Griffie is no longer feeling undersocialized and is happy to spend some time by themself.

Cornelia heads out.

Ship law appears to primarily assume that most people on the ship choose to be there, and are not spending all of their time in quarantine.

Griffie may well be able to break ship law even in quarantine, but at least it is unlikely to happen without using spells or other abilities.

There are also rules about accessing the network and not tampering with it, but it seems to assume that such tampering is unlikely to be done by accident.

The ship law does implicitly give Griffie some additional information, like that space suits exist.

Well, given this information, Griffie can hopefully avoid breaking ship law, and at least has some idea what the expected behavior here is. Seems like a good enough understanding for now, so they can go back to diagramming the sample-stabilization spell until night sleep time.

During this, Cornelia is going to call Griffith's new tablet and ask a few questions about Griffith's higher energy spells and when Griffith can cast spells.

Every 'day', where 'day' is a unit of time length based on Suaal's sun, but does not for this purpose depend on the sun, Griffie can prepare 4 orisons, which are sphere-0 spells that can be cast as many times as Griffie desires, 6 first-sphere spells, 5 second-sphere spells, 4 third-sphere spells, and 3 fourth-sphere spells.

Orisons include 'Create Water', 'Light', 'Mending', and the smallest untargeted positive energy spell Griffie has, the one which didn't cling to the plant. The disease-recognition and the positive energy dose that stuck to the plant were first-sphere. The planetarium attempt and the flame blade were second-sphere, and the hum spell, 'Recentering Drone', would be too. 'Remove Disease' was third-sphere. Creating a body without a soul, or grabbing the soul of a recently dead person and attaching it to an available body, are fourth-sphere, as is 'Life Bubble' and 'Scrying'.

There are a lot of higher energy spells. The lightning options are the second-sphere 'Aggressive Thundercloud', which creates a movable 5-foot-diameter cloudlike sphere that shocks anyone it touches. It can be moved by the wind, but Griffie can counteract at least a weak wind, and there really shouldn't be strong winds indoors. There are other lightning spells, but one of them involves 30-foot vertical lines, which seems a bit tall for inside this place, and another one targets a 20-foot radius area. Griffith's heard of other druids with more precise lightning spells, but never prioritized learning them.

Cornelia notes this down, and thanks Griffith.

Griffie ends the call, finishes up diagramming the sample-stabilization spell, and goes to sleep. Other people would prefer not to sleep in bright light, but it works fine for plant creatures, so they don't ask about adjusting the lights.

Nothing interrupts Griffie's rest. 

After two hours, Griffie wakes up and meditates for spell preparation. They only prepare two Life Bubbles this time, it might be good to have a sphere-4 slot open for experiments. Among their other spells prepared are the sample-stabilization spell, along with spells for creating samples.

Cornelia would like to test Griffie's lightning spells, along with seeing about beginning animal testing of diseases, positive energy, and cure spells.

Griffie can prepare some lightning spells too, sure. However, before any animal tests, Griffie would really like to get a summary of the political situation around intelligent animals. Also, does Cornelia know that shapeshifting doesn't expend resources usable for spell tests, and Griffie can do some pretty interesting things with it? Because both of these are true.

Cornelia says, somewhat grudgingly, that the captain had her read up on the politics involved, so she can talk about that if Griffith wants to do that first.

"I'm fine with doing testing without animals first, I just consider understanding the political situation to be a prerequisite to my participation in animal tests, especially given that some of your people seem to get into swordfights over disagreements that they could afford to take the time to resolve without swords. …I'd probably win if someone went at me with a sword but it seems worth avoiding? Also, uh, apparently my past activities are controversial and, uh, in my experience controversies like that can escalate pretty badly so I'd like to stay on top of the situation."

"All right. So, from what I understand, your world has a lot of different species of similar intelligence to you?"

"That's correct."

"We… didn't have that. And even among different ethnicities there were… problems. The key thing though is that there have been two separate groups, humans and animals. There have been different rules for the two groups. A lot of experiments are done on animals rather than humans if possible."

"So one issue is… suppose you want to know if a medication is safe for humans. You might test it on animals, but animals have various differences. For example, rabbit kidneys are different in some ways than human kidneys, so a medicine might work differently between them. Eventually, as technology developed, we gained the ability to do things like make rabbits that had more human-like kidneys, which made that sort of research more effective. This… well, actually it was controversial at the time, due to some insanity, but in the end, at least for us, we are pretty sure kidneys don't change things in a meaningful way. I don't know if the organ the word is translating to is more morally significant."

"But… so, our brains are like your souls. Sometimes we have sicknesses that relates to our brains. So, some people… thought they were being clever when they thought about making animals with more humanlike brains, then use the fact that the rules for animals were different. So one big association with enhancing other animals' minds is to get more intelligent creatures that you can get away with treating as though they are less intelligent."

"I… hope that doesn't make us look too bad, but does that part at least make sense?"

"First, let me reassure you: I know that humanity includes unethical researchers. I'm not going to condemn your species by them. I've definitely seen worse humans than you and I still have human friends. I don't think that poor behavior or ethics on the part of human researchers, or even research organizations, is going to be an overwhelming impediment to us working together. In the case of the Curdime weapons research program … the issue got resolved by imprisoning a few people in lead roles and imposing economic sanctions? To be clear, that's me trying to name an example of research that's definitely more unethical than talking about mistreating intelligent animals and then not doing it, I don't expect anyone will want to impose any sanctions about that, it sounds like it resolved itself."

