"You realize it'll still be weird if your parents turn up with mage children and then I announce this is my procedure for anyone else who wants some."

"That I can spin as 'I charmed the alien into letting my parents adopt and then she decided in future she was going to use principled rules for that kind of thing'."

"I dunno about that."

"Then pick other people."

Nod.

She announces to the world on her blog sort of thing that she is considering importing human mage children but considers their careful acculturation of paramount importance and while she does not advocate illegal activity wrt reds she does not hold with accompanying attitudes thereunto and you are only even theoretically eligible if you and everyone else who might be helping raise the little mage can demonstrate (especially with evidence of pre-alien-contact behavior) that they are not going to let prevailing culture fuck up the mages on that too much. She will try to find a huggable red volunteer; failing that an elemental who has been in contact with reds.

Uh, you can think reds are fine while also being disgusted at touching one. She could find people who've donated to red charities?

They can shower afterwards, right? 

How old will the children be?

What caste will the children be?

This is going to be a small number of children by Amenta population standards and she's going to be really stringent. Gotta touch a red. And not make a face. They may shower afterwards because she does not advocate doing anything illegal but if there are a lot of applicants there might be a contest to see how long they can sit around chatting with the huggable red before they run and do that, narrow the field. Mage orphans are funneled into schools when they are eight of her years which seems to be about two Amentan years, so younger than that. She is not sure what caste magic is; it's got a lot of green to it but she worked for her tuition principally by manufacturing windowpanes.

It's horribly cruel and coercive to tell people who will never have any other opportunity to have children that their only chance is to put themselves through something disgusting and degrading and pretend to like it.

She will be surprised if she can get ten kids on a first pass, although there might be other batches later. If they find it disgusting degrading etc. then competing for this particular offspring scholarship is probably not for them and they should look into some other option.

It's just, objectively, disgusting and degrading. 

(Someone writes anonymously that even if someone didn't mind touching a red they could lose their job or get beaten in the street and would certainly lose all the informal social capital poor people need to make ends meet, if word got around they'd got their child by kissing up to reds.)

She writes to this person that the important thing is finding good places to bring up a small handful of mage children and if that is the kind of environment in which someone finds themselves she is honestly very sorry, she is working on the planets angle of children too, but that doesn't sound like a good place to bring up a mage child, around people who want to enforce this rule that way.

So they have to hug a red and then they still might not get a child, if they didn't act pleased enough about it? She and her scholarship can go fuck themselves, Anitam could just stop executing pregnant people and that'd free up way more babies.

Okay, no Amentan mage children, that will just have to wait till she finds a world that doesn't have a problem like this!

There are still applicants, even if all the mail she's getting about it is angry.

And what are they like?

Buncha greens who donated to red charities for idealistic reasons and think magic would be cool and can probably stomach the red thing if they take anti-nausea medication first, an orange ex-social-worker who says he's used to it but his wife refuses, would that be a problem, an orange ex-social worker who Isel checks up on and says had three sexual relationships with reds, all of them abusive; two sad yellow couples who could never afford one and will eat raw sewage with a smile on their faces if she'd like.

Sigh. She announces that she has decided raising human mages on Amenta is intractable for now unless she can find human adults to do it.

"What were you expecting?"

"You have so many people! You have so stupidly many people - humans think elementals are impersonal forces of nature but I don't, you should have hundreds of, of me -"

"We do, they just cannot afford to be publicly labelled as such - I know people who are already engaged in illegal relationships with reds, I know people who snuck endangered reds out of Olvala or out of Biyan or helped them disguise themselves as clean castes, you're not asking for people who can see past it you're asking for people who can see past it, afford for that to be publicly known, and don't expect to ever be in a position of regretting the scrutiny they've invited."

"Well, if they're hiding disguised reds, good for them, but I have the impression it might be a lot of work to contradict every television show and every book and every neighbor and every custom that doesn't have the force of law and if they've already spent the resources they'd need to do that - good for them but that doesn't mean they'd be able to get a little mage brought up how I think they need."

He does not comment.

She focuses on artifacting. It looks like sculpting glass and turning it colors in her hands without having to heat it. She does not mind being filmed doing this.

Interested people will film her.

It's a slow process.

She concludes she's going to need more elementals. Penumbra goes and checks on the ones they dropped back on their homeworld. They have found another school collection and a hunter's collection that seem usefully stealable.