an agreement, are you up for that?"

"Yes."

"You said you think you can get the death penalty abolished if we supply Veritaserum. I want to make that happen. I also want you to call a halt to development in the areas that we need for the production of the Veritaserum ingredients, and also to delay for a minimum of ten years new development in most ecologically fragile areas. You can justify it with 'once we figure out how to artificially synthesize these plants we can go ahead and kill the real ones', that's fine because we're very certain that potions can't be artificially synthesized."

"I could do that without significant political problems. The cost would be more than outweighed by the benefits of having found something so useful so quickly, particularly if we can set up the way I found it to have something to do with a policy towards communications with the locals which I specifically pushed for."

"Great. I'm worried your courts will use this to enforce stupid evil laws, which is bad even if they stop executing people for them."

"I do not think our laws are stupid or evil. The ones that might seem that way to you are the pollution laws, laws about out-of-caste income, and possibly laws about advocating illegal activity or wartime communications."

"Expand on those?"

"It'll be illegal to not decontaminate after direct contact with sewage, dead bodies, or garbage. This is hard to prove and would get much easier to prove. It's not legal for people who have castes to derive more than 20% of their income per period from out-of-caste work. Lots of people do vaguely shady things that will be harder to get away with. Enforcement of incitement or wartime communications laws won't actually get substantially easier but I suspect you'd dislike the laws in general, they prohibit arguing that someone ought to break the law and in wartime prohibit publishing information about the war or communicating with the other side."

"So saying 'humans should ignore the pollution rules because they are dumb and mass civil disobedience will get them overturned' is illegal?"

"It will be once we get the legal systems uniform."