"A light-wand is a solid gold cylinder, usually approximately six inches long, optionally engraved in useful patterns. It projects a beam of light when activated," says Inlaith. "Harmless unless you shine it in someone's eyes unexpectedly." He sniffs the donut hole but does not move to take it.

"I am told that you are under attack by evil aliens who don't believe in diplomacy," says Cam. "If this is true I am happy to either load you up on miscellaneous cylinders or just go blow them all up myself, whichever seems more expedient. But I have been told this by people who were selected for drawing what turn out to be really dangerous patterns on the floor, have no cultural or social context or way to verify anything I'm told, etcetera, it concerns me. I am genuinely concerned about your halved population and so on but I would feel really bad about it if your evil aliens are just misguided insectoids or something and then they were all dead."

"You're welcome to go look at them yourself. I can spare the forces to guard you so you don't get yourself killed and deprive me of my chance at miscellaneous cylinders."

"I'm indestructible," says Cam. "...Although I'm not actually sure I'm rated for legitimately magical damage. If the evil aliens deploy magical damage, or possibly Weird Physics Damage, I might have a problem, so maybe somebody should try to blow a hole in my wing or something first as a test."

"That, too, can be arranged," says the king. "Now?"

"Give me four seconds' warning so I can anesthetize myself, but sure, I have nowhere else to be."

"Which wing would you like someone to blow a hole in?" he inquires.

Cam stretches out one at random.

He glances between Faidre and the not-yet-introduced Kevarsin and gives a small shrug.

Faidre sighs. "I'll do it. Ready?"

Four seconds pass. "Go for it."

He extends a hand toward Cam and produces an intensely concentrated fire blast which strikes the outstretched wing.

"Force, fire, light, energy, lightning, freeze, stun, corrosion," Faidre recites. "Those are the basic flavours. They can be combined for interesting results. I could try a mind-killer wand on you but, as the name suggests, they're not safe to play with."

"Yeah, because trying to blast his wing off was perfectly safe," snorts Elarron.

"He could've made a new one, I assume," says Faidre. "Harder to make a new brain."

"Yeah, I picked the wing because these have no nerves at the base and if it were somehow irreparably mangled I could just slice it off and make a new one. What pray tell is," airquotes, "'energy'."

Faidre flicks his fingers downward, producing a blip of yellowish light that makes a small mark on the floor. "Differs from fire mostly in aesthetics."

"Anyway, stun might just plain work on me, and there's nothing stopping force from flinging me around, so if the evil aliens use comparable this-and-that it would probably be a little silly for me to just fly over to them and say hello, but I don't want to put anyone else at risk for what must seem to you all like deeply misplaced curiosity..."

"The Enemy's weapons are not substantially different," says Faidre.

"If satisfying your curiosity gets us an arbitrarily large supply of weapons - with arbitrarily precise manufacture? - it's worth not just risk but lives," says the king.

"Although of course it would be preferable to minimize that risk," says the unintroduced Kevarsin.

"My manufacture is indeed arbitrarily precise, if for some reason you need all the molecules lined up in a certain way or something. If they hit me with a stun - which honestly is not even a particularly damning response from an army receiving an uninvited guest - I may well be stunned and then my fact-finding is cut a bit short. The thing that summoned me was a 'fire shield'? Are there other shields? Do they have to be enormous unwieldy metal disks?"

"The fact that they have to be unwieldy metal disks is why they are deeply impractical to use."