"And inconvenient to get them out of there, too. Uuuuh, naturally occurring gemstones? I suppose asking you to 'instantiate' a 'naturally occurring' gem might be an oxymoron."

"If duplication is an issue I can refrain from making multiple copies of a single item. I do not normally duplicate in that way in any case."

"Yeah, I just don't know how it'd show up on a counterfeit checking spell. I guess there are probably wrecked paintings and books and archaeological stuff people would like to have that would be about as valuable even if it did ding a counterfeit checker."

"For the purpose of creating a convenient and conveniently located transfer installation, I will instantiate any such object that is described in sufficient detail for me to identify it."

"Swell. I'll work out a price sheet for the R&D. You probably want Keo putting you in touch with buyers or in touch with somebody who could find them better than I could, though. If," Kaylo says, "you can just plain summon people out of the afterlife, are my parents going to be in natural form such that I'll need a circle the size of the entire campus lawn to summon them?"

"Your species is... interesting," says the administrator. "They are currently not physically present in my domain, because they had too many irregularities as a group to integrate smoothly into the existing system. Size at time of death is one of those irregularities. There is also the matter of the two subsets who had an insufficiency of a species-unique resource in life, causing early death in one case and peculiar adaptations in the other. I believe in both cases I will see to it that the insufficiency is corrected after death. It seems the most elegant option. But I am less sure what to do with the array of alternate physical shapes. There are intricacies involved. I suppose it would be more convenient from your perspective if shapes with blocked access due to injury were recovered along with their associated items?"

"Yeah. Having to re-learn the shape and replace an outfit wouldn't usually be a big deal, but it'd be more convenient not to have to. You're saying my parents aren't there at all because they're dragons?"

"Yes. The species as a whole will be instantiated once I have made all the relevant design decisions and created a suitable area for them to occupy. I will need to create a version of the storage space local to my domain, since I cannot directly make changes in the other one, but there should be no outwardly visible difference since I can copy it directly... I see there are more varieties of people with similar access, although of a more limited kind. They will need less specific attention. I find it inelegant that the choice of a shape is permanent; I will include an option for the dead to relinquish and replace them. Similarly, all forms will undergo the usual restoration on fatal injury, instead of being switched out and blocked. Do you have any suggestions to make, since you are a member of the relevant species?"

"The - storage space. Lialenan matter theory is correct?" he asks, opening his eyes very wide.

"If Lialenan matter theory says that alternate physical shapes are stored in a space of loose matter while not in use, it is correct," she says. "Is this surprising?"

"Well, I already thought so, but it's not an orthodox opinion. Can you outline the - limits of the parameters of suggestions I could usefully make?"

"Perhaps not easily. What kind of parameters do you mean?"

"Okay, like - insufficiency of a species-unique resource? What is that? I have guesses, but only that. And the relinquishing forms thing, are you saying we'll be able to replace what we've picked up as many times as we want like we're all unusual blues? Just how ridiculously powerful are you?"

"Yes, that is what I mean. The limitations of what I can do in my domain are mostly driven by complexity," she says. "For example, it took me several hundred years to perfect my design for a rule to inhibit the accumulation of dust on surfaces. Minds, their association with their bodies, and the decisions they make are all recognized as fundamental constructs by my magic; everything else is just different varieties of organized matter and energy, and in order to manipulate it I have to address it on that level. The species-unique resource in question is the same one that drives all of your species-specific magic. One type of insufficiency is a fatal condition in the very young; the other type is associated with an adaptation that prevents flight."

"Shrens and dragon infant mortality. Damn," says Kaylo, letting all his breath out in a whoosh.

"Relatedly, your species has an unusually high proportion of dead infants," she says. "While I am reorganizing, perhaps I will implement a directory so that visitors can locate their relatives among the suspended arrivals and wake them, without needing to use a temporary summons or wait for them to be woken the long way, which can take many thousands of years. The major difficulty would be indexing the directory... would genetic information and time of death be sufficient to look someone up? I can have both automatically retrieved without much trouble."

"We usually come in clutches. There'll be plenty of babies with the same parents and gender and color who died on the same day," says Kaylo, shaking his head. "And they die without names when it's that early. I mean, maybe most people will want to fetch entire clutches all at once, but they might want one at a time and care which, and that'd probably be by traits like 'the one that made the cute squeaking noise' or 'the one that liked carrots'..."

"I see. That kind of information is more difficult to retrieve and handle. But I suppose that does not necessarily make the directory valueless. It is possible to match the identity of an individual seen in a person's memory, but targeting the correct memory is non-trivial. If I designed such a system, it might require testing."

"Well, I want my parents back, and they probably want at least some of my brothers and sisters."

"Would you like to test the directory by retrieving them?"

"Unless their status as test subjects will cause some form of disaster, yes."

"Okay, so I'll need to find somebody to send me 'cause I can't send myself, either that or just wait for circles to be set up, I think I can get it invented in mmmmaybe three weeks, possibly less depending on how much fine detail of teleportation circles turns out to be applicable. Keo's brother is ludicrously rich and might be willing to do something fancy like front you the money for the casting and the land to do it on if you let him handle the finding-interested-archaeologists thing... Merfolk should be able to use a suitably underwater version of the circle but I guess that means he needs to do more castings... they could use the aboveground version if there was a watermage on staff on both ends and a canal from the Elcenian end of the circle to the ocean, I guess."

"Water on my end can be supplied, potentially."

"Yeah, the reactivity I have in mind will activate if they touch the circle, so enough water for them to swim close and put a hand on it will do. And there can be a watermage or maybe just a spell to make hovering water on the Elcenian end, and a canal, and we make sure they line up, and they can get into the ocean from there, and maybe if they live in the opposite corner of the world they have a bit of a trip but at least they aren't drowning. Size I'm thinking they'd need maybe ten percent of its area in a blob near an edge."