"I reserve the right to decline to answer if I think it's best and I certainly won't say no to rings, but I also think making sure we don't have problems with the law in New Dover is important for its own sake."

"I'm glad we agree. What sort of response would these people have expected from the authorities they're used to?"

"Slavery was illegal in England, but parents were still understood to be responsible for their children to an extent, moreso the younger the kid is. However, it was also generally understood that the younger a child is the less anyone was responsible for their actions. If a pre-teen broke somebody's window, the parents would be expected to pay to replace it and perhaps scolded for not raising the child better. If a teenager like these children did that, the teen themselves would be punished, more likely, the fine would be harder, perhaps either the child or a parent would be jailed or punished with lashes, and also made to pay to replace the window. As an aside, it's considered cruel to punish women with pain, but not for men. But that's irrelevant."

"In this particular case - teens over fifteen, assault and removing people from public places? - The parents would possibly expect their children to be jailed, and for them to be alerted by the police that their children are in trouble, but not arrested themselves - and eventually the child goes before a judge and the judge decides whether to sentence the child to jailing or labor in a work camp or, if they were not particularly poor, a fine which the parents would pay. And in any case, the parents are likely to punish the children themselves when they're eventually returned."

"So they'll be having trouble with the idea of taking responsibility for their children? Is there anything similar in your society that would make a good analogy, say if an automaton hurts someone...?"

"Moreso with older children, but yes, that's the key point here. Hmm... Automata are actually fairly new, I don't think that analogy would really resonate. Perhaps, even if it's outside of their direct control, say if a gun goes off by accident or you start a fire by accident, you are still responsible for the results? It's - The idea of very strictly controlling one's children, the label 'slave', is very aversive, is the problem - the idea of owning slaves at all is aversive, and one's own children even moreso. That is the single biggest tension point that anyone in New Dover would say is the thing they like the least about imperial law, and it's a very strong sentiment."

"The age of majority for humans might be too high, I know the governor thinks so. But I can't do anything about that today. If owning people is that aversive we can help you arrange buyers or euthanasia..."

"No, no, that's worse, that's handing them off to someone who will then own them, or murder, in their minds. Please don't so much as hint at that."

"It's not that you object to owning people, it's that you object to people being owned? Or just your children?"

"Yes. More the second thing than the first - hardened criminals or people incapable of participating normally in society, we still don't like that, but we don't like it less. It feels unfair, much the same way agerah want to pay people back both good and bad, we want things to be fair. If everyone were freed at least once unless they were clearly incapable, that would be something we approved of quite a lot."

"But before then someone needs to be responsible for these kids. If you're determined that it should be them, I can see what I can do, they're close to their majority and I might be able to convince the right people..."

"Hmm... Does the law see a difference regarding repeated offences for a crime committed by one's slave, which you become responsible for, and one committed personally? That is, if your slave assaults someone and you are punished for it, and later you assault someone, does that count as a second offense of assault?"

"Yes, that would be a second offense."

"...Hmm. I appreciate the idea, and if you could at least float it to the right people, the news that you tried would mollify New Dover a fair bit, but I don't think it's worth a politically expensive fight if it turns out to be one. Perhaps we can establish something like that going forward later, but we don't need to hammer it in right now. These people knew the law in the end, they were just careless - or deliberately ignoring it, which would be worse."

"I'll try."

He does try. He tries publicly. Anyone can scry it for New Dover. He fails. It's the parents who end up on trial.

Katherine notes down his name and tries to find out how to do that officer some kind of favor later. Money seems a bit crude and possibly afoul of some impartiality or lobbying rule, but if she can't find anything more appropriate it'll have to do.

Yes, their kids totally did those things, and they're totally their kids nobody disputes it (though they complain about the ownership thing some), and yes they jointly own them how else would it work?

The court scries the incident with the harassment of locals. Yup, that sure is some harassment of locals.

The parents each have a chance to say something in their own defense if they'd like.

They've been advised in private by Katherine to say that they've learned their lesson and that they'll be disciplining the kids so they don't do this again. They say that in various phrasings.

