The golden light is kind of weird but it's pretty and perking up plants isn't hurting anything except for some people who are vehemently opposed to weeds in their rock gardens. The market for polar land bids up.

Calado can have factories for the manufacture of actual lightleapers, now, they have enough of the prerequisites. They start on those. 

Blues are all formally notified that they're welcome back if they acknowledge the new government. Calado has been holding their stuff in trust for them unless they were engaged in tax and securities fraud or embezzlement.

The Free State of Oahk issues a formal reprimand for mass prejudicial arrest, somewhat belatedly. A few other countries cosign. Calado's new government is entreated to hand the trusts to another party which it is likelier the owners would actually trust, based on the representative population that made it back on their own.

Calado is happy to do that. Everything has been meticulously documented. Countries who issue reprimands do not notice any consequences for their starship agreements or for the willingness of Elves to discuss schedules for sending Yavanna places if she can season the equator.

Most of the blues want to come back, land in Oahk, collect their assets, and arrange to move. They can find blues who would like to swap in to Calado for them with rather depressing ease.

A handful have decided that a basic income on Valinor is fine with them and they will just stay there.

A small number actually move back to Calado and recite whatever sentences they have to recite to do that and invest in panic rooms and other security measures that don't rely on staffing.

Swaps are approved and assets are handed over and Calado has blues again. They can serve on committees (though somehow no committees have a voting majority of blues) and run university boards and do policy work particularly on colonization and towns can vote to request a blue mayor in which case they can be mayor of those towns. He tries to keep a bit of an eye on the ones who are actual returning Calado blues.

They don't really want to be kept an eye on if they can avoid that.

He's hardly going to make them show up to things. He does look them up.

They're mostly the poorer ones who don't have foreign homes or friends, nor close relatives with either, but didn't have what they did have stolen. One of them starts quietly pursuing suit for damages on behalf of the entire nation's blue caste at time of coup.

The judges are all Elves. Blue gets an appointment for a preliminary hearing. 

In he goes.

There's precedent for suing on behalf of a collective of which you are a member, but it's kind of a hassle, and damages are usually capped, does he prefer this to going ahead with a case individually? 

Most of the other parties don't want the additional hassle on top of the hassle associated with being kidnapped. He is hoping to at least create a template case even if there is some reason he can't act as a representative for the caste.

No, he can act as a representative for the caste, that all seems to be in order. Procedure is that he submits factual claims, the other side contests or acknowledges them, the court makes findings of fact, he advances a claim for damages off the court's assessment of the facts, they rule on that. Questions for the court?

Is there an appeal process? How does the court go about finding facts? How will they price things like emotional damage? Is there any adjustment associated with findings like "you could have easily estimated a lower bound and offered it without being sued first"?

There's an appeals court. They review the damages decision but not the factual ones. There are no penalties for failing to settle out of court, though the court can instruct the parties to try to settle out of court if they see fit. They copied the rules on damages more-or-less wholesale from Voa except for getting rid of caste-disparate and resources-disparate judgments. For wrongful arrest and wrongful imprisonment the standard range is sixteen hundred to sixteen thousand ahk.

That's not very much.

The court is empowered to award damages outside the standard range, but they're unlikely to improve that much on sixteen thousand because that times all the blues in Calado is eight billion, and the court is directed to try to avoid making judgments so large they will never be paid.

Is this court responsive to the argument "then maybe they shouldn't have arrested all the blues in Calado", or is he wasting his time arguing that.

Is the argument that the guideline 'try to avoid judgments that will never be paid in significant part' should not apply if the defendant did something really bad? Usually if someone's facing a judgment that is going to bankrupt them they did something really bad. Does he prefer a judgment of a hundred thousand ahk that isn't paid to a judgment of sixteen thousand that is?

He thinks the literal post-coup government of a country can probably find billions if it wants to.

Right, eight billion was an example of a judgment that would probably get paid. 

Is the court being deliberately obtuse?

The court is advising him about the damages guidelines and about the range of possible judgments.

He thinks the post-coup government of Calado can find more than a single digit number of billions if it is moved to do so.