"You're flailing pretty wildly with the planning thing."

"Well, I'm not actually at the planning part yet, I'm at the 'throw ideas at walls to see what sticks' part. Figuring out resources and substrategies and their weaknesses and stuff."

"Okay, good."

"If planning's finding paths from A to B that deal with as many eventualities on the way as possible, I'm figuring out the map and transportation methods. Raising ideas and having you shoot them down gives me a better notion of what barriers we need to overcome and exactly how good each strategy is and what kind of redundancies will be necessary and which holes exist in each bit that will have to be patched..."

"Okay."

"Anyway, what I was trying to get at with that was that even though the Queen not knowing mortal names isn't a huge advantage it's still probably going to be key to actually capturing her, even if I in particular might have to sacrifice this advantage in the course of a plan. I think the end step will be, invariably, forcefeeding her or darting her or something with mortal food."

"That's not going to end it; she can recover from that if she can avoid hearing orders or capture whoever delivers them and may have a lot of contingencies set up in case she's compromised."

"True. Then not the end step, but a step."

"Yeah, there's no way we solve the problem with her name."

"And even if we can't learn as much sorcery as she has access to, knowing as much about what's theoretically possible as we can is bound to help, to know what resources she has access to. And it would be really awesome if you invented teleportation but realistically that's not gonna happen in any timely manner."

"I'm a very good sorcerer for my age. I am not very old."

"Yeah. ...how are new spells developed, and can the new senses provided to you by technology help with that?"

"Senses should... broadly help in the sense that they provide more of the information sorcery runs on. I'm not sure if it'll help with spell development."

"Is there anything that would? 'Cause if we could facilitate spell development to the point that we can actually invent stuff soon that might just be an overwhelming enough advantage."

"I've never actually invented a new spell before."

"I know, but I figured you might know something about the process itself, I wouldn't know the first thing about how to go about inventing something, I'd need books."

"I think it's not that unlike what we were doing with the gates - examining the harmonics of things, willing results until they change in a way that produces the result you want."

"Hmm... there doesn't seem to be an immediately obvious way to cheat on that."

"Not really."

"Do you know if teleportation is even theoretically possible? Is there broad consensus on what is, for that matter?"

"Sorcery in general doesn't move things. There's a kind that can teleport though, and a kind with telekinesis..."

"There's a kind that can teleport?"

"I think not far? But yes."

"Kind magic is cheating. I wanna cheat."

"Sorry."