"Seems the next step."

"I'll need some more and rarer and more exotic things for that, though, should I wait until you have your purple contacts so we can rebuild your wealth?"

"If you need them in quantity, probably. If you just need a small sample - particularly if I can return it - I can arrange most things."

"Small sample works, returning it—hit or miss, some things I'll need to, like, sorta take apart to copy."

"I can probably manage that, then."

"Okay."

"I'll let you know if it becomes a problem. What do you need?"

He has a list! It's about as long as the previous one but way more outlandish.

He raises his eyebrows. "Maybe I can ask my father to do this through university supply ordering. Thank you."

"—university? Aren't castes patrilineal in Anitam?"

"I have a very stubborn father. He decided to pretend so hard that it got awkward to argue with him about it. He's really not suited to blue."

"...is your father Afen Kisantami?"

"However did you guess."

"He was the person responsible for the changes in the rules at the university that caused me to technically not be allowed to sit on classes, but let's say it was a stroke of intuition."

"I'm very fond of my green relatives, liabilities though they are."

"I have a fondness for the caste, myself," he says, rubbing a hand on the back of his (green-haired) head meaningfully.

"Every caste is very necessary."

"...I'm not convinced the caste system is itself necessary—I've run into species that have it literally built into their biology and psychology and it does not look like this."

"Oh?"

"They're—happier about their castes, and more obviously suited for them. They have biological alterations and get emotional reactions out of different things in different ways and need different types of sustenance and have different life cycles... Your species looks like at some point people decided to make castes a thing and then there are many generations of selection on top of that."

" - I suppose, but you might be underestimating what many generations of selection does."

"I'm not sure that I am. If castes disappeared tomorrow and anyone could do whatever—then yes most blues would do blue jobs and most purples would do purple jobs, but some nongreens like your father who would be absolutely miserable as anything else won't be, anymore. And there are so, so many purples."

"Education would be really challenging to get right."

"In my world people had more-or-less generalised education until they were—your equivalent of four—and then started specialising. For certain things they'd start learning earlier, but anyone could go to a university and get, say, a law degree and become a lawyer and then a judge or a politician."

" - sounds really rough on people who shouldn't have to be put through three years of an education adequate to subsequently send them to university, if they're not remotely suited to that."