They smile nervously at her. And shake hands.

Town meeting! Isel's little mountain town is going to determine the future of Anitam.

See, a couple barbaric backwater countries tried getting rid of their reds by murdering them all, including the children! It was kind of a disaster - here's Biyan drowning in garbage - and anyway civilized society won't conduct mass executions of perfectly law-abiding citizens because they got inconvenient, it's reminiscent of the Oahk Empire or the places that did population control by going to the poorest purple ghettos and boarding them up and burning them down.

Disgusting, and not on the table.

So Anitam can stay as it is now, or Anitam can be clean - like Olvala wants to be, like Biyan so catastrophically fucked up at being - in a civilized way, by making all of its citizens clean. The procedure is grueling and has been scientifically tested and she is here to answer their questions about it, because as the first place to embark on this journey they are entitled to some fear and confusion and nervousness. 

But if they think it's too hard and they can't do it, then the blues will all buy vacation houses elsewhere. (This is quite a threat; her vacation house is one of this tiny town's major employers).

The tiny little mountain town is grumpy. The decontaminated reds huddle together near the exit and receive glares.

They are invited to ask their questions.

Why is she personally invested in them anyway. Why do they have to put up with this.

She is invested in Anitam being clean. Reds are disgusting and shouldn't exist and that is why so much research and medicine went into cleaning them. And even more research went into checking that they were properly clean. Anitam in recent memory went to war over contamination of the supply chain, the people who approved this experiment care about nothing as deeply as they care about preventing pollution. 

And they don't have to put up with this. She expects she can find other tiny skiing towns that would be delighted if she bought a summer estate there. She thinks, once their fears are assuaged, they'll be honored to play this role in their country's history. But if she's wrong, she'll find people who are honored to play this role in their country's history, and she'll try to find someone else to buy her estate here so they come out of it all right. Maybe her cousin Makel -

"No," says her cousin Makel, walking in and shaking hands with the new purples, "I'm excited about a clean Anitam too and if the place where this gets started is some other town then I'll buy there. My wife's grey and she can't stand reds, but these aren't reds, it's that simple."

Grouchy ski people. Grump grump. They do not like being a social experiment.

"We experimented on greens. The experimental phase is over. You're not test subjects, you're just neighbors. But if there's anything I can do to help -"

"They don't talk like us and they act like they're up to something," complains a lady.

"I think they're nervous around you because they don't want to offend you. Is that right?"

A new purple nods.

"If you moved across the country and met new neighbors you might bring them cookies, offer to fix their television. They can't do that - you'd throw out the cookies, right? So they're kind of stuck. You all watch the same TV shows. You all listen to the same music. You all do the same work, you probably all have the same complaints about the morons who got elected and how blues never manage to talk like we actually care about people."

"They aren't like us!" the lady insists. "You're trying to feed us nonsense and you think we won't notice!"

"Have you spent a lot of time talking to them?"

"I can tell, I'm not stupid!"

"I don't think you're stupid. I want my country free of reds and it's worth dealing with neighbors who have city accents and are twitchy to get that. I want your input and your help. But I want your input and your help figuring out how to do this right."

"They're not purple!"

"One of the things I called this meeting to discuss is whether they should dye their hair black like aliens instead. They're not purple, they're something new, and maybe we want a new color for that. But I will not have them singled out if it means people will threaten them or refuse to serve them at the store. So, if by a simple vote this room thinks that ex-reds should have black hair and every person in this room can promise their country that they'll treat people with black hair like they treat any other clean caste, then we'll do black hair. It's your choice." And to the new purples - "you also get to vote, and if this town votes black but you'd rather go somewhere where you can be purple you can do that."

"Black isn't a caste," objects somebody else. "Can't make up a caste and give them purple jobs."

"Well, they can't be purple," says the grouchy lady.

"Are you worried there won't be enough jobs? If we can make this work there are going to be a lot of new construction jobs here very soon, and we won't be importing newcomers to take them. Personally, I was in favor of testing people after decontamination to see which caste fits them best and then giving them that caste, but people were worried that then everyone would want to test into a different caste. Are we ready to vote or do people have more to say first?"

People have more to say, a lot more. The general clusters of viewpoint seem to be:

1) They can't be purple, they don't have purple families or mannerisms and purples don't want them as castemates, do literally anything else with them.

2) They can't be black, that's not a real caste and it wouldn't be right to have a made up new caste doing jobs that ought to belong to purples, even if there's enough jobs now that doesn't mean there will be forever.

3) The decontamination thing is a lot of bullshit that the blues are trying to pass off because they think purples are idiots, and the reds should go back where they came from out of sight and not TOUCHING ALL THE THINGS.

4) Uuuuuuugh why isn't this meeting over I couldn't possibly care less my supposed power to affect the situation is illusory so if Isel says they're purple then I guess they're purple whatever I want to go home.

Fine. Vote. Purple, black, or 'I would like Isel to move to a different town and take her new gardeners and housekeepers with her'.

Purple passes, narrowly. The grouchy lady starts shrieking invective at the decontaminated persons and has to be removed by security.

Everyone gets a hundred ni as a thank you for their time. Except persons removed by security.