"It does transportation and weather and translation. If there are other concepts a spell can be built around nobody's found them yet."

"Huh. Well, it's probably really good that we found you in Edda and with only medium reasons to be terrified."

"What would've happened otherwise?"

"Probably had a bunch of people try to wish for some sort of teleporter containment power."

"Those poor people would've felt so ripped off."

"I mean, it'd be a useful thing to have and they'd get much higher reads for it in the middle of a crisis, but, yeah, much better to not do that."

"If I hadn't been a Bell in particular but did the same things what would've happened?"

"I'd have talked to you for longer and tried to figure out what you wanted them for? 'you're a Bell' just means we can skip the step where we worry about your motives and how competent you'll be at ruling your world if we accidentally hand you enough leverage to do that."

"I might've already had it if I hadn't had priorities other than 'rule Beach for a few years'."

"If anyone takes over the world using Charp knowledge and is terrible then we'll have to rethink our approach. This mostly vindicates it. I think."

"I'm not sure being well-intentioned is necessary for inventing writing and figuring out the exploit. The thing wasn't strictly necessary but it helped."

"Not well-intentioned necessarily but - with incentive to be less terrible than most preindustrial societies sort of default to being."

"Are they mostly terrible in ways not direct consequences of being preindustrial?"

"Most terrible consequences of a bad ruler competent enough to take over the world with things learned from Charp are less terrible than terrible from being a preindustrial society, and most people given a glimpse of where technology can take them want to pursue it, and all the things a Charp can teach you are much much easier to use to make the world better than to make it worse."

"What kinds of things did you leave out of them?"

"Some easy ways to make medium-sized explosions, some physics which sufficiently clever and motivated people will notice can, with a lot of resources, let you make very very big explosions - the aftermath of one of those is what those demons and angels you hitched a ride with were cleaning up -"

"It looked very exploded."

"Yeah. We're looking back on that one to figure out if we could've seen it coming, and - they had a standoff ongoing about whether they'd blow each other up, but a terrifyingly high share of worlds go through that stage, and usually they never take the leap. Maybe we should just confiscate everyone's nukes - the big explosion sources - but that could under some circumstances be more destabilizing -"

"People threaten to do that a lot? Why?"

"They threaten to do it if the other people do it. Which is all fine and well until someone's computers mistakenly report the other people did it, or someone very careless comes to power, or some nation is losing a conventional war and decides they have nothing to lose..."

"I wonder if dying at age ten makes people more docile or if we're just temperamentally like that."

"There is some variance. Elves're more prosocial than humans, on the population level. If Beach tribes don't routinely raid each other then you're doing better than Stone Age humans as well."

"Sometimes the egg swapping gets less friendly?"

"How's egg swapping go -"

"When somebody dies if they have eggs on the beach at the time their friends sometimes put one or two of their eggs on another beach and then take back different eggs."