"Probably the latter. Kind of depends on the guard, though."

"That's a really wide spread of policy."

"Not so much policy as Imara not really caring what his guards get up to. 'Tell people to turn around' is policy."

"I guess. Ugh. Unfortunately nobody has figured out how to use magic to turn invisible and this is not the time for experiments."

"Our magic can do invisibility, pretty easily I think, but I don't know much about how it's learned."

"Probably not time for even that grade of magical experiment."

"Yeah."

"Ugh. I need an empty planet first thing, after I have that I can be much more profligate with magic. In your estimation, what odds does circumventing the quarantine and poking around a city taking the temperature about getting off planet or seeing Imara as a diplomatic visitor and then doing whichever of those sounds better get me?"

"I'd give it ninety percent odds at least that we can get out of the quarantine undetected, though it might be slow going. That we can get to somewhere on the rail lines, and get a train, not get too questioned during this, and make decent time... Probably seventy to eighty percent? My ID has where I live and will flag that I'm from a quarantine zone, but I know a suburb train station that doesn't have a mandatory ID check - you can't get off the train in the city itself if you didn't swipe in properly, but we can get a connection just fine, get to the port city, and there's a station there that's had broken ID checking machines for a while - probably sixty to seventy percent odds they still haven't fixed that."

"I don't know what a train is."

"...Uh, how do people cross large distances where you're from?"

"We have magic gates, but they require you to get between the two places first on, like, a horse or boat or whatever."

"So a train is... There's a special type of road called train tracks. A train is a series of specially shaped boxes, like a carriage, but that hook to each other and don't need horses to pull them. The train floats wherever there's tracks, and there's - a way it interacts with the tracks that makes it speed up or slow down at specific points, and each train is long and thin and goes in only one direction. There's stations where the train stops, and people can get on or off. - It isn't magic or anything."

"Like... with steam power?"

"Like - magnets and electricity? I think early trains were steam power, and I think you can use steam power to make electricity, and electricity to make magnets... There's also faster stuff, like flying vehicles, but those are harder to get on without ID."

"If you say so. Uh, if we try this plan are you okay with escorting me as my native guide even though my backup plan is going to have to be magicking myself out without you?"

"Sure."

"Okay. I should undo all the creepy ownership stuff first ideally."

"That might make the local magic around you harder to control, but sure - also I'd like to not be owned by Imara just in general."

"- make the local magic around me harder to - I can't currently do anything with it!"

"Yeah, which is - a way of controlling it."

"Are you saying I should keep - shares of everybody who got sick?"

"Dunno how good your self control is, but if no one owns you that's - the normal way to keep magic controlled."

"I have great self control but you have not been able to tell me what I'd be self-controlling myself not to do and that can't possibly help."

"I've never had my own magic, and Imara doesn't want to encourage people to try to own themselves so there's not, like, primers lying around."