Sigh.

Tempted to take him up on the offer to let us read his mind.

There's nothing–  currently urgent, is there? That bad?

There's a war!

I mean anything they know that we need to that'd be worth the extreme. The war is there either way.

If it even worked. He could swear he's not hiding any thoughts and get away with having sworn not to think about something, or similar.

That's straightforward to work around. I don't know if there's anything we need to coordinate on that desperately, the transaction friction seems costly but I am only seeing half of it, I don't know if they'd tell us everything we need to know, I don't know how much better off we'd be if we could work with them on the name-calling and the karma plan...

Me neither. First one would be a function of how many practitioners they have and the second is less predictable.

Maybe if we absolutely had to coordinate something. Absent that, I've been trying to stay away from magic like this and using it when there seems to be a good reason is– not that.

Hmm?

When it goes wrong it can go very wrong. She debates sending a memory and doesn't. This is read-only, at least, but unrestricted access to someone's brain is really extreme.

There can always be some emergency big enough, but right now it's more like convenience.

I'm not sure it is. We're not telling them about major, important operations, they're not telling us, they'd apparently speculated that the Enemy might take the continent down with him and not shared that...

They shared it once destroying Angband was on the table. The rest I'll agree.

And if we'd seen an opening to destroy Angband and there wasn't time to run it by them -

They were probably relying on their spying to know if we had anything that could do it given a chance. Not exactly reassuring.

No, it really isn't.  Sigh. 

No. 

We can at least wait until there's something more concrete depending on it.

Yes.

For now we can at least scale up what we're doing. I'm worried it might take armies of full-time practitioners.

Well, we can get up to ten thousand pretty easily, past there will be a challenge.

Ten– easily? Wow.

And we've already got enough to irritate him; maybe this isn't that much of a problem.

Not easily, but 'within a year and without anyone going hungry', yes.

Oh. Well, a Year is still pretty fast for shifting ten percent of the population.

We are here to fight a war; the means might be unconventional but we were expecting to be diverting lots of resources to the cause of war-fighting.

I do keep forgetting to think of it as an army as much as a country. That makes this less surprising.

Do you want to ask about a library, if it is going to be a year?

Yes. There is a high enough chance a randomly chosen Vala will do it, right?

A high enough chance to be worth petitioning them? Normally I'd say 'yes, definitely worth the try' but with the Doom I am less certain.