That's very reassuring.

They're still found guilty of assault and fined. They're also all offered a free parenting class.

...Two of them are morbidly curious what monstrosity of a parenting class the evil government will come up with.

The evil government advises parents to use incentives to encourage their children to follow the law. Parents are encouraged to avoid being too harsh on them for minor offenses because that would compromise their ability to threaten even worse things for worse misbehavior. Parents are encouraged not to hit their children in the head or feed them lead if they expect to ever free them.

Some suggested commands for parents unsure how to prevent children from breaking the law are "don't touch anyone without their permission, except in self-defense" and "don't take things that don't belong to you" but of course it's hard to use command magic to exactly cover every law and nothing else. Parents can confine their children to specific areas if that helps keep them away from temptation!

If they need help getting their children tutors there are some recommendations! All these people are competent and can teach some part of the imperially approved curriculum!

Command magic is really quite awful. (They don't say this out loud.) And they're probably going to send their kids to the New Dover schoolhouses, though private tutors could probably find some work in New Dover.

They punish the miscreant teens in various ways and do in fact threaten worse if this sort of thing happens again. New Dover moves on.

A handful of doctors, mostly not working together, approach the Order of Mercy about recruiting some of the immigrants for medical studies. Would anyone be interested in having limbs or teeth or nerves regrown (...or maybe just damaged even more, but they'll definitely get paid for participating!) or having the amounts of different hormones in their body systematically increased or decreased to see the effects? Would anyone who's planning on having kids soon like to try having kids with different genes turned on or off to see what happens?

The otherworldly doctors are a bit cautious about this sort of thing and would like to go over experimental methods and biochemical pathways and so on in a fair bit of detail with the prospective researchers. (The consulting is free, though if a particular doctor doesn't seem to get it they'll stop listening to them.)

Limb and tooth and nerve regrowth studies have a lot of potential depending on the exact methodology used. Worst comes to worst, they can probably just amputate or pull the tooth again if the results are undesirable.

Hormone studies they are pretty skeptical of - probably want to try it on animals first and see if it kills them or makes them miserable, and then when it comes to people, slow and reversible changes. Even moreso with the children's genetic studies. They'll want to very very cautiously select those, and again, try nonsentient animal models which are not great and have a lot of different genes, or cell cultures which are not people and will lose a lot of useful detail, but where an analogue can be found they can rule out lots of definitely-a-bad-ideas. And the generations of mice are much faster too, which will speed up experiments.

They have several methods they want to try in the regrowth studies. Some seem safer than others.

There are problems with those kinds of studies! For instance one time they discovered a way to make cells immortal and it turned out it caused cancer. Another time their mouse model of sex determination turned out not to explain caralendri at all. But then they tried studying sequentially hermaphroditic fish and those also don't work like caralendri. Animals have the advantages of being cheaper and living shorter lives but they're not preferred.

But fine, if they want to restrict themselves to things that have been tried in other species already, there's this hormone that increases life expectancy in mice but maybe has weird side effects, there's a hormone that's important for seasonal cycles in beluli but humans have it too and it's not clear why, they're pretty sure adding an extra X chromosome to human females won't do anything but they'd like to be even more sure... They've got a list!

One of the scientists wants to maybe buy a human or two, maybe a breeding pair, so they don't have to worry so much about whether they want their children to have any genetic diseases.

The doctors would also prefer to keep to experiments where the mechanisms in play are at least vaguely sort of understood - they have Milliways knowledge giving them bright ideas of their own too and both sides can probably learn a lot just by talking to each other - they start approving a couple experiments at a time after a week or so of chewing it over, and publicly ask for paid volunteers. There's plenty for limb and tooth regrowth, a few less for nerve regrowth, and a mere handful for for hormone or genetic experiments.

The one who wants to buy a human or two will not be getting them here that's for damn sure. And the Order of Mercy won't want to help with experiments on slaves. They're giving the other medical associations a lot of money to not use slaves and everything.