If he'd known going into it what that was going to be he'd have watched it first in private, or with Dama or Maki. He doesn't immediately have anything to say about it.

"Wow," says Melda, blinking at the video when it concludes.

"Oh, that's what the Allspeak update about maiming was for?" says Shila.

What the fuck is he supposed to say to that.

He had better say something. It's - in keeping with who he once thought Feris was, to care about that. And it's genuinely an attitude more characteristic of Sesat than Azan. And the idea of mental editing is deeply disconcerting. And it's - everything he ever liked about Sesat.

And after the old Star-of-Stars had them imprisoned it took months for Maki's hand to stop shaking, nearly a year for Valan to walk, years for Maki to speak.

He's not going to bring any of that up with these strangers but there's a long pause while he gets past that to think of literally anything appropriate to say.

"Not what you were expecting?"

"I'd read a transcript but this is remarkably - fiery. I suppose I should have expected it," says Melda.

"...So is he describing something you'd describe differently or just lying?"

"The first thing. - well, I don't think every case of drunken manslaughter has that outcome, that varies locally."

"How would you describe it?"

"Can you narrow it down or do you just want me to translate the entire speech into Vanda Nossëo affect?"

"Oh, if the second thing is doable it'd be helpful, but I mostly meant the part about your justice system."

"Mental alteration is never a person's only option. Even the most exceptionally dangerous people could instead be, say, dead, and most people could be in prison instead. The forms of it used in that way are very surgically specific and would generally leave the person able to return to everything about their life except for crime, or, usually, an even more specific exception than that. I could go into the history of how this policy came into existence but I don't know if that interests you or if there's something else about it that stuck out?"

"The history sounds interesting."

"A plurality of the individuals working for Vanda Nossëo are humans. There's just a lot of you. But it was founded by, and persists at a high concentration of, my species - Elves," says Melda. "And we have two unique features that probably contributed to this balance of desiderata. One: we cannot be imprisoned. Unless you're literally a god - an evil god - it kills us all by itself, it's so intolerable that we'd kill ourselves rather than let it get to that point, it's just a particularly cruel and inefficient way to kill us. Accordingly, imprisonment has never featured in any Elven conception of justice.

"Two: we can swear binding oaths. With some exceptions that I don't think are relevant to how this played out in the founding, an Elf who can talk can use a slightly particular phrasing and enforce on themselves that what they say is true. If I tried to swear to you that I was a man, or a pineapple, or dead, I just wouldn't be able to get the words out; if I swore to you that I was going to get that way, I'd do it, I'd have to, it would happen without stopping to check along the way past my saying so if I wanted to or if circumstances had changed. I could dawdle, maybe, but not quit. This has all the nightmarish potential you'd expect and then some, of course, but unlike imprisonment it's not unthinkable. It did play a role in the development of the Elven conception of justice. If someone has, say, struck a child, or destroyed a neighbor's sculpture, or otherwise committed the sort of minor misbehavior that's all you get in a typical century of a monospecies Elf community? Well, that's terrible, of course, but it doesn't mean they can't be among us - they just have to swear that they won't do it again."

"...I can see how if your species founded a society that worked for you and then went looking for the most miserable humans you could find and let them join if they were willing to have a democratic vote about it you would end up with the thing you've apparently ended up with. Except that I didn't understand the relevance of your problem with imprisonment."

"That... wasn't the trajectory but I agree it could have had the same result. So, another founding and ongoing pressure in the top levels of Vanda Nossëo is a particular personality template - it has sounded like you're aware of the same phenomenon here, people who are the same across worlds and may or may not look alike. This template, 'Bells', actually hates invasive mind magic of all sorts, it's a very reliable and strong feature they have. And none of them are Elves. Most of them come from societies where some sort of imprisonment, not oaths or anything like them, is the default response to crime too serious to handle with scoldings and fines. - Elves alone don't do fines in most worlds where we exist because in most worlds where we exist we wind up doing central planning or a gift economy rather than currency, though my specific world is economically unusual. So you have some Elves, and you have some Bells, and they're pulling at each other, one side barely able to wrap their minds around the concept of a 'humane prison', the other so suspicious of mind control that the first thing every one of them does on meeting telepaths is demand to know how to make them stop. But both of them able to agree on letting the prisoners decide, in cases where either option suffices to make other people safe from them."

"And the societies you know of where they do remotely normal human things would mostly be better off doing things your way, because as lovely humanitarians you went looking for desperately poor people who would be better off doing things your way and don't need to have anything to do with anyone else?"

"...I can't tell if that's your sincere best guess, a sarcastic way of describing your best guess that you are expecting to somehow highlight for me something you found inadequate about my explanation...?"

"It seems very strange to me that you find yourselves deciding between two punishments no country I've ever been in has made much use of, especially when you have magic that can make sure if you go too far with a whipping you can always fix it."

"Frankly, that is because your planet is very poor and very low-tech."

He is not going to be goaded into revealing what he thinks of as the technology they have that best refutes that claim. What if he says "we have electricity!" and they've replaced electricity with politely asking clouds to do all the work on their entire planet and don't even need to make copper wire? ...What if he already has tipped his hand by saying they could use copper wire? Maybe if you use gold wire you can make cooler electricity that does twice as many things.

"We haven't had some of our cool stuff long enough to have seen all the changes it'll bring but I do admit I'm not immediately seeing why that in particular would change."

"One of the things people buy with slack and luxury is being more humane towards criminals. If their labor is less essential to the economy, if the security measures people need to feel safe from them are commonly available, if feeding them is cheap, if there are social scientists willing to take data about whether they can stop doing crime and live normal lives and what made them do crime in the first place, if people are using their larger amounts of free time to think about moral philosophy and try to apply their principles to politics, that all gradually pushes away from permanent and violent punishments and toward rehabilitative and preventative strategies. This isn't a guarantee, but it's definitely a trend and particularly holds among humans."

"...I don't disbelieve the claims you just made but they don't sound related to the claims you made before them - for context, Azan uses execution, public whipping, public display in general, henna marking, fines, and obviously sometimes strips people of rank and associated marks. I'm not entirely sure which of those you consider more violent or less humane than what you do."

"So, in Vanda Nossëo the overwhelming majority of criminal punishments come with an alternative of exile, because it's illegal to stop people from leaving if you're not very sure they're just going to find an uncontacted planet and start murdering people on it. Any of those things except the first two would be fine, even in a member state, with the alternative of exile available, and depending on the details even the first two aren't necessarily off the table."

"Depending on what details?"

There's something that's still confusing here, like he's making an assumption that isn't true, but he's not sure which assumption it might be.

"If there were, say, a religious belief among the criminals themselves that being whipped or killed would meaningfully expiate their guilt, and they preferred that to moving to another country, then that could be implemented as an exception to the usual rules against killing and torturing people. Most localities just omit those criminal penalties across the board but we're much more absolute about having to let people leave."

"I don't think I'm getting less confused, do you want to walk me through concrete examples or just circle back to this topic later when we have more shared context?"