"Uh. I guess it depends what you have in mind when you say 'prison' but Elves will invariably hear 'torture'."

"That seems like a translation problem."

"- consider it a maybe pending discussion of prison conditions?"

"Varies by locality. If this is a pet interest of yours there are certainly countries that would exclaim in delight that you should certainly take all their criminals away as they never wish to hear from them again, we just have more accountability here."

"I will send someone to go take them up on that." Maitimo, they have prisons and she thinks some places will just stop if we ask. "Thank you."

"On the subject of the latter two you certainly can't gut essential services or void people's employment contracts."

"If essential services would stop working if people were not in desperate poverty then I think we should get to work now on changing things about the way they are provided so that this ceases to be the case. Are there employment contracts that we'd regard as tantamount to slavery?"

"As long as you respect the order of operations on that I don't care if you want to replace all the reds with robots and then spirit them away before they burn down half the city in a frothing madness. If agreeing to show up to work when promised is tantamount to slavery for you, then perhaps there's something you'd regard as slavery. People do not own one another here."

"What's the maximum length of an employment contract?"

"It isn't capped by law, although I don't think I've ever heard of one lasting longer than five years."

"You people live forty?"

"If we're lucky."

"I'd like it capped by law. At two."

"You certainly would like a lot of things, wouldn't you."

"Unconditional surrender's not among them."

"I assume as ridiculously powerful aliens you could command it and then you could have us doing whatever you'd like, line us all up and decapitate every third one if it amused you, but you seem to have something else going on than a desire to destroy our way of life roots to leaves."

"Yeah. For weird alien preference reasons I've been told it would be a diplomatic mistake to characterize as 'morals', we want to arrange an easy transition to a world where everyone has all of their material needs met and need never fear for their lives. We'd prefer to arrange this under the auspices of your existing governments."

"What would happen if someone decided, instead of complying with your morals, to pretend that you did not exist?"

"Some individual who wanted to do that could. Some government who wanted to do that could probably get a couple years while we handled everywhere more easily handled, unless the plight of one of their citizens happened to catch our attention in the meantime, and then we would ask all their citizens whether they'd like to have all of their materials needs met and never fear for their lives, and they would find themselves governing only the people who preferred their governance to ours."

"So in fact individuals cannot do that unless they happen to be indifferent to living in a civilization or a partially deserted wasteland."

"Or unless they managed to build themselves a civilization people'd voluntarily live in, yes."

"Our civilization, lacking whatever magic supports yours, is interdependent. It would not take many deserters to stress whoever remained."

"I commend you for noticing this and treating all your citizens like the valued assets they are."

"Sarcasm is unbecoming. One does not ensure that one has eggs by telling one's chickens they are free to go and prevailing on their generosity."

"Oh, I meant it. I respect the food-handling thing. Didn't work, but at least someone noticed that having your society depend on a loathed underclass you avoided even looking at was an impending disaster."