"That is probably why you had to shop around until you got the kinda red who stole a van to cross international borders, I guess! But riots aren't always suicide, sometimes people get away."

"She's been lobbying ceaselessly to go after the police for killing Rindeya. For - whatever that's worth to you."

"I didn't know Rindeya personally or anything. It's nice I guess."

"I meant more -" He shakes his head. "Never mind. Thank you for. Explaining."

"You're welcome. Any more stumpers?"

"It'd be useful to know which of those four options reds actually want."

"Probably somebody'd go in for any of 'em, we're not like, all the same, we just coordinate pretty good. But nobody's going to buy that you'll terraform a whole planet just to put reds on or leave us alive in the gap where you don't need us but don't have it ready yet, or that you'd bother bringing us back after going to all the trouble of getting us dead in the first place if that's even a thing, or that there'll be a way to like, buy food, once robots take all our jobs, even if you don't just barricade the neighborhoods and torch 'em, or that the people on that other planet won't care - about us, about not being able to trade with clean castes if they let us touch things because they supposedly don't care, whatever."

- nod. "That makes sense."

"You don't need a reason to kill us, you need a reason to keep us alive," she repeats.

"You want to be alive. That's a reason. That's more than enough of a reason."

"The jail has a piano in it, but there were not very many reds in there looking at it."

"- because we sentence people to probation or work release for most things."

"Which is very nice of you but does not let them have a good long look at the extravagance of your alien interest in red well-being!"

"It's also what this office was supposed to be for, but if we can - mess up that badly just by saying 'if people want' instead of 'if reds want' then I'm not sure it's even net positive on that front - we could maybe do it via email, easier to be careful over email -"

"Yeah, that might be good. And it'd be kind of easier to email you on impulse than walk half a mile of tunnel on impulse."

" - apparently there is already an office phone and email. Just need to make sure people know about it I guess."

"That might actually be a simple enough job for a social worker to not irretrievably fuck up!"

"Well. We will try that and see if they manage to irretrievably fuck it up anyway." Sigh. "Uh, if there's another riot can you please stay particular about killing Elves?"

"I am not personally eligible for riots and do not speak very good Oahkar but I can try? Uh, in Tapa we usually tried not to kill anybody, if you kill somebody you delete their influence and if you scare 'em right you flip it and that's better, I dunno what they usually do in Calado but maybe they were killing Elves 'cause you come back."

"That's why we want to keep it to Elves, yeah, that and then the courts can call it assault and not murder."

Nod.

"Thank you so much for talking to us."

"Thank you for putting a piano in the red jail for no reason. And taking immigrants."

"Of course."

"Not of course! The course here is not that!"