It's a universe. It's very large - lots of stars and rocks and atoms and cosmic radiation, if she's interested in that.

If she's interested in people - here's a planet with people! Circling this star over here, being circled by its moon (and various artificial satellites), has oceans and a few continents. And a few billion people.

Lots of people going about their lives - they grow food on farms, they meet with other people in tall metal and glass buildings, they walk with friends in streets and paths and marketplaces, they pump water, they launder clothes. They fight with each other. They write and read on glowing screens connected across the world. 

A smaller subset of people have something different about them. It's attached to them, part of them, like parts of their bodies are parts of them (it runs itself through their bodies.) They can use it - someone is bent over another person in a hospital and their injuries close up, someone disappears from a place with a group of others and they all appear elsewhere, a factory makes bags that hold some of the weight of their contents, someone scries at a crime scene, someone wards a building against fire. 

Actually those people... seem to stand out in more ways than that. She'll notice basically universal collars (which seem to be exerting constraints on that additional part, actually); lots of other restraints. Lots of uniforms, not all the same but with a lot of elements in common. None of them are with families; none are alone with friends. None are alone. Sometimes in groups of others like them; always with a guard or several. 

Also torture. Kind of a lot of that.

How odd. So very many of them - so very different from her dragonets - such a large, empty universe around them, rather than a single nursery -

Whoever shaped this world had a quite different design philosophy than her, and possibly quite a bit more experience using the same powers.

She isn't really bothered by the torture, though she dislikes the control.

Hm...

She should announce that they're under new management, now. Seems only polite.

She swiftly calculates the appearance of stars from their atmosphere - oh, the light's been traveling for aeons, how interesting, whoever made this world was patient -

Well, it's easier to do something localized, anyways. Less math. A beautiful, harmless light show around the edges of their solar system, tweaked so it'll be differently gorgeous as the planet swings around its sun (what an interesting set up) - and new images forming, an enormous coiled dragon apparent in the shell.

The light will take a bit of time to reach them. She settles in to observe while she waits for her announcement to propagate, figuring it's good to understand her new people.

There's a lot of control. (The torture's pretty related to the control, actually, more punishment for stepping out of line and warnings not to step out of line than whatever other reasons there could be.)

Wow! Wow!!!

Once the light reaches them, people have a lot of reactions. People call to their friends and neighbors to come look. Pictures go up all over every social media site, are sent by every means of messaging. People on the night side of the world crowd outside; people on the day side of the world stare at pictures and start looking outside as night starts coming in. (Some people in cloudy areas are very disappointed.) (Claims that this is a hoax are soon mostly buried under the amount of reporting coming in, relegated to a few conspiracy theories here and there).

Amateur astronomers publish nicer images, some with theorizing. Space agencies are soon putting up some of their own.

There's a lot of theorizing. Top theories include 'natural physical phenomenon we hadn't previously run into in this form', 'cosmic magical phenomenon!' (reading these one might gather that there is generally a lot of disagreement and not much settlement of it with respect to the nature/properties/actions of magic outside of local level), and 'aliens!'. (The first two tend to be accompanied with various notes about human tendencies toward pattern finding and how that would lead to the popular interpretation of 'dragon'.)

Reporters start putting out articles - there not being much else that can currently be said, these tend to be focused on the pictures, the social reactions, and some amount of citing of various theories and which credible or less credible people are extending and coming out in support of them.

Governments, after some flurried various-amounts-of-covert establishing that it doesn't seem like any of them are responsible for this, make various generally vague but potentially inspiring statements about science and the future (and sometimes national readiness, and sometimes reminders about various public safety guidelines and why they should still be abided by.)

(Some people do ascribe the phenomenon to the divine in one way or another. Mostly whatever divine is already their own. A few cults that got lucky in their symbolism and/or date predictions see their hits go up.

Some people are very freaked out about this sign of the end times/powerful aliens that are coming to kill everyone/dragon that will eat the planet.

