"If you don't turn out to have mages, how much of a disaster is it if elementals innocently visit reds - or touch garbage or whatever - and then just go around about their business -"

"Pollution hysteria is hard to predict, it's not guaranteed that it'll be a disaster but it could be. Probably if it gets known elementals do that people will be uncomfortable interacting with elementals. Places will be tempted to get rid of their reds but they don't want to offend you either."

"Do birds not go through your trash and then fly off?"

"The dumpsters are designed to keep out animals. I'm sure the rate isn't zero."

"Do birds not land in red neighborhoods?"

"Only so much we can do about birds but a stray animal that wandered into the red district would be killed, maybe decontaminated if it was someone's treasured pet."

"Can't elementals be like birds?"

"I don't expect it to be a winning argument but I can arrange for someone to float it."

"They fly. They don't know any better - even if you tell one they'd need to be very invested in interacting with Amentans to distinguish this very charged superstition from something that was just made up, it'll be 'gullible' and 'skeptical', not 'cooperative' and 'hostile'. They fly and don't know any better, they're more likely to do the halo thing than a bird for sure..."

"They could ask the reds, they could ask anyone, it's not hard to verify at all."

"You've only met elementals who've been enslaved for a while. Wild ones are different. They are not going to have coalesced mid-cloud with fact-checking habits that happen to suit you."

"Do they have other personlike variance in - personalities - such that eventually we'll get one who'll attack or murder humans for fun -"

"I can't rule it out but all the stories I have about pre-slavery elemental/human contact don't get worse than 'dangerous misunderstanding'."

"Then hopefully we can avoid hostility arising. I'll work on it."

"Thanks."

And how does everybody feel about 'wild elementals: kind of like birds' as an argument?

Many locales have laws on the books against reds doing anything to attract birds. That at least should be copied over.

Yeah, that seems reasonable.

Since the elementals can read, perhaps red districts should have signs: Elementals Not Welcome, Do Not Land Here.

He will push for the signs to say 'please'.

They can A/B test that.

Uh-huh. Are there more of the elementals.

Yes. There seem to have been more than eight to start with, some in less monitored locations, and there are a few more happening every day.

" - there'll be billions soon enough -"

"I have no idea how the rate is determined. There aren't billions at home, we'd have noticed billions, even before we started hunting them they were hard to find."