"Oh, did she - did she issue resolutions condemning the massacres? Suggesting that the next place spare the children?"

"She," Telkam says, "helped me pass on to the resistance in Evalee information about which children to take hostage."

"Uh. I did not know that."

Aitim sighs heavily.

"Uh, wow," says Isama, "I did not know that either, what the fuck."

"They were all going to die."

"I am not sure it's - useful to hash this out -"

"It seems pretty distinctly not-useful, really."

"You knew?"

"I had far too little information to reasonably make the inference."

"Sure you did."

"...I don't see what the big deal is? A million people are going to be horribly slaughtered, you give them information so they can instead get out alive and found their own state and be happy, that seems like kind of a moral no-brainer -"

" - uh one thing that is going on is that telling people you've committed a ton of capital crimes is impolite because then they could get in trouble also - the executed kind of trouble not the Elf kind of trouble - and even though we are presently nowhere near avenues of getting in trouble it's a kind of sticky norm?"

"We fought a god. It is hard to come up with words for how irrelevant you should consider your government."

"We want to get home as quickly as possible. If it is possible, I think what people want to do once they're home will vary but it would be very unfair to them to deny them avenues to continue their lives normally -"

" - yeah okay so go about your lives normally and have Timothy or Michael Confund the courts if there're any problems."

"What does that do exactly."

"- it's not ethical and I'd really rather it not be relied on - just makes people really really malleable in their impressions of what they did with the last five, ten minutes. In a court case you'd usually just leave the judge with a strong impression they'd thoroughly reviewed the evidence and found nothing to it -"

"You could potentially end up having to do it to a lot of people. There is actually already someone blackmailing me over the whole thing -"

" - wait, really?"

"Yeah," says Ladah, "we had to randomly flee to Uncle Makel's island."

"I wasn't sure if it was an actually dangerous situation or not - it was not."

"There are non-dangerous kinds of being blackmailed over crimes your government shoots people for?"

" - blue and green can take poison - and yes, there are - I suppose if Elves never commit crimes you never blackmail people either -"

"I can't say it has ever come up."