"There're these - beings, I don't know if they think - called Dementors. They feed off positive emotions; in their presence it is impossible to feel happy, and with extended time in thier presence impossible to do anything but relive the worst moments of your life, over and over. People convicted or in some cases just accused of crimes go to Azkaban. They usually stop eating and die."

"So, yeah."

"You have a plan for that one too?"

"No, I figured all it really needs is a new paint job.

- containing wizards is a little bit complicated but even without anything from 2179 we have plans in the works."

"What are they?"

"I don't have my notebooks - can you just make them, they're next to my bed and they're green and they literally say 'plans for world domination' on the cover -"

"Are your notebooks inherently magical in some way?"

"...well, I don't want random people to be able to read the world domination plans..."

"I can't make magic stuff."

"Oh. Sorry." Door - "Accio notebooks -"

"They'll probably be a minute, someone'll have to let them out of the common room."

"They have to travel through not only the intervening space but a clear trajectory through it? How do they pathfind?"

"Magic. I think my father checked once, they pretty much try to go directly at you and nose around if they run into obstacles, they can in fact get stuck even if there's a path to you if there're specific traversibility properties -"

"Aww, nosing books."

"Common room's always full of people, someone'll let them out for me."

Cam awaits the approach of books.

Books! He flips them open to the section on criminal justice reform! "I guess I should summarize current procedures so all of this makes sense - most law enforcement in Britain is done by the Ministry of Magic, which has a bunch of somewhat autonomous departments which enforce laws under their own purview. Things that'd warrant a sentence in Azkaban are usually heard by the Wizengamot, a gathering of around eighty preeminent and elderly wizards from families of political importance - seats are inherited -"

"Of course they are."

"I am deriving a lot of satisfaction from how the future apparently considers all the things I personally dislike to be abhorrently primitive."

"Bar give you a future history lesson?"

"Hasn't been time for a very thorough one but I picked out books for people who'll be good at implementing them and I flipped through them to see if they covered the bits we'll need."

"What other personally disliked primitivenesses turned up?"

"Slavery gets abolished, non-property-owners get to vote, wizards're actually better than Muggles on women being allowed to own property and so on but the Muggles get there too, adversarial justice systems instead of 'the accused can speak in their defense if they want', my little brother Aaron has strong feelings about financial systems and is going to be outright gleeful at the idea of fiat currency..."

"Wait, has fiat currency not been invented yet in 1802 -?"

He gestures at the fat gold coins he had out to pay Bar for the goodies. "Muggles some places have it, backed by gold or silver in their reserves..."

"I suppose wizards might have an easier time counterfeiting but then I'd also expect you to have an easy time conjuring up all the gold you found convenient to have, naively I'd expect IOUs to hold up better because you can go ask somebody 'this says you owed so-and-so this amount for this thing, is that true'..."

"Goblins are really strict on counterfeiting, and there're spells to check, and it's a small enough community you couldn't get away with it for very long..."

"What're goblins like?"

"Uh, short, wrinkly, greyish skin, long pointy ears, long history of wars with wizards which even having only read our side of the story were probably mostly our fault, run Britain's major wizarding bank..."

"That sounds... tense."

"A bit. I wouldn't have files and files on how to run the world if it was running itself well enough."

"Suppose not." Pause. "To answer your earlier question, no I have not done anything except reembody Elves for several months before finding this place."

"Well.

Want to help me revise plans for running the world in light of lots and lots of evidence on what works apparently already existing? It sounds like more fun than months and months of reembodying Elves and I take it it doesn't even slow the return of the Elves to life. 

- what happened -"

"There was a war."

Pause.

"I suppose it would be inappropriate to take you up on your invitation to go modernize your world without telling you that they died because I destroyed their planet."

"Why?"

"The war was against an evil god - who could make binding oaths, that I could verify - who really really wanted it destroyed - and. Needed to stop doing what he was doing."

"And you can bring them back."

"I can bring the Elves back."

"There were other peoples -"

"You wanted to know what kills a god."

"I hope it was worth it."

"Was or I wouldn't've done it."

Nod. "None of this affects how good it would be to have future hospitals and so on, so if you want to come give us future stuff you can still do that. Though we should make really sure you're either protected against magic mind control or just nowhere near any wizards at any time."

"You're a wizard."

"And apparently could make you destroy the world, objectively you shouldn't trust me that much."

"If you point your stick at me unexpectedly we might have a problem."

"Fair.

So, did the evil god keep his end of the deal?"

"Yes."

"I would like more information but it doesn't need to be now or in the format of a conversation."

"I have the oath we got out of him written out if you want to see. It's very thorough and refers to a lot of evil things you'd probably need more context on the brain backups to get."

"That and the - absence of other solutions -"

Cam makes him a copy of the oath.

And he reads, and occasionally asks for clarification on what servers and simulations and backups are.

"People can be - rendered as - information. You can sort of put them on pause and then they don't change or have any experiences - that's what happens to an Elf if their body dies but the chip is fine. Keep them around as static records in case something happens to a copy you're messing with, backed up. You can 'run' them - that's what servers are for - the body's unnecessary, you can with the right stuff interact directly with the information, give it whatever experiences you want, much faster than normal. Duplicate it, run two or more of the same person at the same time. Edit it, fuck around with memories or anything else you know enough about to change precisely."

