"Hear hear! Every spell invented adds to the collective understanding of civilization- I'm overwhelmingly glad to hear those words still spoken in the home of Aroden!" Coeliaris blinks away a tear.

Wave. Wow, she hopes Victòria got an invitation to the wizard party and wasn't hired to come here in her capacity as a prostitute; probably not, the crowd's heavy on the distaff configuration of wizard.

Nice, she correctly guessed how to appeal to the foreign wizard.  And apparently lucked into Arodenite theology as an added bonus?  She should have figured, Aroden was a powerful wizard so it makes sense his theology would praise wizards.  Too bad Asmodeus killed him.

Liushna waves back at Victoria. 

"I...don't know much about liches, specifically, and I'm well aware that different types of undead are different, but I don't think ghosts are less responsible than anyone else?"

She's...not sure what Feather means by "we have to help them." Presumably she means the badgers, but Liushna isn't sure what kind of help she means. 

Fins-to-Feet sounds deeply cool. Liushna is putting "contact with merfolk???" in her notes to bring home. 

She's not sure how she feels about spells being described as a Civilization thing. So far Civilization seems to be deeply, deeply overrated, but she's not stupid enough to say that out loud. 

Rojix has picked up that one waves at people and he also waves at Victòria.

"I'm not worried about it being worthless, I'm worried about it being dangerous or harmful somehow. Everyone would be better off if some particular spells didn't exist. Maybe you understand magic better, but also, all the wizards can do a new thing and it might be a very bad thing for them to be doing! Advancing understanding isn't worth everyone knowing how to - torture people at a lower circle, or something."

"If the lich passes around a spell without saying what it does, everyone will copy and learn it like you did. Maybe if you knew what the spell does you wouldn't want it; maybe it's so bad that Professor Coeliaris, or the government, or the archmages, would stop that pamphlet if they knew what the spell really does. So if the lich didn't tell you, I think it means she didn't have your interests at heart. An undead who makes other undead isn't going to be helping people."

"Or maybe it's something like - everyone foolish enough to cast it on themselves suffers horribly, and the lich has a good laugh, and it doesn't really matter on the grand scale of things, but it still isn't going to be good."

(She meant helping them by destroying them and stopping the lich from doing it to any more badgers!)

"...I mean, I still don't know? About liches specifically? But the undead are often, uh, limited, compared to alive people, so I wouldn't necessarily assume it was malice and not thoughtlessness?"

"Turning badgers undead out of thoughtlessness still hurts them just as much and needs to be stopped. The mysterious spell isn't definitely malicious but I think it's an awfully big risk to be taking and by spreading it first without knowing what it does, it's being taken in a particularly irresponsible way, because after many people have seen it you can't count on all of them destroying their copies if it turns out to be harmful after all."

“I think given the Lich’s other writings, a misguided flawed attempt at a useful helpful spell is much more likely than a self-torture spell.  Her other spell permanently preserves food and stuff, but renders it poisonous in the process, and a purify food and drink can later remove the poison, but the taste is ruined… but maybe with some appropriate cooking technique the taste alteration could actually be used beneficially, like how pickled foods have a unique taste.  So I’m hopeful the self-transmutation is intended to be useful, and might genuinely be useful with some clever usage.”

"You seem to have done quite the investigation, Miss Estella. Have you ever considered working as a research wizard? There might be a position at the College opening up."

Fernando wants to impress the professor also!

“Is there a… temporary undeadifying version of polymorph?  You could make yourself temporarily undead, and that way you’d be more similar to the Lich  and thereby likely to avoid any side effects, like poisoning, living creatures might take from the spell.”

“I’ve considered it… but I am in fact still first circle… I didn’t get well rounded leveling opportunities during my one term in the army.  And the raw power of higher circles is often confounded and confused with equivalent to skill at spellcraft.  But maybe with wiser leadership coming into the college my circle wouldn’t hold me back so much?”

Feather is somewhat dubious about the novel idea of preserving food by poisoning it. Maybe the poison protects it from mold and such?

"I hope the poison isn't any worse than what someone could make anyway, or less detectable or something? I don't know at what circle a wizard can poison a lot of food, if they don't know how to do it nonmagically."

She waves at the little devilspawn toddler. She is trying not to be uncomfortable about the fact that it's a devilspawn, it's a toddler, it almost certainly hasn't done anything Evil yet. (She is not totally succeeding at not being uncomfortable but she's succeeding at not showing it.)

“You are correct the spell isn’t much more valuable than a bottle of vinegar, maybe less so given standard recipes can positively leverage vinegar, but still, permanent and indefinite duration spells are unusual enough that any examples of them, especially at first circle, are quite valuable from a research standpoint.”

Wow what a ludicrous idea going against every fact about life and wizardry, polymorphing is totally different from inverting the processes of life to running off negative energy.

"What an Intriguing Concept it is, to Assume the Form of Unlife Temporarily! Has your Research tended down this Road? I myself do not much practice Necromancy, but All Spells are Wondrous Knowledge, after all."

He’s sensing some dry sarcasm, or maybe outright mockery?  Either way he’s not high enough circle for even alter self, so he doesn’t know much about polymorph spells.  Subject change!

“I’m more of a Conjuration specialist.  Healings done with eschew materials (and thus no evil component) have been selling quite well over the past year.”

"...I am sorry for butting into a technical wizarding conversation, but" it is showing the classic wizarding lack of Wisdom "making yourself temporarily undead is the worst possible thing you could do! Becoming undead warps your mind and makes you want to stay undead, and possibly to make other people undead, that's probably how we get most undead in the first place!" And also makes you hate and try to destroy everything Good and Natural - these people might not care about that. "As well as being reportedly excruciatingly painful. And definitely extremely Evil."

Nod nod nod at Delegate Feather. Raising people as skeletons doesn't stop being wrong if you're raising yourself as a skeleton.

"...Most of the ghosts I've met would rather still be alive than be ghosts? Maybe it's different for corporeal undead, being a ghost can be annoying." 

Okay it was a stupid idea.  There probably isn’t a spell like that.  Can they stop mocking him about it?  And it seems hypocritical from a Druid that thinks monsters should get votes or whatever that she can’t appreciate unlike.

He doesn’t say this out loud, hopefully no one has detect thoughts up.  Hopefully the topic changes soon.  He’ll keep silent until it does.

“I think Ghosts are possibly the least Evil of undead?  Many of them don’t have a hunger for life, or innate murderous impulses, and they have more lingering traces of their mortal sentiments which puts them ahead of all other undead I know of.”

She specialized in necromancy, but she generally tries not to draw attention to that.

"Consider however the Possibilities; why, it is said the Undead are Immune to many Ailments of which the Living suffer. Moreover it is Harmful Negative Energy which Heals them. Why, the Advances in Medicine could be Vast. Perhaps you should Apprentice yourself to the President's Wife!"

"I think ghosts aren't really undead, they're just - dead but still here. So they're more like people in afterlives, who also often would rather still be alive. It's still wrong to be or make a ghost, it's not the natural order, maybe unless it's - trying to escape Hell or something - but it's not always and necessarily hurting and wronging them like making them undead would be. They're like undead only in the sense that they're hurt by cures, not in all the other ways undead are like each other."

"...also, I've never heard of anyone making themselves or someone else a ghost on purpose. All the other undead are made on purpose, or by a disease or something."