"- to be clear, when we're addressing slavery we do not do it by killing anyone. We try to find ways to free the slaves."

"Well, then you have the additional concern that many of them like that their families are alive and the planet exists! I am imagining that, say, a serial murderer would go on to commit more murders once no longer restrained from doing so, or that someone with poor impulse control would be angry that a town was laid out confusingly and try to rearrange it and get frustrated if that didn't work and do something big and destructive about it, or that a child would like the bath they were taking and not want to stop and freeze the entire room so that nothing within it could ever change in any way again."

"- is that the main problem that you're using slavery to address?"

"Yes. Of extremely secondary importance are uses like medical research and the fact that some people enjoy owning other people."

"Would you be willing to work with us on ending slavery if we had some kind of non-slavery-related antimagic that sufficed for safety purposes like that?"

"I can't immediately rule it out. I'm not convinced you'd like the effects it'd have and I'm concerned that incorrigible criminals would still be able to do something objectionable, and there are lesser concerns like the unpopularity of such a policy with people who just want to hurt others."

"Vanda Nossëo has," sigh, "prisons, for people who can't be safely released into the general population, but most people prefer them to slavery."

"Why do most people prefer them and for which species is that true?"

"Prisoners have guaranteed rights - which don't include leaving the prison system but do include lots of other things - and they're generally maintained to a high standard of comfort and include opportunities to learn skills that will be useful upon release. As far as I know every species in Vanda Nossëo and our allied neighbors Mîr and Elendil with... hm... three exceptions, nigh-universally prefers prison to slavery in typical conditions, and the individuals in other species who choose not to exit slavery conditions usually have a specific reason like having close personal relationships with people they wouldn't be able to see if they left."

"I don't believe we'll want to interfere if you want to buy some and take them to very comfortable prisons to teach them things."

"Buying slaves on an ongoing basis has a tendency to incentivize people to enslave more people. We'd be happy to buy every single one of them as a one time thing."

"I can understand your concern, but we have all the incentive we need to keep doing that indefinitely."

"I understand that your current rate of enslavement is incentivized quite sufficiently," Alassë assures them. "The issue would be if, say, people chose to have more children knowing that Vanda Nossëo would buy them."

"Are you hoping to increase our infanticide rate or are you hoping we'll institute wildly unpopular laws about that?"

"...we also distribute contraception."

"For what species?"

"Any. We have nonmagical methods that work for humans but the magical ones will work for arbitrary species."

"I suppose that and the ability to check in advance whether the baby would be a void mage would bring the rate down."

"What exactly is the issue with void mages?"

"As a practical matter, it's been historically true that we haven't had the ability to create matter, only to destroy it, so we haven't permitted the destruction of matter, for obvious reasons. On an emotional level, their magic is useful only for destruction; it feels uncanny. I expect with demons around they'll be more popular again up north."

"Oh. Yes, there's not a scarcity of matter, multiversally speaking, and actually one of the things angels are in demand for is garbage disposal. There's an entire magic system from a planet that did in fact destroy too much of its matter and is now gone, which is also destruction-oriented, but different in details."

"I wonder if void mages will turn out to be cheaper than angels, for that."

"Quite likely! Angels have a lot of other things they're good for. We can't employ slave labor, though, which brings us back around to the slavery question. With universal contraceptive access, something to ensure the safety of incompetents with dangerous magic, and an economic niche for void mages, can you envision Har transitioning to a no-slavery model?"

"Can we envision it, well, it depends on what you mean. If you have the legal right to confiscate the products of someone's own body, and have the surveillance state necessary to ensure no one can reproduce in secret, in what sense do you lack slavery?"

"Our legal apparatus considers everyone to own themselves, with that ownership in many respects held in trust until they can make meaningful decisions with it but that trust revoked in cases of maltreatment," Alassë says. "It might be a useful model if you imagine, say, people already existing before they are born and then being transported into the world of the living upon conception - that's not in fact what's going on except in cases of reincarnation, which as far as I know you don't have, but it might get at some of the concepts I have in mind better? And we want to recognize and enforce the rights of all the people involved with our best guess of what they would and would not have assented to had they been in a position to make a free agreement in advance."