"Yes, we have invented soap."

"Great! Soap is very important, but -"

Actually, uh, quick question what do their cities do for sanitation.

"- what do cities do for it? Why would a city - do - a city can't take a bath, can it?"

... Right then, in that case Jinye will explain plumbing systems and just how much they cut disease rates and just how important it is to never use lead for any of them ever. (She may have some trouble grasping for 'lead'.) This will cut disease rates a lot, she has no idea.

Gosh. Okay. That sounds like a lot of work compared to the printing press which will take just another day to finish but Maurabel writes this down very seriously.

This will take a tremendous amount of work and she needs either a great deal of credit with the government or enough wealth to build her own city, if she's going to do anything with it. But it's on Jinye's fix-everything list.

"I'm starting to like the idea of building my own city, honestly. I could save up to buy a ton of elementals and work out conditions they'd like to help with building all this stuff."

"Is there anyone accepting immigrants from all the world's countries, or could we be the first?"

"...as opposed to - what, killing anyone with an accent?"

"... Oh." She pauses. "As opposed to saying that the only citizens with a right to decide things are the children of citizens and a few people the government likes, and everyone else is driven out by force or enslaved."

"How are you supposed to figure out who someone's parents were if they don't tell you?"

"Assume guilt," says Jinye drily.

... Okay, no, she's incapable of not nitpicking.

"Also, humans contain the instructions for replicating ourselves inside the tiniest parts of our body - that's part of how reproduction works - and we can read those to compare. But incompetent countries were handling the problem by assuming guilt long before we know about those."

"I think if you assumed everyone was not a citizen and drove them out or enslaved them you would have... so many problems? Like for one thing who is going to do the driving out and enslaving... probably there are nuances you're not covering. Anyway, I don't think anyone is looking at tiny parts of people's bodies to determine if they're native."

"Sorry. The usual rule is that when the city is founded, they say that the founders are citizens, and then everyone keeps track of who their children are and gets them added to the list of citizens. And anyone who isn't on the list of citizens - who can't prove they're on it - is assumed not a citizen."

"Sounds like a lot of work and I'm not clear why you'd bother."

"If there's only a hundred [units] of land that can grow food, anyone new you let onto the land is taking land from someone else. So you don't let anyone new onto the land, just your own citizens, and if you do let someone you say they don't have any right to the land, and they can only stay as long as they make themselves useful. That's the model and it's a bad model - you can make land more productive, and every new mind you have thinking about the problem might find a new way to do it - but it's how they think."

"I mean, I don't think I'd be naturally inclined to award a random person land just for showing up?"

"Yes, but most of these places don't sell citizenship, either."

"Yeah, I guess that's kind of weird. I'm not planning to do that."

"A lot of people have made a lot of mistakes, in my home's history.."

"I'm not surprised, it's just not clear why that one was so tempting. I suppose I could waste a lot of time ruminating on it, though."

"... If you can build a system in which people attach their loyalties to an Us that includes all their friends and neighbors, which is under attack from a foreign Them, you can get them to work quite hard to support the Us against the Them. But then We start to ask 'why are we letting Them into the nice happy world we built for ourselves?'"

Jinye sighs. "Also, that usually automatically happens whenever there's a war. Fear causes the birth of both alliances and hatreds."

"Rixo hasn't had a war in my lifetime so perhaps I just don't have enough experience."

"Oh?" Can Jinye get Maurabel talking about local history?