"I would have to ask our military, I don't know of something offhand. Lots of stun grenades or something might do it."

"What's a stun grenade?"

"Grenades are thrown weapons which explode shortly after being thrown. A stun one makes a - noise so loud 'noise' isn't even precisely the right characterization, ideally debilitating but not killing everyone in range."

"That - only might work - a lot of elementals in one place is a very appealing target, they have magical defenses too, I don't know about all of them -"

"Could we bribe the right people?"

"Mmmaybe. I'm not sure what you're picturing."

"I don't think I have enough of a picture - we have weapons that would, just, not leave anything larger than a speck of dust in the area for quite some distance around, the hard thing here isn't doing it at all but doing it without casualties. If there are people who would smuggle you elementals for lots and lots of salt and shells, you could take that back with you - Penumbra can go invisible, will she help with this?"

"Some other elementals can see her."

"And might be obliged to say something?"

"Can't make them talk, can sure threaten them. And they can be tapped to let their owners see them."

"If you find this plan potentially valuable I'm inclined at this point to put you in touch with someone with more relevant expertise. 'here's a target, how do we get what we want' is a thing some people do professionally and they'll almost certainly catch things I'd miss."

"It has potential but - I think common knowledge would be dangerous -"

"I won't tell anyone until you feel comfortable with that but we're talking 'bring in an Anitami special forces team' not 'go on the news', it would not become publicly known."

"...mm."

"I know how my people work, you're entirely right that if they were on your planet and told they had to use slaves to get a new one they'd rationalize it away but they're not going to go from 'Penumbra wants her friends, who are prisoners and who might when freed be inclined to do terraforming' to 'or we could try to take the one alien hostage to get the other alien, who has a lot of magic we know nothing about, to take us to their home world where doubtless everyone will think this was brilliant of us and want to teach us how to use elemental slaves."

"I'll talk it over with her."

"Okay. I'm right across the hall if you think of any more questions."

"Any more nasty surprises like the reds?"

"One country recently transitioned away from using reds for red jobs and killed almost all the reds except the ones Anitam took in. Another country is in the middle of doing the same thing. Everything else is less obviously horrible but I'd expect you might genuinely have different sensibilities than us - Anitam executes people for serious crimes? Some places do less of that. ...we let people do sex work before their first spring if they're of age? There's some place down south that's been sanctioning us over that for the last twenty years but no one else cares. Different castes have different penalties for the same crime, by law in some cases and in practice in others. There's a province on the coast that's been experimenting with corporal punishment in place of prison."

"Those seem less like - things you could get permanently stuck in - can I fix the red thing -"

"Planets fix the red thing. Otherwise not really."

"How do planets help with deciding to kill them all?"

"Olvala didn't kill them all. They kicked them out, and there was nowhere for them to go, except the ones we could squeeze in."

"Will they wait? The ones in the middle of it?"

" - I don't think so, the situation has kind of escalated to the point where it'd be hard for them to back down. Other places will probably wait on starting."