"From my perspective, the laws of Kef are pretty normal except for not having dons and insisting that money belongs to individuals, rather than households or species. So let's see, how would I explain the laws to someone from far away. The basics are no stealing, no attacking people, no lying about business agreements, no murder, no maiming, no disiniuria, no torture, no pollution, no provocation...

Stealing means using or taking something that's not yours, including the ground below someone's house to a depth of ten feet and the air currently in their house. Damaging something is a kind of using it.

Attacking people means hurting them, unless they tried to hurt you first, or they hurt someone else first and you saw that happen. If you find people fighting, you can break up the fight by getting in their way, but you still can't attack them unless they attack you first. If you're worried that someone is about to hurt someone or steal something, you're allowed to hit them once, with intent only to cause pain, to distract them. If they attack you then, you can defend yourself but they also count as defending themselves.

If you attack someone intending to kill them or cause them lasting damage, that's worse that just intending to cause pain or distress - murder or maiming. It's also worse to cause someone pain or distress if they can't leave, or to chase after them if they try to get away - that's torture. If someone steals something, you can attack them, but you still can't chase after them or do anything worse than just attacking them to cause pain or distress. Physically preventing someone from leaving is considered to be distressing, and so counts as torture even if you don't do anything to them.

If you attack someone by exploiting a difference in your traits, that's disiniuria, which is much much worse than attacking them in any other way. Killing someone with poison is a lesser crime than slightly toasting a bit of their fur with catfire. Disiniuria usually involves magic, but it doesn't have to. Slashing someone who doesn't have claws is disiniuria. So is hitting someone half your size. But hitting someone a few inches smaller than you isn't - there's not really a clear line there. A werewolf suffocating another werewolf in rock is not disiniuria, since they're both werewolves. If someone attacks you with disiniuria, you can defend yourself with disiniuria. If you witness someone attacking with disiniuria, and you attack them with disiniuria to stop them, that's called a counter-disiniuria. If you survive the fight, the only crime you committed was 'unlicensed counter-disiniuria', which is a small crime punished only by having to pay money to the Magistrate. But you should not expect to survive the fight.

Don't lie when you say you're going to give someone money, or do something for them, if this is understood to be a formal agreement. If you're not sure if something is a formal agreement, ask. If you say you're going to do something and then you can't, that's okay, just talk with your business partner about an alternate agreement. If you can't work something out by yourselves, go to the Magistrate.

Pollution means making someone's environment noticeably worse. Their environment is specifically: their house, another house where they're living, and places that they need to access to get food and water, empty their chamber pot, make business agreements, carry out business agreements, visit the Magistrate, and have social contact with any one chosen member of their species and any one chosen person of any species. Changes that count as pollution are blowing wind at them, stopping the wind from blowing, changing the temperature, changing the amount of water in the air, changing the amount of light from the sun, putting smells in the air, making loud noise, or hollowing out the rock deep beneath them so their house is damaged, without touching the house itself and the rock ten feet under it.

In the past, provocation meant being mean to someone with the intent of getting them to attack you so that they would be in trouble. Now, it means any deliberate nonstandard use of laws to hurt someone. If make a complaint about someone, believing that they committed a crime, and your argument is considered to be not the way the law was supposed to be used, the complaint is thrown out. Confusingly, the defense against your complaint is called the 'principle of provocation', but as long as you were sincere about your complaint, you didn't do anything wrong - you didn't do the crime of provocation.

If you visit a werewolf and there is suddenly a terrible smell outside, so that they close up their house and refuse to open the door for you to leave, they did not torture you by confinement, according to the principle of provocation. If you arranged for the terrible smell in hopes of getting them in trouble, then you did the crime of provocation, and likely pollution too.

If you hurt someone, you will be hurt in the same way. Or for disiniuria, killed by the magic of the victim if possible. The punishments for other crimes vary for different Magistrates, but in Kef they're always having to pay a fine to the Magistrate.

Magistrates can do almost anything. They can't lie in business agreements. If a Magistrate is confining someone before judging or punishing them, they have to let them travel to a different town, although still in confinement.

All the stuff in the town that doesn't belong to someone else belongs to the Magistrate - oh, that's another difference. In Kef, all land within the walls belongs to the Magistrate and we have to pay her to rent it, meaning to own it as the law cares, for a temporary time.

All elves are unable to commit disiniuria. Within the area of a town, a Magistrate can give licenses to commit crimes that don't hurt people to anyone. A Magistrate can give licenses to hurt or distress people to fifty chosen agents, and can give licenses to attack people in all ways to five chosen agents. In Sota. Other countries do it differently."

...He resolves to run away again, burning magic if he has to, if Meikalani tries to use this to force him into things. It's not like that's a new decision though. Hearing she can get away with anything only confirms it. So he needs to make a business agreement with the Magistrate, if that's the only time she really can't lie?

"That's not very fair. That elves can't disinuria. Is that why the Freedom Democracy hates them? It makes sense that magistrates can make a [guard] of fifty and a [army] of five. Who's the [army] and [guard] here? But disinuria I don't think I understand it right. Is it only on purpose? What if it's an accident? And there's two kinds of accidents, where you were being stupid and should know better, and where you were careful and there was still an accident."

"Not exactly, since in the Freedom Democracy elves can commit disiniuria, that's just a difference in laws. But the reason that they can't here is because of historical thoughts that it's correct for elves to be better than other people, they're supposed to rule. And that encouraged elves to not listen to other people, to hurt them if they were in the way of how the elves wanted to do things. That's what the Freedom Democracy fights against.

