If the children don't know that reds are gross they might touch one.

Sometimes the elementals do that, like to heal tortured children.

They have to touch them to do that? Do they shower afterwards?

Yes they do and no not really. Since their interviewers came to this red-inhabited rainforest to interview them that seems like the interviewers' job.

Yeah they will but it's just weird that the elementals wouldn't want to.

Wanting to shower for five hours after healing people seems like a them problem and Maurabel doesn't want little mages to have it and the elementals think she is right.

They write to Maurabel saying they are concerned that if she teaches humans to have contempt for decontamination some of them might break the law and get into trouble.

(If Maurabel looks it up, Anitam executes people for willful pollution violations.)

Maurabel assures them that she will not bring more mages to Amenta till she's sure that's a good idea all things considered, and that's a thing she's considering.

Oh good.

Reds themselves seem to be very responsible about avoiding pollution violations, for instance! If she gave the human children to reds they would not learn unlawful habits. She's not totally happy with this solution but it would solve the problem of thinking reds are disgusting and the problem her concerned correspondents bring up.

But it'd be horribly unfair to the human children and also they might be brought up with other bad habits. And what if they sympathized with the reds and did magic for them?

She's curious what other bad habits they think they might have. Maurabel does not consider sympathy with or doing magic for reds a problem.

...doing magic for reds would be a catastrophe they could touch anything no one could leave their houses ever again and they'd have to stockpile food and what would they do when it ran out? In Voa didn't they have trouble keeping the trains running on time because people kept jumping in front of them? Something like that, anyway.

Only elementals can do the shadow-walking and outright teleporting things. Human mages would, like, make them magic lamps or something. Anything else would require more education.

She tells Aitim, "The more I think about it the more I like the idea of emptying a mage orphanage, then placing one mage kid with a red family in any country who thinks that will be good for them. Sorts kind of neatly, doesn't it?"

"I don't know if you'll get any takers. And the kids will have a hard impoverished life with parents who are unusually likely to be murdered -"

"I was imagining the country would subsidize them and not shoot anyone they liked if they knew what was good for them. No?"

"You don't win elections by giving reds money. Maybe some places would be subtle enough to pull it off. And - most red murders aren't on the orders of the government, they're random citizens who get startled or just want to hurt someone they won't get in trouble for hurting."

"I wonder how many worlds I'd have to land on before I found one that wasn't fucked up."

"Could try finding ones with more magic so you could have more leverage."

"Maybe. But maybe they'd just have their own urgent awful problems."

"That's not really an argument for not visiting. Or are you worried you'd have trouble prioritizing, presented with lots of urgent awful problems?"

"I could prioritize but it would be awkward to do so between 'tractable urgent problem' and, like, 'I don't look like a flake to people here who did stuff like give me a rainforest'."

"Being knowably reliable about commitments is a reasonable priority."

"Mm-hm. I'll go looking for more worlds when I don't need to coordinate terraforming any more I guess."

"Sounds good. - you could raise the mage kids in Olvala, it doesn't have reds anymore."