"I used to," Livingstone says mildly. "If he'd gotten me when he was sixteen, I don't think I'd have looked so pretty."

"But the damage is rehabilitable."

"Oh, yes. But it takes a great deal of effort, and most of the Council just doesn't have the spare time between pyramid-sitting and meditating under the North Pole."

It is probably eminently clear what Livingstone thinks of both of these activities.

"Does meditating under the North Pole and sitting - on? under? - pyramids serve any purpose...?"

"Oh, naturally. It makes them more powerful."

"Which power they then use to..."

"Live in beautiful alabaster towers secreted away in the Nevernever, frolic with nubile succubi, and accumulate more power. Rinse. Repeat."

"...Literally?"

"There are exceptions. They are not the rule."

"That's not the point of having power! I mean, if they were doing really important shit with their power it might be shortsighted for them not to recruit rehabilitable kids on the wrong side of the law for long-term alliance reasons but it would make some sense if they had a lot of short-term emergencies going on, but alabaster towers and succubi, that's just outright offensive."

"Yes," Livingstone says. "Harry would disapprove of me saying this, I'm sure, but I did the math back when I was living in his skull, and around sixty percent of the White Council would accomplish more for humanity by being hooked into specially designed power plants. At least then we could get rid of coal."

"Well, I don't approve of power planting people either, but the math alone is damning."

"You'll note I don't have the blueprints written up."

He considers. "Well, partly because I'm not sure how I'd work the chalk. But also because there's better things to do with terrible wizards than Matrixing the damn things."

"Yeah, what's your actual policy proposal?"

"Well, ideally we'd actually talk to them first. I don't imagine the problem will turn out to be that no one asked them to get off their asses nicely enough, but if it does convince at least one of them then I'll be happy. Failing that, while Harry's temper and attention span are both too short to do anything about it, he actually has a decent amount of potential political weight on the Council through his mentor and his mother's connections. If he could swallow his anti-authoritarian bile long enough to cozy up to a voting bloc, we could actually force political movement, glacial though it might be."

He lowers his voice slightly. "And, if all else fails and the system still doesn't work... You don't make it very far in our line of work without running into a couple of assassins. The current Merlin protects himself very well, but there's only so much you can do against a bullet you can't see coming. Harry would hate it, but... unpalatable and wrong aren't always the same word."

"They've got a lot of overlap," murmurs Isabella. "Careful."

"I did say if all else fails. But beheading teenagers who could be saved if we infringed on the wizard bourgeois' copious free time is... very unpalatable. And Merlin Langtry has had his centuries wearing the funny hat and carefully doing nothing; if he won't budge when I ask nicely, than I will not hesitate to move him myself."

"Even if they don't help when they're alive I don't think killing them will improve their helpfulness much unless death works differently where you're from."

"Following the assassination, the most obvious choice to assume the funny hat would be Ebenezar, who is also our mentor and one of the perhaps ten sensible human beings on the Council. Other obvious choices include Ancient Mai, who is semi-conservative but would still mark a vast improvement, or Martha Liberty, who stands with Ebenezar among the ten Councillors I would trust to pour water on me if I were on fire. I'm not just going to kill people for the sake of it."

"This is a for-life position?"

Wolves do not have eyebrows. Livingstone raises his anyway. "It is a for-life position, yes. The Council does not have what you might call a political cycle, unless you mean the cycle of life and death. Langtry has been in power for coming up on two hundred years."

"Well, I suppose witch clans work that way too, although there's ways to shuffle things around short of murder if a queen isn't doing her job."

"If I thought I could gather the necessary votes for the 80% consensus, I would be delighted. Unfortunately, the last time over 80% of the Council agreed on something was in 1940, when they were voting on whether to take action against a genocidal necromancer attempting to ascend to godhead. I believe that only thirty voters opposed the motion."