She bites her lip and mashes a lighter grey clay with the darker one. "I'm not allowed to quit under fire but I'm allowed to quit the rest of the time. Seems like a better way to do it, really."

"I don't think I have anyone employed without an exit clause."

"You're pretty cool, really."

"Thank you - I think -"

"Does it translate weird? It's meant nicely. You care about your people. 's why everyone at home loves our King, pretty much, but he had it easier than you because everyone told him from early childhood 'your entire job is to care about your people and do right by them'. It's more impressive to get there yourself."

"It translated fine. I keep thinking about that story out of Rivik about the green who was arrested without a chance to get her daughter a sitter..."

"They don't arrest anyone who's alone with a kid and there's like three ways to sort it out as soon as you get there, it's not that we don't care about that. They're revising procedures anyway, so it can't happen even for a minute."

"Mm."

"And they did notify Rivik first and request their assistance, it's just Rivik said 'go fuck yourselves', couldn't happen here."

"I will refrain from telling you to go fuck yourselves if you want to arrest someone for stabbing a red but that's not because I've pulled Vanda Nossëo's values out of thin air, it's because I'm desperate and also wouldn't tell you to go fuck yourselves if you wanted to arrest someone for reupholstering a chair."

"I feel like 'the aliens think reds are people' should be easier to model than it apparently is, even if no more compelling."

"Yet you don't act like idealistic green adolescents fresh out of their first drug-embellished philosophy club meeting."

"...is that how you'd act if you somehow stumbled on compelling evidence reds were people?"

"I would probably be less inclined to try to lick light fixtures, assuming I came to this opinion without the drugs. I wouldn't start arresting other people's citizens without extradition over it."

"If Rivik declared it open season on purples, and you had the means, you wouldn't be at all tempted to arrest people for murdering purples?"

"I might be tempted to conquer them, if I were of a more conquest oriented frame of mind... I wouldn't pretend we were still going to be friends after that. This isn't how you acted about Tapai infanticide, either, you just found them another way to get what they were getting from that."

"Are we pretending to still be friendly with Rivik? I don't think we have any contact with them at all..." Mash mash. "They prefer finding another way whenever it's available. Easier when they want something like 'deterrence' or 'population control' and not - whatever Rivik's thing with reds is. It's evil, it really is, to hate people that passionately and teach your children to hate them that passionately...we don't conquer places but if we did we would have done."

"- as long as you don't take my people's children away for - the evil of being Amentan."

"I wonder how Amentans'll feel about comparable cases in other places. Slaveowning societies that massacre their slaves when they hear we oppose slavery, that's the most common one, or people who execute some kids with a claim to a territory because they're scared the people of that territory will petition to have their rightful rulers installed, or governments who execute whoever we talked to first for the crime of not being complimentary enough about them, or people who go out and throw the neighbors' babies off a cliff because they heard we're going to grant the neighbors legal rights..."

"...are you in fact going to take my people's children away if they parent them in a recognizably Amentan fashion, because if you are then I have to go find my math yellow to figure out if it's worth it."

" - no, of course not, we'd only arrest them if they literally murdered someone and you refused to prosecute it and even then some other conditions have to hold."

He nods once. He sighs. He picks up a bit of dropped modeling clay rock and squishes it between thumb and forefinger.

"Like, there's a place that teaches kids that if they're gay that's the forces of evil inside them tempting them to sin, but if they do sin they will be tortured forever after they die. And what they've got to do is suppress the voice of evil and get into a normal marriage. And we don't take kids away from their parents for that but I don't feel bad about calling them evil, all the same."

"There's a few different things going on here and I don't know that I've got the emotional energy to argue any one of them."

Nod. Squish squish.