"No, it's just a game mechanic, because it wouldn't be fun to have to find it all out some other way, but it's not supposed to mean your character can read minds."

"Oh, I don't know if you heard, Kitty - or, uh, if you care - but Pelape did have a successful Veritaserum test right before she got Felicized and now if you want to be safe from rogue mindreaders there's precedent for Muggles."

"I'm set. Well, probably, anyway."

"It sounds like it takes a long time and is very hard and how many rogue mindreaders even are there?"

"It's rare, your use case would be more likely a memory charm considering."

"Does it protect against mind-altering effects as well as mindreading?"

"Yes. Though it's not rated against the Imperius Curse and I don't know how it'd hold up to your system and it's not protecting Pelape from Felix and so on. Do you have a harmless test?"

"We could test Charm Person or something. We'd have to test repeatedly, it has some failure chance each time anyway and my first guess would be that skill with this mental habit increases the failure chance."

"What does Charm Person do?"

"Makes a person more favorably inclined towards you, likely to trust you and cooperate with you and so on."

"Does it wear off?"

"Lasts an hour for weak spellcasters and not longer than a day for strong ones."

"Maybe you should wait until Timothy comes home. He already likes everyone and is accustomed to working around it and is less skeeved out than me by mind magic."

"I'm looking forward to meeting him. And Aitim."

"Should be soonish but I don't have exact ETAs. Busy people."

"That follows."

"What does the pharaoh do?"

"Mostly meets with people. There's a council that runs the country, and he selects its members, and can dismiss them, and spends a lot of his time talking with them individually. And then there's foreign leaders, and the earth elementals that live in the deserts, and Abadar, and so on."

"Do you talk to Abadar the same way you talk to anyone else?"

"I don't. He can, when he needs to."

"How much attentional capacity does Abadar have?"

"I don't know. The gods avoid advertising their precise capabilities."

(He is so confused.)

"Why do they do that?"

"So people aren't more adept at thwarting their plans or forming confident estimates of what would be needed to take them on, presumably. Osirion also doesn't advertise our precise military capabilities for about the same reason."