"Just because we aren't flesh people doesn't mean we aren't people. I don't know why you'd have to think we weren't people to know we weren't going to coalesce wanting to live in cities and wear clothes."

"It's more that the Amentan concept of people includes 'is obliged to obey the laws' and 'needs permission to cross national borders' and so on."

"You make people need permission to exist," Wood points out.

"Yes. Because otherwise we can't feed them."

"We don't need food and still don't need food if we cross a border."

"No one's trying to propose credits for elementals who coalesce. But the concept that the law applies to all people is harder to shake off."

"Maybe there could be an elemental country that is everywhere and says it is legal to act like a wild elemental."

"- I can see if that will make everyone feel more comfortable and if it does then we can arrange it. Thank you."

"You're welcome."

"Are there other things we should think about?"

"I'm not sure."

"Okay. Thank you."

How does everyone feel about some kind of international elemental governing authority that resolves problems with wild elementals, since they're not very suited to Amentans doing it. 

Well, that depends on how it resolves those problems.

They can't actually do much of anything about wild elementals, so the elemental buddy-system solution to violence or troublemaking improves on having nothing at all.

It does improve on nothing at all but are they sure they can't do anything about them? Even if they really have to?

What are they thinking they might be able to do?

Well, they don't advocate slavery, but whatever mechanism is used to accomplish it could probably be tweaked to just do imprisonment.

Maybe they can figure something out if there are elementals who do something problematic enough to be worth importing mages to arrest them and keeping them until a mage dying of old age can release them.

Seems like the sort of procedure you want worked out in advance.

On the human world there were no recorded incidents of elementals making trouble before the slavery started. It seems silly to prepare too exhaustively for something that may never happen, thereby alienating the people who are doing interplanetary travel and terraforming for them.

Why would non-criminal elementals be alienated by having plans to handle criminal ones?

They're really touchy about the slavery thing and will be equally touchy about proposed modifications, plus worried that once anyone has an elemental imprisoned they'll be tempted to enslave it.

Can they be persuaded not to worry about that?

Yep! Working out plans to imprison people who are currently less than a season old is probably not the way to do it. Maybe they could come up with safeguards to make sure the imprisonment can't be exploited?

...like how?