"Reasonable. I don't have much of a guess as to whether any existing wards would interfere with that but I am broadly willing to try to facilitate experiments if that would be at all helpful."

"I'm not sure that translated correctly."

(Ariu thinks as clearly as he can manage about the part of that that anyone might plausibly be confused by, which is the exact meaning of "broadly willing to try to facilitate" - it doesn't constitute a promise to definitely do anything in particular, it's just expressing that it might happen, possibly as a favor she doesn't have to pay for, since it's in the government's interests to help her leave or maybe get her to hate them less.)

"Hm," says Haria. "I am tentatively interested in helping but am not committing to anything. I want you to know that there's a substantial possibility that if you could benefit from help with, for example, making sure you aren't constantly within wards that keep your friends from contacting you, or designing a spell that would allow you to reach your friends rather than waiting for them, such help might be available. I don't mean to help as, myself, a spell designer, but in my capacity as a member of the government. Not, myself, being a spell designer, I don't know if this is a real concern in the first place, and I am using an imprecise layperson's definition of 'wards' that includes some types of illusions."

"I meant the part about 'experiments'. You also said 'experimental' a little while ago and then it sounded like it mostly meant - new - but -"

"An experiment is - trying something before you know precisely how it will go, usually with the implication that if it goes poorly you'll try something else, or that you specifically hope the results will be somehow informative - central examples of experiments might be, hm, changing individual parts of the inherited instructions in, say, oats, that determine how the seeds grow, in order to see which changes are survivable and what the resulting plants are like, or combining the constituent essences of air in different ways to see what substances can be made that way - the experimental wards are significantly safer than that example, which occurred to me specifically because it's a cautionary tale."

"Cautionary how?"

Well, explaining chemistry isn't his job, but preventing her from destroying things is. "In general, magic is not only dangerous when used maliciously. Using only the single element that makes up the majority of air - where it appears as a substance that is inert and which you can safely inhale every few heartbeats without any ill effects - you can construct a substance that reliably explodes when touched. This is dangerous if done under the assumption that all things that can be made from thin air are safe to breathe or at least to stand near. The process of drawing other things out of the air increases the local concentration of vital air, making fires easier to start, precisely in the air around the explosive substance. This is not a unique danger; this is only one of the more well-known examples."

"How was this discovered? - I know this seems like a tangent. It is actually very important."

"It's so easy to synthesize that people have discovered it multiple times independently. Would you like specific dates on which this has happened in public that you can have someone scry for you?"

"...maybe. What other things are people discovering experimentally?"

"The genes that determine fur color and whether you have a tail. Other substances that can be easily synthesized - often metal alloys with useful properties. I suppose what other examples there are might depend on what precisely I mean by 'experiment' - does trying to improve voter turnout among people likely to support your faction count if you're trying things that have been suggested to you but that you aren't sure will really work?"

"That's... less important but not uninteresting."

"What are you trying to learn with this line of questioning?"

"I am trying to learn whether this universe permits experimentation within it."

"The... universe? It's possible to experiment within this universe. I confess to not entirely understanding the question, if the fact that I have given several examples of experiments hasn't answered it."

(Ariu is thinking if other universes have laws of physics different enough that she doesn't already understand how to do science safely then it would sure have been convenient if someone could have just gotten some bracelets on her when she showed up, though he doesn't suppose that was actually possible. Alas.)

"The examples help a lot, it's just the sort of thing one likes to be particularly sure of. No one wants an angered universe."

(Ariu is now thinking that it would also be a great idea to enslave anyone from Har who fetched up in whatever universe can be angry about experiments. He is thinking this slightly more at her than the last thing.)

"The universe will not be angry. When you perform an experiment, you, by definition, do not know what exactly will happen; sometimes what happens is not what you hoped would happen. Experiments can be dangerous in that sense."

"Yes, that's not the thing I mean. If you want me out of your universe at best speed I need a lot of very large paper and high quality ink."

"Such things can be provided to you. Before you leave, I would like you to continue telling me about how other worlds might impinge on ours and, of course, come to an agreement about the manumission incentive program."

"Do you think your world might impinge on others? One of the first people I spoke to wanted it to."

"I would be surprised if that happened without someone from another world facilitating it."

"Is that a technical limitation only or are there other reasons you might hesitate?"

"The current government views war as a means to the end of ensuring peace and safety for the Hari Empire and might therefore see no reason to invade a foreign country that was no threat to us."

"But that could change with the next election and certainly wouldn't hold if there was any possibility of a threat?"

"I think it has held mostly steady for most of the Imperial Period, about four hundred forty seven years. I think most people likely to be elected would make some attempt to resolve threats peacefully, by means including but not limited to offering the opportunity to join the empire peacefully."