"I should memorize some spells," Gabe says abruptly and leaving.

Sigh. "I shouldn't have joked about that. Uh, give him a few minutes. Do you guys actually want the story?"

"We're not that close. You don't have to talk about anything that's private."

"I was only going to joke that Malia would need to die in my world-cluster and then reincarnate to become an angel, which I doubt would interest her."

"I shouldn't leave my dad again, but that sounds worth it."

"Seriously?"

"He didn't exactly offer to take you, Malia." 

"Yeah, I didn't, sorry Malia."

"Henry, how long before we should start worrying about him?"

"We should leave him be, he actually needs to memorize spells and that will give him something to focus on. When he comes back just be smarter than I was and don't treat the topic of my deaths lightly."

"We can probably do that. Should we move on to how to earn your trust?"

"I mean, memorization based spellcasting and non-native hallowed vows are already on the table. If you have ideas on how you can earn my trust I'm all ears so I can be paranoid and note all loopholes on them."

"Yeah, he's already giving us a lot of magic, do we even need more?"

"It would be nice to have something to handle something like the Dread Doctors."

"Yeah, I think you mentioned those, what is up with those Dread Doctors?

"Memory wiping, mind control, mad science."

"Urgh. Well, important note: most forms of mental-tampering block your ability to memorize spells, so it might useful to carry a lesser, usually-useless spell book on your person so you can try memorize whenever you starting to doubt reality, not efficient nor fast, but works. You can still cast spells under mind control, I can't think of a good way around that yet."

"What if someone were possessed? Is that like mind control, could the possessor use magic?" 

"My guess it is like mind control, but if the whatever possessing you can't access your memories they can't cast your spells and definitely can't memorize spells for you. It might depend on the finer details."

"We don't need to add weaknesses, we're already easy targets." 

"Yeah, I don't want to see the bad guys with this magic." 

Henry frowns, this kind of information would've been more useful earlier, oh well.

"How does their mind control works?"

"None of us know all the details, and they're not around anymore. There are probably other things like them, though. If you want more details, you should probably talk to Hayden."

"Sure...? I mean I was wondering about the risks vs. benefits of getting this magic. Sure it could be used against you, but that is a risk of basically anything you come up with to defend yourselves."

"It's about scale. We wanted your magic because it's bigger than anything we have here, but that's also a reason not to take it."