"Yeah. There's some stuff that might actually be more testable - mild good luck charms, rather than stuff in the genre of 'helping people makes good vibes around you' - though magic's... Finicky, sometimes."

"Finicky?"

"It's really hard to tell if other people's charms and spells are having an effect except by watching for impact on the world, and if you see a plausibly magical change in the world it's also really hard to trace what caused that. It's often also hard to sense the external effects of your own magic - if I decided to use magic to hide myself, I might not be able to tell if it was working until I observed people ignoring me. You can get a sense for workings you're very familiar with, but - it's more like feeling a vague pressure in the air."

"That sounds really annoying, not having feedback on your spells."

"Yeah. I think it slows down figuring new things out, too - witches are pretty willing to get creative, but then you need to filter for whether your creativity actually helped to keep advancing..."

"Yeah, it would be very hard to do science to it if you can't measure."

"Should still be doable with the right set up, but, yeah, I've heard that complaint, especially from people doing reverse engineering work on spells you don't want to test broadly..."

"Like..."

"We have - not exactly reliable - documentation of spells that cause earthquakes being used ever, but no documentation on how to cast those. It's possible to do the opposite of most spells, so the theory's that related spells should be able to predict and even suppress major earthquakes that threaten population centers - but I think we're also not sure if suppressing even a few earthquakes is safe, since brute force preventing natural processes is the type of thing magic can get iffy about."

"There's some people working on general disaster prediction, moving from standard divination, but as far as I know the witches in spell development are pretty sure they'll need the earthquake spell as a base to reverse for prevention..."

"There's also even more unreliable documentation about weather control spells that've also been lost - and I think there's a feeling that we should have better abilities to predict and model natural weather before we try directly messing with it."

"What would happen if magic got iffy about the earthquake suppression? - ideally you'd probably want to spread out bad earthquakes into much smaller earthquakes, several of them per. Ideally at predictable times so no one schedules their elective open heart surgery for right then."

"I think spreading them out is the general consensus? But we don't actually know how to do that safely. If we suppressed clumsily - usually if you're entirely stopping a natural process, instead of working with it or redirecting it, you get... Kind of a backlash or build up that causes worse, related problems down the line. Even if that doesn't mechanistically make sense."

"How is that best modeled, is it like - the natural world's union is pissed off and rebelling, or what."

"It's..." She pauses, thinking. "Some of it's clearly that we don't have a perfect understanding of physics. But - everything has a spirit. Things want to happen, in meaningful ways - a union protest is... Close in that conflicts of interest are happening? But - it's closer to 'we live interwoven with other sovereign nations, and sometimes our needs and goals conflict, and no one's invented the spirit UN yet.' A union and a company generally share a nation, and there's some common authority you theoretically could appeal to that has an interest in defusing conflict. There's no such authority for spiritual matters, and - a general conflict between spirits and witches wouldn't be the type of thing either side could win, because we're interwoven."

"...Also because everyone effectively disarmed, modern witches are significantly more conflict averse and more into - essentially hippie 'we are all sharing this Earth and are one people' philosophies than ancient witches typically were. If you angered earth spirits by preventing earthquakes entirely, you could maybe just overpower them and force the matter, but..." She pauses, apparently struggling for words. "...That wouldn't even occur to most witches nowadays, I don't think, at least not as an actual option. It's so obviously - against everything we are, and also so obviously blisteringly dumb."

"...I'm accustomed to people not having it occur to them that bad things are bad, like, say death in general, but earthquakes do kill people and stuff. If I ran a country and another country wanted to occasionally kill some of my citizens that is in fact the sort of thing it's conventional to start wars over."

