"If you genuinely wish to be that casual about forking, I can see how it might help."

"It's not remotely casual," he says. "It's... this, putting everything we've got into accomplishing the impossible, finding the best possible outcome of a situation and then making it happen no matter how hard it is, this is what Taliars are for. We cannot give this any less than our best. And the fork will have plenty to occupy him after he succeeds in clearing this up - there's a whole multiverse out there, I'm sure it contains several more problems worth throwing a Taliar at."

"Having a Taliar who was not devotedly attached to a - there will need to be some less loaded terminology for the subtemplate than 'evil Maitimo', presumably - would potentially be very useful in bridging the gap you observe and would certainly make it easier for the peal and Nuime to interface without complications. It will not make Midnight - or for that matter Tivarante, although he has less of a track record problem - any more trustworthy than they are willing to be, and it seems like nothing about that is liable to change in a positive direction."

"I am confident that we Taliars can bridge that gap," he says. "Regarding the teleport - I really don't want to keep using a stolen spell whose creator feels proprietary about it, but it's fundamentally not practical to have three separate dimension-spanning polities collectively relying for all of their interdimensional transport on two soulbearers one of whom no longer leaves her house. Is there some kind of compensation we can offer to the inventor, or official channels we can send some people through to acquire authorized copies of the spell, or any alternatives?"

"Materian wizardry is capable of interdimensional transit, though it has its own set of problems. I do not think it would be impossible to convince Loki to accept Midnight and Tivarante and various Nuime residents having it, but people she's never met who were not vetted by people she vetted at any degree of remove in control of its distribution is a harder sell and you would have to convince her that Midnight and Tivarante would not continue to hand it out however they pleased."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Anchored worldleapers can also enable travel from world to world in a stable fashion."

"And how interested are you in setting those up between Nuime and the peal?"

"It would be an easier sell if the Dawn Fëanáro were stashed with some of his alts like the Independence one is and not maybe quietly figuring out how they work, but even without that more palatable than handing out high-flexibility magic solutions."

"I'll make the suggestion. Oh - unrelatedly, it just happened to cross my mind, there's a potential unfortunate interaction between eidetic memory necklaces and trauma flashbacks. Have you seen anyone get trapped in a memory loop for hours because something got them started while there was no one around to pull them out of it? I don't know how common it's likely to be, but it happened to me and I'd really rather it didn't happen to anyone else. Hopefully it was just some personal quirk of how my mind works and not something most people need to worry about."

"To my knowledge none of the people with eidetic memories who've been prisoners of the Enemy or nonconsenusally Yeerked or otherwise traumatized have that problem."

"That's a relief."

"Is that what you were hoping to see a subtle artist about?"

"Yeah, I have some lingering trouble from before Nuime's first interdimensional contact, it's really inconvenient. Would still be pretty inconvenient even without the interaction - my soul says rings of dreamless sleep are subtly bad for me, I hope that's just another quirk - but with the interaction it's really inconvenient."

"The souls thing is fascinating."

"Soul artifacts are pretty great!" he says. "Esarkan hopes he'll eventually establish enough mutual trust with the peal that he can let you send people to Nuime to become soulbearers."

"To what extent are soul powers predictable in advance?"

"If you know a lot of soulbearers, and know the person well, it's usually possible to guess some things, but not always, and not reliably. Whatever someone gets, it's always... appropriate for them, though. And powers can change when a person changes, or when their circumstances change. Taliars' souls are unusually flexible, but most people's souls change at least a little bit over time."

"'Tivarante' is in the style of a soulname."

"Yes. Tivarante Maitimo is a soulbearer."

"What does his do?"

"Protection from mental tampering, expanded osanwe range, improved memory, and it protects itself against being touched - is it already known to the peal that you do not touch a soulbearer's soul?"

"Yes, some of us have been looking at published materials from Nuime."

"Okay, good. It's important for people to know that."

Nod.