All right then.

They need someone to test the antimagic field, so they put up ads about that; and they will send state-level envoys to all the states that aren't just about guaranteed to reject such overtures, to see if they can buy out all the slaves on a state level.

People are interested in testing the antimagic field.

States that control parts of Anemone Bay confer and jointly suggest to Vanda Nossëo that they might be willing to sell off all of their anemones, specifically, for the right price. The anemones are people but they've never had much success integrating them into society given the massive difference in sensory perception and the inability of most anemones to speak vocal or visual languages. Maybe telepaths will have more success.

Cloudbreak assigns one of the people who usually interface with Anavel Sani, a caralendar in his sixties, to talk to Vanda Nossëo's emissaries. He takes the suggestion of fair dealings with the unborn well and asks how that's usually implemented in practice in other polities.

Meiu and Har (the state, not the empire) are both trying fairly hard to hold onto a lot of residents right on the border of willing to interface with society and want to know if Vanda Nossëo has a privacy-respecting solution to enforcement.

Anavel Sani, Rasa and Ehima's governments won't even consider it without effective, convenient, free contraception for essi (the snake people) and clarity on how eggs would count and what would happen if someone stopped being able to raise a child after having one.

The person they speak to from the state the empire knows as Eserag, and who makes a point of repeatedly pronouncing the name as Ethornak, mostly just wants to hear more, in general.

Erhau and Westgarden want to send representatives to observe relevant legal proceedings in Vanda Nossëo if any are public.

Some telepaths will go try talking to anemones!

Sometimes Vanda Nossëo has computers look at evidence, or have conclusions sent to precogs so that only the conclusion makes it into the real timeline. Do they have specific use cases in mind?

If the essi need their contraceptives free a bunch of Elves will go to work overtime on that till they can deliver. They don't have a strong position on how essi eggs should count but can deploy some telepaths to peek at eggs at various stages of development to ballpark it. Normally if someone has a child and then stops being able to parent the child they hire help or, if they really can't handle it even with help, adopt the child out to someone who can. There are people in Vanda Nossëo who are willing to adopt children and some of them would probably be happy to adopt specifically snake children if that became an option.

Plenty of Vanda Nossëo's trials are public, are there more specific desiderata to be had?

Some anemones will try talking back to telepaths.

Precogs seem like they'd help some, in addition to being creepy and driving some marginal people into seclusion. Computers, depending on how smart they are, might be able to find out more from less data and guess the presence of secret slaves in hidden areas... but there's already a bit of an arms race there, as people figure out more tricks for getting information out of unscryable areas and then other people figure out more tricks for hiding the evidence that lets those tricks work.

Essi hatch able to move around and use magic and do explicit logical reasoning, and in theory that relies on gradual brain development in the shell, but they turn out to rarely be conscious and almost never have preferences before hatching. Essi are not that popular among Hari people who buy babies to enjoy their company and have fun teaching them to function in society; they're initially easily provoked, and the temperature necessary to make them cuddly isn't good for them, and their behavior at hatching is more like that of a disoriented adult, and they don't have big eyes, and they don't love people.

They'd like to see trials that involve people who would've been slaves in Har. Custody disputes or something, maybe? Or things that involve people who have committed several crimes?

What do anemones have to say?

There are some daeva who enjoy teaching disoriented adults how to be people, because daeva start spontaneously existing as adults, but it's good to know that essi do not love people and interested parties would need to not have a loving filial relationship in mind. They tentatively don't have a strong opinion on killing essi eggs that aren't going to hatch real soon though they will still be getting right on free birth control for the essi adults.

Scheduled for today are trials including a noncustodial parent who tried to take his daughter and sons into a remote part of Dreamward, an infinite flat plane, on the hopes that he would be impossible to conjure for usefully there; a serial shoplifter; an aggravated assault case; a guy who trapped his morphed friend in a cat carrier, leaving her a raccoon for several days before finally calling in the authorities to set her right; a person who's been talking Beach natives into sex despite the fact that they're in a weird legal pickle with regard to the age of consent; a serial scammer who defrauded people out of their basic income; a vampire who ate a guy; a woman who misrepresented her relationship to a dead person to get the dead person resurrected and then behaved badly once the person was alive; and an arsonist.