I don't think democracy in general is such a bad idea - it just means that everyone gets to have a say. But if most of the population says they want elves to be forced to use a single shrine, which gets destroyed when they die, and the elves say they don't want that, it still happens. There needs to be a way to avoid bad things like that. In Sota, and most countries in the Allheart Alliance, you can go to a different town if the town you're in is bad. If it's really bad, the people can overthrow the Magistrate.

In Kef, there's only ten police and three jailors. The Magistrate has people picked out to be selected if there's an emergency, but thinks it's bad for people to have power they don't need. Before the waterworks accident, I was on the list of backup police, like most of her clerks, but not actually police. Clerks already scare people because anything we know goes to the Magistrate - it's better not to make people even more scared.

Accidents are not disiniuria, even if you were being stupid. A business agreement to do a task might reduce the amount of money you get if you're stupid about how you do it.

If someone is stupid often or dangerously, they might get exiled from the town. That means they have to leave, but the Magistrate has to pay for them to travel to the nearest town they aren't exiled from."

"Something's odd about Nico, you know."

"New species, appears human but demonstrates odd magic. You don't say."

"And he's scared. Not sure what's okay to do sometimes. Asking so many questions about complicated subjects too, and it doesn't necessarily feel like curiosity. He was talking about how dancing is great because it's difficult? That's not... Something normal kids do. It feels like he's pushing himself. I don't get to meet a whole lot of people, you know, but... I don't know. Something's off. We should invite the rest of his family over some time, Lin sounds just as clever."

"That's up to you. You know I don't really care. I don't know why she wasn't settled into the frogold district. But again, I don't really care."

"There's a frogold district? Huh."

"Yes, in the aqueducts. Calling it a 'district' is probably overselling it. But about Nico. What do you think the rest of his magic is?"

"Invite them over some time too maybe. Webbed feet stick together. I thought you didn't care about him. And what do you mean, the rest of his magic?"

"I care about people who have common sense and don't annoy me. It's obvious there's more. An earless whissoper with a knack for geometry wouldn't be worth standing on your toes so much for. Someone smells blood or power. The magistrate closed the town for a bit, you know. And only has the leeway for so many stipends. Do you know if whisshopper light can grow plants?"

"He has common sense? High praise... I actually don't remember. Should write the old library and ask, maybe."

"What else do you think he can do? I want to know! Magic is where we transcend the possible. It's an awful process getting new types, but once we have them they open the world."

"Do we have a new type yet? I haven't heard anything about where he came from..."

"We obviously do. Meikalani shipped in a bunch of human women. Pragmatic of her, but then again most elphs are like that when the fire-stick goes up."

He makes a face. "...I don't like that idea. I don't like it at all, actually."

"Maybe he'd be fine with it. And if not it wouldn't be any worse than Butter-Apples."

"That's no reason to go 'oh, okay, sure-'"

"Indeed not. I'm not the one making that decision. I don't really want to be very near it either."

"Standing idly by while injustice takes place is hardly a good look." He sighs. "I think we're speculating an awful lot here. And freaking out about things that may or may not actually be problems can harm kids too.  If you change the rules too often, or give them ghosts to worry about, it can mess them up. Though I'm not sure there's anyone in the world who's not messed up somehow... He's a kid who likes plants, let's just keep it simple for now? Please?"

"Avoiding the hard question, excellent strategy. Maybe the drydark civilization he's from is fussing over him and threatening to invade. Maybe he's dangerous somehow, though he hasn't been isolated. He reacted pretty strongly to you. Maybe he's an exiled hybrid experiment smuggled out of Lei by those who feared for his life, should the taboo be discovered, or maybe he's-"

Neffie's job singing for the fire crews gives her plenty of opportunity to get lost in the mines.

The aquifers don't seem to have anything interesting in them. They're mostly porous rock, not open caves, unless that's a clever deception - she doesn't get a chance to look closely before a werewolf inspecting the sluice gates gives her directions.

The mines for iron ore are too busy to wander into, so she claims she's picking up an extra shift and sings for the miners. Nothing unusual there either.

The aqueduct between the new turbines (on the darkward end of town) and the main waterworks (on the brightward side) is easily accessible through the mining tunnels. The aqueduct to Archer's Tabard is not accessible at all. She visits every turbine, every pump in each turbine's chain... an abandoned tunnel seems to have been filled in with rock that mimics the shape of the sedimentary lines in the walls but is a homogeneous material.

Hm.

Three deci-years ago, a mouseling was condemned for murder. Execution, obviously, but a higher Freedom called. The mouseling was offered options, and choose to have their brain's halves separated and alternately drugged to sleep and forced awake, while living a long life in a comfortable cell.

Mouselings, like all species on Ansaf, can only use active magical abilities while awake. Asleep, a drake's breath and a boark's toughness endure, but a catfolk's flame goes out and a mouseling's cursor dies and cannot be reanimated without another touch.

But this mouseling is always partially awake.

Neffie punches her bicep, in which the tiny cursor is embedded. When it wiggles in response, she squeezes in a code:

target located

person with unknown magic

another secret in aqueduct

The response:

no change

prioritize target

Four hundred miles away, in another town expanding into the drydark for water, drips of glowing ichor follow a scurrying trail around the mines.