Pretty much no one really arrives at the 'new management' conclusion.)

Lots of observatories and space agencies write lots of letters and grant applications about the new funding they should clearly get to look further into this phenomenon. They need more/better/adjusted observation devices and data processing / mages and mage time to improve the previous. Several organizations think this is the time to renew their argument for lots of mages and mage time for speculative scrying experiments. Various governments/foundations/individuals find these arguments and/or the giant sky dragon persuasive; lots of space agencies get funding spikes.

Various important military authorities have a lot of mostly clandestine meetings and initiate some mostly readiness-themed actions.

People process a lot of data. People do a lot of math. People write and draw a lot of imagined stories about the imagined dragon-liking aliens. People try to send messages to aliens.

Some mages who are outside at night for various reasons see the dragon; some mages in countries where mages are allowed to watch tv watch the reporting. Some mages outside at night get distract by the dragon and are punished to varying amounts depending on the mood of whatever guard is around them.

She can't directly disable the control collars. The natural laws are absolute. A bit annoying.

She knows everything happening at this moment. Figuring out how to interpret things presently stored as information in the 'cloud' takes her a short time. She then sets to knowing what people say about these mages and the collars - especially what the people controlling the collars say.

The people controlling the collars are mostly the overseers. They don't actually tend to say much about it in internet public - some of them complain about their jobs, but their complaints are schedules and coworkers and ugh-mages-are-horrible; very rarely anything about collar controls.

If she can get into private communications, she can find a lot of work-related communications mentioning it, from overseers to various supervisors/managers, sometimes from those to larger policy-decision-makers, and back. Guidelines for what permissions to give when; reports on what permissions were given. (Permissions, she can gather without much difficulty, means adjusting the collar constraints to allow some magic use from the mage).

If she can get into encrypted communications, she can find more of about the same from organizations and people with field mages, high level research mages, army mages.

(At the moment, some organizations and people are working on their plans and policies for potential alien-related matters; for the divisions who deal with mages this includes permissions planning.)

What people say about mages and their collars in general is easy to notice (if slightly less easy to find said outright - it's common knowledge, very often taken for granted. But it can be found). Mages are naturally and fundamentally terrible, treacherous, untrustworthy, dangerous. If left to their own devises they would do all sorts of awful things to the great detriment of non-mage humans and society. Collars keep a mage's power bound; collars are a central device of keeping mages contained; collars (and organization, and overseers. And torture) are how mages are kept in line and made useful for society.

Private and encrypted communications aren't any harder than the public internet. She tries to find all the literature on how the collars work.

Then she can see all these things.

Basic layman's explanations are around all over the place. Collars form an involution with a mage's magic, which is the basis for the containment. It's also why if you try to just take a collar of a mage there'll be an explosion - the mage's magic is what causes the explosion, kind of like how if two people lean back against each other and then one disappears the other one will fall over. (Everyone generally considers this to be obviously a good thing, since some random person (or some random mage!) being able to easily take off a mage's collar would be very bad.)

The basic technical idea can also be found described. Mages are not quite the only magical thing in this world. Some substances exist with magical properties. Collars use these. A very basic collar can involve taking some particular ones, shaping them, doing something like analogy-to-magnetizing them to a mage's magic, and then putting them on to form the involution. (There's even more basic things that can be done without the 'magnetizing' step, but they work better used for something like a wall than something like a collar.)

Collars have a very long history. The most basic collar just blocks a mage's power when it's on the mage. There's been a lot of technological progress over the course of history, with a lot of improvements on granularity (being able to block some of a mage's power rather than only all of it, being able to change which part), controls (how these changes are put into effect), production (these days collars are generally mass-produced), reliability (more likely to work exactly how they're meant to; less likely to stop working), and some other properties. 

Modern detailed technical descriptions are not all over the place. But they do exist.

They're generally very technical.

