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."

"Has to be mages? Do any of the elementals know why -"

"You have to do a magic thing to use one or free one."

"So until someone invents a way that doesn't involve a magic explosion, it's a matter of better conditions, we can't just bribe the human societies to free them."

"And there are free elementals but they are still free because they kill humans - which you'd look like - on sight, or make themselves very hard to find."

"Do enslaved elementals have a wishlist, given all that?"

"Lots of them would probably be happy to see all humans dead, at this point. Some of them might except me."

"Do they have a wishlist given unwillingness to kill all humans."

"If Penumbra went around personally vouching - uh, we can shut them up, we can't make them talk, although if you are ever not sure of that I don't speak any of the other languages she knows - maybe they'd settle for me nominally holding them all till I was really old and then having an explosion party."

"But then it'd almost certainly be a very very long time before any of them wanted to trade ice cream for colonization help."