"At bare minimum if they have a physical halo and then pull it in then neither their unhaloed skin nor their new halo has touched whatever the discarded halo touched."

"If they're willing to do that I bet I can build a consensus it counts."

"Doesn't help with immaterial halos or any elemental who is like 'or how about I ignore you, you are not the boss of me'."

"It doesn't. If we have mages, then someone is going to try to arrest elementals who are going around happily breaking the law and they're going to stumble on the slavery thing."

"It - it took a while relative to all human history but it didn't take long for someone to come up with it once elementals were around more trying to figure out what this new writing thing was."

"There are few enough elementals we can maybe hold interventions with each of them explaining that for fragile mortal people who'll be gone forever pretty soon it's terrifying to have people able to do whatever they want with no consequences, and it'd be really nice of them to avoid places where they don't like the rules?"

"There are few enough now."

"So let's try to say hi."

"My point is there will be more, this is just a thing that happens now."

"I can have a hundred people whose job it is to have relations with elementals individually. But yeah."

"If you don't turn out to have mages, how much of a disaster is it if elementals innocently visit reds - or touch garbage or whatever - and then just go around about their business -"

"Pollution hysteria is hard to predict, it's not guaranteed that it'll be a disaster but it could be. Probably if it gets known elementals do that people will be uncomfortable interacting with elementals. Places will be tempted to get rid of their reds but they don't want to offend you either."

"Do birds not go through your trash and then fly off?"

"The dumpsters are designed to keep out animals. I'm sure the rate isn't zero."

"Do birds not land in red neighborhoods?"

"Only so much we can do about birds but a stray animal that wandered into the red district would be killed, maybe decontaminated if it was someone's treasured pet."

"Can't elementals be like birds?"

"I don't expect it to be a winning argument but I can arrange for someone to float it."

"They fly. They don't know any better - even if you tell one they'd need to be very invested in interacting with Amentans to distinguish this very charged superstition from something that was just made up, it'll be 'gullible' and 'skeptical', not 'cooperative' and 'hostile'. They fly and don't know any better, they're more likely to do the halo thing than a bird for sure..."

"They could ask the reds, they could ask anyone, it's not hard to verify at all."

"You've only met elementals who've been enslaved for a while. Wild ones are different. They are not going to have coalesced mid-cloud with fact-checking habits that happen to suit you."

"Do they have other personlike variance in - personalities - such that eventually we'll get one who'll attack or murder humans for fun -"

"I can't rule it out but all the stories I have about pre-slavery elemental/human contact don't get worse than 'dangerous misunderstanding'."

"Then hopefully we can avoid hostility arising. I'll work on it."

"Thanks."