"...that's terrifying."

"Yes."

Read read. 

"Okay. You did the right thing, if you want confirmation of that from teenagers from the 1800s."

"Your alt thinks so too. Helped with it."

He flinches slightly.

"Makes sense to have more eyes on it."

"Yeah."

"Speaking of which offer stands to look at the taking-over-the-world notes and go "oh they tried that in the 2060s and it doesn't work as well as you'd think" or whatever."

"Thanks."

Investigation of notes commences.

They are really thorough and exhaustive! Here is a glossary of every single person of influence in magical Britain and how well he knows them and which projects he could trust them on and avenues to reduce or increase their influence or his influence over them, updated after regular holiday parties and with notes about frequency of personal correspondence (he is talking to everybody, all the time). There are forty pages on Ministerial reorganization. There are three full notebooks on the Statute and the international conference that would need to be held to overturn it and the people he is in the process of persuading to hold that conference and proposed timelines and their drawbacks. There are eight pages devoted to prospects for marriage and their political advantages and disadvantages.

And then there are plans for once the Statute is repealed and he is Minister of Magic: infrastructure, research, governance, Muggle-magic relations, goblin relations, centaur relations, werewolf regulations, merpeople regulations, international conventions for dragon handling, potential things to do about the human slave trade, potential things to do about the Muggle colonial holdings in Africa -

"I can have less meaningful future knowledge on things like centaurs, although I can extrapolate a little bit from daeva."

"There's a notebook for Muggle governance stuff in particular, if you want to confine yourself to that, or I'll take centaur-daeva parallels."

"Might be more efficient to give you a book on Revelation and take questions, since there are only three kinds of daeva and that's faster than teaching me about all these things." Book.

"Thanks." He starts reading.

And Cam takes notes and writes in suggestions and cautions on all the Muggle stuff.

"Thank you. - you doing okay?"

"In what sense?"

"Uh, spending the next however-long being sad seems worse than not doing that?"

"It isn't - useful, but it seems appropriate."

"My world really really sucks and I guess it would be appropriate to be sad about it all the time but. I don't know."

"I'm not like this about things I didn't do."

"It was the right thing to do. The - awful - is all located in the situation in the first place."

"I murdered fifty-five million innocent bystanders, only most of whom I can bring back. Their planet had some magical properties I couldn't replicate when I made them a replacement planet and the ecosystem's going to be shot because I can't put most of the animals back smart enough to walk and breathe at the same time and they were post-scarcity because of the intervention of the magic god things which are now dead and staying that way and I can't resume any pregnancies that were interrupted after a few weeks and before the chips were fully formed and Elves are fanatical about that, I have heard the most absolutely heartbroken crying about people's babies - yesterday a little girl wanted to know if I could get her dog and I cannot get her dog - it is not appropriate to whistle while I work."

 "- can you - put the pregnancy-as-it-was-at-a-few-weeks -"

"Yeah. The helpers your alt sent with me are gonna ask when people are slightly less shellshocked if that's an acceptable facsimile. Didn't want to spring it on anyone."

"Muggle England has a child mortality rate of 30%".

"And I will be eager to come through your door and modernize your planet and eradicate malaria which at a generous estimate may be responsible for as many as half of all human deaths to date where you're from, and then follow up with the thousand next best interventions, and I will do coffee instead of sleep for that too, and first I am going to put all the Elves back - they really do have inhuman levels of baby-obsession - and it would not. Be. Appropriate. To be cheerful. While I have not even undone the murders I can undo."

"And you're not going to - burn out, or -"

"Don't get me wrong, as long as time is paused there I will take advantage of that, but no, I was not planning to burn out and I expected to be able to follow through on that."

"How long is it going to take?"

"Few more months for this planet. Putting the war casualties back will be a few more beyond that. Might lay down some infrastructure too."

"And how long have you been at it -"

"Months. I'm fast but there are so many."

"You are fast, that's - wow, like 10,000 an hour."

"I figured out what order to do them in on the way there. Make 'em in batches."

"Okay. Let me know if you need anything we can do."

"Recommend me some books about what you can do, maybe there's something you take for granted that'd be useful even if it wouldn't solve the central problem?"

"Uh, sure, Gamp's Fundamental Limits On Transfiguration, Keddles's Charms For Household Use and her Charms For Hobbyists, Ketteridge's Garden Guide To Magical Plants and Marjoribanks's Herbology, Third Edition - fourth edition's better if you happen to read French -"

"I do. Perks of being a daeva, we cheat at languages." Stack of books.

"Lucky you! Uh, Strougler in An Enchanter's Overview, Hipworth's Potions for the 19th Century, Alderton in Duelist's Guide. That should at least mention most spells and give some clue as to what there's promise for in future development."

More stack. "Thanks. You occupied or should I give you some books too?"

"I would love book recommendations from the future, my runes homework can really kind of wait."

"Inconveniently much of my education was aimed at demons and assumes the ability to create arbitrary material objects but I should be able to come up with some things that don't..." And presently Timothy has a stack of his own, medicine and electrical engineering and computer science and such.

"Thanks. ...do you mind if I use a dictation quill to take notes, I can make it so you can't hear me speaking to it but some people find that annoying in its own right."

"Won't bother me."