"Do you mean 'which side of high-class versus cheap should I err on' because you're worried about both of those being potentially offensive even given magical conjuration."

"Uh-huh."

"- well I'm not going to stay in it, I don't need to sleep! But it might get tedious to pawn enormous numbers of objects eventually? Or suspicious or something."

"Things can still be insulting by proxy," she mumbles.  "Should I wake up my - daughter, or."

"- oh the cat I was confused there for a sec. I guess she might have an opinion on the hotels, sure."

"Yeah I almost said cat but I'm trying very hard to avoid dehuman - uh, depersonizing? - her."

"Cats don't seem to mind being called cats, their language didn't even have a word for 'person' before I introduced one, but it's a thoughtful impulse. Anyway yeah. Mr. Mistoffelees!" he says, raising his voice a tad.

"She's very nocturnal," Ellie says, walking to the bookshelf cat nook.  "Also I feel like the connotations of 'cat' definitely aren't the same as 'person' in Latin even if they're the same to cats and that it would have sounded dismissive in at least that particular sentence.  Hi sleepyhead."

Presently there is a yawning kitten being held like a baby in Ellie's arms.  (Felicity is too professional to squee with this body.)  She stiffens when she notices the other people present in the room and hops down on the floor.  "You're back already?"

"Yeah, I wasn't expecting to but something came up. Do you want to come with us to pick out a hotel room?"

"I guess."  She spots the blood.  " - What happened to Mom‽"

"She got in some trouble but I fixed her up, she's okay now."

"Okay that's good but what happened."

"I should, uh, probably change shirts and wash up a bit and pack?  A set of clothes??"  Ellie slips into her room and then to the bathroom.

"I gave her some shiny things to sell, like the pile I gave Mungojerrie and Rumpleteazer, and someone thought she must have stolen it from someone, and they hurt her about it. I'm going to try to set things up so that won't happen again."

"Oh."

"I found the thing I was looking for," chimes Felicity after a moment of silence.  "Given that it does look like you can replace all the relevant volatile crystals with diamond, which is inert, is there something you were hoping to get out of a tour of the power plant that couldn't be satisfied by making a model and having Ellie describe its contents?"

"That seems like it might work fine."

"Then if at any point she decides she wants to be manumitted we could probably do that right away."

"Um, I mean," says Ellie, stepping enhoodied out of the bathroom, "I?  . . . . - would maybe benefit from a description of which specific parts of slavery are the ones you object to.  In order to make more useful suggestions."

"...the part where people are coerced into doing things for other people, especially if that situation is uncompensated, otherwise abusive, permanent, hereditary, or accompanied by other inequal treatment in the eyes of the law."

"Okay, um, thank you; sorry.  So - I don't know how long it's going to take to replace all the power plants with - something that nobody has to run?  But in the meantime, y'know, somebody's got to run all the power plants, and currently that's pretty much slaves - and if you freed everyone but we all kept working that'd be somewhat of an issue but maybe not too much of one?  It'd mainly be, um, cost, and everyone only working a quarter of a day instead of a third although I guess you could maybe fix that by paying overtime, possibly out of their manumission fees?  But the thing is that I don't know whether we'd keep working; the whole point is that we're very specialized so maybe people'd stick around but I don't really have any idea.  And, uh, I guess my point is that - if, um.  You wanted to free me, for reasons of I guess being principled, I'm not actually sure that I'm better than a random person off the street to be a random local guide and in fact might be worse?  Um.  Sorry if that's - mischaracterizing you, or the situation, or.  Yeah."

"I'm aware that you're basically a random person but - I don't like situations I have contacted to go on having glaring problems it is within my power to solve. Uh, replacing the power plants might be very fast, depending on how many of them there are and how complicated the hookups are. We can go over a model later to figure that out."

"Oh, that makes sense."  She starts helping Mr. Mistoffellees into her jacket.  "If it's fast enough then I don't really have an opinion I guess.  . . . About power plants; presumably there are lots of other ones doing important things which I know nothing about."

"Hey, Felicity, is there some kind of existing abolitionist organization I should be hooking up with that has thought about this sort of thing?"