<That does not seem like the most systematic approach.>

"Do you have a suggestion?"

<I can only speak to this universe, I have not spent any time getting acquainted with any of the others. But humanity took the revelation that aliens exist and were fighting a proxy war over them astonishingly well, and are unambiguously the better off for having been fully informed. At least here, I do not see substantial risk from going public with everything. If you have ten of my father and they have not been able to reverse-engineer anything at all from the extremely dangerous and powerful spell, it seems vanishingly implausible that anyone else will, and while I respect being cautious with stakes that high how many countless hundreds of billions of people have died for lack of a perfect healing spell, or been stuck in bad situations for lack of a local teleport? Is there a number that would be too many? What has been seriously attempted to restrict spell reverse-engineering, beyond keeping it in very few hands? Can you lock the necklaces to one dimension, can you conjure for writing in the alphabet consistent with an effort to reverse-engineer it, can you do eidetic memory necklaces that offer only a few hours of perfect memory so you can commit the extant spells to memory but not do anything else?>

"Your father's alts haven't had long enough to make progress at reverse-engineering the sorcery alphabet. It takes longer than they've had to invent a spell even at Loki's pace, and she gets the alphabet making sense for free - and they've got a lot of projects underway and I don't think that one has been a priority. I don't see how dimension-locked necklaces would solve the problem; the sorcery system itself is not incapable of producing an eidetic memory spell, if someone was desperate to produce non-local trouble. Demons can restrict conjurations by alphabet but that won't find chiplocked work or anything where someone uses their own symbols or numbers instead. And one does have to memorize the symbol correspondences as well as the spell sequences to be able to cast; all a time-limited eidetic memory would do would be not grant you the added convenience of being able to remember everything else that's ever happened to you."

<Or the ability to memorize new spells.>

"Necklaces are also not the only source of eidetic memory; that's not where I got mine, or where the vampires get theirs."

<If the answer is 'some motivated people sat down in a room for a week and thought really hard about ways to make the universe safe other than 'secrecy' and tallied up the death toll from secrecy and concluded that there was no way to do better' I will respect that. My experience of people who decide secrecy is the only way to make the universe safe is that they usually have not done that to my satisfaction.>

"The answer is more like 'some motivated people are not out of lower-risk low-hanging fruit'. Like, every month or two my wife finds us a new world in range of my wish-granting-thing and I end mortality there and do other spot repairs, I think this is actually pretty efficient compared to spell distribution which is both bottlenecked on telepathy and hideously dangerous. And even if we did decide that everyone gets all the sorcery, distribution would still be a logistics problem and we're laying groundwork that would smooth that out if we go that route."

<There is also a lot of ground between mass distribution and "Bells and whoever they personally trust". I agree that Wish has better avenues.>

"Don't look at me, I spent a while refusing to do anything too useful because I thought I might still be a captive of an evil god and now I have a planet. Loki has two planets - sort of - and spell development to do - and Cam is running around meeting all our trustworthy demon needs - and Golden has a planet - and T'Mir and Boots are co-running a federated thing and Boots does spell development and high-trust therapy stuff - Iobel has a country and spell development - you are entirely welcome to make a case for stepping up distribution or trying it as a pilot program here or something but I don't think we're underusing our resources particularly. And it sounds like you may be slightly underestimating how many people Bells give stuff out to? Like, a bunch of orcs have the healing spell because they otherwise have a species-wide chronic pain problem and Loki can't personally poke every single orc from every single Arda, so there's orc planets and orcs on them with her spell."

<No, that's exactly my point, all of you are tremendously good at leveraging your resources and there are not very many of you and any system built on personal trust is going to end up mostly ignoring any world that does not happen to have one of you in it. My objection is not that Bells underuse their resources but that Bells are way too busy to also be the bottleneck on resources. My concerns will be significantly alleviated if there are dimensions without personal Bell involvement that have since they were discovered become significant contributors to the project of improving the multiverse.>

"Worlds we have discovered mostly fall into the categories 'an Arda', 'has a native Bell', and 'boring'. There's one two steps from Wish with a neat magic system and I have people on looking for exploits on that but that probably constitutes personal Bell involvement?"

<I will look around before I decide how concerned to be. I would not try to run a multiverse off personal trust but perhaps Bells know a lot more people and are much better judges of character, obviously in our case the species difference is confounding.>

"Was that sarcasm? We do not and are not."

"Feel free to present an alternative. One which doesn't lead to people running amok. We already have one Melkor running amok and have not yet been able to catch him."

<Do you mind if I visit a few boring dimensions and try building institutions by which people acquire nifty interdimensional magic for achievements at improving local standards of living? Not nifty interdimensional magic that would make them any more dangerous than the average Pool ship, of course. If not, I will try that and revisit the conversation once I am better informed.>

"Sounds like a perfectly reasonable project. There's a catalog of boring dimensions in the standard files. May be a confounding factor that most of the boring we've discovered is a hop from Edda or Wish - since that's where we've got the best advantages at fixing things - but there's also some boring off Shadow encountered in the course of chasing the runaway Melkor."

<Thank you.>

"No problem."

"I think the difference in perspective there is that we all started in worlds small enough that we actually could run them by personal familiarity, and this was not an astronomical waste of potential because people would rise to our personal attention even absent any institutional means for them to do that. I take it your world's bigger than that?"

<...yes, I definitely could not have been sure that I was doing right by everybody if I tried working just off the ones I personally knew. The Andalites have a smaller population than Earth by an order of magnitude but we are distributed across a dozen star systems.>

"Yep, we've got a smaller population than Earth by four orders of magnitude. Space's only two. And you're also the only one without obligations at home. Go ahead and give it a try."

"Criminal waste, really, them causing you to have no obligations at home."

<They were aware of that, actually. They just could not think what else to do. I could probably try to redeem my name once we have ended the war but I had a lovely time on Earth and it sounds like I can do that again in lots of different worlds and that sounds very much more fun.

Speaking of the war, which of those magics are you inclined to make known to this world and which will we need to win?>

"If we operate openly at all it will be inconvenient and challenging to conceal the teleportation, we'd have to manufacture a lot of transit delays and so on. We could pass it off as pure personal transport and not let on about the extent to which it is more than that, but it does scope well enough that we could probably collapse a lot of explanation of how we're accomplishing a lot of things into 'they have snazzy teleportation'. Our divination type stuff - wizardry, demons, Golden's got a staffperson with magic perfect timing, might also be able to interest the friend of hers with magic planning stuff powers even though she's not on staff - I don't think we ought to explain at all, although it will probably be pretty clear we have some kind of intel advantage it is also pretty normal not to detail those. Osanwë's an excellent Yeerk-checking tool, or probably is, pending tests, and is only up to the best standards of consent if people know how it works, so that should probably be public."