This one has an out of date take on politics from a couple decades and a fork ago based on recollections of its knowledge mage predecessor. This other one wants the water one degree warmer and isn't near a heat mage. This other one wants the water one degree cooler and also isn't near a heat mage. This one wants to renegotiate its current agreement, it no longer feels it's getting a good deal on all this chemical synthesis but isn't a knowledge or illusion mage. This other one wants to know what the fuck is going on.

There are enough people interested in observing legal proceedings to go observe all of those trials.

Vanda Nossëo will ask the anemones if they would like to be purchased and freed (possibly with some kind of antimagic situation for safety) and collectively hire a telepath to make sure they can all communicate.

Relatively few anemones have opinions about surface-dwellers' legal systems, relatively few anemones have a good understanding of surface-dwellers' legal systems, and the overlap between these groups is incomplete. One of them is against anything that involves more restrictions on magic use. One of them thinks it's about time they managed better communication and more useful trade. One of them wants to know if they can all have knowledge magic. Several anemones want to know how this proposal would affect the pH, KH, salinity, and temperature. Someone wants to know how much telepathy access they'd get out of this plan and is only in favor if it lets them and their forks coordinate better. Someone wants to know if this means moving to a different spot. A handful of anemones want to know how this would affect these dozen water quality indicators not popularly studied on the surface. Someone is concerned that if they change their current arrangement, which involves getting fed, then they will not get fed, and then they will die. Someone is in favor of freedom in general. Someone is in favor of being able to buy their preferred weather. Someone else is in favor of being able to buy their different and entirely incompatible favorite weather. Some of them struggle with the idea that non-anemones are people and capable of communication and possibly going to take their preferences into account and also have some kind of complicated... cooperative situation... about holding objects... and some of the objects are people...?

Well, the telepath is an Elf and very patient, and can try to explain everything to all the anemones.

Eventually more than half of them have any idea what's going on, and more are in favor of being bought by Vanda Nossëo than are against it.

Are the ones against it objecting for any addressable reason?

Reasons include general conservatism, the fact that their likely circumstances if they stay just improved because other people can also hire telepaths to communicate with them, mistrust of Vanda Nossëo, and the fact that they like where they're living now and would have to move if they were bought by people who don't own the bay.

What are the prospects for buying the bay?

It's right near an inhabited area. It's useful for shipping. It's useful for fishing. It's popular for playing in. It's lucrative to sell it off a tiny bit at a time to people who want to live in seclusion. Selling all of it now would require rearranging a lot of things. It's big. As an off-the-cuff order-of-magnitude guess before the involved states actually talk it over, maybe something in the vicinity of 5,159,780,352 imperial rings (number chosen for its roundness), which is... somewhere in the vague ballpark of 644,972,544 pounds of apples.

Presumably apples decrease in marginal value well before you drop nearly six hundred and forty four million pounds of them on the market ex nihilo, but understood. They will maybe buy the anemones and just not remove all of them at this time. Could the anemones be allowed to continue to live where they are if they are purchased and the bay is not? Perhaps they could pay rent out of their Vanda Nossëo basic income?

Rent can be arranged. For less than six hundred million pounds of apples, even.

Okay. Would the anemones who prefer to stay in the bay like this arrangement?

For the most part, yes.

The Elves sent to talk to anemones will attempt very patiently to make sure every anemone is satisfied with the arrangement and that the anemones that want to move are aware that moving will mean their descendants and possibly also their forks won't have Hari magic and so on.

A majority of them think it's unacceptable for their descendants and forks to not have magic. ...Several people, including an anemone, suggest that most coastal areas are not right off the coast of the biggest city on the planet, and might be cheaper, although there might be a bit of a bubble starting now that it looks like the planet's getting immigrants...

Hm, how much water rights does the island-state come with?

Not enough, and it gets too deep too fast, and the area gets too cold. All of which things are fixable for less than the cost of six hundred million pounds of apples.

Yeah, they can DIY that. They will put the anemones who want to move near their island, heated to various temperatures so they can all have the one they like.

The imperial government, since so much of its attention is on the aliens anyway, checks that the extra heating is properly contained and not going to fuck things up come winter. If it looks like there might possibly be any problems they can send the aliens literature on best practices.

The terraforming department is happy to swap information with them about that!