"Yeah." Sigh.

"Take care." He goes back to the ship. 

He goes back to meet up with everyone else.

Maitimo is informing the Tapai that Elves would like all executions to stop immediately, how can they best make that happen.

...Uh, they can do life in prison instead?

He manages not to make faces. "Thank you. What are your prisons like?"

"It depends on security level and caste," says the Justicar he's talking to.

"Of course. It'd just be fascinating to have some idea, Elves can't be imprisoned and I've never visited an orcish or Dwarvish prison."

"Can't be? What, do you teleport?"

"No, we just die. Rather quickly, and in a great deal of pain; most Elves who found themselves imprisoned would just kill themselves and skip the painful part."

"Prisoners are generally given the option - not necessarily at arbitrary times, they can't have weapons when they mix with the rest of a prison population, but if they ask - they don't usually prefer it."

"I guessed there was a species difference as soon as you mentioned having prisons at all. I suppose it's a convenient species difference, since you don't have oaths and that's how we'd handle many of the crimes you handle with execution or imprisonment."

"...I suppose if that works for you."

"It does. If it turns out to be possible to chip your species we'll have to discuss it with you at some length, oaths would be very dangerous to suddenly impose on people unaccustomed to them, but we're raised with them and so they work fine."

"Anyway, blues and greens who commit nonviolent crimes usually just get house arrest."

Nod. "And everyone else?"

"There's different prisons per caste. The reds have to self-administer theirs day to day because we can't have anyone else in there but they have grey perimeter guards to prevent escapes. Everybody else has grey guards - even the greys - and a few orange social workers to make sure they're adjusting to the environment and have reasonable prospects for release whenever that's scheduled."

"That makes sense. What's the basis for separating them -"

"The castes have a lot of cultural differences - greys need more space and purples need more schedule and they're often allowed to have prison jobs and are suited to different ones, that sort of thing - their social workers need to know different populations they'll be released into - that kind of thing."

"That makes sense. What sort of crimes do you execute people for -"

"Treason, serial murder, spread of pollution, certain infrastructural sabotage."

"Do those come up much?"

"Oh, no."

"I am terribly relieved." And he moves on to a lighter topic.

And he goes out walking, singing to himself enough that the architecture's tolerable.

There's a military truck with red paint on it over there, idling, and a young woman with pale pink hair and a military uniform on sitting in the cab.

"Rotten Elf," she says at a volume that wouldn't be audible to one of her own species at this distance. "Meddlesome bloody fucking Elf -"