"We have about 6 trillion on trade worlds, a further trillion in outposts on contacted worlds, and then Oifilei accounts for another trillion by itself. Contacted... putting aside Heresy, which at last estimate has a human population in the sextillions, we have contact with another nine trillion. Including refugee worlds from Heresy, another... let me see here, we've evacuated 17,432 star systems as of last count, Heresy crushes people to a trillion a planet, estimate ten planets per star system... one hundred seventy four quadrillion. Of all of those, only about six trillion have access to an immortality policy. We've made agelessness standard - only people who don't want it or haven't made solid contact with the OTC don't have it, which amounts to about five trillion without it, mostly on Half-Tamed worlds again excluding Heresy, the depth of which's humanitarian disaster is - almost literally beyond reckoning. Inconsistent physics."

"The situation in heresy sounds extremely concerning and at a scope we're not currently able to help with meaningfully in a hands on sense. It's possible we have knowledge which could be helpful but that's hard to assess. If you have any documentation on the problem we assign researchers and archivists to see if there's anything they can think of. The assembly might vote to put our crash build plans into effect but that would be such a major change that I can't really speculate on how the politics of that would work out. Currently projections are that we could sustainably house about a hundred trillion people in a median solar system with our current magic and technology but our current infrastructure doubling time is estimated at ten years under crash build conditions and wide scale use of self-replicating machinery carries its own risks."

"We are most concerned with finding the wild talents in your population at this time - we have access to enough magic systems with variable enough scope that it's likely that in a non-Heresy population of fifty billion we'll find about ten deity-level talents. Each one would have power sufficient to fully evacuate a star system within a reasonable timeframe - a hundred trillion people each, and continuing from there."

"If there are such individuals among our population we haven't detected them, one individual having that amount of personal power is... unsettling. We use the Heart to tune realm bridges and restrain some magics and exotic physics from spreading. I expect you could bypass our protections but we'd prefer you didn't."

"I see." 

Director Grey taps her thumbs together. 

"What is your policy on sharing your immortality technologies?"

"We share them pretty freely, though we mostly distribute the magic based version because distributing advanced nanotechnology without oversight is a recipe for disaster. We also tend to deploy some spies to ensure that others aren't editing stored minds without their consent. A bit like your own crackdown on slavery I expect."

"We would make a point of crediting your state account with us the value of such advances, which I expect is more than enough to cover any knowledge or technology base you might want from us."

"What do mean by advances in this context? Our nanotech based immortality is something that could be shared as data but our magic based immortality relies on magical objects that we manufacture en mass but aren't really something I think people without our primary magic system could make."

"We're confident that if you give us access to a functioning example of your immortality tech - magical or technological - we'll be able to replicate it to some degree."

"Alright, I think that's something we offer as a show of good faith." She turns, "Riley?"

"It'll take me about five minutes. I'll be salvaging one of my dodecs though. Assuming it's alright for me to do magic here?"

"Let me just get a sign-off with Security..." 

She taps her watch. Green checkmark.

"Alright, we're set up to catch now. Morning-Glory will receive your sample on my behalf."

She nods sharply.

Riley taps her staff once and a small disk detaches from midway down and hovers onto the table. Extremely intricate symbols begin writing themselves into the surface before Riley sets down the hand not holding her staff to cover it. Simultaneously her backpack opens and a metallic dodecahedron about ten centimeters on a side hovers out. The it comes apart. The metal panels from the exterior neatly stack themselves before finding their way back into her backpack nine cloudy white crystalline spheres and one metallic box set themselves down on the table while the remaining parts also return to her backpack. Throughout it all Riley smiles widely. Clearly enjoying herself. The crystals go from cloudy to perfectly clear over the course of about a minute. And then they start to get cloudy again. The metallic module splits in two and also starts to morph in small ways the interface port on one half changing from a structure used by Starlight into one documented in a book from the library. The other part grows a small hatch.

"While she's working is there anything else you'd like to discuss?"

"I would like you to have this."

She reaches up and pulls a golden ring from the air, inscribed with the OTC's trigram amid a honeycomb engraving.

"This is a Cernnous. It represents one year of godly effort on the bearer's behalf. It is at a very rough valuation the equal of the technology you intend to grant us. I encourage you to use it for the betterment of your people."

"Thank you. I expect there will be a lot of debate about how we use this."

"I trust your people to find a good use for it."

And she hands the ring over.

A little hologram pops up as it touches her skin. It reads: "This ring is a Cernnous."

Liath frowns. "Sorry, identification routines - Cernnouses announce themselves to their bearers because the form is ceremonial. The enchantment is the coin, not the object it's anchored on."

"Interesting. Do you know how it decided I'm here? Most magics we know of don't register bodies like the one I'm wearing as being people."

"Proximity cues - it assumes anything human shaped is a human, and displays the message if they're nonreceptive to telepathic contact."

"That makes sense. Simpler than I would have expected but simple is good sometimes." She slips the ring onto a finger. "Could you give me a sense of what we could do with this? I expect we'll do a lot of research into things but the only direct application of godly power I was briefed on was the true name erasure on this world and I don't know how much time that took."

"It's roughly worth as much as a custom star system. Where by 'Custom' I mean 'down to individual flowers in the gardens.' A year is a long time in god-hours."

"Would a less detailed construct take less time? Why would someone use a god to fine tune down to that level of detail?"

"Less detailed constructs take less time. Because that level of fine detail control is only really possible with godly intervention, I suppose. It was merely an example."

"That's reasonable."