"Okay. Well, hurting people is already illegal, no matter what weapon you use. So that just leaves options for concealing things. Could you give an example of what that entails?"

"Turning someone to stone and dropping them in the lake," Lhemur immediately interjects.

The others turn to look at him.

"What? It's the obvious thing to do if you can turn things into other things and you want to hide a body," he points out.

"A whole person would be a lot to transform but yes that a good example. You could also clean up blood more easily than without magic and more comprehensively; normal soap and water doesn't get all the traces most of the time. People generally have less reason to steal with magic but you could also transform something you've stolen or use magic to make a better hiding place."

"Alright. So future organizers might need to bear in mind more problems when finding and evaluating evidence," they conclude. "Or maybe we need to place less weight on physical evidence and more on testimony."

"Well, that's going to cause problems," Lhemur remarks. "You know what people are like, or we wouldn't even need organizers."

"It's a difficult balance. Testimony is unreliable for a number of reasons and evidence can be tampered with. There's magic I use so that other people in my weave will know how I died if things come to that and for the most part that's something I can teach but it does have its trade-offs. It requires magical bonds and while they aren't permanent they are a significant gesture of trust. Magic also gives more options to investigators but if someone is thorough enough magic can't let you find information that isn't there and it can't directly look at the past."

"Why are magical bonds a gesture of trust?" Lhemur asks. "I assume they do more than let people know how you die?"

"They mean that magically speaking you're always with the other person. That means you can use magic in their vicinity without being in their vicinity, centrally that means you can use your magic to sense the world around them and use your magic with them as a starting point. They'll know you're doing it, it's not subtle, but the only way to stop it is to break the bond."

The villagers consider that for a moment.

"How fast is it to break the bond, if someone abuses it?" Lhemur asks. "It seems like that would seriously affect people's willingness to use them."

"About half a minute for most people. You can do it faster with practice but most people don't practice it."

"I was going to say that someone can't cause all that much harm in half a minute, but that's not really true anymore, is it."

Penþa leans back against the wall of their house.

"This is going to make every unobserved death into a potential murder, if I'm understanding right. Because someone could have a bond and use it to kill someone else from a distance."

"Well — that's not likely to be too much of a problem. Most murders are crimes of passion," Gornet points out, breaking his silence. "So it's only an uncommon subset—"

"But if you're bonded to someone, you can't get away from them. Meaningfully, I mean. They could always reach out and tap you on the shoulder," Lhemur interjects. "That's going to be a massive pain in the winter, for some people."

"It's harder than you would think to kill someone through a bond. It's more difficult to do magic, especially structured magic, through a bond than where you physically are and like I said you can feel when someone is using magic through a bond you have with them."

"Maybe we need to actually try it, and see how hard or easy it is to do different things," Lhemur suggests.

"At the very least, we're going to need new politeness standards for what is and isn't acceptable to do through a bond and when," Penþa says. "And those will probably depend a lot on how it actually feels."

"What do you usually use your bonds for, if you don't mind me asking? Is it mostly just monitoring that nobody has died, or do you use them to send messages, or ...?"

"Bonds are the foundation of my travel magic. We also use them for messages, including the last gasp messages I mentioned, and to help someone remotely when it's either too dangerous or too urgent to go help them in person. In my society at large, travel and messaging are the most common uses. They're also used to let bigger groups act through a single person when that's advantageous. That last one takes a lot of training and practice though."

Penþa rubs their chin.

"Hmm. That all makes sense, and is helpful, but I feel like I asked the wrong question. Let me see ..."

"The people you're bonded to — are they friends, family, colleagues, community members, officials? When you send a message, is it more like tapping someone on the shoulder and whispering to them, or is it more like writing a letter? Not in terms of logistics, but in terms of how it feels."

"Most of them are colleagues while a few of them are friends. Writing explicit messages feels more like a letter I expect. Sense bubbles are an imprint of a moment or an experience and depending on how many of your senses they include and the nature of the moment you're recording they can be pretty intimate. And with friends I also exchange hugs and similar gestures remotely."

"Ah, okay. So you can actually make people feel as though you're touching them. Yeah, we're going to need to have a whole community discussion about all this."

Penþa sighs, and makes a mental note to add it to tomorrow's agenda.

"You know — I bet this will fundamentally change where people decide to settle down," Lhemur points out. "If you can have a bond, there's no reason for spouses to settle down if one of them wants to keep traveling."

Penþa throws their hands up in the air.

"If everyone can survive in the wilderness alone, and we don't need to cultivate food, and everything can be repaired with a flick of the fingers, and you can talk to anyone you care about over any distance, why even have villages!" they exclaim. "I bet when this spreads a lot of people will just walk out of the cities."

"I've seen that happen. It's a question of whether cities can give people what they want or not and whether people decide to improve their homes or just walk away."

The three of them exchange glances. Plenty of people from the village have traveled, but none of them have.

"This is second-hand, but I think the major problem with cities is just that they're dirty and crowded," Lhemur explains. "They're convenient, because they let people specialize more, and they simplify logistics. So there are a lot of things you can only get in a city, or can get more cheaply, and for many people that's worth it. But there's a reason that less than one in six sixes people live in cities. And if you can fly to travel great distances more quickly ... well, then why not just have centralized markets and everybody living much more spread out?"

"Magic can help a lot with the problem of cities being dirty. As for crowded, I think it depends on what part of that bothers people. If it's not having enough space to themselves, then with magic and some knowledge it becomes easier to build upwards. If it's having lots of people in a physical space, you can build larger markets and flying also helps."