Ugh, this is embarrassing. "By all rights I should be, but I suck at sitting still and keeping my eyes pointed in the same direction long enough to watch TV of any kind."

Mara leads Katie to a couch and pulls her into her lap.

"Would you have an easier time learning to sit still if you practiced like this?"

"It's certainly worth a try!"

"Excellent!"

"Now, we do have a few matters of business to discuss. If I'm going to cover for your existing violations of the Laws, I need to know all about them. What spell did you use exactly, on who, and were there any others?"

"I found this spell online that's supposed to make people supernaturally gullible, and used it to convince my family I was at college, so they'd pay for me to live on my own without me having to do any actual work." The soul damage thing is scary but she continues to feel zero guilt. Fuck them helots.

"Seems easy enough to cover up, then—say you've dropped out and are moving in with a girlfriend, I wipe away the traces of magic so if they look back on their memories and notice anything off later it can be dismissed as temporary insanity. If they try to pull anything against you legally, my lawyer can fend them off. The other matter is—I want you to think about solemnly swearing to never break the Laws again, and to not use magic against me so long as you're on my property. Don't jump right to it. You seem like someone who takes her word seriously, and it's important to hold onto that as you enter the supernatural world. Oathbreakers draw the ire of all factions, and if you swear on your magic, it can actually weaken your power to break your word. However, if after some thought you're willing to take those oaths, they will be the easiest way to ensure your safety and mine, and proceed quickest with magic training."

Nuzzles. God she's so soft and lovely. "It's very kind of you to not just force me to at gunpoint. The first step for me being willing to do that is actually knowing in full what all of them are. No killing people with magic, no mind control, no necromancy, lemme guess, is there one about binding demons?"

"Not exactly! Imprisoning and extorting the denizens of the supernatural realms is actually a classic wizard trick. Some of them will euphemize it, but I prefer to be honest about what I'm doing. The only so-called 'demons' that it's forbidden to mess with are creatures from outside the universe. Have you ever read H.P. Lovecraft?"

"Yet another thing I'm supposed to have read but haven't. I have even less of an excuse this time, there are audiobooks of him and it's pretty easy for me to listen to those while playing video games (well, minus the constant technical issues), but starting new thing is EFFORT and there's another episode of my favorite riddle podcast right there begging me to hit play."

"Well, if you wanna get an idea of what they're like—or at least what wizards typically think of them, I haven't actually gone anywhere near one because I value my life—give him another chance. The ones you're still missing are no mind reading—it's considered a separate thing from mind control, maybe because it's the rule with the most exceptions, no transforming another's body, and no time travel."

"Some speculate that time travel doesn't actually have the brain damaging effects of other types of black magic, but was simply added to the Laws because it presents too great a risk to the world itself! There aren't enough case studies for either side of the debate to fully demolish the other."

"Hold the fucking phone. TIME TRAVEL IS POSSIBLE???"

"We really don't like to think about it. Shit is worse than nukes or nanobots in terms of catastrophic risk."

"Okay, but like, the potential reward is equally massive??? Are there not a bunch of Jewish wizards who would very much like their spouses and cousins and best friends back, and also probably Irish wizards too depending on how long exactly we live, and oh yeah Armenians and Rwandans and I guess Native Americans but that one's kind of uncomfortable because if that genocide didn't happen probably neither of us would exist."

"That's the catastrophic risk. You change the past on that scale, and it undoes your own motivation to change the past, creating a paradox. The results of such are unpredictable and inconsistent. No one wants to push it further and risk obliterating the universe."

"There's gotta be some galaxy brained way around that but I can't think of any right now. Still makes me a little uneasy about swearing never to violate that one, though. Anyways, transfiguration feels like the other obvious odd one out. Is it not reversible? Because if it is, I can think of several extremely beneficial non-evil uses."

"Transfiguration pushing you in the warlock direction is considered a mystery by many wizards! It is dangerous, often irreversible or carrying other negative effects, but it would indeed have positive potential if done right and it didn't damage your brain and soul. Unfortunately, in this case we do have enough case studies to conclude it does."

"Well now I feel bad for all the perverts who want to be turned into a mouse and have a subjectively-giant woman pick them up with two fingers and plop them in between her tits. Let's be grateful our depraved fetishes don't require dark magic to enact."

"Indeed!"

"Also, 'kill people with magic' is very vague. If you use magic to push someone off a cliff, does that count? Enchant a gun so it never jams and then shoot someone with it? Use strength-enhancing magic and then beat someone to death with your bare fists? What if you have a magic item with properties totally unrelated to violence, like, I don't know, a metal water bottle enchanted to be bigger on the inside, and beat someone to death with that? What if you- no, enchanting food to be supernaturally delicious would probably count as mind control anyway."

"I think all of those would count as violations except for maybe the water bottle thing. It's better to not be rules-lawyering it at all, though, if you're going to try to kill someone use a regular fucking gun. The food wouldn't count as mind control if you did it by altering its physical properties, but there would be limits on how delicious you could make it by that method."

"Also I'm noticing the laws say nothing about torturing people with magic as long as you don't kill them, even though that intuitively feels like it should be on there."

"For better or worse, that isn't against the laws. Kind of like the transformation thing but in the opposite direction, I suppose, a way reality doesn't quite line up with our moral instincts. There's not as much low-hanging fruit as you might think there, though, once you rule out methods that count as mind control and those with a high risk of lethality. You might as well waterboard someone."

"Actually, wait, I thought of another edge case. Say I kill someone through entirely mundane means. The actual physical act of doing this did not employ magic in any way. However, I would not have done it if I were not a wizard, because I have become fabulously wealthy via, I don't know, selling penis enlargement potions or turning lead into gold or something else that might be a violation of regular laws but not the Laws of Magic, and can therefore afford to hire a really good lawyer and bribe the justice system so I get away with it. Is that a violation?"