"I couldn't pick someone up in the city planning to immediately ship them off to the plantation to cease making me miserable and my loved ones angrier with me, they might have family in the city. Not a problem with the foreign ones, but I couldn't abandon one of you somewhere where no one spoke the language and the expectations were all different. Ancient Sudre, my mother spoke that and so I could reasonably expect this was better than whatever'd happen otherwise and that you wouldn't, all things considered, wish I hadn't bought you - and also, how would someone learn that, it was interesting - and the drawing but I've promised myself not to mention that again, you got more careful the one time I asked about it."

Nod.

"Do you prefer I hadn't?"

"No ma'am."

"I'm sorry for not handling it more gracefully."

"Of course ma'am."

"Would you stop - sorry. Never mind."

"...I'm not even sure exactly what it is you want me to stop."

"It's - when there's something you'd obviously say if you were talking with a friend and instead you say 'yes, ma'am', or 'of course, ma'am' in a way that mostly communicates how very much you are not talking with a friend. It's deeply unreasonable to ask you to stop."

"...I don't know how to be less obvious about that."

"Yeah. I'm not mad at you."

"If you actually pull it off maybe I will be your friend."

"Or you can leave and go do the same thing for Eseo, if you like, it's not that everyone has to like me it's ... having most of my interactions be with people who justifiably hate me. I'm not under the impression this matters next to all the other things wrong with the situation but if you want a better model of me."

Nod.

"Is there anything else."

"Am I going ahead and asking about the idea or no?"

"Yes. If we can find reliable people for it we'll do it."

So Aya goes and talks to some of the chiller plantation slaves about that.

They get freed, they get assigned some other people, Amait tells them how to vote? What happens if they don't vote the way she says? What happens if they just, like, let their slaves leave? What happens if one of their slaves escape and they refuse to hurt them for it? Not that they are against being freed, they are in favor, it's the rest that seems complicated.

If they don't vote the way she says she's not planning on retaining any legal ability to retaliate but the idea is that she's working towards abolition and should be able to explain how votes on which she has opinions advance this goal. It is illegal to just let your slaves leave or to refuse to punish them as required by law should they do so, and nothing about this proposal would change that, but if they can get the money they can manumit them.

...okay but realistically these people would not torture their slaves for trying to escape. And if they manumit them that interferes with the politics, right.

She's hoping there can be batches of twenty people who are all willing to trust a twenty-first person to technically own them and not run off and leave them in legal trouble. A steady manumission pipeline as money materializes for it does not necessarily interfere with politics as long as it is timed right relative to the votes and they buy new slaves to replace them, possibly ones they know or who are being mistreated.

People are tentatively on board.