"Okay. Having everyone who's learning magic in this hotel with video surveillance seems like a reasonable thing to do."

"It will take you a while to have much mana anyway."

"How's that part work?"

"You just get more with practice. When you start you can only do a few cantrips and then eventually you can do more, harder things. I've had magic for two of our years and I could do two, maybe three, teleports like that in a day. So it might be a while before any of you can do them."

"Hm, okay."

"You can get free mana by tapping a Maia but you don't have those here."

"Any chance of importing one down the road?"

"Maybe there is a Maia whose life goal is to keep the hundred and twelfth floor of a skyscraper shiny and has just been wandering around aimlessly because we haven't invented skyscrapers yet."

"...pfffwhat?"

"They're like that. Or - not exactly like that, that's the wrong sort of thing, but they care about things that aren't at all the sort of things normal people care about. Lots of them spend all their time looking after one specific tree or one specific river, or they only care about things that have a prime number of atoms, or they spend all their time making shadows dance in a forest no one has ever been to."

"That's cute. Maybe there is a Maia who would be very happy here."

"There are lots of them. There might be one. It would be hard to find them, though."

"Guess so. Well. Can't even start looking right now."

"Yeah."

"You can read peoples' minds, do you want to use that for screening people who will learn magic?"

"I don't think Bella would want me to do that even if they consented if we could come up with any other way."

"- even if they consented?"

"It wouldn't be horrible like if I was just reading everyone's mind all the time but it would be better to have a not-mindreading solution."

"Yes, it would. But if we can't think of one, and people don't mind, it seems like an option to me. There's a lot of people and some of them really wouldn't mind. I'd almost wonder the opposite, if it was thorough enough - you only look at things that are being thought right then, right?"

"Yeah."

"So it's not perfect anyway. Someone might be good at not thinking about things. At best it could be combined with something."

Nod. Sigh. "What do you do with the other things that could kill lots of people?"

"The people who work on them have a long track record of making good decisions and not taking bribes and so on, they're watched pretty closely, and we make sure we'd know about a problem right away and have a plan to address it."

"A plan like..."