Maurabel looks up words. "They don't trust you -?"

"Most people want them dead. Almost anybody, given the chance to press a button and replace them all with robots, would. They - it makes no sense to them that anyone would care for its own sake. So if someone shows up acting like they care, it's likelier to be a - test, or a self-aggrandizing performance of altruism - until you actually do things for them, they just won't believe you that you care at all."

"But I'm an alien."

"Doesn't matter. - I guess it might help a little on the margin. But - you're an alien, you met us, smart and kind with impressive things to give you, why would you decide we were all wrong -"

"Because you are so rich and then Penumbra found a red neighborhood and had not been told reds existed and they were not so rich, and they're your -" Note consultation. "- species, and I'm not."

"You don't actually need to be scared, you're clean, it's easier to care about clean aliens than unclean neighbors."

"You didn't check," she points out. "For all you knew school mages have unclean chores."

"It'd be the kind of unclean you could fix with a shower, it has to be generational to get - reds."

"I mentioned what my parents do but I didn't say what their parents do."

"At that distance it just wouldn't be expedient to consider you unclean so they won't."

"They're just making it up?"

"Not - exactly? There are things that aren't at all up for debate and then there are things which you wouldn't want to risk guessing wrong on lest there's a pollution hysteria and then there are things where whatever the ruling people'll be fine with it and you may as well rule the overwhelmingly convenient way, and 'alien whose grandparents might have done red work' is the last thing."

Sigh.

"Thank you for doing this."

"Of course."

"Aside from the thing where we treat three million of our people like garbage, how's everything?"

"Aside from that it's so much better here!"

"Yeah, I don't know that the reds would trade you. No internet."

"The internet is great. We have books but not very many and - I'm new at Anitami but I think people here are just better at writing -"

"I think there are inventions in storytelling like in any other field. TV dramas from fifty years ago are awfully badly shot and tedious compared to modern ones. And our best greens are really something, in every field."

"And you have so many people that even if you only look at greens you'd have more people than a few dozen countries in my world to go through!"

"One thing we are not short on is people! You met my cousins, right?"

"I'm not clear on how everyone is related except that Kefin is Afen's son."

"So is Aitim but he doesn't remind people of it because technically that ought to make him green. Aitim is also dating my brother. Separately they are our cousins."

Vocabulary check on 'brother'. "...huh. I don't actually know if humans do that amongst themselves... elementals do in the wild and humans will if they have elementals, sometimes."