They can't actually do much of anything about wild elementals, so the elemental buddy-system solution to violence or troublemaking improves on having nothing at all.

It does improve on nothing at all but are they sure they can't do anything about them? Even if they really have to?

What are they thinking they might be able to do?

Well, they don't advocate slavery, but whatever mechanism is used to accomplish it could probably be tweaked to just do imprisonment.

Maybe they can figure something out if there are elementals who do something problematic enough to be worth importing mages to arrest them and keeping them until a mage dying of old age can release them.

Seems like the sort of procedure you want worked out in advance.

On the human world there were no recorded incidents of elementals making trouble before the slavery started. It seems silly to prepare too exhaustively for something that may never happen, thereby alienating the people who are doing interplanetary travel and terraforming for them.

Why would non-criminal elementals be alienated by having plans to handle criminal ones?

They're really touchy about the slavery thing and will be equally touchy about proposed modifications, plus worried that once anyone has an elemental imprisoned they'll be tempted to enslave it.

Can they be persuaded not to worry about that?

Yep! Working out plans to imprison people who are currently less than a season old is probably not the way to do it. Maybe they could come up with safeguards to make sure the imprisonment can't be exploited?

...like how?

Well, the big problem is the thing where it's inherently permanent unless someone dies ending it.

They could reserve it for things that would normally carry a life or a death sentence.

That varies a lot country-to-country. He would know; Anitam is on the unusually execution-happy side.

In the jurisdiction where the crime was committed.

"No one keeps track of what's illegal under two hundred different legal systems."

"They could keep track of capital crimes, I'm sure."

"But what caste would we try them as, what caste are they -"

"They're aliens, they've got the element categories, they're not a caste - this is why we should have a single oversight board with laws consistent everywhere -"

"I suppose it'd be simplifying -"

"But agreed on how -"

"That I wholeheartedly agree should be started on now, long before it becomes a problem."

They get to work on that.

Shadows who are interested get a long list of candidate planets they can see through a sufficiently sophisticated telescope. Hopefully some won't require tons of terraforming.

The interested Shadows find it easiest to be looking straight at the thing they are looking at, with no reflection or any other intervening complications, which limits telescopic sophistication, but they can still check out most of the planets and take pictures and samples.

And are any of them interested in dropping off the supplies to set up an arcology, and a few dozen people who can set it up and start a colony project?