I wish I were more surprised.

Alright, what are the concrete implications - if Melian told them or some combination of Melian and Maitimo told them are you still accountable for their karma -

Melian is. No way Maitimo let it be himself. I'm responsible for her, though, including whatever reflects on her from the people she told. At least the new layer is diluted.

You can probably expect them to make some move that risks their karma soon after I die. No idea what that would be, though, and it's not a short-term prediction anyway.

I could ask to meet up with him and break his jaw, he says a bit wistfully. Okay. They can't actually be very effective with magic, if all they know is what Melian knew....

I think they're planning to experiment.

Which means they'll wind up being able to sloppily do elementalism, enchantment, some shamanism. Nothing complex like time magic or summoning, and no advanced anything. They might or might not get far enough for experimenting to become dangerous.

And they don't know the familiar or implement rituals, but do know about the demesne one.

I'd suggest we trade them more concrete knowledge in exchange for oaths about how they experiment, but we're not good enough with oaths to make that work.

Oaths wouldn't help anyway; it's the breaking new ground itself that can be risky. And they shouldn't swear off it entirely.

I'd rather not turn knowledge into a currency if we can avoid it. That turned out badly for everyone on my world, and it's why I've only got a handful of books' worth to share here.

Fair enough. Keeping it a secret from them entirely works better?

I'd phrase it more as shared freely except among people we really don't like, but using knowledge as currency is stable in a way that both sharing and not sharing aren't.

If we just tell them everything we can, it makes us pretty redundant because they'll advance faster, and it puts them somewhere where experimenting gets more dangerous. Any other downsides?

Incentivizing bad behavior?

Yeah, but I don't really see how this could come up again to be incentivized.

If you're inclined to teach them everything now that they have magic, then Maitimo could probably have predicted this about you and it probably motivated him to get magic. If you were going to react by killing them all from the air and then saying to him 'don't try it again', he could also have predicted that about you. I realize there's a sense in which it's too late to be the sort of person who does something different.

That would make a lot more sense if I had told him in advance that I had thought of it. Or at least if I had thought of it in advance, that'd be almost as good. Since it's Maitimo.

But he does know I'm not going to hand this over unilaterally, and can definitely predict you. Probably that extends to predicting you'd come up with complicated backwards reasoning like that. So, I think it checks out?

So. We don't reward their behavior even once it's too late.

Agreed, I think.

They probably won't be able to do much. Copying the bindings on the spirits in their forges, maybe at most.

It is probably unwise to underestimate them, and possible they've been spying on us more than we realize.

I guess Maitimo did say that he wanted full information sharing and the form he expected that to take was 'he spies, he tells us things'.

He did say they'd tell us what they discover. Which I assume means unless they're working from a baseline of what we know and he wants to hide that.

I am really tempted to tell him I'll meet with him. It's a bad idea, but not less tempting for that.

Why is it an especially bad idea? You're offended personally as well as politically, but that sounds more like it'd just make it less tempting.

If I have emotions about him he can pull on them.

Ah. That.

Yeah, if he's half as good at that as he is at the informational kind of psychic powers, you're right about it being a bad idea.

Better at it.

Definitely a bad idea, then.

Now that they know, we probably don't do anything different, right? Maybe go faster, since we don't know what happens when they pass us up.

Worried they'll attack us?

That'd be extreme. Maybe try to monopolize resources. I don't know, but I really don't trust them not to try something that incidentally harms us.

No, definitely not. Provoke the Enemy, plausibly...