A lot of people try to pass the encounter with the red question by guessing what she wants to hear.

Depending on how blatantly they do this some may get through this stage of filtering.

Hurrah. Now she has a lot of clean applicants.

She skims the applications and picks out a few with promising "why am I an unusually good pick to do magic" answers and emails them saying they've passed the first application stage what would be a convenient time and place to do interviews.

They reply with times and places! All over the world.

At the first indicated time she has Odette fly her to the first indicated place.

Purple in Cene. He's waiting for them.

"Hi! I'm Illia, and this is Odette--can this language handle all those phonemes, Tapap couldn't," she says over machine translation and text-to-speak.

"Illia and Odette," he says. He has an accent but it doesn't preclude the sounds.

"Excellent." Illia sits down on a nearby bench. "So I think my first question is what did you mean by not having a personality?"

"Uh, the personality effects seem like they'd bother people who have strong senses of identity or dispositions that they want to keep. I don't think anything I consider important is the things the personality effects sounded relevant to. If I balanced Sympathy and Effort it might not add up to no changes but I don't think it would change anything that matters to me."

She nods. "That makes sense."

Nod.

"So the main concern I have is that there are things one just doesn't do with magic--not as in can't, as in must not. And in my culture these are nearly as ingrained as pollution avoidance is here, so you can teach just about anyone and it'll be fine. In order to be willing to teach you magic, I'm going to need to be convinced that you get it."

"What are the things?"

"The two big ones are killing non-mages with magic--killing another mage with magic is bad, but it's basically just normal murder, it's on an even level like killing a non-mage without magic would be, you must not kill a non-mage with magic. The other thing is that you must not do mental magic to anyone but yourself. Doing mental magic to yourself is risky but you're free to take the risk if you so choose."

"Is the killing non-mages with magic thing like how only greys are allowed to be combat soldiers?"

"...Sort of? I got the impression that was to prevent escalation."

"What's this to prevent, then, since it's apparently worse than murder -"

"...So the thing is a mage can kill a non-mage trivially. With normal murder you have obstacles, like, you need to find a weapon, you need to overpower your victim or figure out how to get poison into their food or whatever. There are barriers to normal murder that don't exist for a mage killing a non-mage--mages have a level of inherent resistance to magic being done to them without their consent--so there have to be higher incentive barriers."

"I don't have a record, if you want to background check me."

"Already did."

"Why the mental magic thing, if somebody's got a disorder or something they want fixed, I mean I'm purple but you were taking orange applications too -"

"Because it's all but impossible to tell with magic what mental magic was done. Suppose you go to a mage and ask them to remove your phobia of spiders, and they do but also rearrange your mind so you tip generously and also find their niece who they've been trying to set up intensely attractive, mages can't tell the difference between that and 'the mage did only what was asked for, and the client independently decided to tip generously and go out with the niece.'"

"And people aren't allowed to decide they trust the mage or it's worth any risk -"