"Haven't decided what to try first. And it's going to be a little complicated to sightread, the motifs aren't influenced by the musical tradition I learned in at all. Also it's almost all got lyrics and those don't seem to be optional and I'm not a very good singer, not sure how much accompanying myself can compensate for that. But I'm mostly done with the notation translator."

"I'm happy to sing along if that helps any, though I won't know your notation..."

"Well, if my translator's good enough you can read the original and we'll match."

"I will eagerly await it."

Cam sends him a list of magic music he has found. "What do you wanna try first?"

"Crops would be hard to test...wind? blizzard - sounds fun, perhaps not in the bar - the illusion ones all look long and complicated -"

"Sure. We'll go out back and play with the weather sometime someone else is around to monitor this area."

"'grace' - useful, also hard to test - here's one for light, that might be a good place to start -"

"I could probably test a grace one pretty well," Cam remarks.

"You can try running around while I sing but then we've got no accompaniment."

"If I can walk at all while playing the violin, the song is doing something."

"Okay, sure, let's try the magic grace song. ...do they have any idea of the mechanics of their magic..."

"I didn't find any. Vague woo about the universe being made of music and the song of creation."

"Evil and incurious. Though I suppose they couldn't have had their Macalaurë write a commissioned symphony in exchange for a particle accelerator."

"I suppose this'll be another source of complete works of Macalaurë, albeit with no recordings."

"Wonder if he's evil too."

"Well, apparently he doesn't object much to the slavery, but there's ways and ways to not object, I guess..."

"I could probably pull it off politically. Wouldn't, but probably could."

"How?"

"Our people trust me. We were considering a forced evacuation of an inhabited planet, we were considering killing all the orcs, obviously some people are in the know and could independently do the cost-benefit analysis and understand why we might give orders like that but most of them don't have all the information, they pilot a ship and they know that the Enemy's evil enough for anything to be worth it if it stops him, and we don't have a conscience exception to orders, we don't have the concept, if I said 'yes, looks bad, it's a cover story and I need people to stop digging, after the war I'll explain' they would trust me there too -"

"Ah."

"I couldn't go 'I'm keeping a slave because I feel like it' but it's unclear to me whether my alt ever did that."

"Suppose he'd say if asked?"

"Hard to guess. Might lie, probably wouldn't refuse to answer. Might tell the truth - I think he's at least interested in trying -"

"What does trying look like on his end besides 'retaining the ability to swear he hasn't raped his slave lately'."