Nod nod.

"Theodore's school apparently whips students for that. Isn't that something. I'm imagining if our blue schools did that -"

"I mean, not everyone at Hogwarts is equivalent-of-blue, right -"

"No but they do punishments with no consideration for who your family is. It's awfully refreshing really. - not no consideration. But ours's important and they still got beaten when they broke the rules."

"I think that's horrible," says Ladah.

"Humans might be different? Or wizards in particular. But it's not that I think beating children is a good idea it's that I think whatever the rules are they should be the same for everyone - partially because then if they're bad the powerful people will change them."

"But the powerful people are the ones who aren't children any more."

"I am all in favor of putting the kids in charge of the school too. - they kind of do that, the kids are the ones who assign punishments."

"Huh."

"It's not a nice place and my alt dropped out as soon as that's allowed. But it's - it doesn't pretend to run on principled rules and actually run on favors and lies and games."

"For the record I do think the vast majority of court cases at home are decided fairly."

Ladah snorts.

"Think I'm wrong or just setting the bar in the wrong place?"

"I don't really know. But it's a different thing to get the right answer most of the time and to be doing it according to rules? Like if you steal a teacher's answer key you can also be right a lot."

"We could do better on doing it according to rules."

"But then where would we all be."

"There is that."

Ana wants to go swimming in the lake.

"Only with grownups supervising. - or the wizards giving you magic water-breathing ability, I guess that works too."

"Now."

"No."

"Michael said you are the worst you," she says.

"Is that so. When did Michael say that?"

"We went to his house." She stomps. "I want to go swimming."

"Why are you the worst you?" wonders Isama.

"I'm not really sure. I very much doubt he lets his Ana go out for unsupervised swimming. Maybe because I wouldn't have married Red Peka without decontaminating her? Ana sweetheart the aliens don't understand Amenta and they can be very rude about it but that doesn't make them right."