"Why would you have a category that is most people?"

"...why not?"

"I guess maybe I just don't get the point of having the categories at all."

"Well, they're kind of dumb. But people in different castes are acculturated differently and trained differently in school and so on, it just happens that a lot of people are acculturated and trained to be purple."

"Because that's the most useful kind of training for most jobs that there are?"

"Sort of. Purple jobs are mostly the kind that don't rely directly on school-style training; that means purples often spend less time in school and hop between jobs more often."

"Lots of Elves like making food for people."

"People cook for their families or for parties they're throwing or themselves in any caste, if they want to, but cooking for strangers like this is purple."

"We don't really have strangers but people cook for the whole city, give things out from little carts."

"Well, you said you weren't familiar with buying things? If someone wanted to give out food for free here they could do that without being purple."

"Bella's world has money, she mentioned it. It seems clever if you need it but in the way if you don't."

"It's very convenient that a lot of Elves like to hand out food from carts. I think if we didn't pay people to do that, then it wouldn't be very popular - I can tell because only purples do it, even though other people could do it as much as they liked if they didn't care about getting paid."

"Well, you need the money for ridiculous numbers of babies."

"People past their fertile window, when they're twenty and up, can't have babies any more. They can help with paying for grandchildren, but not all of them do, so if the ones who don't wanted they could take up food-distributing."

"And none want to? Huh. Maybe because people here aren't as nice? Giving food to people who sew your clothes for you and invent songs for you and helped build your house might be more fun than giving food to mean people."

"I guess that could be it. Random people mostly don't know much about how to build houses, at least not the kind of houses in the city that don't take up too much space, maybe lots of purples could manage a cabin."

"I could build a house. Not just with magic, I mean. It would be very slow without magic but I do know how to do it."

"I think you have a lower tech level, which means different standards for how complicated a house has to be. It'd be really hard for an Amentan to live in a house without plumbing and electricity."

"Why?"

"We're not used to it and it'd be hard to keep clean and comfortable."

"I don't think it's very hard but I guess if you insist on wearing clothes swimming maybe you insist on lots of inconvenient things like that."

"It'd be easier to get used to swimming naked than to get used to living without plumbing and electricity."

"I guess your way of making sure everyone has houses works just as well."

"We have good social services for people who can't afford a place."

"That's good."