"Did humans have lightleapers when you were alive?"

"They don't have them now, it's an Elf thing."

"Have they managed to explore space without them?"

"Not very far, but they're settling within the solar system. Projects to get all the way to another system have been tried but they turn out to be incredibly logistically and managerially challenging and so far nobody's landed on an exoplanet."

"What makes it challenging?"

"You need to put a lot of people in a sealed environment that can keep them all alive for years and manage a terraforming project at point B. Also, since you can't compel daeva to do things, you need to do this without being able to count on them for propulsion, fuel, or resupply. Also the people in the sealed environment need to not go crazy and kill each other. I think someone will pull it off eventually but there's not even people on every moon of Jupiter yet."

"That sounds like a really interesting challenge honestly,"

"I know, right? Honestly I'd love to go along with a colony project as the supply demon but whatever chance I had to score a gig of that nature has now... evaporated forever, so."

"Why?"

"Because I holed a planet, Lucien."

"Ah."

"Are people in your home dimension aware of that?"

"Not yet, but like, I don't want to - seal myself in a tin can with a thousand excited generation-shippers and then have them find out somehow, they'd be so fucking scared."

"Oh...."

"Basically everyone in my world would panic if they knew I was doing magic. And it's not like they're wrong to - cultists keep trying to destroy the world and dark magic kills far more people than mundane crime and I haven't actually heard of anyone who does as much magic as me and wasn't possessed by some sort of horrible madness or another. I've thought some about how to change this so I can sell people on resurrection once I get it but as it stands I have to keep everything I am doing extremely secret."

Nod. "I knew I was - taking a cost not just in lives but also in my - moral credibility, forever, but knowing it doesn't make it go away."

"I... still hope I live long enough that people change their mind about the sort of thing I've done. Unless I'm wrong about the tradeoffs being navigable in which case I'd prefer they find out and stop me sooner rather than later."

Nod nod.

"It does sound to me like you did the right thing, for what it's worth."

"I think so too.

Thank you."