....oooh. "Let's learn magic then we can read more."

"It says it takes years."

"So?"

"We might wanna read more before we get sidetracked into that?"

"I bet it won't take us years. Is it a question of amount of material you have to learn or building up magic stamina or -"

"Amount of material, there's lots of runes - I can cheat with my antimagic but you can't -"

"I have an eidetic memory, though."

"Then you can memorize thousands of runes in less than a year, but it looks like the principles of spell composition might be a little more elusive."

"I can memorize thousands of runes this afternoon, accelerated. - I guess we should at least do enough reading to get the best spell composition book."

"I guess, but then we can't learn it all together because we don't have eidetic memories yet!"

"You said you can cheat because of being a dragon, right?"

"Yeah, kind of, I can make it so only the parts of a spell I mean go through and that means I can have extra in that I'm not careful about and antimagic it away," she says, frowning at the book that informed her of this, "but it isn't as good that way."

"It might be that this magic system can do eidetic memory, faster than making all of you necklaces which'll take forever."

"...okay, maybe."

"We could look at the sphinxes' magic publications to see if they have anything to add," she says. "—Oh, this is interesting. The Emperor of Cetaganda is a dragon."

"...are they a dragon planet?" asks Nika, disconcerted.

"Hard to say from this book alone... and if we're going to spy extensively on the Cetagandan Empire I should really call Simon."

"Yeah. I wonder if he secretly knows?"

"I very much doubt that."

"Do you suppose you should call him right now or should we read more stuff?"

"If we call him, perhaps he'll help us read the stuff."

"Makes sense."

"Who's Simon, is he the king or president or whatever here -"

"No, that's Emperor Gregor. Uncle Simon runs Imperial Security."

"Is the emperor good at emperoring?"