But if that works for her then she can read about the various magical substances with different properties that are used for modern collars, how they're exposed to magic in various ways to give them some more desired properties, how they're then put together, and various other work that goes into things like 'durability' and 'the locking mechanism'. (In some countries collars also have spells added to them by factory-working mages; other countries consider this imprudent and a bad idea.)

She institutes an afterlife system, almost off-handedly, since there's a decent chance her experiments might get people killed, and there's an awful lot of people on that planet who keep dying in a dizzying array of pointlessness. (They've probably noticed by now that she's protecting them from dying of stupid things; they can certainly still stab each other, but accidents in general have stopped being fatal or even seriously injurious. She's also figured out how to turn off individual poisons - their kids are astonishingly stupid, but the calls to poison control centers dry up once she starts detoxifying things before children can put them in their mouths. Oh and this politically unstable area, it's kind of amusing, but the whole shooting people who aren't armed thing is unsporting - non-combatants stop getting killed in war zones, too. Maybe she should just make any bombs near civilians stop going off... She's going to have to restart her research on killing pathogens since she still can't just delete them with a handwave... And making magical disease curing mist doesn't work here, which is obnoxious... Also what is this old age thing, that's bullshit... So she sets up a bunch of time-accelerated fields off in the intergalactic space where she can test treatments and preventative measures for diseases. They have a lot more diseases here so she should start being able to target the low-lying fruits soon.)

She plays around with breaking a few of the collars that currently aren't on anyone, and with various ways of subtly sabotaging the ones that aren't on anyone so they flat out don't work, then with making fake mages with collars in her testing fields and playing around with deactivating those. She can spoof the person meant to be in control of the collars, so theoretically she can just set them to 'off' then break the controls...

People getting killed does seem pretty likely. There's a lot of people; if she doesn't solve everything very quickly souls will start arriving pretty promptly.

In countries with developed medical systems dying in accidents is actually pretty rare unless it happens very quickly - EMTs have very good response times, and medical mages can stabilize people if nothing else can. Depending on details her intervention might actually make demands for medical care go slightly up (though not to any level that will cause a problem, and it will save lives). 

Hospitals and other medical offices see some changes in demand, but statistics are noisy, and they're not necessarily aware of each others' demand data; it'll take a bit for people to notice that something is up. (Poison control centers see a possibly stronger change but a similar dynamic.)

In countries with less developed medical systems her interventions will have a greater impact, but those also tend to be countries with less developed data collection, and lots of the now-survivors wouldn't have made it to hospitals in the first place. Plenty of people are alive, and not scrambling desperately for care they might not find, and shaken and grateful. Not very many people suspect anything beyond luck, or whatever else they might generally ascribe such things to.

Non-combatants don't get killed. They go home to their families and hug their loved ones and some of them pray in thanks to assorted deities and some of them tell fervent stories about their lucky charm/ritual or their own cleverness and good decisions and prowess at fighting/ducking/bluffing. Aside from aforementioned cults with lucky symbolism, it is generally not occurring to people to make connections to the recent sky dragon.

The local people actually have a lot of research on killing pathogens! One thing that kills pathogens is in fact mages, but you don't want to depend on that (because well, mages, and because even in developed-medical-system countries there aren't going to be enough medical mages to go around if you try to have them attend to everyone one-on-one). They have medications, some magic-involving, some not, and various other treatments. They're actually pretty good at cancer, though that usually does involve magic especially in the more severe cases. They don't have anything for old age at the moment, but some laboratories are working on it (they're really not anywhere near a breakthrough though). Countries with less developed medical systems have more pathogen deaths.

Information on collars can tell her that collars whose controls break generally revert to default suppression (which includes suppression of active magic). Some broken or sabotaged collars are noticed by quality control checks.

Someone puts a subtly broken collar on a mage (she's still wearing her previous one; changing collars is always done in that order if at all possible). She freezes. She reports it, careful and terrified. Her overseers get a different collar. They beat the mage, but comparatively not very much, and she's clearly acting afterwards like someone who had a close call with something very very bad, but a close call, not the thing itself.

