"We'll have a lot to learn from each other," she grins. "I hope we can get started soon."

"Aren't you? Getting started?"

"Well, yeah. But there's only so much I can do when it's just me here and I can't tell any of my druids anything. That's who you really need to talk to for the practical stuff, I don't have much practice at needing to work for things the way you do."

"Why don't you pretend the pictures idea is yours? Nobody owns it."

"I guess I could, if you're sure nobody will mind. I might need you to show me how you do it."

"I'm supposed to do checkups on the elephants today - I guess that'll go fast since I can just, uh, ask them how they're feeling - and then I can do that, sure. Or Omar's back at the station if you want to ask him."

"I'm not in a rush."

And the next day Raafi returns, with another batch of things to auction - this time including a small colony of giant fire beetles, a couple of stunning halfling-woven tapestries, and a larger batch of miscellaneous potions - and a list of wizards who might be open to moving to Revelation:

- An elderly gnome abjurer - defensive magic specialist - of the twelfth tier with a hawk familiar, who loves telling stories and is looking for a change of scenery and lower workload than his old teaching career as he moves into retirement.

- A younger but promising gnome abjurer of the sixth tier with a raven familiar who wants to bring her dwarf girlfriend ("all dwarves have beards; the way they braid them shows gender and a lot of other information", say Raafi notes) somewhere the girlfriend's family can't find them. She doesn't have any teaching experience, but does have alchemy training; the dwarf is a potter by trade.

- Another gnome, this one a generalist of the eighth tier with a with a rat familiar, who's very interested in the promise of a new kind of magic to study and maybe incorporate into new spells. Up to this point he's been a magic item specialist, and he's more interested in his research than defending someplace full-time, but willing to take apprentices and do some teaching.

- A human abjurer of the ninth tier with an owl familiar, who was recently the defender of a coastal city but was run out when the old duke died and his replacement decided there was too high a risk that she was loyal to the wrong political faction. She comes with two apprentices - both human, one has a cat familiar and the other doesn't have a familiar at all - and wants to live by the sea again; she's open to teaching if she gets to pick her students.

- A catfolk evoker - a kind of offensive magic - of the eleventh tier with a snake familiar, who recently retired from adventuring after the rest of her party died defending a dwarven stronghold from giants. She's most interested in earning enough money to have them raised, and may be able to talk a human friend who's a teacher into joining her to help run classes, if teaching pays well enough.

- A halfling abjurer of the twelfth tier without a familiar, who has been making his living escorting trade caravans between the material plane and the various elemental ones. He wasn't available to speak to but is well known for having a passion for new places.

- A trio of gnome siblings, two abjurers and a transmuter, who are interested in coming together if at all and want to be able to see each other daily or close to it; the transmuter and one of the abjurers have teaching and alchemy experience while the other abjurer specializes in setting spells in locations. The abjurers have cat familiars and the transmuter has a hawk.

- A silver dragon who, while not technically a wizard, has magic and has made a study of the arcane, including teaching it; he likes to move every hundred years or so, so as not to get too complacent. He can live happily as a human, for the most part, but would prefer the option to go fly at least once or twice a week and will need someplace to store his hoard.

There are a lot of cities in the world, and at least a few will make bids for each.

While he's waiting for those bids to slow down, he goes to check on how Pelor's defense plan is coming along; it turns out that they've been waiting for him to come back, to meet with people in his capacity as a cleric of Fharlanghn.

"There you are," says the Secretary of Defense of Mars. "Look, I've been trying to explain that 'hi, my friend, with me along on the premises and actively assisting, dismantled your fully functional defensive policing system, but now I want to replace it, so you need to tell me all about how my magic people can beat up your magic people' is not the most comforting thing we could possibly hear. I'm told we get a year's grace period going forward. Let's use it retroactively. Let's get everything safe and legible and squared away, how it was, and then we can work on our own wizards and, uh, apparently you can be a cleric of a concept so we can have Martian patriot clerics or clerics of the rule of law or something like that so we don't have to have people beholden to foreign interests responsible for learning all our interesting daeva-related military secrets and handling protection of our citizens. I don't want to go to my people and say 'the strangers who put you in danger are protecting you now, I'm helpless'."

"None of that sounds unreasonable, but some of it sounds a little confused. What exactly do you expect your own clerics to accomplish?"

"Whatever cleric-type magic needs doing so we can have a system that appeases the jailbreaker."

"Have you been able to confirm that it'll be a cleric spell?"

    "Mmhmm. We don't have it yet but Shining One is working on it."

"All right. That's not going to be fast, but fortunately it doesn't need to be. Do you have a plan for finding clerics?"

"Put out a general job ad, and a military specialty assignment people can apply for."

He nods. "I've never known patriotism to work as a cleric's devotion, among humans, and while lawfulness does, it's fairly rare. What will you do if you don't find any clerics with devotions you like?"

"It doesn't actually have to be rule of law or Martian patriotism. I'd have nothing against one whose driving ambition was something unrelated. But it can't be devotion to someone who was present and chose to endanger us in the first place."

"Oh, I doubt Fharlanghn will be giving this particular spell to his clerics anyway. But you seem to have something against Pelor's people, too, and that makes less sense."

"He was there. It's on the security camera footage. So was the magic one."

"He was on Ganymede. He didn't go with the jail when they sent it to space. He didn't try to stop Fharlnaghn but I'm not actually sure he could have, in a case like this."

    "Not without damaging the structure of our world," the other cleric nods.

"And I can't stop my grandmother when she goes off on a waitress for forgetting the extra cheese, but I can make it clear I don't approve instead of nodding along."

"The stakes are different, here. Choosing not to pick a dangerous and futile argument isn't the same as choosing to endanger you where he had the option not to."

"Well, his actions have consequences, such as it not being remotely obvious to the folks I'm answerable to that he wasn't in on it from the start and his clerics aren't moles."

"Mm. Well. I expect it to take something like a decade for any of your clerics to be able to cast spells of the tier I expect this to be, and I don't think that's a reasonable timeframe when there are other clerics available. It doesn't have to be Pelor's."

"That Ehlonna character's getting good press."