"...huh."

"Some places still don't. Women are legally the property of their father until they sell them to their husband. Places that wanna be a member state have to cut that out."

Soyok makes a face.

She grins at him. "It's a hard balance to find between - giving what we've got to everyone who wants it and - insisting that people grow up. It helps that there's just not enough to go around and we do have to prioritize somehow."

"It's not going to make people - most comfortable - if they - notice that if you had slightly fewer things you'd be insisting on the reds instead of helping us. It's good that you have enough things to do both, if you come up with another way to get their jobs done I don't care what you do with them, but if you didn't..."

"It would be nice if you were treating them - just the way that was necessary to satisfy your pollution thing. They can't go places, okay. It's legal to torture and murder them - that's not something you need. Where being decent to them actually involves putting this stress on you, okay, that's really hard. But - there's lots of decency to them just lying on the ground for free and no one thinks it's worth the effort to lean over to pick it up."

"...it's not literally free."

"You could let them have their own courts and jails for people who torture and murder them, if you didn't want to pay for it."

"They can do what they like if it's other reds. They just can't bother clean folks about it. I don't think that's a very popular way to blow off steam anyway, you do have to shower for five hours afterwards, it'd be more convenient to just pull the petals off flowers or something."

"...okay, it would at least be free to consider it horrifying that people torture and murder reds for no reason, even if it'd take some tiny amount of effort to allow the reds to arrest them for it."

"But then we'd be horrified all the time."

Sigh. "If we had less resources then I think we'd just take them to another planet, give you robots, and hope that after they'd been gone for a while you were - more palatable allies. If we didn't have resurrection then people might want to, you know, put the torturers and murderers on trial ourselves, so I guess it's a good thing we've got that."

"It seems - not like the behavior of new friends to try people for things that weren't illegal when they did them."

"I should probably not get into this. We do have the resources we have, we're not going to hold anyone accountable for atrocities you committed under scarcity, these aren't the kind of conditions that make people their best selves.

But if for some reason we'd had to choose whether to be allies and friends with the reds or the clean Amentans, uh, they're a lot more sympathetic and indescribably less of a diplomatic liability. So. Yeah. If it'd come to that, we wouldn't be friends."

Soyok sighs. "I will probably be able to warn you if anyone marches on the property before shots are fired."

"Great." She pokes the television.

Computer. But it has TV available, domestic and foreign. Soyok leaves her alone.

She hangs out in the guest room watching television on the computer. 

Vanda Nossëo sends Calado a complaint about the kidnapping of their emissaries.

They are sorry! They are not sorry at all. They didn't harm them. They volunteer to have the perpetrators shot.

They are actually requesting extradition for trial in Vanda Nossëo. They understand that kidnapping is not very illegal in Calado but they take misconduct towards their emissaries very seriously.

Are they sure they wouldn't rather have them shot? They can have the greys but not the senator. The senator but not the greys. They can't have them at all!

They are very sure that they're requesting extradition of all involved parties and no shooting at all. Calado need not comply but it'll be a barrier to further diplomatic relations.

They didn't want further diplomatic relations anyway.

"What an interesting country."

       "I feel bad for the people."

"Yeah, but what can you do?"

       "Probably a lot of things if we're willing to expend stupid amounts of resources on it."

"...I'm listening."

Someone asks Elendil about the going price for one-off rings of teleport.

They're pricey, wizards being a bit scarce, why?