"Well, sure you'd say that, you want out."

"And me expelled."

"I would want out whether I was going to cause whatever destruction or not. Regular, non-evil people tend to also not like being inside a magical cylinder" he will understand this cylinder eventually "so it doesn't mean anything by itself. I don't want you to get expelled, but I want to waste this opportunity even less."

"Well that's easy for you to say you can't even get expelled," says Saasnil.

He heaves a long sigh.

"Maybe we shouldn't even let Nemaar see him," Saasnil tells Korulen.

"I'm not going to summon a replacement."

"Ugh."

He leans forward, resting his head on his hands.

"Is there anything I could do that would convince you it was worth the risk to tell Korulen's mum?"

"I don't know," Korulen says uncertainly.

He looks at Korulen, somewhat hopeful, wishing that uncertainty is an idea.

"If you're not in a huge hurry I could maybe summon you back later in like a couple years..."

"...that's better than not being summoned back at all, I guess. I did explain my reasons for wanting to be summoned back."

"And in a few years I'll be able to do things like summon people and it won't be a huge deal."

"Should still be a last resort, though, two years isn't a lot but it's not the best possible solution."

"I'm not going to get my roommate expelled for you," says Korulen crossly.

"Not for me," he sighs, "but regardless, I don't want to get her expelled, and if this is a hard constraint we just have to think around it. Your mum could somehow determine whether I'm speaking the truth, and I expect it involves some mind stuff, given your reference to a 'mindlink' which would also make the prospect of hiding it from your father the headmaster untenable. Does nobody else have similar magic? What other similar resources are there?"

"Mom's the only one like that," says Korulen. "Wizardry does lie detection but you could have almost any kind of magic, you're from another world..."

"You could do lie detection and I could fully describe my magic and everything I can do with it and you could see that it won't be a threat? Or, at least, it will be a containable threat—I'm pretty sure your magic has mine beat in most situations, I'm having a real hard time understanding this ward."

"How can you even see it?" asks Saasnil.

"My type of mage can see—and usually manipulate—other magic. We can't produce any magic of our own, at least not of the kinds in my world, but we can detect all of it—and apparently detect magic here, too. I'm mildly confident I could figure out how to undo this ward if I spent long enough staring at it, but that would be rude."

This does not look like it was the best thing to say to get the girls to keep him around.

"Long enough is, like, hours! And like I said, it'd be rude to do it, I still want to convince you to trust me, I don't want to just cheat, that wouldn't work at all, would it?"

"This was a bad idea," Korulen tells Saasnil, "we should just unsum-"

Pause.

"Korulen?"

"Oh no -"

"What? Look I've been nothing but honest here with you two, I could have lied, could have simply hid my magic—"

"And this was a stupid idea to begin with and we can't send you back -"

"What, sure we -"

"Can't co-cast a reversal!"

He facepalms loudly. "I'm stuck here?"

"I'm sorry!" exclaims Korulen.

Saasnil sits on her bed and buries her face in her hands.