The doctors are carefully neutral. After deliberating they say that the little belul will probably never be quite as smart and will probably have these seizures for the rest of its life, but will maybe live to be an adult and could feasibly be a happy and productive one. The young man will buy him at the low price mentioned earlier (if only to keep it out of this bad parent's hands). Oh, by the way, what kind of mage is he?

Three years is already kind of pushing it. And usually he would be paying them to train his daughter, this is already generous. Maybe if he treats her well she will want to keep helping him even after she's freed?

Various people consult and are varyingly useful for learning how to instill morality into a soap opera. Kenneth the linguist actually studied literature for a while and is surprisingly good at coming up with ways to display morality to the Hari perspective.

The baby is a command mage. He's mostly healthy and in a couple weeks he starts saying single words and seems to mean them.

Fine, they can have their apprentice and he'll free her three years after her majority. But don't they know how irresponsible the young are? What if she does something stupid and immediately gets sold to someone else anyway?

Mr. and Mrs. Cooper buy a bunch of books about beluli and do their best to be caring and responsible parents, even if their new kid is decidedly nonhuman. They have him bound against accidentally using magic on the urging of just about everyone, they'll find a teacher in a few years.

Hopefully she'll impress them! At any rate that's their condition and they're sticking to it. There's some negotiating about how often and how long they have her for, exceptions can be made later if something comes up, but that's quickly resolved.

Meanwhile, Nik has a working elevator and working 8-bit processors and miscellaneous other computing hardware all locked away in his top-secret lab. He spends much of his days programming. His questions and work for Dareni lately lean more towards business knowledge magic than manufacturing.

He sells a few more calculators and similar to get a little more capital, studies all the architecture books Ahgari threw at him, and then goes and builds his shop-apartments-penthouse tower, with magic from all the necessary kinds of mage involved, in all its eight-story architecturally pretty glory. Taller than most or all of the other buildings in the area, he makes short work of hiring staff. The wide open shop filled with technological wonders - his own (ranging from little games like you'd find in cereal boxes on Earth to motion sensors that will open doors for you to laser rangefinders to much smaller calculators to voice recorders to full computers), and some of New Dover's more techy output - will hopefully attract a lot of attention.

A corner of the shop displays two little pod rooms on top of each other, maybe 3-by-3-by-7 feet. It has dull green patterned wallpaper, a warm sleeping pad (with a temperature adjuster), a rotating shelf that folds into the wall and will lower different compartments to the floor, controllable by pressing little buttons arranged so that essi and ereli can use them unaided, an automatic door that will open when the little example RFID chip is brought in front of it, and a bunch of little other touches designed for his three target smallish species. The sign says 'Try our affordable, space-optimized pod residences! Designed for essi, ereli, and thwilit on a budget. Customization available! Speak to cashier for details.' It goes on to list the (rather cheap) rates and describe all the features.

You can try it out with the little stamp-sized RFID tag he has hanging on the sign! The door opens for anyone wearing the correct tag, and only for the correct tag, and the shelf rotates and everything!

Nik gets an erel interested in his pod residences... and three weeks later he gets five dozen ereli all interested in his pod residences. No such luck with thwilit and essi.

The producer of It Happened In The Storm and Best Goods In Pecan Grove writes him to ask if he thinks any of his inventions could be useful for illusion shows.

He can happily accomodate five dozen ereli. He fills in the third floor with more ereli pods and puts agerah-optimized rooms on the fourth and human-optimized ones on the fifth. All the rooms have various gadgets in the doors and walls.

Show business! He has computers, which have things like word processors and spreadsheet programs and paint apps that can make organizing complicated sets and shows much easier. They can send messages immediately to other computers in the same area. Many computers can write to the same message board. Only if they're physically connected for now, but he's working on that. They can also do automatic games (he wrote a few simpler ones) and control or use a bunch of computer-accessory gadgets that he sells. He can make a computer do just about anything given enough time and money, and the computers are going to get better and faster over time, but this is what he has for now.

He has vehicles and gadgets for raising and lowering props, opening doors, and so on, if they don't just use a force mage for that. He has something that could be used as a teleprompter with no need for an illusion mage to run it. There's no copyright here - how about a way to make scripts and so on unreadable except by certain people? To prevent things from leaking. You'd need computers, or the cheaper but single-purpose encrypt-o-matic machine. He has lights and cameras and microphones and so on but he doesn't really think they'll want them, what with illusion mages around.

A few more ereli trickle in. Eventually so do a few young essi who are still just five or ten feet and fit very comfortably in the pods. A couple beluli and a very desperate human want to rent teeny pod residences too.