"So... Humans and spirits are already frequently in conflict, but there's no... Path you can slowly escalate through? Between 'diplomacy with the occasional fist fight' and 'mutually assured destruction,' and in an all out war humans would lose first. And... Spirits don't usually directly and intentionally cause disasters, we don't think, they're not that powerful, but hindering natural processes usually harms spirits - us declaring war on spirits over related disasters would be kind of like if a species harmed by oxygen tried to destroy all oxygen in the atmosphere rather than wearing space suits, and said our biosphere producing oxygen naturally was war on them. The relationship's less direct, for earthquakes, but - from what we've managed in talking to earth spirits, the... Way they live? Is tied to it, and to the - spiritual health of the planet. And there's - a sort of flow of spiritual energy through the ground, that harms them if it's altered - so they do get mad about drilling and mining, sometimes, and we suspect blindly barring earthquakes would cause worse problems. We don't think the spiritual energy itself is what's causing the problem for us, though - it doesn't build like water behind a dam, or anything - but it's possible spirits trying to shove disturbances back to livable ranges for them cause over-corrections."

"Wildfires are about it, I think, for disasters you can solve purely diplomatically... But the wildfire starts on its own and spreads on its own, and it generates fire spirits, who can influence it and even make it go away, but are all small children. ...And possibly earth-mountain spirits could redirect avalanches, but they can't actually sense humans."

"This all sounds so frustrating! If on my Earth somebody found a way to prevent earthquakes - I might be able to do it somehow myself, though I'd need to be much more powerful - then they could just do that. Which I realize doesn't help you at all but it's what I'm mentally comparing to."

"Yeah, it's immensely frustrating and hard - and there's a lot of tragedies that are hard to avoid, because there's a lot of... Just innately conflicting life needs. Witches - possibly could fix a lot, if there was enough of us, living long enough to get actual experience and power. Which is also hard, because - the witches who don't want to reveal do have legitimate reasons to be afraid, the satanic panics were recent enough and our main defense is obscurity, and even if we went open - scaling up magic education blindly risks things like 'terrorists with earthquake spells.' Which, maybe we could have regional defensive spells hindering that - but we're not sure."

"On balance I think it's worth it to reveal - to try and get enough people that we can have large scale divinations constantly running, and can have open diplomatic teams, and can at least negotiate about and advise on things like logging, and even with the few people we have right now could talk to disaster prevention and scientific research teams. But those advocating being constantly hesitant and risk averse aren't entirely wrong."

"I guess it's hard enough for humans who disapprove of logging to get anywhere with that and spirits who kind of don't give a shit about people will be more difficult to integrate into the negotiation process."

"Yeah. There's a lot more than just a language barrier."

"There are humans that disapprove of logging, though, what are there in the way of spirits sympathetic to human-typical concerns?"

"Plenty - some get attached to one family, some to one human building... Some just really like humans. Usually either - ones that are very young and small, or ones that are older but have been interacting with humans for a very long time. The older ones sometimes are more like - a different polity you can ally with or work against, but some will go out of their way to help humans. Spirits attached to plants and water are unusually likely to be human-friendly, for some reason - witches tend to do really well with search and rescue and the like because very often we'll get trees practically shouting at us there's someone in trouble over this way. I don't know how much most spirits understand about large scale problems like mass disease or war, though we can sometimes get a plant to make its best guess about whether some part of it is edible or medicinal or toxic."

"The plants don't mind being harvested?"

"None of them I've spoken to mind taking nonessential parts off - many of the edible pieces of a plant are meant to be eaten anyways, to spread their seeds - and the spirits of plants like corn and wheat usually just reattach to next year's crop. Tree spirits are - a bit unusual, for plant spirits, in being so thoroughly attached to one home. ...Though, thinking of, I don't actually know if spirits on tree farms with rapidly growing species get as attached as spirits that naively expect to be in one place for decades or centuries..."

"Huh. I guess that's convenient that feeding people doesn't require constantly antagonizing assorted grain spirits."

She nods. "Lumber's the biggest problem, really - and enough negotiations and careful experiments probably could work something out. Just..." she sighs a bit. "Witches aren't a massive secret cabal pulling at the world's strings or anything like that, and until very recently we've intentionally stayed away from anywhere the spotlights might shine. Magic could get us to the negotiatingtable, easily - but I know enough about people and politics to say that a seat at the table doesn't always get you far."

"Farther than no voice, of course, which is a large part of why I support the revelationists..." She rubs the back of her head. "But the secretists have actual concerns we need to address - and valid fears we need to hedge against coming true. And I don't want to go into any revelation right on the heels of a schism."