"What would you do with it?"

"...I don't even know, I didn't think that far ahead. Probably spell development for, I don't know, would it be too cliché'd to say 'charity'?"

"It's difficult to gauge the extent of what magic can or can't do, from the outside, but it seems to be able to do more than we've seen done, if we extrapolate some things."

"Extrapolate what things?"

"Existing magic. You can fly, there are we believe protective charms, development is possible at all and if there are moving units of meaning it seems to be plausibly flexible, and it is demonstrably flexible enough to summon an inanimate object as well as the person holding it and his daemon. From this it seems like large-scale transportation could be easily revolutionised and if nothing else the vast amounts of riches this would generate us could be invested in aforementioned charitable goals.

"Off the top of my head."

"There are protective charms, yes, though flying's not a spell, it's the cloud-pine. I'm not sure it scales up as you're hoping - a witch has to personally place every rune, and it took me a while to do enough of them to summon one alethiometer and person."

"Perhaps, that's why it's just extrapolation, but it does seem suggestive. Even if you absolutely need a witch to do it, if you could make it so everyone touching some specific object could be summoned you could employ witches at various transportation hubs around the world. An airport for teleportation magic. It may not be possible but it is the genre of idea existing magic makes us think of."

"You know witches don't generally use money, right?"

"Another advantage of the plan 'make me a witch'."

"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."