"Ice cream's pretty good, but - I don't think you can just use the history of local slavery here, there's - I can make her blink, I can make her hold perfectly still, I can make her do anything, I used to have a serious problem of doing it by accident, it's easier than moving my own body, if she's nearby and it would be marginally more convenient for her to be doing something else. They don't have to sleep or eat or rest or ever do anything that isn't be convenient magic vessels for their owners and occasional or not so occasional sex toys. Even if their owners have to sleep we can share them. They've been so - so -"

Nod. Sigh. "Can more than one be let go in a fatal magical explosion -"

"I think so."

"But elderly or terminally ill humans can't be convinced to do it..."

"Most mages are about my age or younger. Anybody my age who's dying is well within the range of things magic can heal."

"Prospects of inventing a spell that releases them remotely?"

"I don't think so."

"Is it legal to capture new ones?"

"Encouraged."

"How hard would that be to change?"

"Wild elementals are both extremely dangerous and worth a lot of money, so, hard."

"What's the concern exactly with sending some people to teach you science and vaccinate you and so on -"

"Somebody would say 'sure, get the stolen Penumbra back and I will bring you to another planet and make my elementals make it all nice to live on. Pay me in salt.' And you would."

"You obviously should not clarify this point but as far as we know we couldn't."

"I mean, we'd make it really hard, but it is not impossible to recover stolen elementals."

"And there are other ways of getting here from there?"

"Penumbra might be it till another Penumbra coalesces unless someone can do it simultaneously tapping a regular shadow and a regular shine, which someone could maybe figure out."

"If Penumbra's our only way of getting between planets then it's a lot more straightforward, as long as she's off where no one can bother her we can't be bribed into cooperating with slavery."

"No. Planets is easier than worlds."

"Ah." Sigh. "So, letting them go is absurdly difficult and even if accomplished they'll likely be recaptured, or else kill lots of humans, which might not be an innate tendency at all but just self-defense under the circumstances, more are getting captured all the time, and the only way to get the thing we want is to participate. ...what would you need in order to successfully steal a bunch more?"

"...uh. If you could render everyone in a decent radius unconscious I could grab all the university rentals. And some other big collections."

"How big a radius, how close to simultaneously, does 'incapacitated' do it."

"Has to be mentally incapacitated too or they could direct any elementals they had on them. They don't have to all go down at once but they have to all be down at once. Maybe a block?"

" - tentative plan, we send you back with the resources to steal lots more of them, we announce elementals get asylum in Anitam due to being enslaved on their home planet, we explain to the elementals once they get here that they can't be released until you're elderly unless they know a way but that under local law you're not allowed to order them and if they like we can have a social worker routinely check with them about whether they have been ordered and stop you if you're doing it. We hope that after a couple seasons some of them are feeling recovered enough to consider finding us planets, but we know that might not happen and we make it work regardless."

"How're you going to do the knocking people out thing?"