The producer decides to invest in some encryption machines and asks him to let her know when he's able to make computers communicate without being physically connected. She'd really like something that can function like a copy of a show but receives messages from multiple sources. Like if he could make something that could be used to watch It Happened In The Storm and Best Goods In Pecan Grove and then, later, pick up whatever her new show is, on the old machines without any upgrades, with some way to toggle between them when they're on at the same time?

That is actually a thing that existed where he's from in the other world, congratulations on inventing the TV network. He's working on it as one of his many projects. How much he'll work on it depends on how much she expects to be able to pay him and how many such devices she expects to be able to sell to customers.

Hundreds of thousands of people watch illusion shows. She expects most of them would at least be interested, but how many of these things she can actually sell will depend on a lot of factors she can't predict yet. Like how much they'll cost.

Meanwhile a caralendar comes in and asks how much it would cost to get a chance to look at Nik's electronics without any illusions.

The letter-chain can wait. He's working on it. Maybe broadcast TV will tick up a notch or two on his list of things-to-remake.

He tells that caralendar, "Probably more than you could afford."

"Maybe or maybe not. What about telling me what they're made of?"

"If I give away the secret, I lose quite a lot of profitability potential, don't I?"

"I'm willing to agree not to make my own copies or resell the information. Does that change anything?"

"Maybe. While I know I probably can't keep a lid on it forever, there is the issue of me potentially failing to convince a judge that something you invent or reveal later is actually covered by this agreement. If two months down the line suddenly every structure mage knows how to make their own and everything was said under illusions..." He shrugs. "I already have a knowledge mage in on it under a timed nondisclosure. Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead."

"What about just the elements you use? Not the structure, just elements and ratios?"

"Hmm. Someone could experiment and experiment until they get something that works, even with just that, but they'd have a lot to catch up on at least. I'll tell you the elements and ratios of the five most common components in my electronics for... 2200 rings, if you tell me what you want to know for. I'd still want a nondisclosure agreement, one year."

"That works."

"So it has been said, so it is agreed. My office has antiscry on it, I'll tell you in there." And there he heads.

Silicon and boron and gold and phosphorous, and a hint of germainum and gallium, in such and such a ratio. Carbon and hydrogen in the protective layer. For the second type, all the same things in this slightly different ratio. The third type has some ruthenium and platinum. Neodymium and iron and boron feature in mixture #4. The last mixture he gives is mostly gold and titanium.

The caralendar takes notes. Very carefully illused notes.

"People want to know that they're not being watched. One of your electronics could be carried into a hidden area secretly, but either it is under an illusion and I can detect the illusion or it isn't and I can detect the presence of things made of those elements in those ratios. If I'm the only one who can make sure someone's home is private... it's like being the world's only farmer. In a couple years I'll have two dozen boyfriends."

Oh. A profiteer after his own heart.

"Aha. Boyfriends are a big deal, are they? I still don't quite get how caralendar work in that regard. At any rate, I have all my work so far illused. It's not impossible I decide to stop some day, or someone cracks open the case on one despite the defense magic and figures it out that way, or those New Dover chaps figure it out on their own. You'd be more thorough if you knew the principles upon which it all worked, of course. I'll just let you have the tidbit that similar things can be made in slightly different ratios..."

"I can explain caralendri to you! How much is it worth to you to know?"

"Oh, I know the basics, just not all the social complexity under the surface, because of course there's some of that. Eh, twelve rings for five minutes of explanation?

"Sure, want me to just talk or answer specific questions?"

"Just talk and if I have specific questions after I'll give you a ring each for 'em."

"So basically a family is one woman and however many men and children. Everyone looks up to women and wants to follow them, but obviously since there's more than one woman some are more appealing than others, because they're more competent or more commanding or hotter or richer or more your type. So how many men want you is a status thing, and how many you have can show that. Obviously when you start turning men down that's also a status thing. Most people don't become women and most people don't want it badly enough to do what I'm doing and go off alone to change, so they only leave if they have some men who'll follow them. Sometimes instead part of a family gets inherited after the woman dies, then usually one of those men will change.

"Let's see, what else... Some families are closer than others, usually the women are related to each other. Those are the clans, they've been around since before the empire. There's clans and there's clans, obviously, the reason you only hear about six is because almost every caralendar you'd've heard of comes from one of them. They're not actually constantly backstabbing each other, by the way. Now. They really did hundreds of years ago. And it's sort of a real thing now, just less than everyone always says. Like the Vesairel and Marenasar just worked together on a new blight-resistant kind of peach tree. And Vesairel and Sorota always work together on hurricane prevention, but that was true even when they used to actually go to war with each other. Sort of. Sorota didn't exist back then, but you know what I mean."