"And the rule of law doesn't actually work?"

"The police aren't great at investigating crimes against reds. I know someone who bought all the reds cameras and we made a law that no one could tamper with those and that made it easier to identify troublemakers even without police cooperation, but some crimes are legitimately hard to solve if all the witnesses saw nothing."

Sigh.

"You've been trying to evaluate if we're the kind of people who'd enslave elementals if we knew how."

"- uh -"

"We won't. I haven't told anyone I don't completely trust not to be stupid and there's absolutely nothing stopping you from leaving and we won't. - we might have. If the first visitor had been someone from your government who said 'oh, they're more like forces than people -' not even because we'd have believed them, just because it would have been enough to make it not something we had to think about. Two planets and then a moral revelation, that's how lots of people work."

"They don't even have to let them talk. You could've just never found out."

"I think I'd have noticed. But I don't run this country yet, couldn't've done anything - is there any chance they'll do planetary transit for ice cream? This is not even remotely a dangerous secret if we can sell it as 'elementals will give us planets for reasonable payment, except the humans are enslaving them, let's bribe the humans to stop and then bribe the elementals for planets'. It is a dangerous secret if they won't want to help on their own."

"You're more like humans than like elementals and humans have just - it took years before Penumbra would even talk to me -"

Nod. 

"Why don't you come in - or I suppose you could stand in the hall, since Penumbra landed in the neighborhood -" Sigh. "Is there possibly magic I could do that would be sufficiently soothing."

"If there's magic that does cleaning very thoroughly that'd do it."

"I don't know what constitutes thorough. I have good water magic, but..."

"Decontamination takes about five hours, normally. There's an agreed-upon sequence of soaps, though no one thinks it has to be those in particular, that's just the standard and definitely good enough."

"Soap is not an element."

"I'll stay out here, if it's okay with you."

"Whatever," she says exasperatedly. She gets the chair with wheels and magics it towards herself with a jerk of her wrist. She sits. "It's more complicated than you think."

He nods.

"Elementals can be enslaved magically. It's - it's easy. It had to be invented but it's easy, I know how and I wasn't even trying to learn. You have to be a mage to use one like that, and it's probable that no matter how much seaweed you eat you just can't ever be mages, even before we knew seaweed helped there were some."

"It doesn't seem likely, no, unless it's something about your world."

"Yeah-huh." Sigh. "Penumbra belongs to my school. It has rentals. So students can borrow them and play with more powerful magic. I could've just refused to go to school at all but that wasn't going to help - I didn't have any luck with any other humans though. So I just tried to - I'd trade the elementals for their time, I couldn't give them stuff, they couldn't keep it, but I could arrange for them to have privacy or teach them to read if they were too old to know how or arrange to rent them when somebody particularly awful was otherwise going to."

...nod.

"I can't let her free outright because literally no one has ever survived doing that and no one knows why. Like, we have a pretty good idea why the Emperor's elementals killed him as soon as he was persuaded to let some go - they convinced him they'd handle his hundreds of simultaneous rebellions, let him act in more places at once, but - sometimes people have just said 'well, around here it's customary to manumit slaves after twenty years' and - magical explosion, dead."

" - we could ask if there are people on death row who'd volunteer -"

"You're not mages."