"Still love to check on the kids - I'll make a list, how about that, with people and how much I remember about them, and then Belmarniss can tell us which ones are good bets."

"Probably faster to tell you what helps? The best case is targeting a kid or somebody who could really use an Owl's Wisdom to the face, ideally not a caster, with a lock of their hair and something they own and a picture of them on hand, who you know really well. You can make do with a lot less than that but it increases the failure chance."

"Elaborate on 'could use an Owl's Wisdom to the face'."

"There's three spells that make people smarter, so it's useful to think about there being three kinds of cognitive capacity even though that's definitely oversimplified. Owl's Wisdom makes you better at noticing things, exercising good judgment especially in a non-systematic way, and generally maintaining mental equilibrium. The other two spells are Fox's Cunning - that's the kind I use to cast, it's also the one for memorization and doing math or whatever - and Eagle's Splendor, that one makes you more socially gifted and kinda... shiny."

"How likely is it to succeed with a name and a face, both of them thirty thousand years out of date, but no one is a spellcaster or anything?"

"About half the time you'd probably get somebody like that if they were just on another regular plane but I think something's going on with all these newly contacted planes."

Nod. "I can probably ask Lirnith to remind me the faces of anyone I've forgotten."

"If we can get ahold of her. I guess the other yous might know some of them but it seems like they'd be gender-swapped."

"They got ahold of you, right?"

"Yeah, maybe we're 'closer' or it'll work if Masaharta tries it."

She looks at Masaharta thoughtfully for a while.

"Hm?"

"They're just all so young. And - happy, mostly, and where they're unhappy it's so fixable -"

"Yeah. How's Lírnith doing?"

Snort. "All right. She's Taylor Swift, right now - I guess you wouldn't listen to music -"

"Haven't really been able to, no, I'll catch up now that I've got ears to borrow from a safe distance."

"Well, she holds herself back when she's doing popular human music and will embarrassed for you to hear it but I'd be happy to loan you my ears."

"I love you."

"This is a discouraging set of evidence about how we'd get along if we'd met without the magic artifact, though."

"...it's not helpful if I say Cor liked his till he turned out to be evil, is it. Mirelótë likes hers? Albeit differently?"

"This is true. Anaander adores hers but this is more creepy than reassuring."

"Is it?"

" - I'm not sure. I guess I prefer it to if Anaander did not like hers but - Anaander is upsetting. I ...already knew I'm evil but I thought it took more."

"I mean what I'm getting here is that we're both kind of all over the place, you more than me though Rubelite is real wacky."

"This is true. Well. I love you."