"Will do. What's the song?"

"One of mine. It's not as good a find as one of your alt's next eldest brother's but I can't guarantee those aren't already all over Hell."

"Oh, you compose? That's lovely! Are people honest with demons out of inherent decency or is the deal invalid if, say, I claimed to have a song not in circulation and was wrong -"

"Violin," says Cam, "which is funny for high-context reasons. The deal is invalid if you overstate your confidence, you wouldn't be able to dismiss her."

"Useful. Okay. I'll be back in twenty minutes, I should think."

Nod. "Don't say anything that sounds agreementy till you've got it outlined how you like."

"Got it. Thank you." - and out of Hogwarts, calling his broomstick to meet him in a courtyard, off the grounds, a Apparition-hop further away to somewhere in anonymous Scotland.

He draws a circle.

There is a delay, and a demon appears. She has the wings (red) but no tail; she's darker than Miranda but her hair matches the wings and her eyes are blue. "Ooh," she comments experimentally, peering at the circle.

"Hi, I'm Timothy!"

"Charmed. What can I do for you, Timothy?"

"Scale model of King George the III's throne room in 1801, a cubit across, in some kind of box I can carry? I have a song that I guarantee has not been disseminated anywhere."

"A cubit," she giggles. "Recording or sheet music?"

"Recording." 

"Damn. Well, I'll take it anyhow."

"If I need more historical scale models of things I'll get you sheet music. Thank you."

That seems to suffice, since she makes him a box and holds out her hand.

"It's on a chip in my pocket."

"Oh, fine. I do wash my hands, you know."

"I didn't intend to give offense, I just forget which pocket." Pants are so confusing. 

"I will go through the contents of your pants in the privacy of my own home, then." Smirk.

He is from 2179 and who knows maybe that's a totally reasonable thing to say in 2179 in which case he is fairly miscalibrated on how to hit on Cam - 

- not really the time - 

- "nice meeting you." And she can go home. 

And she is gone.

He waves his wand and sweeps the circle away and flies back. 

Minor is leaning against the door reading.

"Works fine. Which invites the question of how no one ever stumbled on it."

"No idea. I suppose the magic system could be outright contagious."

"Well. We can plan around summoning working - we probably can't announce it like you did, between most people being illiterate and the mind-control concerns being yet untested..."

"Right. The wings are not necessarily obligatory, incidentally, it's possible for daeva to go stealth if we want - easiest for angels."

"So if mind control doesn't work, we find and screen some daeva who would like to bring 1802 up to modernity and end the slave trade and so on, and they do so incognito. If mind control does work and in particular if it gets around bindings it is probably safer not to have daeva and wizards on the same planet."

"Which gets harder as space travel gets more accessible. Can cut that off with bindings for daeva, harder to bring your world up to the space age without any spacefaring..."

"You could conjure for wands on outgoing spaceflights. But it'd definitely require ongoing maintenance - might in fact just be better to train people to throw off the Imperius -"

"With what maliciously-intending caster, that seems like a serious limitation."

"- there're ways to make it work, they're just - dubious. Maybe with more thought I could come up with less dubious ones."

"What are your dubious ideas?"

" - if you're in Slytherin and determined to take over the world someday and towards that end to at least dabble in dark magic far enough to handle it should it come up later, it is not that hard to find someone who'll help teach you to throw it off. The usual arrangement is something like 'I'll take it off in four hours; if you manage to throw it off before then, good for you, but if you don't, no complaining -"

"Ah-huh."

"Bet we can do better."

"That would be ideal, yes, even passing for human I probably should not spend four hours like that, just in case, even if I managed not to make any stuff my indestructibility is quite passive, same goes for other more adventurously inclined daeva..."

"And might come up, yeah. I was not suggesting you try it."

"That does put a slightly encouraging bound on 'malicious inclination', though, if I catch the implications right."

"Yeah. You can have training that is within parameters agreed-upon in advance."

"But I assume the parameters can't be 'caster makes trainee do their laundry'?"

"You could probably cast it intending not to do worse than that, but I doubt you'd get anywhere having explicitly agreed in advance not to do worse than that."

"How does this interact with the trainee having well-grounded expectations about what might be intended without explicit agreement?"

"No idea. I have a very small sample size here."

"Fair enough."

"And my sample somehow fails to contain anyone who wasn't terrified. But again, the only people currently doing this are ones willing to risk being tortured to death -"

"Which is rather terrifying - the indestructibility is suppressible -"

"And there's a different Unforgivable that might or might not interact with it at all."

