"And some countries will not be great about enforcing the law when that requires killing them."

"It's worse than that, if I died all the elementals I'm holding would still have amulets. You basically have to find a suicidal volunteer, or I guess give the amulet to someone trusted."

"Can a spell that protects elementals from this be designed -"

"Working on it. I think wards as a class have a lot of potential."

"You've probably got a couple years before they're of elemental-enslaving age."

Nod. "There might be too many elementals to ward them all."

"Even once there are even more mages?"

"Maybe. Depends how many want to help with that."

"With the right PR campaign probably lots will."

Nod.

"How are your students doing at the magic?"

"Pretty well. I'm less equipped to teach the elements I don't have but there's only two of those and some elementals can fill in bits."

Parties with small children beam at the small children. 

"If your magic is contagious that's a constraint on hopping worlds looking for things that can solve our problems - you may be springing elementals and mages everywhere - and it seems likely aliens in our universe also got elementals and mages recently..."

"Crossed my mind. I think it only happened once there were a lot of elementals here but it's hard to be certain."

"Timing matches the second batch of rescuees, yeah. But it could be that elemental-time-in-universe builds up some magic effect or something. Once the colony planets have more people we can find out if it's per-planet or per-universe, at least."

Nod. "I mean, there aren't any coalescing on the inhabited moons at all, yet."

"Uh huh - and that's with a substantial elemental population."

"The appearances have seemed to be pretty randomly distributed across the planet's surface."

"Could be a gravity requirement but why would there be a gravity requirement - we just need more data points."

"Yeah."

"How many elementals are still enslaved on the human world -"

"Hard to get exact numbers. The team has personally observed dozens that were owned by people who sold them some which were held back."

"We can't follow them home and go get 'em?"

"Haven't come up with a good plan for that yet. I mean, I guess at a certain point we could just shoot people and then steal the amulets off 'em."