"Sure."

What happens if she swears not to say 'potato' - well, she can't, feels like this -

What happens if she swears to clap her hands five times within twenty minutes - she barely feels it for the first nineteen, then the pressure builds rather abruptly -

Isabella bounces her results to Maitimë.

"Okay. You learning anything psionics-relevant from this?"

"There are some psions who treat naturally-occurring compulsions; might work, might not, relatively cheap to try. I think the potato thing would require a specialist angle that won't be available on the market."

"Okay. Do we still need to know what happens if you swear to do something and fail to -"

"Might be relevant, there are psions who can do behavior blocks and if those worked..."

Nod.

"...If tying yourself to the chair is going to be weird or anything you could just leave the room, maybe."

"I'm guessing I couldn't swear to do something entirely outside my control - though I guess that's worth checking."

"Yeah, we can check that first."

What happens if she tries to swear to delay the sunrise on Earth by three hours -

- nothing at all, turns out -

"So total infeasibility is a safeguard, there's that."

"Yes. That's- better than most potential outcomes of total infeasibility, I guess."

"What about merely staggering infeasibility, what if you swore to get all official Earth timekeeping adjusted three hours..."

Hypothetically if they try that Maitimë indeed feels obliged to take over the world. "But that's not really staggeringly infeasible," she muses, "just slow going."

"All right, what would be staggering."

"We could see what happens if someone who isn't me swears that."

"Like who?"

"Lemme ask my sisters -" Tyelcormë? 

Yeah?

Wanna come here and do experiments with oaths that'd be hilariously dangerous if we weren't precogging them?

Sure.

She reports this. "Can you check before she even gets here or -"

"Depends how fast she gets here and how much un-predetermined action I wind up doing in the lookahead -" Check.