There are some good reasons not to do that, like, public schools and people not being allowed to literally keep slaves any more and stuff are good. Dismantling it and replacing it with something better might work; they really do need to talk to someone who knows more about that.

Sam comes back. It's going to be at least a couple days before they can talk to a lawyer, but in the meantime he did get ahold of someone from the nearest Black Lives Matter chapter who'd like to talk to them; he has a tablet all set up for the Skype call if they want to do that now.

...sure? They don't know how Skype works but if he can help.

It's a video call, it's pretty straightforward. He starts it and introduces them and hands the tablet over, warning them to hold it by the edges and not touch the screen.

"Hello," says the man in the picture. "I understand you're interested in helping us out?"

"We are from another dimension. In ours it is considered absolutely monstrous to keep people confined, and we originally came here to offer to take everyone in all your prisons and institutions to our world. Apparently that'll be complicated?"

"Around here, yeah. We're making an appointment for you to talk to a lawyer about it, but it'll probably be better for you to start with Africa or Russia or China or something. What's your world like?"

"It's habitable for humans and there's enough of everything for everyone. What specifically are you interested in?"

He has lots of questions - how many people can they take, what will conditions be like for them, what will they be expected to do there - he's genuinely surprised at the answer to that one - what laws do they have and how are they enforced, will people be able to bring their families, how easy will it be for people to come and go or communicate with people here...

That last one depends a little bit on how disruptive the whole thing is! Hopefully it won't be a problem but the Valar might insist on supervision for people to return to Valinor if there are a lot of problems.

They do at the very least need to be allowed to leave once they've served their time and communicate with this world in the meantime.

Of course. That won't be a problem at all. They can have internet access and they can leave Valinor any time.

That sounds good. And the laws? And do they expect to be able to handle people needing to stay permanently even if they wouldn't be in jail for life - for example if they start with Russia they're going to have people who've been jailed for being gay, and it's not going to be safe for them to go back even if they're technically allowed to.

Oh, the Valar can fix that for them! And people can stay permanently if they like, that's fine.

...um.

What do they mean 'fix'?

The people who are gay? If they'd like they can go to Estë and he'll just change that bit so they are attracted to the right gender.

...that is actually considered worse than putting people in jail, here. Are there gay Elves they need to be figuring out how to offer asylum to?

...no, because they're not gay anymore.

...okay. Well. For humans there is no 'right' gender, and if they're going to have trouble dealing with that it's going to complicate things, but they can still help; probably just start with China or something instead.

Okay! They appreciate the advice and will do that.

Cool. They should talk to the lawyer first, though, they have somebody who knows more about international stuff and can help get them started with that.

Also they never did answer his question about laws and enforcement?

The only law is not to disrupt other peoples' enjoyment of their lives, and usually problems are mediated by the royal family.

And what do the results of the mediations usually look like?

The people agree not to disrupt each other, and sometimes to made amends if a wrong was committed instead of just a misunderstanding?

Okay. They're going to want to start with simpler sorts of cases - not that guy who bombed an abortion clinic a few months ago, for example - but that's probably okay.

Sort of depends why someone bombed something, probably.

Sam can bring up the news about it, if they want to know the details. The point is more that it'd be hard to talk someone like that out of wanting to do it again.