"...Well, I don't know what word you're using that's getting translated as 'slave' or what different word is getting translated as 'chattel slave' but I have to say I don't think there would have been any real controversy about the claim that serfs have thoughts."

"There clearly isn't! You think serfs have thoughts, and I also think serfs have thoughts. 'Serf' is a more specific term than 'slave' in the language I usually speak, but falls under the umbrella of slavery; 'chattel slave' specifically refers to a slave who is, as you put it, livestock, bought and sold."

"Well, if people think all Sesat does is have serfs, I suppose someone should tell them it's much worse than that. And, uh, not accidentally imply to Sesatis that someplace else's serfs are incapable of acting with virtue just because they've had to do work they didn't choose. I'm sure that sounds hilariously ironic."

"I have only casually skimmed the Sesat-specific literature but I don't think there is a widespread belief that you have only serfs and not chattel slavery, and I believe this is not the source of the confusion, the source of the confusion is definitely specific to how Sesatis talk about chattel slaves and I just gave a broader definition that also caught serfs."

"Makes sense. Anyway, was that everything you wanted to know?"

"How about I propagate my tentative update to one of my colleagues out there and you turn your Allspeak off to stand in for an arbitrary Sesati and you try to have a normal conversation with them about the labor market in Sesat and we'll see how it turns out?"

"With the caveat that I expect everyone involved to find a conversation about Sesat's labor market horrible, sure, sounds great."

"And they're Elves, too, but they're linguists, they should hopefully be able to focus." He leans out of the door. "Which of you is going to be better at checking my update to the Allspeak vocab for," jazz hands, "~chattel slavery~?"

The Elves look at each other. They pause the "strawberries" recording. One of them stands up, sighing, and sweeps in. "I'll do it," she says.

They confer about the Allspeak update and she looks flatly at Valan.

"I would also rather listen to someone say 'strawberries' over and over again all day than do this but hey, I guess we're talking about why Sesat is an abomination, got any questions?"

She closes her eyes and sighs. "Hello!" she says. "I need a... ditch dug. How much will it cost to hire a free námo as opposed to renting a chattel?"

"I have no idea, it's not my field, but if I had to guess I'd expect that any free person who found themself competing with slave labor would be really desperate, in a way that a slaveowner wouldn't be - because if your chattel aren't turning a profit you can probably still sell them for enough to not be destitute - but on the other hand the rest of the chattel's time is pretty well spoken for and their owner is probably spending the same amount of time to figure out how to feed them as cheaply as possible and all the others so it's less overhead... per... námo... on the other hand I think probably chattel do worse work besides needing free labor to keep an eye on them, which is a price you might not pay in coin if you keep an eye on them yourself in person, but you'll still pay it. So I don't know, I'd recommend you hire a free person but I expect the cost actually depends on what kind of costs are cheaper for you."

"As a percentage, about how many námor held as chattel in Sesat are enslaved in their lifetimes as opposed to being born already chattel? I have heard that Azan keeps prisoners of war as chattel; do you anticipate that those námor will return to Sesat once released, or choose to settle elsewhere? Once I heard of a námo who was hit on the head hard enough to damage his brain and he had no impulse control afterwards; he was restrained before he did anything regrettable and healed good as new, but if he'd been in Sesat, and enslaved for an outburst, would he have been offered this healing, or is it not customary to extend such things to chattel?"

"More than half are born to it. I have never heard of chattel being released and if you're sure that's a thing that happens then the word is - you know, Azani isn't the same language either and you can make yourself understood across the gap but they're definitely different and you should check what their terms mean too - I am going to feel so silly if it turns out they actually make their prisoners of war into serfs. Sesat hasn't had magic healing before so for that reason it's not customary to extend it to anyone but I hope that changes - I honestly expect that for most likely things someone would do who had no impulse control it still wouldn't get them enslaved, that's not the punishment for getting into a fight while drunk or something. Also I suspect it'd be offered if it were cheap enough even for chattel with no impulse control problems so their owners wouldn't need to be so gentle. If you talk to the people who make decisions about sending healers maybe you could ask them not to cooperate with that."

"If Azan made prisoners of war into serfs, how would that be different?"

"Serfs have worth - serfs have names and they raise their children to be good people - it's not legal to cut a serf's hand off or tattoo them or hobble them - they're allowed to wear their hair long - they're told what to do but not when to do it, if a serf is sleepy all day every day and bouncing with energy all night they're allowed to work at night. Like anyone else, because they're - because they're acknowledged to be people, so they get the same basic rights as any other people. There's such a thing as a crime committed against a serf. There's - if a serf was rude to me there would be such a thing as a disproportionate response. Frankly I'd consider letting it slide if a serf was rude to me, and people'd think that was funny of me but not completely absurd like if I let some chattel get away with insulting me - if I did that it'd cause problems for me with other people - and I have personally told off a friend's cousin for being an asshole to their serfs, which is the kind of thing you can tell someone off for and they might not listen but they'll get why you'd care. If I had serfs there are things I could do to them so awful that I would be enslaved if I got caught - not that I trust Sesat to be adequate about making sure I would get caught, but - this is a lot of different ways of saying 'serfs are people and they're for being nice to', that's all it is."

"If a society on another planet bought and sold some námor but let them get their work done at any time of day, and had laws against doing some things to them, would those námor 'have worth', beyond whatever you could sell them for?" she inquires.

"I mean, I don't want to absolutely promise that because any community can have a horrible out-of-nowhere scandal and I don't trust people from Vanda Nossëo to find it important enough to remember or mention whether they've ever done anything worth enslaving them over, if you have a planet like that I want to, uh, actually I want to convince you to stop buying and selling them but that's not the point, the point is it's not enough information to say, and in particular it's not enough information to say no."

"I'm speaking hypothetically," she says dryly. "Has this conversation struck you as fluent and minimally confusing?"

"...It's... comprehensible. A lot of it sounded very strange but I think that was the content, like asking what chattel do after they're freed or whether Sesat withholds healing magic we don't have at all. I could follow your word choice."

"All right. Thank you for contributing to the translation project." She goes back to whatever was going on with the strawberries thing.

"Any time."

The walk back to the bus stop he keeps alternating trying to protect his thoughts from osanwe and dwelling on how awful it would be to be someone like Zatar, and then once he starts to be able to get his mind to do both things at once he takes a second to reassess his plans - Feris asked him to handle getting both their families out of Sesat and Feris's family is going to be sort of awkward, teleportation still seems like the way to go there and it's going to be... easier than Valan was expecting to act exactly like someone who thinks slavery is wrong - that doesn't really change any decisions he's making but it makes this one seem better.

When next he makes it to a computer somewhere less excessively fancy he resumes trying to figure out how to get into a teleportation class and trying to figure out exactly how feasible it is to do that without drawing on Vanda Nossëo's basic income or commuting from Sesat.

If he doesn't want basic income while residing in Vanda Nossëo, he can decline it by interacting with a bank - they have this available for various fringe philosophical sects - and if he wants to commute there is no particular obstacle to doing so, he can still tell stories for bus tokens as often as he wants.

Well. There's the obstacle that Sesat may have let him leave without pressing him into any ill-advised oaths once but will they do that every single day for however many days this takes, maybe they would and he'll never find out.

The information about tuition is confusing and he's starting to notice that the search engine doesn't actually understand his questions and is just giving him random documents with some of the same words in them, some of which don't even seem to agree with each other. He goes to an information booth to ask about it instead.

"Hullo," says the tapir manning the desk. "What can I do ya for?"

"I'm hoping to get the ability to teleport and I'm confused about how much it costs for the lessons."