"Ew."

"Were you doing something you didn't want them to know about?"

"...what? No, why is that your first guess?"

"Why did they even have that policy?"

"They wanted to screen people for intent to steal the artifacts, I think was the ostensible reason? The only reason I could attend the school at all was that the mindreaders couldn't stop shouting curse words at the top of their lungs, it was pretty easy to keep out of their way under normal circumstances."

"There are so many easier ways to stop people stealing things. Unless they're teleportation artifacts, I guess."

"They did have one of those. The side effect was awful though."

"What?"

"...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."

"Huh."

"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."

"That would be more tempting."

"Sorcerers are usually like that but I'm a weird kind, all cunning no splendor."

"Summoning uses some of that skillset! And was one of my favorite things when I was learning magic."

" - that sounds fun. How does it work?"

"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."

"Why shouldn't it 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."

"Some of them'll be grey soon enough if summoners become daeva."

"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."