"It is, again, a matter of incentives. Ideas like that don't just disappear, they need to have very good reasons to disappear, and merely practical ones aren't enough. Not when they've gotten so deeply rooted."

"And that's the stupid part. The incentive is the Golems that they make! The giant cool walking statues! The thing people like me spend our lives trying to find... Maybe you too, I don't know why you joined."

"That's part of the reason," he agrees. "But on the other hand there were the huge wars that devastated the continent and left all these giant cool walking statues around."

The correct answer is not 'so?'.

"I know. At what part did I say to do that all again? All I said was like, using metamancers. There's plenty of ways that don't let them have that kind of power."

"Right but the thing is, if even one gets that kind of power, then it's the wars again. And according to the doctrines, metamancers were corrupted by Vinkar and everything they touch is spoilt."

"If one gets it, we just-- SURE! We're all touched by the same set of magic, we all must obviously be spoiled! Time to just plummet down now!"

Cynthia doesn't give off the sense of sarcasm that well.

He recognises it anyway. "We just what, exactly?"

"I'm pretty sure like, several sane mages and some good test subjects could make some sort of way to kill a Metamancer. I mean, we did beat them before? And with all the neat stuff around, having a few good Metas could be a ton of more help then one bad one?"

"An army beat them before, and it was a near thing, and we had several times their numbers."

"And a better prepared army versus a starved Metamancer? Where---"

She rubs her eyes. "Sorry, I'm stupid. This is why people hate me if they know me. Say weird things then never shut up. Don't have to keep talking."

"I don't hate you. I... understand why other people would not like to talk about this. Taboo is strong. And you're not stupid. Also you'd have to first starve the metamancer, and that's not super easy to do."

She stares out towards somewhere and squeaks out "well I'm sure we could find an easier way to do that. This is probably the worst I've felt flying. Flying together is different."

"We can just talk about something else. I think you're correct, for the record, we could find a better way."

She looks back over. "Okay." A shrug. "I said I joined for finding Golems because I liked them, what did you join for?"

"Finding cool things, getting money, gaining a lot of social capital to start pushing for large-scale change in policy that does not require me to be royalty, directly."

"... Changes in policy? What?"

"You know, change laws, divert more taxes to large-scale public goods and services, that sort of thing."

"Oh, the stuff that makes people in Teinnab yell at each other. Sure, sure. Not my thing." Cynthia doesn't have anything else to add to the topic.

"Well, not just that. Taxation itself and tax reforms, investment in technology, getting someone to stop those petty Bezanab lords squabbling all the time and taking the townsfolk with them, better wealth redistribution, medicine... Maybe even trying to make metamancers more accepted, who knows."

She isn't into the conversation until the last sentence. "Well, the usual stuff until the end there. I stopped paying attention to all that bickering, but good luck I guess?"

"Well it's the usual stuff that's gonna save several lives, yes. End goal, utopia filled with immortals."

"Immortals? Aren't we like, too young to think about living forever? Feels like something a grandpa would want to implement."

"Most things I do, I do for altruistic reasons. I can care about people other than myself."

Did I insult- well, I guess I can ask.

"Did I insult you? I didn't mean to. I'm just saying like..." Puzzled look. "Okay, well I don't know how old you are or anything. Yeah, putting it together for others is alright? Like... Thanks for helping me too?"

"Oh, no, I'm terribly hard to insult. I'm also incredibly ambitious and literally all of my ambitious are prosocial in one way or another. I don't really have a whole lot of things I want for myself."