Nod.

"What is he?"

"They call themselves wizards. It's a - heritable aptitude to do magic, as far as they understand it, and if they're right that their drugs resist reverse-engineering I'll be inclined to grant them 'magic'. They live separately from the Muggles because, well, wouldn't anyone who could - they still don't have a pollution instinct, but even without that - and they have international law against getting yourself noticed. They, uh, waited a while to see if we had instructions for them, pieced together that our things weren't magic, and, well, noticed that whoever got to me first would have a pretty convenient perch."

"And got to you."

"Yes."

"Are you all right?"

"Yes. Are you?"

"It was distressing but not impairingly so, I think."

"I expect once there is concrete progress on the death penalty thing I can request that our homes and workplaces be shielded against teleportation, if that'd buy you some peace of mind."

"I'm not sure he teleported the first time. He was invisible."

"That's harder to screen out." Sigh. "I cannot think of any circumstance that isn't laughably implausible under which he'd hurt you now, if that's reassuring."

"It helps."

Nod. "Do you think our courts should use that drug?"

"It's certainly effective."

"What I am considering is announcing that it's been offered to us, on the terms that the area where its ingredients are harvested be protected from development until we have chemical synthesis and that its use in court abide by certain standards. The only standard the wizards actually insisted on was the end of the death penalty, but I think they can insist something more specific and useful if you have thoughts on what the laws surrounding its use should be."

"Speech-to-text transcripts so people can appeal abuse - irrelevant questions, especially."

Nod. "Perhaps judicial review for use in the first place, no dosing everyone you bring in for acting shifty."

"And I think it might be a bad idea to extend it to mental health nuisance cases but I'm not an expert in those."

"Yeah, that sounds like it'd be a terrible idea. Anyway, I'm going to say that the benefits to deterrence from the impossibility of deceiving the court might outweigh the costs to deterrence of abandoning capital punishment and I want to try it somewhere and see if that's true. Want to be a trial region?"

"If the region makes a good test case."

"It's not a bad one but I can foist it off on someone else if you'd rather never think about this again."

"I don't object."

"I'm going to make the announcement at the end of the week, so let me know if there are any other demands the wizards should make before then."

"How secret is this?"

"I've got a research team on the Veritaserum sample. The official story is going to be that the suppliers are locals who reached out through their human regional coordinator to make the case for preservation of forests, and presented the Veritaserum as an incidental part of that presentation, and the human regional coordinator took it to us and is liaising as they're frightened of us. A few dozen people know that this is a cover story for vague security reasons; you and Kan and I know about wizards."