"Do all the societies in the world have the same castes?"

"Loosely. Some of them sort things differently - there's a province where medicine is historically green instead of orange, that sort of thing - some people are more or less strict about mixing -"

Nod. Elves sing some more.

And here is the city! The city is called Tap. The building where the blue caste does most of the work of governance is one of the tolerably pretty ones. They've sent messages ahead to pretty things up and shoo the red caste and braid hair and so on.

So thoughtful of them! Elves are privately murmuring in telepathy about the caste thing but Fëanáro has so far been dissuaded from asking his approximately three thousand probably-impolitic questions.

Here are various tolerably pretty offices! Here are more green-haired people who want to talk about the math of lightleapers and learn Quenya and see pictures of pretty Elf art! Here are blue-haired people who want to talk about the structure of Elf government and the possibilities of trade! Here are some yellow-haired people who want to know if the Elves will require hotels or food or anything else!

People are apparently on rations so they'd feel terrible about accepting any food. They brought some with them and will do fine until the ships come back with more supplies. They are so so enthusiastic about green-haired people and will delightedly teach Quenya and show art and show city skylines and start in on the precursor math to the precursor math to lightleapers! Elf governments are like such and very interested in trade!

Fëanáro finds a particularly intelligent-seeming green-haired person to ask what happens if someone with an obvious talent for mathematics wasn't born with green hair.

"Oh, that actually happened to one of my children! Her grandfather on her father's side was yellow and she was bright sunshiney yellow. But she's green caste so when she was old enough to hold still for it we started dyeing it."

"Does mathematical talent just not occur in people who aren't of appropriate green lineage, then?"

"They'd channel it differently. A math person who was grey caste would do maybe logistics or ballistics or something like that, orange ones might wind up in research medicine - I once met a purple who could do excellent mental arithmetic, barely wrote any of his shop's accounting down -"

"It seems like you'd get better matching of people to jobs if they were all allowed to dye their hair, then -"

"Oh, no, that would never work. People wouldn't really be happy if they were pretending to be the wrong caste."

"How intensively has all of this been studied? Can children be adopted between castes, are there countries that assign things differently enough you could learn something by comparison -"

"There's pretty serious limits to how much we can study this without wrecking the social order, everybody's family ties and aspirations for their children - every now and then if we don't know who an adoptable child's parents are they just go by hair color even though that might be wrong, but that's when you don't know and have to guess. Otherwise it's all in-caste. Our enemies do things differently - they used to be more like us and now they're poisoning the food, I think that might be a bad sign, don't you?"

" - yes, if changing customs led to poisoning food that's a really good reason to leave them the same, I'm just trying to think the best nondisruptive prosocial way to check whether there are innate differences being captured or whether the differences are fundamentally arbitrary - which wouldn't mean they shouldn't exist, gender's probably arbitrary and I still think people are happier having it, but I'm terribly curious which it is - what customs did they change before they started poisoning food?"

"It was some change in how they dealt with the red caste - red caste are really different, I don't understand them at all, honestly, they heard about the food and threw a party, they live mostly separately from everyone else -"

"Can we meet some?"

"We've told them to stay well out of the way, I really don't think that's a good idea."

"But no one's asked them why they were happy about food being poisoned? Back home that'd be considered terribly concerning -"

"I'd be concerned if it were anyone else! It's just the red caste being gross and it's best to let them be gross on their own as long as they keep doing their jobs."

"What do you expect would go wrong if we talked to them?"

"I don't know specifically. Sometimes it seems like they go out of their way to be disgusting, maybe they wouldn't braid their hair for you or they'd try to grab you -"

"Huh. How is it decided what caste the child of a mixed-caste marriage is-"

"Almost always it's whatever the mother is, but if either parent is red it's always red - not that anybody else marries reds - and sometimes if people expect their children are going to take after their father they can get things shuffled around."

"Are there rules against pretending to be in a different caste or is it simply not done -"