"I half-expected them to over the necklace, I very pointedly didn't go home for awhile once I had it so they wouldn't tear things up trying to figure out if I'd given it to anyone."

"Mind control'd be worse than that. At any rate, getting the powers wished on at all definitely involves talking to Gem, no way around that, so you and them'll have to be on the same page about what you'll do with it and whether and how they'll spy on you about it etcetera."

"How'd you get involved in this?"

"They thought my world was 'boring'," she says. "It wasn't; I got out."

"And now they aren't interested in helping you stop your people from dying because there are higher priorities?"

"I got us bumped up the priority list and got them to do something less stupid with boring worlds but I want it done faster we die of old age in ten years."

"I'm sorry. And they said the bottleneck is number of necklaces? Have you tried asking a Vala, they can do it with a touch, they are hard to persuade of things but if you could convince one -"

"They let me keep the necklace I stole," she says dryly, "or I'd run off and do that for myself right now. I might see about borrowing a Vala to pat everybody on my planet on the head, it's not the silliest idea."

"Or giving your planet the Valinor delayed aging effect, I don't know if they're persuadable on that either but they might be."

"Doesn't that require letting one build up power invested in the planet over decades?"

"My Valar are unusually terrible, I haven't actually spoken to them. If that's what the peal heard then probably."

"Worth asking anyway. And it might have to be yours, we're neighbors."

"In that case they could at minimum do a portal and people who want to live ten times longer could come hang out in Valinor, they're apparently pretty persuadable on portals - don't do it if people are going to murder each other and so on, the Valar panicked over that and started mindcontrolling everyone to be virtuous."

"Beach is very nice for a stone age planet but not flawless."

"And Elspeth improves the Valar tremendously but they're still not perfect. I can find you someone sympathetic to go plead with Gem, but I wouldn't count on it."

"I was imagining talking to her myself."

"Then you are authorized to make whatever promises you like on our behalf."

"...uh, would they be true if I made them?"

"Yes, of course - my people are dying -"

"How many people want to be artifact stamps?"

"Haven't asked, and it depends how many of the artifacts we get to keep for our own people, but probably ten thousand if we get to keep most of them, a thousand if the peal gets most of them, if we don't get to keep them but we can, say, give them to you instead of giving them to the peal that'll help -"

...heh. "I'm assuming that's scalar, if my world's the offplanet priority until and unless everybody there who wants one has one and they only overflow to Vanda Nossëo after that what's the inflection point that gets the most total exports?"

"Are we allowed to look for neighbors on our own and give the necklaces to them?"

"...teleport doesn't do unknown destinations, how would you do that?"

"Wizardry one does."