Bar provides the census for the year that happened 234 years before Har took over, and a rather boring human's boring memoir. He was a very uncreative information mage and a tax collector who worked in an office.

I cannot find any guides to century-long illusions.

Boring average people are so useful, such a good window into ordinary life. What does Bar have that even mentions any of the kinds of magic from before the Hari Empire?

Void mages could totally filter things, voiding only certain elements, even acting as sort-of-sun-mages and turning elements into lesser elements by voiding only part of the element!

It's kind of patchy, digging through things for references like this. A story about a court case includes a knowledge mage declaring 'he's telling the truth' and 'she's hiding something' after two beluli each tell their side of a dispute over their child.

She passes the references to void magic on to Valanda and takes a minute to preen. They totally could do lie detection, she's going to publish an article about this, everyone is going to admit she was right. She keeps combing through references for anything else they could do back then.

Valanda, meanwhile, finishes his food and puts up his sign.

Nik disappears into the backyard with his blood.

The bar patrons are as interested in invulnerability as ever. One of them whose skull is part metal and whose voice sounds vaguely hollow asks, "Can you protect objects from high-intensity electromagnetic radiation pulses, colloquially referred to as 'EMP'?"

"Strictly speaking I defend from damage, not from types of attack, and I don't know what damage an EMP would cause. I bet if you explain what one would do I can protect against it."

"EMPs create strong voltage differentials and excited electron states in all conductive components of electronic devices, causing the material to heat rapidly and be subject to intense local magnetic fields for a fraction of a second. This disrupts or destroys internal components. There are ways to shield against it but not without losing other desirable traits - size, power draw, unobtrusiveness."

"I can protect against overheating. I could also make it not conduct electricity but as I understand it that would mean it wouldn't work. I can try something experimental if you expect to be conscious and know about an incoming EMP any time your electronics might need to be protected, then it'd be similar to making people invulnerable to physical attack and I sort of know how to do that."

"I want protection against overheating. I can not always predict EMPs before they occur, but that may be valuable for such times when I can. I have an EMP generator and an example of equipment I would like protected. How much will you charge to perform the experiment?"

"I've probably never heard of your currency before, let me find out. Bar, how much is forty-eight rings to him?"

Five point two KE&O-issued credits.

"Acceptable. If the EMP defense works it will increase my aggregate capabilities several percentage points and provide an... 'Ace in the hole'." He says the idiom very awkwardly, as if he's trying to sound less robotic. He's failing.

"Mind if I ask what it is you do?"

"My work is highly sensitive. Though this... Place removes many of the normal concerns. Do you have any affiliation of familiarity with the corporations known as Kelfried and Odin, Factory To Market, Sankaku, or Plastek?"

"Nope, never heard of any of them!"

His onboard coprocessor tells him that the mage's micro-expressions indicate truthfulness, high confidence.

"I am an intelligence operative. I infiltrate secure areas, deal with any security, and collect information or technology for my employers. EMPs are frequently used by security forces. They are... Inconvenient."

Oh, that's alarming.

"Do you have morals? Where I'm from people don't, but I've met people who do here."

"Morals are generated by structures of power to maintain and expand their power by restricting the actions people will take. They change so drastically and frequently through history I cannot believe they are inherent. There is no 'good', there is only power. The corporations certainly embody this philosophy."

"That sounds like my world, except using the word 'morals' for some reason. That might just be the translation in here doing something weird, though, it's not like we're speaking the same language to begin with. But that's not how other worlds are, in other worlds people work together to make everyone happy and everyone ends up happier because of it. I wish I could tell you how to make your world the thing I'm calling moral that translation's going to translate as the other thing. Uh, if I say 'morals' and 'laws' do you hear a difference?"

"Yes. Laws are specific rules enforced by violence. Morals are nonspecific rules enforced by social censure."

"In practice I think they're goals, not rules. The rules are just ways of achieving the goals. If you get a lot of Milliways doors, you'll be better off if you try to make other people happy, even if the rest of your world doesn't, it turns out that being able to show people that you're a moral person means other moral people know they share important goals with you and they'll help you become more powerful and give you things."

"The corporations will crush and drain anyone who allows them to. I will not allow them to through physical or mental weakness. I have made myself strong. I have no interest in helping others for nothing. Nobody will repay me for it. Is your rate for performing an experimental EMP resistance treatment still the same."

"Yeah, of course! And do you need something done about the corporations in your world so they stop making it hard to be moral?"

He brings out his gear. "You would have to be very powerful to unseat the current power structure. What would you propose?"

He tries an experimental ward. "There, you should be able to make it temporarily invulnerable by wanting it to be but I can't guarantee there won't be any weird glitches if you operate it while you're doing that. So, about your corporations. I can hardly propose something before I know how they're crushing and draining people and why no one's stopped them yet. Is this the kind of problem that I could solve by making people literally uncrushable, for instance? Or was that a metaphor?"

"It was a metaphor. The four largest corporations control at some degree of remove over 97% of all wealth, law enforcement, medical facilities, media outlets, education, manufacturing, and technological innovation."

He tries it out. Does it successfully resist his EMP generator? Does it work while resisting EMP?