...doing magic for reds would be a catastrophe they could touch anything no one could leave their houses ever again and they'd have to stockpile food and what would they do when it ran out? In Voa didn't they have trouble keeping the trains running on time because people kept jumping in front of them? Something like that, anyway.

Only elementals can do the shadow-walking and outright teleporting things. Human mages would, like, make them magic lamps or something. Anything else would require more education.

She tells Aitim, "The more I think about it the more I like the idea of emptying a mage orphanage, then placing one mage kid with a red family in any country who thinks that will be good for them. Sorts kind of neatly, doesn't it?"

"I don't know if you'll get any takers. And the kids will have a hard impoverished life with parents who are unusually likely to be murdered -"

"I was imagining the country would subsidize them and not shoot anyone they liked if they knew what was good for them. No?"

"You don't win elections by giving reds money. Maybe some places would be subtle enough to pull it off. And - most red murders aren't on the orders of the government, they're random citizens who get startled or just want to hurt someone they won't get in trouble for hurting."

"I wonder how many worlds I'd have to land on before I found one that wasn't fucked up."

"Could try finding ones with more magic so you could have more leverage."

"Maybe. But maybe they'd just have their own urgent awful problems."

"That's not really an argument for not visiting. Or are you worried you'd have trouble prioritizing, presented with lots of urgent awful problems?"

"I could prioritize but it would be awkward to do so between 'tractable urgent problem' and, like, 'I don't look like a flake to people here who did stuff like give me a rainforest'."

"Being knowably reliable about commitments is a reasonable priority."

"Mm-hm. I'll go looking for more worlds when I don't need to coordinate terraforming any more I guess."

"Sounds good. - you could raise the mage kids in Olvala, it doesn't have reds anymore."

"You don't really think that solves it, do you?"

"I do not."

Snort. "If my parents weren't divorced I'd see how they felt about bringing up a bunch more, maybe they could get more of me if I'm not a freak accident."

"My parents did all right and would absolutely do it but you're rather taking my word for it that they did all right."

"I like your family and if you and all your siblings will line up and hug an elemental who has just spent all afternoon patching up reds without wincing I will consider giving them some mage orphans to bring up. I say an elemental and not a red only because I don't want to terrify the reds."

" - yeah, all right."

...she giggles slightly. She phones the rainforest elementals. There is an Earth who is not too traumatized to hug people and will come over via Shadow next time he's taking a break from healing.

And Aitim will call up his relatives. "My mother won't do it, but she has a good reason, she works on pollution theology in her spare time so she can make the case for the adequacy of new cleaning procedures and if she didn't take it seriously enough she'd be less credible there. We understood that, growing up, it didn't interfere with respecting reds as people or managing the disgust thing."

"I could make this a standard vetting procedure! You can maybe bring up human children if your existing children can get the fuck over themselves about pollution and vouch for your parenting!"

"Some of my siblings would not benefit from attention called to their nonchalance on pollution but if you want to announce in future that that's the rule going forward you could."

"- not benefit like how -"

"Some other time, maybe."