(From her nice safe chair, Sally follows this Look and rubs her temples.)

Micaiah beams at Ari. "Thanks for taking care of Pen."

"I mean, I'm not refusing the thanks or anything, but it was kind of the only decent thing to do. Plus I had the apartment to myself for the week, she kept me company and all, we slew unpleasant dragons. Not much to thank me for."

"...Dragons?"

Swat. Not real dragons. It's a video game. I want video games at home! They're better than the spaceship computer games, those are silly and trivial, the video games have stories and dialogue options and I like them. We can keep consoles in the spaceship. You should do nice things for them. They're wizards and wizards make technology explode. Be careful of the Janegem.

"Oh dear." But Jane has been lucky so far; Isabella wards the gem Micaiah has and her own. "Would you like to not make technology explode?"

"Hell yes. Oh, and while I'm thinking about it, Sally is allergic to cats and that seems to be the same category of Things That Could Be Fixed."

"Oh, of course." This takes three pentagons to fix both wizards' explosion problems and the one's allergy. "There. Before we go I will also want to leave a Janepoint somewhere to sync time and establish stable access to the world for later, and you'll be able to brainphone her - did Penninah explain the brainphone? - if you want anything else."

"Yeah, I have brainphone access. And... hm. Even though we're no longer hexing tech, our building kind of gets a lot of magical crossfire. Will she work if I put her underground?"

"Will Jane work? Jane will work just fine anywhere, although I'd need to put plenty of wards on her point if I were going to house it in a star or something. Do you want to be able to physically go visit the point?"

"...Right. I guess we'll just put her in more leaded glass. Maybe we could set up a fountain to send running water over the case. And a Greater Circle. And lots of wishy stuff. Are we going to be able to get the wishes for ourselves, or do we need to spend a while proving ourselves first or something?"

"...I'm going to ward the Janepoint just as I did these gems," says Angela, gesturing at her bracelet. "Other wizards wandering in won't harm her point. The wishes for the gems went just fine so I have every reason to assume they'll suffice for a larger hardware installation. There are at minimum safety lectures associated with the wishes - and giving people coins directly in exchange for them doing us favors has not always gone well in the past. I do immensely appreciate your looking after our daughter, but I do not want to hand you any wishcoins right now."

"Ah. Well, given reliable enough wards I guess we can skip the Rube Goldberg routine. Pity, I'll miss it in a way. Trustworthiness is hard. From what Pen's told me about you, I'm going to guess you're not going to want to use a soulgaze as evidence?"

"What's that?"

"You may have noticed I'm not making eye contact? I'm a wizard. If I meet someone's eyes for more than a couple of seconds, we have this sort of psychedelic trip into each other's souls where we learn about who the other person truly is on the inside. And if you go in with a question in mind, that question often makes an appearance. In my case, I'm pretty sure you'd get 'this guy is trustworthy and can have power without misusing it' in some form or other."

"...My template is unlikely to take you up on this, but we're willing to trust the words of a variety of people who will not necessarily have such a reaction to the concept. And one or two of me may want to investigate how this property of local wizards interacts with wished and other mental opacity and consider risking one soulgaze with a known person a reasonable tradeoff."

"I'd do it," shrugs Micaiah.

"For example. Speaking of investigating the properties of local wizards, do you mind if I invite one of my alts here to have a look at the place?"

"Glass," says Pen.

"Sure. I mean, invite who you like, honestly, I don't own the place."

Angela glances at Sally. "Do you?"

"I own the apartment, but I think he meant the world. Anyway, you can invite who you like, you seem to have sound judgment. As long as they don't track mud onto the white carpet, but the white carpet's on the other side of the suite."

"Glass will not arrive with muddy shoes."

Glass arrives. Her shoes are not muddy. "Hi, Pen! Oh, good, you weren't lost too long. How are you holding up?"