" - Hm. All right. The thing I think is most likely to affect your fundamental attitude is that the government of the Hari Empire is chosen by popular approval, and this in itself acts as a stronger incentive to free slaves than the program you want us to run."

"Do the slaves vote?"

Telling this person about how the first guy she met petrified her and put slave bracelets on her and they didn't work would be a bad idea for so many reasons. For one, there could be a fundamental psychology gap; she doesn't know the species well. Even the humans here are weird, but a species gap is less possible to just intuit one's way through by knowing more about the culture. And however tempting it feels to contextualize her opinions in that example, no matter how knock-down an argument it seems to her, it could just fail to land. For another, she suspects she doesn't want people to know that she can just take command-magic bracelets off, that seems like the sort of thing that gets her executed on the spot as a precaution and then Fëanáro has to figure out arcane resurrection and find her soul wherever it winds up and that would probably take, oh, at least twenty years, not to undersell him but seriously. And -

- they tortured a guy to death on live national television.

Bella is in an incredibly bad mood. Possibly the worst mood she has ever been in in her entire life. But she is not so mad with the trauma of the last twenty-four hours to want a guy, even a guy who tried for incomprehensible stupid reasons to put slave bracelets on her five minutes after saying hello, to be tortured to death. On live national television. Maybe if he looked like he was going to do it again, but he appeared to live alone in a poky little apartment and one's behavior with out of context extraplanar exiles is not that predictive of one's behavior with anyone else. He could be fine with anyone else. By the local standard.

"They do not. This is not definitely a loss for them; they usually belong to the same geographical and linguistic interest groups as those with the authority to free them, and arranging and maintaining that incentive is a concern of multiple levels of government."

"I guess I can see how in the statistical aggregate interest groups in search of more political power would incentivize freeing their children. This isn't a huge shift in my opinions over and above knowing that everyone's born a slave here, though."

"I see. Well, I am interested in hearing about the justice systems you're familiar with and how they avoid using slavery."

"My friends' solution won't work for you at all. They've got magic that's harmless and other magic that requires years of training to do anything with at all, and they're as a species gentle and generous to a fault, and the only other species of sapients around didn't involve themselves too much in day to day governance, except when doing things like deciding I moved too fast to track and exiling me.

"The society of my birth had slavery. It had less of it than here, because it didn't enslave children by default, and did not have the reasons to do that which you have. But I can't remember nearly enough details to be confident that the other ways to become a slave in the Imperium didn't add up to about the same percentage as what you're looking at for reasons to still be a slave in adulthood. Especially since I don't know what your percentage is either. It was, at least, a controversial social issue. A lot of people thought that slavery should be taxed into the ground or forbidden in more situations or that ownership of slaves should disqualify people from sensitive positions or that there should be more limits on what people were allowed to do with their slaves."

"Huh. Did your society place limits on what people could do to their children?"

"Yes."

"How did your society prevent people from becoming hermits?"

"That... was neither a policy priority nor a popular life choice among any of the common races, that I recall?"

"Ah. I think it’s not only the different magic that explains the differences in our laws. That is a reasonably popular life choice and allowing it is widely considered necessary for the legitimacy of the government."

"I don't think it's illegal to be a hermit in the Magisterian Imperium... I guess depending on some details I don't remember one might still be technically obliged to pay taxes unless one was a dragon or something."

"What if a pregnant woman were to choose to become a hermit?"

"...then she'd probably have a baby, I guess? - the enforcement of laws in the Imperium is not perfect and they might miss someone abusing her child while hermiting it up without that omission making it legal."

"An interesting philosophy of law, I suppose."

Yeah pal the Hari Empire is not perfect at enforcing laws either. "The Imperium is majority human, and while I do not yet have a sense of how Hari culture may affect humans on a population level, it would be very, very weird, in the context of the Imperium, for a citizen to decide to cut off contact with civilization, while pregnant, specifically in anticipation of abusing her child. There are other reasons someone might become a hermit, including while pregnant, but that one would be an extremely irregular coincidence of several rare things that are not correlated with each other at all."

"Humans are not the species that decision is most characteristic of."

"I don't know very much about most other species in Har except that yesterday I learned some interesting facts about belul anxiety. It doesn't seem like any of them match except for humans."

"I see. Are you still hoping to be paid with the creation of a manumission incentive program?"

"...is there something we have talked about which you'd expect to make it a bad idea by my lights to subsidize the manumission of slaves who are not one's own children? If there was such a thing it escaped me."

"No, I just think that if I wanted to improve people's well-being in the long term I would try to drive essi extinct, because they're the species least likely to find anything intuitively appealing about that motivation and I would expect them to cooperate with being driven extinct because they don't love their children."

"That's interesting but I'd need to learn more about essi before I'd feel motivated to drive them extinct or have any clever ideas about how to do it."

"I personally would try paying essi, or people who own essi, not to let any more of their eggs hatch. I don't suppose you'll want to take my word for anything about them."

"You're correct that I don't want to do that."

"Does your magic work to just make people happier?"