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Atennesi Cohen has had to be many things to survive his peers' scrutiny for over a century and a half. Wary is one of them.
But a snake with a mirror for a head suddenly appearing in his office and sweeping its mirror-face at him? That, he wasn't prepared for.
"You can make them grow faster with magic but it's not that much more efficient than cutting off a branch the tree can live without and growing that into more wood so."
"It's occurred to me. Woodsail's pretty sparsely inhabited, they don't need to be very efficient in space and do need to be reasonably efficient in labor."
Nod. "Resource considerations are really different up here, where magic is plentiful and space is at a premium, than on the ground where space is plentiful and magic is at a premium."
"I don't know if it's a lot per capita on the ground but it's more than we can admit--every year we set up a budget of people to immigrate and some of it is for refugees and some of it is for mages with skills we want and some of it is for nonmagical skilled labor and we usually throw in like half a percent for people who are basically okay where they are but want the higher standard of living so many mages brings because it makes people a lot less likely to resent the magic floating island of wonders if they get to dream that one day they'll be there too."
"Yeah, exactly. Although given how refugee situations aren't usually polite enough to warn us in advance that they're going to happen it's often more like 'okay, we went way overbudget last year and need a slimmer budget the next few years to compensate, what can we cut,' and the normal people margin is usually the first thing to go."
"Sometimes! Usually it's mages who would rather be a big fish in a small pond than a medium fish in a big pond, but sometimes people leave for other reasons. It's pretty rare, though--I mean people come to live at the university while they study here and then go home when they graduate, but that's not quite the same thing. But people almost never leave who aren't mages, I don't think anywhere else in the world has the per capita mages to cover everyone's de-aging."
(Belamaveth knows very well this isn't, actually, true, but it is the commonly accepted answer as to why people regularly die of senescence outside of Genosha.)
"I'm not a mage! I tried, but the side-effects...I couldn't handle it. I do my part working on policy. Maybe more mages should leave to do de-aging on the ground, but I don't think trying to make them would work out very well."
"That's very good," she says approvingly. "Personally, I think we ought to send the University students down for fieldwork, let them see what the rest of the world is like while we're up here, but he won't budge on that one," she adds, her brow wrinkling in disgruntlement.
(The reason Atennesi won't budge on that one, which this woman wouldn't know but Belamaveth may infer, is that any potential Great Mages who might make trouble for the establishment--the type of person Belamaveth was made to be--are killed as soon as the others find out about them, which Atennesi takes great pains to prevent should any spring up in Genosha.)
"No, the University and affiliated institutions bring in plenty. Trading magic for things is much more our comparative advantage than putting up the infrastructure for tourism for tourism money."
"Makes sense. I wonder how people decide they'd rather live here of all places if they can't have ever seen it."
"Nobody starves, here, and your children will definitely have the opportunity to become mages without having to hope that someone wants them as an apprentice."
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