Enchanting work has reached a mostly-chanting stage. The globe intermittently glows in various colors.

Sable's definitely still enjoying fucking Esme while she does this, though. Multitasking is great.

The lightshow is very pretty and the being constantly fucked is very hot and the in-depth look at how Sable approaches learning about her capabilities is fascinating.

One through-line that becomes clear over the course of Sable's research is that it's an absolute ditz. More than once an experiment shows up twice in the notebook, separated by several months, with the second instance followed by something like, "ink and fucking madness I already did this on page 39." Similarly, there are references at the end of some experiment notes to try a particular idea, and the same idea gets written down three or four different times as though it's completely novel, before eventually getting a "damn it, I need to reorganize my to-do lists."

Eventually she manages to get the individual-tracking enchantment to stick to the globe as well, and steps back with a nod. "Okay, the globe is done. Need to tie the wall display to it for listing alerts and providing zoom functionality, but that's a good bit of progress so far."

"My conclusion from reading your research notes is that you're adorable."

Well that gets a blush out of it. "Hehe, thank you. You do seem to be a bit of an expert on cuteness."

"It's true, I am!"

"Spot anything obvious I missed yet, or just cuteness so far? I know I'm a bit of a scatterbrain, so there's probably something obvious I should've been doing."

"I think... hmm. I haven't gotten there yet, I'm still thinking about..."

It's still a little hard for her to bring up her other life, but it's relevant.

"My other family was involved in politics, on a very local small-town level. And I'm picturing Grandma Vicky on the receiving end of some of the interventions in your list, and for most of the dream visions she's like, okay, reasonable way to communicate if you're a dream-focused moon goddess, and for the ones where you were meddling pretty directly with how somebody felt she's like, hey, family meeting, I'm being haunted by an evil spirit."

She nods and frowns. "I don't like meddling that directly in people's minds. Well, except yours, but that's because you just wiggle cutely about it. For everyone else, I don't want to use it unless there isn't a better way." She sighs.

"Take Mitchell Carter, for example. His company had conducted human trials of a new drug, and some of the subjects were badly harmed by the testing. He ordered his lawyers to bankrupt the families in court so they couldn't cause problems. He laughed off a warning dream. It wasn't illegal, so I couldn't set investigators on him for it. A dream showing him how horrifying and demoralizing it was to be in his victims' shoes didn't phase him either. And I didn't have any blackmail on him.

"What do I do with a man like that?"

"It is very hot when you mind-control me," she says, wiggling a little on Sable's tentacles. "I just... also think one of the biggest systemic issues with magical society was people who didn't see a problem with using magic on the mundanes for whatever they wanted, whenever they could get away with it, because it was the tool they had and because it was—something those people couldn't anticipate or understand, so it didn't matter what you did to them because they were never going to find out. When you ask 'what do I do in this situation, when this is the tool I have', I think it makes it easier to overlook the question of 'when does using this tool cross the line into acting in a way that would be a crime if the people you were using it on could be protected from you by laws'."

It nods. "I just. Don't like letting people like that keep hurting people. I don't like seeing people get hurt when I can stop it. Feel responsible."

A long sigh. "Maybe the solution is to go full chessmaster and throw around enough dreams and non-invasive meddling that most of those classes of harm are disincentivized and the legal loopholes they use to do 'em get closed. I don't know."