"Moving on: I think my world has better options for testing medicines than your world does. Probably someone is likely to be offended by the details of whatever you're doing, but … right, you don't have spells at all. You can't Speak with Animals. This suggests I'm likely to be offended by the details of whatever you're doing, but, uh, you're in a really difficult position when it comes to doing right by animals if you can't talk to them ever, not even an annual check-in when someone comes by on circuit. Well, this makes animal testing of my spells a lot more urgent. Don't worry, if any druid can speak to your world's animals, it's me."

"We have both brain illnesses and soul illnesses. I have never heard of someone proposing to awaken an animal's soul for the purpose of inducing a soul disease and testing treatments, but mostly I delegate reading terrible people's books about their evil research projects to someone else, so if it were happening I might not know about it. The common association for enhancing animals' minds is to have them as competent companions and assistants. The typical process for that is for someone to find an individual animal interested in working with them, and bond with the animal, after which they have the option to lastingly enhance their bonded animal's mental capabilities."

Cornelia nods. "There are people who specialize in acting as sort of… representatives, of the animals' interests. That is only… one of the issues, however. Another argument is that it would be confusing if you couldn't tell just by looking if there was a human level intelligence or an animal level intelligence."

"That's quite an argument. A lot of things in life are confusing? We could probably convince some animals to wear flashy jewelry or dye their hair or something, would that help? In my world, most intelligent animals are either paired with more human-shaped people, or visibly not like regular animals, or verbal."

"Those… would be options, yes. Then there are some of the… other arguments."

Cornelia takes a deep breath.

"I'm not sure if this is going to translate right, as you mentioned a 'shard of the power of nature'. However, one argument is that human-level intelligences and animal-level intelligences are two separate groups, and to violate the boundary between them is… unnatural."

"It sounds to me like it's translating, I just think if it were unnatural I would have heard about it! The fact that I contain what I am calling a 'shard of the power of nature' means that if I do enough things which are objectionable-to-nature, I could lose my spells and some of my other abilities. And, I mean, people connect to different aspects, my aspect discourages mistreatment of animals but technically gratuitous mistreatment of animals is in fact an aspect of nature, but… if something were abhorrent to nature I wouldn't be doing it, and if it was such a feasible-looking and tempting idea as enhancing the intelligence of one's animal companion, I would have been actively warned against it."

"Also, I think my world has more natural examples of human-level intelligence and animal-level intelligence being two points on a spectrum, not two isolated categories, than yours does. In my world, elementals vary a lot in intelligence depending on their overall strength. This is actually a pattern with dragons and some other species as well, but the elemental case seems most informative." Griffie sketches elementals. "See, the ones which are too small and weak to even show up in documents of entities you might need to fight have animalistic intelligence, but some of the most potent types of elementals are as intelligent as the typical human. Well, you humans might be on average smarter, nutrition and prenatal care and such help and you seem to have fewer issues with that than my world does."

"The degree to which they are two isolated categories… is actually exaggerated in our world, I think. Different creatures have different levels of intelligence, and while none reach the technological status of humans or mercurials other than us, things are substantially more complicated than some people wish to believe. There are also… so, there is one somewhat… unfortunate bit of our history. It lead to a lot of problems for a while, though at this point it is resigned to a few insane people, but I should warn you in case you encounter one of them, as they seem… potentially quite relevant to you."

"There was a major controversy about preventing or ending pregnancies. Explaining all of the context behind it goes well beyond what I studied, but this then got tangled up with certain scientific research that was at least somewhat  related, because someone figured out how to end pregnancies in a way that got reusable resources that could be used for medicine and research. For political power, at one point a political leader of a major country at the time created a council, and helped support it… it didn't exactly take over those who studied… 

"There is a translation issue here. There is a category of ethical studies we have, that especially includes, though isn't limited to, things like advocating on the behalf of animals. I think it might not be translating because you didn't have to try to figure out how to treat animals nicely the way we did due to your ability to speak with them? Though… I think a lot of it was more pushing people to listen to the animals’ interests at all. Sometimes people are very resistant to listening to the interests of anything where they have a long history of benefiting from not listening and the thing can't fight back effectively."

"Anyway, this field of ethics, the political leader pushed for his council to be sort of the 'face' of it. The person appointed to lead this council was… selected more because he would create strong arguments for the position that would help the political leader please his supporters, than other concerns like… he was very obsessed with things being… 'natural' in a certain… eccentric… way."

"Unfortunately, with the political leader's support, he managed to infect a lot of thought with his ideals, and for a while after there was a lot of controversy about even simple things like basic enhancements to the genetic templates of plants, if they used more advanced ways of doing it rather than old fashioned selective breeding. Also there was backlash against the other members of the field he got labeled with and… it was a horrible mess. The article linked it to a lot of other issues, most of which I didn't read, including a lot I didn't even realize existed… sometimes I feel a lot of sympathy for the mercurials' reactions to our past."

"Anyway, long story short, while at this point such positions are pretty limited, occasionally we still have someone banging on our door. Given that apparently your common spells do things that they oppose, it seemed to me like you should be warned."

"Well, thanks for the heads-up. I've dealt with angry people upset about perfectly good modifications to living creatures banging on my door before, but I had help at the time. How powerful and well-armed are these people, usually? What's the opinion of more major authority on the issues?"

"They… aren't likely to attack you, if that is what you are asking?"