" - oooh. I don't suppose there are any resources that could speed either of those along? I've been trying to detangle funding for magical research and immortality is the obvious best possible thing to throw it at."

"I'm not going to turn you down, but I'm not currently funding-bottlenecked. - Unless you want to get someone to translate Obscurities and Condensations into Marlatian for me."

"Can do! And I'm not in fact handing out money to pretty girls I meet at galas, I've been trying to reform the system we use for that kind of thing so people have a better sense of whether their projects will get funded. But immortality work by someone with an impressive professional record is the sort of thing we'd fund."

"Oh, what's the new process going to be like? My parents both complain about the current one all the time."

"Instead of distributing a fixed pot, which sometimes means we run out of money before the end of the year and sometimes means we're extraordinarily generous in the last month of it, we'll have a standard for project effectiveness and fund everything that can demonstrate it. The considerations are probably going to be track record and capabilities of the people working on it, benefits if they're successful, other sources of funding and reasons it wouldn't wisely be commercialized, so forth, but the important thing is that whatever they are they'll be published and public. So people don't wonder if it's even worth applying if they haven't the connections. What are your parents' complaints?"

"My father's a police officer in a little town and he only inconsistently manages to get anything to distribute as performance bonuses, and my mother's a teacher and wants more scholarship money in the system."

He nods. "I should be able to get my father excited about scholarships. One would think."

"Would one? I don't know him personally, obviously..."

"He's taking the King's decline by locking himself in his room and doing nothing but spell design, which would be admirable loyalty to his father's wellbeing except there's a country to run and there's only so much I can do without formal authority. In general education's something he's passionate about, though, education and more people spellbinding and languages and things in that vein. You'd probably get along, he skips all pleasantries and spends most of his time picking peoples' heads on their idiolect and on spell details but he does it very warmly."

"I would not advise anyone to learn my idiolect. All it would let them do that they couldn't otherwise would be understand my cat and invade my privacy, neither of which are to be encouraged."

"Maybe more royals need to understand the insults your cat's levelling at them, it might be humbling or something. I am sure he wouldn't want to invade your privacy. You write notes in it?"

"Yeah, I'm very writing-oriented so I invented it an alphabet, which even Cricket hasn't bothered with, so now I can pretty easily write private notes-to-self."

"I expect his inclination to not be disrespectful of someone's space would win out over his inclination to see if he can understand an idiolect just by reading lots of content in its private alphabet but just in case, don't go tell him all about it. Not that you could. Locked in his room." He sighs. "It'll be worth it if he somehow comes out of there with immortality but I don't think even he can pull that off, not fast enough."

"If he wants what I've got so far - but probably none of it's on whatever tack he's been cramming for already -"

"I'll pass a note in with his next meal, asking, but it's probably not, no." He sighs. "Thank you anyway."

"You're welcome. If he can get it done faster than I can that matters, I'm happy to help."

He's watching her like his thoughts are very far away. "Yes, it does. We should have put out a call for projects or something, but I think we were all being foolish, acting like the King'd live forever."

"I'm sorry your family's going through this. He's been a very good king."

He nods fervently. "And barring a miracle we at least have enough people to scrounge up another good one."

"Everybody's saying it'll have to be Ruafar if your father doesn't just... uh, benignly neglect things from under a crown."

"Problem is that Ruafar's my father in miniature and equally likely to benignly neglect things from under a crown. I should have gotten married years ago."

"Is this a 'the one who got away' story or are you just under the impression you can schedule it like a haircut, because if you can I've been deeply misled."

"I did not make any time for romance in my life and have no idea if, had I done so, it would have led me anywhere. If I try now the selection effects will be quite interesting - not that it'd bother me if a girl very dearly desired to become Queen - that'd be hypocritical, when I very much want to be King, but there are better and worse reasons."

"Roll out an application with the new funding allocation process if you're going to be all unromantic about it," snorts Iobel.

"That's the other thing! I do not want to be unromantic about it, I want to work on a project with someone and find that I cannot stop thinking about her and also as a bonus she'll make a splendid Queen. I am starting to realize that this is naive, and I will feel very silly if the country sits through five decades of benign neglect because I was waiting both for a fairy tale and a competent administrator - not that the two shouldn't be rather strongly correlated, competence and ambition are so attractive in people...but anyway I haven't resorted to taking applications yet. And I can't roll out the new funding process while we're transitioning Kings."