"I'm willing to go to war over the principle that wizards cannot do whatever they please with everyone else no matter how resentful they are of this, but not if we don't need to, and we don't. We need someone to wear a funny hat and tell the wizards that we're their property, and then we need to make our people magical and obviate the whole thing."

Miranda conjures up a hat on her head.

"They won't notice the legal fiction?" wonders Sonan.

"We need to be convincing, but I think they'll want to be convinced - the current situation isn't making them happy either, the proper jurisdiction over magical children born in Anitam is unclear and Long thinks it will be completely unacceptable to wizards if they're expected to abide by the law -"

     "Are you imagining not expecting them to?" Intal says.

"I think the Anitami magical government should have a rule that its citizens have to comply with all local laws, probably while counting any variant on 'being a wizard' as in-caste income. Their capacity to verify any of this is very limited and there is a magic potion for good luck that can be used to arrange that things go as well as they could go."

"Luck potion?" says Kethasa.

"It's easy to overuse and has some limitations but yes," says Karen.

"There are lots of potions. Some of them are very useful. "

      "What limitations does the space-warping have," says Intal Neli.

"It requires slightly specialized training. It works much better with previously enclosed spaces and isn't good at generating more land. It has to be done individually per space, and can sometimes spontaneously contract, ejecting its contents, if it was badly cast or poorly maintained or combined inexpertly with other magic. It can't expand a space infinitely, although the exact formula is complicated, and it's harder to do to larger things."

He looks very disappointed.

"But we can make objects that indefinitely conjure water and air."

"There are some complications about making Mars habitable but our engineers are optimistic that they are solvable. There's also research in progress into a potion that causes reseasoning without an intermediate spring."

"We're testing it on weasels because they change color."

"What's your plan if the wizards don't buy the conveniently-surfacing Anitami wizarding government, Aitim?"

"My recommendation to this council would be that we try to keep incident rates down through extensive camera installations, stop prosecutions, and avoid antagonizing wizards until we have more leverage, either through a better understanding of wizarding internal politics or through a magical population of our own which is substantial enough to not even be a legal fiction."

"Magical children can begin serious study at eleven Earth years, and performance is well but imperfectly correlated with general intelligence and good study habits. Most magical schools graduate people at age seventeen or eighteen with some people branching into specialist apprenticeships after that."

"Half their genes would have to be human, though," says Aleva, "so they won't be that intelligent -"

"The percentage of humans smart enough to be green is not ten but once they get better early childhood nutrition it won't be zero, we could find some wizards who are smart enough to not drag the children down that much."

      "You still get the same problem as with smart purples, statistically speaking -"

"I am aware of that."

"Wizards are smarter than Muggle humans both for cultural reasons and because we have magically protected physiology, making even Muggle-born wizards less susceptible to the problems their nonmagical siblings have with nutrition and disease and any applicable head injuries."

" - then a lot of hybrids sounds like a good idea as soon as we know they're viable," Aleva says. 

"Tahike Lam is due in four months. I am optimistic we can pull off the legal fiction."

       "What's the timeline on terraforming -"

"Sent you all the full report. They could do interesting things to Mars right now, but there are -" hairtouch, sigh, "magnetic field problems, I think, and the attrition rate of the new atmosphere is manageable but would mean we were long-term dependent on magic ."

       "Is it possible there are other hybrid children -"

"Yes. Not likely, she was kidnapped when it wasn't spring or it wouldn't have come up and wizards do seem to consider that an undesireable outcome, but possible."

      "What are we going to tell everyone -"

"Nothing, I think, until we start to get a lot of external pressure over population controls for humans, and I'm hoping terraforming or the spring potion is ready first."

      "How many people know?"

"I had ten who were fully informed. Wizards memory-wiped three of them plus a bunch of people who knew too much information but not any details."

      "Why didn't you just send your family home -"

"Rather undermine confidence in the colony project, wouldn't it. I need to attract investment."

      "Are your babies hybrids -"

"I found out too late and also their genetic relatedness to each of their parents was already a very carefully managed project. No. Kefin's looking into it, though."

       "What does Veritaserum look like for deterrence - "

"Great. I sent a report on that also. We already knew that certainty did more than severity and the experience is a deeply punishing one all by itself and it seems to cut through the rationalization 'I'll just tell the police that I thought...' in a way that is very useful to us and it looks good even given the requirement that we not have capital crimes in the region where we're trying it. I think I could probably persuade the suppliers that premeditated murder really should be a capital crime if we think that's a good expenditure of political capital, I'm not going to bring them around on anything less clear-cut than that."

"Humans, including wizards, have fewer and different hangups about children than Amentans do, but while you might find a few wizards who are willing to father hundreds of children and never follow up on that if you look, most prospective hybridizing wizards will probably want to personally evaluate would-be parents and may want to be involved in their upbringing."

"We can't have the children raised to think wizards are superior and need not answer to the law," Aleva says. "If we can find some who won't care we should use those."

"You can also find some who want access to or vetting over their children who won't teach them that."

"What approach to recruiting hybrid parents makes sense may depend on the results of the unveiling of an Anitami magical government."

"Yeah, especially its attitude towards immigration. Which I know is fraught for Amentans, but there are only two million wizards."

"Immigrants would quickly notice that there isn't a magical government," says Intal.