There seems to be one or two species of mosquitoes responsible for carrying a small handful of very obnoxious pathogens. There's other mosquitoes in the area, so she thinks removing them won't cause any problems - and she can always create more mosquitoes later anyways. All members of pathogen-bearing mosquito species get individually squished.

She keeps playing with the collars in her experimental fields -

Wait.

Can she relocate her experimental collars? Teleport them somewhere non-explode-y?

...Also maybe she should get a mage cultural consultant. Since she doesn't have priests.

She starts paying attention to mages who seem especially observant and ambitious.

Squished mosquitos no longer infect people! This is actually noticed faster, though people aren't yet sure what happened or what's going on. 

She can potentially relocate the collars but that will actually do the opposite of solving her problem - collars aren't the thing that explodes, the explosion is caused by the mage's magic in the breaking of the involution. 

Ambitious mages who are obvious about it don't have a good time with that, but if she can look in people's minds she can find some mages who have managed to be sufficiently unobvious.

- Here's a field mage for the CIA. She would probably make a pretty good actual agent if she was allowed to do that. Since she is super not, she's limited to observation and internal analysis. She's very good at that. She would like to run away, and has thought through her chances of that. It would take some really particular circumstances to make a try worth it. She's looking out for them.

- Here's a mage with abilities underrated by the people doing that. This is mostly caused by her putting a lot of her effort into finding all opportunities possible to be tortured instead of other people and take them. She's pretty observant (of how well various people are doing, of what she can do for them and how she might be able to do it. Of aforementioned opportunities). She is definitely going to continue doing this as much as she possibly can for as much life as she has.

- Here's an unusually powerful mage currently being used for high level research (including for one of those aforementioned anti-aging projects). She seems to occasionally manage to get herself work she likes better than other work by being really obviously better at it than at work she doesn't like so much. Her overseers tolerate some amount of this (for values of tolerate that involve really pretty incredible amounts of torture) because she's not actually very easily replaceable, either on the magic side or in fact on the good-at-her-job side. (The consequences of this are also more torture).

She also has fond feelings about and kind of misses one of her old overseers, which is really not a common mage experience.

...Hm.

She pauses time, except for the minds of the three.

'Hello,' she whispers into their heads. 'I would like to speak with you.'

Well that's interesting. Has some other research mage with imperfect discipline actually figured out telepathy.

She tries out some basic magic sense on it - nothing that would get anyone noticing. Tries responding back. 'Hello!

Sounds great to me.'

She wonders briefly if it's Lesha. If anyone could figure out telepathy... 

She is, of course, not going to turn whoever it is in. 'Hello. I'm here.'

Conveniently she is not on a mission at the moment.

Someone is talking in her head. If she goes and kneels at the minder and reports this, as she would pretty obviously be told to do, then they will go find whoever this is and tear them apart, and probably beat her and such lest she get ideas and ask her a lot if that was all. But she'd be able to say yes, when they asked.

If she doesn't, and they find out, well - she used to work for the Authority of Mages, she knows pretty well what sorts of things happen. Not something one forgets.

If they know there's a mage out there with telepathy, and they don't know who it is. If they know that mages can have telepathy. She doesn't have convenient remembered images for that, but - nightmare is an obvious understatement.

If someone has managed to invent telepathy, and is now contacting a field mage with it - she can probably think that they have some plan there. 

There's a voice in her head. Telepathy hasn't existed in the history of the world. She can probably get a truth spell to stick on something like 'voices in your head aren't real'. People don't usually demand completely careful phrasings of the mages screaming and pleading at them. Lot of interrogation, lot of punishment. But she won't have done anything, and there aren't already rules about voices in your head.

She doesn't respond back - that would be doing something.

She clamps down on terror trying to run away with her and waits to see if anything else will happen next.

