"Yes. I am technically already on the run, wearing my other faces."

Felix stops opening the door and goes over to hug her.

Hug. Very hug. So much hug.

Eventually: "Do you think it's worth it to try to make sorcery socially acceptable? By ourselves I mean..."

"Maybe. I'm not sure. The fact that everyone on the planet could do it could serve as incentives but people might find it all the scarier for that..."

"I think magery might be stronger in every aspect that isn't creating permanent effects and accessibility. Should we present sorcery as less scary then?"

"Possibly. I see two main classes of objection: religious, because it's new and scary and who knows what kinds of evil gods might have made it, and practical, because it's unknown and giving everyone on Galatea magic like that would be... a very delicate situation."

"We could present the story of my people as an evidence that sorcery is good? And most people wouldn't know how to use sorcery. Elan figured it out mostly by luck and exploring ruins... Should we be afraid of metamancers knowing it exists?"

"So where did the ruins come from in the first place? And—possibly. Shit metamancers will totally figure out that sorcery's started existing."

"Ancient civilizations, we are going to use Milliways to figure out. And shit. How fast do you think they would figure out? And if a metamancer tells someone that there is a new type of magic...?"

"They wouldn't, that'd reveal they're a meta and they'd be killed. And—without you and knowledge about the rituals, having absolutely no clue at all about any of it—months, at least, they wouldn't figure it out sooner than that."

"Okay." Hug. "And we have the lifeforce advantage too. And the mana one. Now I don't know if we should consider recruiting metamancers in case the various governments turn against sorcery."

"...maybe. Might be a good idea anyway, make the Cult of Vinkar exist if it doesn't."

"Vinkar? Yeah, organizing metamancers sounds like a good idea anyway even if we do that in parallel to distributing sorcery in this world."

"Vinkar is the evil god associated with metamancers, there's rumours of a group of people who think that, hey, maybe metamancers aren't so bad after all, and it's purportedly named that. I've been looking for signs of them for a while and not found anything, which makes sense since if I did they'd probably be too incompetent to not be all decapitated, but it might also indicate they're just a myth."

"...Do you think your infinite mana hack would win if they were using magical defenses against detection? ...would they be using magical defenses? I am not sure the other mages are any good at any sort of metamagic."

"...probably to the first, but I'm not sure they'd be using magical defences—at least not from detection."

Nod. "Should we tell the three delegations about the lifeforce-to-mana conversion? We could justify it as being an aspect of foreign magic."

"But they'll discover we were lying when it turns out they can't convert lifeforce to mana."

"I mean, in the sense that only Sadde could do it and we... don't have access to him anymore." Squeeze.

Yes, very squeeze. "I'm not sure we should tell them about it, actually. Letting it be known that I have unheard-of amounts of mana sounds... unwise."

Nod. "How about huge amounts of lifeforce? I think it would be diplomatically worse if we revealed great power after they tried to contain us for one reason or another. At least worse than if we just came forth as having great power and they negotiated with us a bit warily. But I don't really know."

"...you have a point. I'm not sure; if I just announced I had enough mana to lay waste to the continent they'd—" She pauses, and her eyes widen a lot. "We could go north. We could end that stupid storm and figure out what's there and found our own country if there isn't one already there—"

"How long would that trip take? Is there a way around the storm? If there is a country over there it sounds like we could get a complicated political situation in our hands."

"There is no way around the storm as far as anyone knows. No one can cross it. Why would we have that, though, it need not necessarily be known we were the ones to do it."