"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."

"How large do you mean your circle or circles to be? I will need to create a suitable place to put them."

"About the length of this room in radius. There's no compelling reason to have them near each other if that makes layouts more convenient or whatever."

"It seems most convenient to have them in the same room but separated by some distance. A transit station in the upper base level of the tower should be suitable. It will connect to the indexed catacomb transit, and to the upper and lower Tower Stations."

"That would probably sound great if I knew what those places were."

"My domain is bisected by an extremely tall cliff. At the arbitrarily chosen centerpoint of the cliff, there is a tall tower. It reaches from the bottom of the cliff to the top and then that distance again up into the air. The transit systems of the upper and lower levels are distinct, and each has a separate station at its own level of the tower, called Tower Station in both cases. The catacombs are the complex of tunnels and rooms in which the unwoken dead are stored until waking. They radiate outward from the tower, beginning at the upper base level, which is just under ground level for the high side of the cliffs. I intend to create an indexed transit system for them, which will have its hub in a room containing your circles. Transit systems work by teleportation in a way that seems similar in some respects to your teleportation circles, except more convenient and organized."

"Arbitrarily chosen centerpoint? Is it infinite?" asks Kaylo.

"Yes."

"Coooool. Okay, so yeah, as long as there's uniquely defined sufficient space in your domain - does it not have a name besides 'your domain'? - then the caster will be able to aim the scry that handles that end's reactivity in just fine. The spell will technically all be located in and working from Elcenia; wizardry doesn't play nice in other worlds."

"The two levels have been nicknamed Downside and Upside respectively, but my domain as a whole is nameless. Is wizardry the type of magic related to the numeric quantity attached to Elcenians?"

"Yes. It is that thing. The numeric quantity is called channeling capacity and if you are about to tell me you can screw around with CC for fun and profit I will become very annoyed that you are too warded to high-five."

"Wizarding reservoir," says Kaylo. "...By entity what exactly do you mean?"

"I can perceive that it has a mind which makes decisions, but not very much more beyond that."