If she swears to change Earth's time zones around she feels obliged only to make a pleading face at her sister, and if her sister swears she won't help in the endeavor then she feels nothing at all.

Which Isabella passes on.

She thanks her sister for her hypothetical participation. "So there's an impossibility threshold."

"Hmm -" What happens if Isabella mentions to Tyelcormë that she can beat Maitimë at Governor and says she is not categorically opposed to time zone adjustment.

"Do you want to take over the world? You'd be good at it."

"I have considered it."

"You should take over the world."

Well that's an entertaining result. Is that her not trying very hard or just not being very convincing?

I don't think she's trying that hard - Turka, can you bounce us -

Sure, it's like a minor impulse towards plans that achieve that but none of them are very plausible to her and so the impulse is pretty weak.

Huh. Isabella drops out of precog again and relays that.

"Huh. Okay. So behavioral blocks should work and even just making it unlikely helps -"

"Apparently," nods Isabella.

"So prospects for helping orcs are pretty good."

"Yeah. Checking whether a psion can be effective with respect to the particular sort of oath orcs swear would be most definitively checked with an orc, but I can ask Alex to find people who do memory and compulsion treatment and behavioral blocks and they can be checked against safe-scale Elf oaths within precog."

"And then we don't even have to get into something as socially complicated as erasing oaths."

"What's specifically complicated about that?"

"Well, there are some things oaths are useful for - like, say, not having to imprison people for all of eternity - and they don't work for that if they might be erasable."

"Psions being able to go around oaths seems nearly as disruptive to that."

"Behavioral blocks wouldn't do anything to make someone who is, say, sworn not to harm others, more dangerous."

"No, but if someone added compulsions that might - this isn't especially likely, people don't routinely do this to each other on Earth and it'd be no more rewarding here, but it'd matter if someone wanted out of their oath -"

"So we should probably check adding compulsions and whether that can get you to do something you're sworn not to do."

"Yeah. Alex'll shop around." Sigh.

"We're not demanding too much of him?"

"Nah. Although I can't actually send him on this errand till he wakes up."