To Anica: 'Good! Did you see the star dragon?'

To Shiarl: 'I'm not Lesha. I'm the Sky-Scaled One.'

To Elvira: 'I'm sorry for scaring you. I don't really know how humans work. That's why I wanted to talk to you.'

'A bit. Heard more about it.' She'd been outside in the dark once since then. Heard a little on tv (she ends up with less breaks than most mages because of all the time she's spending being tortured, but her minders do know that mages don't end up functioning well if they don't get some of those, and there's a tv sometimes). Heard a little from research humans talking.

Does the sky dragon somehow help people figure out telepathy; that would be interesting.

That doesn't really mean much to her - she knows different countries do mage names differently, but she doesn't think there is anywhere that would allow a name like that. Could be a private name. Anyone could have that.

(And the telepathy mage is reading her mind, but that doesn't bother her, really. As long as they don't turn her in. Not for herself, but for everyone she takes blame for.)

'Do you need something? Can I help you?'

She has absolutely no ideas how there could be a mage who doesn't know how humans work. (Even if some runaway mage managed to have a mage baby and not let anyone know, presumably they would tell the baby things?) ...Amnesia, somehow?

Also in that case the telepathy mage might have to know she's scared in some way other than 'it's really obvious'. Scrying her or something? Reasonable to thing to do it you're trying telepathy. The CIA is pretty scry-warded, but if you can invent telepathy...

A mage who doesn't know how humans work and also invented telepathy is going to end extremely badly. Probably not just for the mage either.

Well. 'I heard a voice about not knowing how humans work, it was scary, I thought about reinforcement in the same way I heard it' is probably something she can try to plead at interrogators. 

She thinks, in the same way she heard the telepathy - humans are not-mages. Humans are all over the world. Humans have mages to do work for them. Humans say that mages are treacherous and dangerous and need to be controlled or else. (She'd get beaten for the 'humans say' if anyone knew she'd put it that way, but not in a way where it would surprise anyone. She's a mage, isn't she.) So that's collars and minders and rules and punishment - warnings, reprimands, reinforcement, usual punishment, special punishment. She thinks about the Authority of Mages. She thinks about what they do to mages who earn themselves special punishment.

To Anica: 'I made it to say I was here, but then humans didn't react like the dragonets would have, and that was confusing. I have been watching your planet since, and the people are very strange, and I want to learn more, including about mages, so I can help them.'

To Shiarl: 'I'm new to this world. I made the sky dragon to announce I was here, but then the humans reacted weirdly to it, and I haven't been able to figure them out just watching. I want to understand your planet's people more, including mages, so I can help them.'

To Elvira: 'I'm not a mage or a human. I'm from very far away, and I don't know how your planet works, but I don't like a lot of things about it, and I want to understand more so I can fix it for people. Mages and humans.'

Well that is not the sort of thing she was expecting to hear. Not that she was expecting to hear telepathy. (Could theoretically not be true, but it would be a bizarre thing to make up. And there is, in fact, a star dragon.) 'Don't know anything about dragonets' (are those aliens?) 'and not sure how much I count as knowing about humans, but I totally know lots about mages!' (In an interpersonal and scientific sense both, even!). And she definitely thinks that helping sounds great. 

That's - pretty incredible to her, and in more than one way. (She'd - thought about it sometimes, mostly as a child reading. Aliens in books and tv either had their own mages or agreed with humans about them when they learned humans did. But she'd - wondered if it had to be that way, really. If maybe there could be someone, someday...) 

She wants to help. There is very little she wants more. (Humans as well as mages, though she's never really had a chance for the first beyond work. She doesn't know more about how humans live than one gets from books and tv and lessons, but that's enough to know about war and murder and poverty and slavery...)

(It might not be real, there might be a lie. But she can't think of anything she could hurt too badly, if she though it was real, and tried. And if it's real - she'll burn for that chance, happily.)

'I want to help. Please.'