"...but that isn't necessarily any more efficient than going around putting infrastructure on the planets people already have."

"Well, in Limbo they won't die while we're getting to it. But yeah."

"All right, maybe you're doing a very nearly reasonable job with everything except for the metal things not being able to pass back messages and not taking life expectancy into account."

"I'm glad you think so. We can go around telling the Charps to tell people how to get in touch with us."

"How will they do that, does your telepathy reach like that?"

"Nope. They'll just have to tell everyone to write letters with the right header and then we'll have whoever's on messenger demon duty in Space conjure them and some of my people in Space read them and figure out who ought to see them."

"Might be a large volume, can your people in Space handle it? And how are you going to deal with places like my planet where I literally invented writing last year and have only convinced three people to sit still to learn how."

"The Charps are equipped to teach literacy but I don't actually know how to incentivize it. Maybe Kib and Aydanci can work something up so Charps can write messages for people. And Space'd be the ones handling it because there're a couple million of them."

"...how would it teach literacy in a language where writing wasn't invented?"

"They know a simple-enough phonetic alphabet, they can teach people how to use it to spell things in their own language. Don't know what to do for peoples who don't speak aloud or things like that."

"...I don't think it'd even work for our language, unless phonetic includes pitch..."

"Might not. Kib's the person to ask about new Charp capabilities, you might be able to just teach them or it might require building an improved variant somehow."

Nod.

"I'm sorry it's not enough."

"I guess you're working under more constraints than seemed implied by casually dropping a metal thing that teaches math on every island in the world."

"We can bring a pretty overwhelming show of force to any particular problem we see but we are not even locally omnipotent and adjacency is super annoying."

"...in principle my system might be able to affect that..."

"That'd be really really big."

"I'm getting that. But it'd be - even by your standards of investment I'd need to learn and burn a huge amount of information. Might not even work."

"What happens if you try to do something your magic system can't do?"

"Depends on the kind of can't-do. In this case nothing but I'll have to learn a ton of stuff I don't mind losing to even check."

"I wonder if you can get anywhere with Elspeth - she can transmit information really fast."

"Maybe. I do also need it written if it's too big to sing."

"Well. Information won't be the bottleneck. We can also keep looking for new worlds. Maybe someone's got something that solves it."

Nod.