"Nothing like a little money to make everyone become a better person."

"Well, there are some people that are not moved by economic incentives, but we can at least outcompete them by virtue of all the shiny new magic and technology that we can distribute to everyone that is more sensible."

"That might nnnnot be that easy. The cultural taboo is really strong, and there were some wars in the past where a single metamancer was a match for an army. A lot of history was lost, then, and because of the taboo. Now my continent has exactly three countries, except they're pretty much the same political unit."

"I was thinking more in terms of how they would react to sorcery and possibly the other kinds of magic."

"I know, and I mean they might get suspicious of you on similar grounds, that your magic is evil or something."

"Simply because it's weird and new or something else? Maybe the lifeforce cost? Any idea on how we could make them think positively of our magic?"

"Maybe we could use Daliad or some other faith to portray sorcery on a positive light?"

"I think it's because it can do large-scale stuff that our magic can't and that's always been by default what metamancers can do. Starting with your limitations might help, like, what you can't in fact do—or with ours, like, your magic can do permanent effects, right? Ours can't, so that's obviously not a metamancer thing and not automatically bad."

"Yeah, if you want to be technical about it. We can do long-lasting things, but considering they can reach millions of years."

"And some of Synth's bio-manipulations are hereditary, so there is that too."

"Yeah, probably open with that." Pause. "I just realised Bar might have books on the actual history of my world."

That causes a reaction on the triplets and Katur.

"Bar might have books on the history of all of our worlds. Even the origin of Elsewhere itself."

She asks and "Bar can make anything that was actually published so maybe not—" some more questions and "—it's about licit access to the work, apparently, where that's relevant."

"Well, we could just ask for history books published in the worlds currently known as Exile, Eidos and Elsewhere. Oooh, maybe sorcery books too."

"Are there any published books you wouldn't normally have access to?"

"Plenty? It can give us things long out of print. And maybe some ancient civilization was more public about portal making."

"Makes sense, yeah. And by the way, you guys seemed to be assuming we could put your and my worlds in contact, so I gather you can make portals to my world?"

"We should check, obviously, but as far I understood the main constraints are that one end of the portal needs to be in Elsewhere and you have a way to target the right world."

"Well. That sounds delightful, then." There's a thoughtful pause, and she says, "You know, the time stop thing kinda takes a lot of the pressure off."

"Absolutely! Or did you mean that you have some sort of emergency back home?"

"No, I meant that while normally I would be running off to use all this knowledge and all these resources but here I can relax and stop holding off on all the flirting I'd normally do when finding four incredibly attractive, competent, and presumably polyamorous boys."

"Honestly, few situations are urgent enough to hold off the flirting you should do when finding the totally polyamorous boys."

"Meeting people from other universes that can solve all your problems is one such situation, but time is stopped," she says, raising an eyebrow, "which means that until we run out of money we are completely and totally free to do whatever we want."

"Oh? Do you have suggestions?"

"Several, but they might not be accepted immediately so we should start with a series of decreasingly plausibly deniable ones until the five of us have settled on an arrangement we're all comfortable with."