"Two of them, even, although the one that just kills you - well, I guess we could try to summon somebody out of the Poppy Gardens, write the caretakers and see if they'll wake someone up - occasionally you get a suicidal daeva, some do-gooders keep them asleep."

"- oh, of course that'd be a thing - if the other two don't work we can assume that one doesn't either, if they do then maybe we can ask -"

"Hard to find somebody who knows the spell and con them into thinking the Poppy Garden sleeper wants to live?"

"Yeah, most people wouldn't commit a serious crime to murder a random innocent - I could arrange it but it'd be an awful lot of orchestration."

"We could maybe find a Poppy Garden sleeper who is willing to pose as a nonrandom or a noninnocent."

"That'd make it easier. - you have permission to manipulate me in ways useful for trials of spells that require a certain state of information to cast, incidentally, but I'm hard to lie to -"

"Yeah, I don't really expect to be able to pull it off, I have a reasonable deadpan and you're very low context and it still sounds really hard."

"I can test the intent thing somewhat systematically by getting someone's permission to try and then checking how malicious my intent in fact needs to be to successfully cast the spell, but I haven't done that yet because, well, Azkaban."

"It would probably be hard to catch you here."

"If I expect someone to stop me from following through I bet that throws things off, and I don't know how our host feels about me mind-controlling people into doing themselves or their loved ones serious injury."

"Bar?"

Security will interfere with any attempt to do such things within the main bar area.

"In my room, though?"

Security does not cover private rooms or the back yard.

"Father, while we're out of the Ministry's jurisdiction want to learn to throw off the Imperius -"

"Maybe later," he says distractedly. "You should ask one of your brothers, for the experiment -"

"Can't summon enough malicious intent, I tried teaching Michael."

"Should I be insulted?"

"You should probably be insulted if it turns out my subconscious is as protective of you as of my little brothers."

"You should try your grandfather's grandchildren by his second wife."

"Fredrick'd do it."

Sigh. "Maybe Miranda'd do it, I can ask her -"

"Are you going to hurt her -"

"We are trying to determine whether it can be done without hurting people much but the answer might be 'nope'."

"I'll do it -"

He makes a strangled sort of sigh.

"Who's Miranda?"

"A friend of Minor's in my House who picked up Occlumency astonishingly quickly and would probably get this down pretty fast, too. And find the rest of what we're doing very intriguing though I don't know how narrow we want to keep that for the time being."

"Occlumency's -?"

"Some wizards can read minds; it's a rare skill but it exists and Occlumency's the counter."

"I assume I can't learn that either?"

"I've never heard of a Muggle learning it and there're things like potions where you'd think Muggles could do them but they can't, but there aren't any magic steps per se. The workbook I used to pick it up was called The Mental Arts: Occlumencee - misspelled - if you wanted to have a try though then we're back to testing."

"How's it misspelled?"

He spells it.

Cam gets himself a copy.

"You actually remind me of Miranda a lot, I'd wonder if she was a distant ancestor but she's black."

"If she was distant enough and the genetics shook out right wouldn't necessarily be able to tell."

"It is in fact 1802, that's probably distant enough. Of course it's also distant enough that 'genetics' as an explanation for the similarity in mannerisms is a bit implausible."

"Quite."

"You have good reason to not want to be around a lot of wizards, even if Miranda's barely thirteen and definitely doesn't know any Unforgivables. How do you want to handle Milliways traffic?"

"I'll probably get my own room. Although it's been quiet so far."

"I was mostly thinking of people I might invite for out-of-jurisdiction testing, not people from yet other worlds. Though that'd be cool."

"What do you mean by how do I want to handle it, then?"

"Would you like to refrain from being present, would you like to be present but keep most of your capabilities secret for your safety, would you like to keep it to people who definitely couldn't hurt you - or people I trust, if you happen to trust my people-trusting that far..."

"I trust your people-trusting pretty far, albeit mostly for secondhand reasons. I should probably default to not being present if I happen to be irrelevant, but when I'm relevant my capabilities will not make very convenient secrets... Bar, how far should I trust Security?"

Security reacts very quickly and is at any given time capable of subduing persons in the establishment, although they cannot guarantee a specific duration of maximum rule violation. Read-only telepathy does not violate bar rules.

"Why not?"

It is the default or only communication method of some patrons.

"I won't invite anyone who has Legilimency in. ...well, except here I am, but I promise I have never used it except to check peoples' Occlumency."

"- you've picked up more Dark Arts than I realized, I apologize for calling you incurious."

"I haven't picked up any dark arts. I've gotten a working familiarity with a lot of usable-for-evil ones."

"Does 'Dark Art' have a technical definition?"

"Mostly means 'spells without practical uses other than harm' but it's not formal."