"They don't know what a blog is yet!"

"That'd do it! - if they do start committing crimes that'll make it harder to get a consensus against enslaving them. Not for the use, just to serve in place of prison - but then once it's available..."

"I won't do it. It had to be invented. If you have mages, they could invent it but I'm not helping."

"I hope they don't. But they're a lot less likely to if we can - acclimate elementals in a way that gets them to not commit crimes."

"Could ask some of the stolen ones to go talk to them."

"Might be good. It'd - it'd be appreciated if they mentioned that going into the red districts and other parts of inhabited areas is a thing that'll scare people very badly."

Nod.

And attempts (which are not likely to succeed) can be arranged to make the argument that elementals are just too magic to transmit pollution - actual fire wouldn't - and that tracing down elementals zipping across the countryside is as practical as tracing down breezes, and just as unnecessary.

"At bare minimum if they have a physical halo and then pull it in then neither their unhaloed skin nor their new halo has touched whatever the discarded halo touched."

"If they're willing to do that I bet I can build a consensus it counts."

"Doesn't help with immaterial halos or any elemental who is like 'or how about I ignore you, you are not the boss of me'."

"It doesn't. If we have mages, then someone is going to try to arrest elementals who are going around happily breaking the law and they're going to stumble on the slavery thing."

"It - it took a while relative to all human history but it didn't take long for someone to come up with it once elementals were around more trying to figure out what this new writing thing was."

"There are few enough elementals we can maybe hold interventions with each of them explaining that for fragile mortal people who'll be gone forever pretty soon it's terrifying to have people able to do whatever they want with no consequences, and it'd be really nice of them to avoid places where they don't like the rules?"

"There are few enough now."

"So let's try to say hi."

"My point is there will be more, this is just a thing that happens now."

"I can have a hundred people whose job it is to have relations with elementals individually. But yeah."

"If you don't turn out to have mages, how much of a disaster is it if elementals innocently visit reds - or touch garbage or whatever - and then just go around about their business -"

"Pollution hysteria is hard to predict, it's not guaranteed that it'll be a disaster but it could be. Probably if it gets known elementals do that people will be uncomfortable interacting with elementals. Places will be tempted to get rid of their reds but they don't want to offend you either."

"Do birds not go through your trash and then fly off?"

"The dumpsters are designed to keep out animals. I'm sure the rate isn't zero."

"Do birds not land in red neighborhoods?"

"Only so much we can do about birds but a stray animal that wandered into the red district would be killed, maybe decontaminated if it was someone's treasured pet."

"Can't elementals be like birds?"