Two wizards and two soldiers appear in the desert, a few feet away from a tired slave caravan.
They nod at each other and disappear again.
Two wizards and two soldiers appear in the desert, a few feet away from a tired slave caravan.
They nod at each other and disappear again.
"...this was hundreds of years ago and none of my effects do memory. Uh, maybe it was the one where you couldn't use written language any more, or the one that made touching something very common... water?... really painful, or the one that made you need to sleep for most of every day. ...no, I think the sleep one was the one that let you identify artifacts without touching them, now that I think about it."
"Magic sounds neat and everything, it's just that there are lots of other people who can pick it up."
"There are actually some casters whose abilities depend on their charisma rather than their intelligence or wisdom but sadly they're all innate kinds of magic."
"Summoning uses some of that skillset! And was one of my favorite things when I was learning magic."
"You still have to learn the spells the normal way but then you get to talk to people and convince them to do whatever it is you wanted them for. Probably you want to learn Cam's style of summoning, it'll be faster to learn and more powerful to use."
"Uh-huh. It's not going to be blue, though. - maybe convincing them to make planets will be blue."
"Making stuff isn't blue and ensuring that sets of rules are appropriately thorough and complied-with isn't blue and one obvious thing people will want them on hand for is combat operations and that has to be grey."
"The daeva aren't grey, I don't think you can use them in combat operations unless your plan is to just dare everyone else to do anything about it - in which case why bother making sure the summoners are."
"I think you'll have to rework everything to do with expected population, including greys-only combat treaties, if you make some of your population indestructible. Unless, again, you're just daring everyone to do something about it."
"That is definitely not what I would prefer we do about it but it's going to take some finesse to make sure no one does.The extra planets should help a lot."
"Anyway, until there are Amentan daeva you could probably make a case for talking to them being diplomacy."
"I guess everyone who didn't buy an airport will be pretty eager to get in on all this magic and might be on board with that."
"Speaking of airports, unless you want this thing detailed down to the potted plants I have it specced out now, three cheers for computer aided design and this nifty utility that simulates pedestrian traffic flow. Was I at some point going to explain IUDs to some people?"
"Couple rooms over. It's not all that differently designed but it's bigger. While they're on their way I might have...advice for going over well, culturally?"
"There are lots of countries that are sexually liberal and make the math work out with poisons and infanticide, in those countries this'll just make the math work out without that and it'll be great. Maybe Osirion will eventually slide down that road but no one wants it to, and no one's going to be eager to shove it. But there are problems which people care about which it solves, like poor hardworking city families with more kids than they can afford to feed and minor nobility splitting and splitting their inheritances or shoving all their excess kids into dangerous occupations. Your - ideal introductory case here - is a harmonious family with four kids who can't care for and educate and marry a fifth or sixth. And then we can add some edge cases, like obviously prostitutes should have access so they don't kill their kids, but that can't be the public face of the thing."