<You have my name and those of several of my loved ones and that of a student in my care. You are manifestly not consistently acting according to your own preferences even if you can do so right now. I need you to stop having those names. At minimum, I need an ally under an empathy ward acting as a deadman switch for the erasure if something happens.>

I have strong feelings about the integrity of my memory. If you will not compromise on this point, I will leave, attempt to solve your problem without you, and perhaps fail. If you work with me, we can solve it much more easily. Queenscourt will not start looking immediately; I am free for now. There is time to talk.

<I have strong feelings about my responsibilities to literally every person whose lives my compromised freedom could casually destroy. I would be able to do the name removal with surgical precision if there weren't something stopping me, but there is. Are our needs here absolutely incompatible?>

As my vassal, you cannot harm me. That is what stops you. Can we not discuss dealing with the Queen before we discuss contriving to allow that harm? Planned right, you can neutralize the Queenscourt before they know you exist, and there will be no trouble over my ability to act on my preferences.

And this faculty member can accurately comment on the various capabilities of local magic including yours?

<Yes.>

He erases his latest message and waits.

"I believe it would not be difficult for her to neutralize the Queenscourt using wizardry and her own magic. But I need to know more about the parameters of summoning before I can recommend a strategy."

"The summoning spell that retrieved you collects a random target from a random world. Spells also exist to retrieve specified individuals, given adequate specification of those individuals by the summoner or someone serving as a focus."

"Adequate specification being? Also, at what distance and under what other necessary preconditions can the headmaster's wife interact with a mind? And can she retrieve forgotten knowledge?"

"Having met the target or any unique specification of both world and person. She is unlimited by distance but most of her powers will not work transworld, except her mindlink, which should be able to persist even if she and the headmaster are in different worlds. She needs an empathic signature, most conventionally acquired by passing within thirty feet of someone, although she in particular can acquire them from other people whose signatures she has already collected. She can undo conventional forgetfulness but not all forms of magical mental attack if they sufficiently destroy the data in question."

"I expect to be able to adequately specify most members of the Queenscourt. It is likely that the Queen has forgotten her name in the conventional way. If the headmaster's wife can be brought to my world and can target the Queen's mind there, and can retrieve forgotten names, she could acquire the Queen's name and command her from a distance; without the ability to retrieve forgotten names she could still do that to any other targetable person in my world. If she cannot retrieve the Queen's name, the Queen should be summoned and securely confined here and someone should feed her mortal food, which will also work to vassalize her but may be difficult without her cooperation."

"The headmaster's wife wishes to convey that dismantling systems of government is well outside the scope of her usual activities," says the elf in an absolute deadpan.

"The alternative is that the Queen eventually comes here and dismantles all of yours. Which outcome does the headmaster's wife prefer?"

"It is not at all clear how the queen in question would accomplish this," the elf points out. "She has found instances of controlled interworld travel in your memories but says they do not appear to refer to our world as their target."

"I - not as a relay for the headmaster's wife - wonder to what extent you are asking, to what extent you are offering, and to what extent you are threatening."

"I am not threatening. I am still here entirely because my desire to save your world from probable conquest outweighs my desire to avoid the non-negligible risk that someone will out of poorly aimed caution damage my mind with unknown local magic. If neutralizing the Queenscourt is not a project that you or the headmaster's wife or anyone else here wishes to involve themselves in, then I will look elsewhere for help and have considerably more trouble, but I intend to neutralize the Queenscourt regardless because otherwise, whether in a few hundred days or a few thousand years, the Queen will learn that wizardry and unique green-group dragons exist and she will take steps to eliminate those threats to her sovereignty."

"The headmaster's wife very much values her reputation for nonintervention in large-scale politics," says the elf. "Do you have an idea which does not require her direct participation or put her freedom or those of the other people whose names you acquired at risk?"

"Omitting the highly advantageous mind magic - prepare whatever resources are required to summon," he thinks it over for a moment, "about three dozen people more or less at once, each isolated so that they cannot communicate with one another or with anyone else by speech or writing. Contrive to feed them all mortal food, whereby they will become vassals to whatever mortal fed them. Command the Queen to describe the structure of her court and disclose any remaining obstacles to dismantling it. If my knowledge is not as complete as I think it is, it may be necessary to summon more courtiers at that point, but vassalizing them will be easier with the Queen available to give you their names. The Queen must be ordered to never give an enforced order and never reveal anyone's name. Everyone else can be ordered to free Queenscourt captives and dismantle security measures and so on, and then returned to where they were taken from. The Queen herself should not be returned to her court until all its unwilling members have successfully fled. And this method will work unless one of the summoned courtiers is clever enough or magical enough to escape your captivity, or one of those not summoned is clever enough and quick enough to find where everyone else has gone and lead an army after them."

"Could you have exited your ward without its disruption from the outside? Could others from your world?"

"I could have made a gate back to my world, stepped through, closed it, and made another one to come back with outside the ward, and it's possible that there are other generic magical solutions I haven't thought of. Someone whose kind can teleport might have been able to teleport out of it. Someone with other travel-related kind magic might have been able to use that. I know most but not all of the kinds and associated magics that might appear in the Queenscourt, and cannot guarantee that I know them well enough to be sure none of the ones you might need to capture can escape a ward."

"Kind magic?"