"So you can get filthy rich! I see."

"And make other people witches! They can get filthy rich, too. And isn't money meant to be a way to represent how much value I have generated to society?"

"We don't particularly have much use for vast quantities of money, anyway. We're fine living reasonably frugally," says Luca, raising a wing in the direction of the huge backpack.

"You did say charity, I suppose." She turns the turkey legs over.

"I think project 'make everyone immortal' still takes precedence, mind you!"

"Witches can bless trees, can't they? They can presumably curse things, too. There seems like it should be a way to combine those things to reduce the population of, or even perhaps completely extinguish, certain parasitic species or carriers of diseases, as a step before scale witchlike immortality. As an example of a more directly charitable application of magic."

"Range isn't that good," she says.

"Teleport to relevant locations—actually, if one can create a spell that tracks alethiometres then maybe one could make something to track malaria-carrying mosquitos, somehow—or malaria-immunising potions? We have even less knowledge of how potions work than the rest of witch magic."

"You're aware there's a vaccine, right?"

"Yes, but last we heard it required specific cooling conditions that were hard to move to the more remote locations that might benefit the most from them. And something about needing multiple shots? We're fuzzy on the details."

"But it's not bottlenecked on witches."

Sadde spreads his arms out. "Everyone's a witch!" He settles back down. "Although I guess if we can already turn people into witches we can turn them immortal so we might as well just do that." Shrug.

"Everyone being a witch is bottlenecked on witches."

"It can explode exponentially if every new witch turns two more people into witches on average."

"Maintaining that rate adds a lot of screening cost though."

"Maybe we can resurrect people and that relaxes a lot of constraints."

"That sounds unlikely."

"Nah, that's on my list."

Blink.

"Wait, for real?"

"It's harder than immortality, I think, but with an alethiometer, yeah, I hope to figure it out. I don't think it improves the witch bottleneck that much though because there are way fewer dead witches than dead mortals."

"No, that's not why, I meant that then it's less urgent to turn everyone immortal immediately because then anyone we miss we can get later. So yeah still bottlenecked but that's less a problem."

"How? Past-watching? Where is the spell getting its information from? ...maybe the same place the alethiometer is."

"It's a proof of concept all right."

"Was it made with witch magic?"