"The fact that you tried to keep us out of Voa does not indicate that it's safe to assume your desire for peace is decisive."

"Voa didn't want us to stay out of Voa. And I wasn't in charge. Now I am, and we're not going to have a war."

"This is a long term question."

"And in the long term every military in the world is going to have a magic division, there's no way they wouldn't."

"So you're declaring the problem insoluble."

"I suppose it depends on what you conceive of as the problem. The problem I care about - getting us to a place where we can peacefully go get dozens of planets - doesn't seem insoluble."

"Yes, and I'm not proposing to leave that one unsolved but I'd like to think for more than an hour about how to prevent subsequent magic space conflict. I'm optimistic about just keeping a lid on the whole thing till we can get Bella and ask her but you don't seem to like that plan."

"No, I think that's a great idea, I just don't think you can keep a lid on the whole thing without making it a military project."

"Why exactly can't you find a quiet flatworm biologist? You're not casting a net for a specific skillset, magic is a totally different thing, runs on - g-factor per se and not any training we give out in any school system or wouldn't I have ever been ill-served. You don't necessarily need a lot of people to go on a teleportation based rescue mission. - where'd you find the linguists, are those your relatives -"

"Yes, they are. And terrible candidates to go to Materia. I don't want one person, I want twenty, we don't know how much individual variance there is and with a lot of people if one of them is behaving dangerously we have others of them to counter it. And what if we tell some flatworm biologists about this and they go 'no thank you, my passion is really for flatworms', we've still got to keep them under surveillance at that point."

"If you don't teach them any magic... you're coping with my three year old sister having met Fëanáro but you don't want to tell anyone there is a project they might want in on, are you running entirely on 'people would think she's making it up'?"

"People would think she's making it up and also I cannot, actually, do anything about her which isn't at least as suspicious. If I could decide not to tell her in the first place, I absolutely would."

"So you want military because you can order them to shut up whether they wind up being helpful or not."

"Yes. And expect that if they come up with clever breakthroughs they'll tell their superiors instead of unilaterally deciding to do something brilliant or stupid, and because lots of otherwise intelligent people really do do things like get drunk and tell their hookup classified information to impress them or publish a paper they think is sufficiently obfuscatory. Particularly when 'flee the country, get asylum, publish all the papers you want' is a reasonable option, which it would be for anyone with magic."

"R&D greens, not soldiers, right?"

"It seems like a better fit."

"Fine."

"Thank you."

"Are you worried that I want something different from you or that I'm very bad at my job?"

"I'm allowed to be concerned with things that aren't about me personally and I can think you're very good at your job without expecting you'll go for the outcomes I'd prefer."

"What are you worried I might not care about?"

"Fair outcomes for people in other countries, Fëanáro as an individual, me as an individual, things that happen after you retire."

"In addition to getting it right for people in all countries here, it would be nice to get it right for the current inhabitants of any planets we may stumble across."

"Yes, I'm not going to complain if you don't offer Calado a bunch of wizards."