"Which might or might not have our family, she wouldn't have had much chance to find out."

"Oh?"

"She was a slave."

"Ah huh."

"Yeah I didn't get out much. And we don't have recorded music. As a whole thing, anyway, there's probably embroidered stuff that'll do it."

"There probably wouldn't be slavery if we were running the country?"

"Could be a different country, or hard to fix."

"Ugh."

"Some things take time."

"You only get to vote if you have slaves. I forget how many slaves to a vote."

"Well that's appalling."

"It is the kind of thing that would complicate unravelling it, though."

"You could just kill all the slaveowners! Problem solved."

"Countries actually historically do very poorly when they murder their entire governing class in a fit of populist outrage."

"To be fair that's at least half because someone will usually see an opening and invade them."

"Anyway I ran off into a magic when my owner tried to sell away my baby."

Hug.

"When Amenta had slavery that was not typically legal."

"Good for you guys then." And now she's sort of ambiguously owned but nobody has tried to take Cathei so she's good.

" - uh?"

"We did tell her that we don't practice slavery and she was free."

"I think 'you're not a slave but you are a prisoner because you might be an agent of the Enemy' might seem like a semantic sort of distinction if you're coming from the wrong context. Aren't Amentans obsessed with babies? Why not sell them?"

"If you give someone a permission you gave them a permission, fucking around with that kind of thing was highly discouraged even before it became an inevitable international incident. I think there was not much pressure to carve out an exception because either the child was yours or you liked them enough to let them have a child in the first place."

"You had birth control then?"

"We did not abolish slavery everywhere until well after we had birth control. I don't know much about ancient slavery."