"Thanks." This one she knows in the local language.

I feel like you will have a version of the slavery question that won't just make him go - well Quendi are weird -

My country has slavery too last I checked, I don't have a lot of experience with competing models known to work for humans to propose, but I can try. And to the pharaoh, Is the institution of slavery mostly sticky because you don't like prohibiting things that don't seem like they have a lot to do with general social breakdown, or are there other things that make it seem like a good tradeoff?

Not obvious what we'd replace it with for criminals. For debt, the only real replacement would be laws about how you can declare you're not paying your debts anymore, and we might trial something like that. There's a council of freed slaves working on researching reasonable policies here.

I have banned things that cause less social harm than slavery. I have complicated thoughts on when I ought to use the state to improve peoples' character that as you might expect mostly boil down to 'are they getting into Axis?'

Not every crime has enslavement on the books for it, right? You do have jails.

Just for holding people while we conduct an investigation. But no, we fine people for most things and execute people for some things. 

That's a really dramatic jump there.

Oh, sorry, there's things in between, that's just the range. We also whip people and cut off their hands, we just don't try - holding onto them past the trial, except under very rare circumstances, it's not improving and it's very expensive.

I suppose cutting off people's hands is not expensive.

No. And I wouldn't call it improving but it discourages repeat behavior by making it harder to get away with.

Don't roll your eyes, Bella, nope, not rolling your eyes at the pharaoh. What things have you tried in the improving department?

Curfews, streetlights, prayer and reflection, lectures, job training, supervised work programs, various forms of restitution, public apologies, watching other criminals be tortured in the evil afterlives, hard labor, meditation, a geas, prohibitions on drink, separation from criminal elements, probably more but I'd need to consult my notes.

Okay. They don't work very well?

Some do! Streetlights work really well, so we have them everywhere now. Prohibitions on drink work so well we're contemplating whether to ban alcohol entirely. Curfews work reasonably well. Many of the other things do something but not very much. Some people think it's a matter of addressing the specific issue that drove someone to crime and that judges should be trained to evaluate that and select the appropriate punishment but right now judges selecting one of those doesn't work much better than chance selecting one of those - though note that Abadar's domain includes luck, and selecting things by chance is usually understood to mean letting him select them, and it's not surprising that'd work better than humans choosing one.

Are geases too expensive?

Expensive and it's unclear if lawfulness under a geas counts to your credit when you die.

She nods. Apologetically to Fëanáro, I'm not sure I'm going to make much progress.

Why not?

He's trying a lot of things and under a lot of constraints. And like I said, the Imperium has slavery too, I don't know what countries that are full of humans and don't have it are doing.

Oh. 

Okay.

Sorry. I'll keep thinking about it.

I'm not mad at you. I just wanna have enough magic to make all the bad things stop.

Yeah. Me too.

"Can we come talk to you again once we have more magic stuff?"

"You can come talk to us again sooner than that, if you'd like. We usually only have one world to draw on in trying to think about things."