"I mean, if two political unities suddenly found each other that could lead to all sort of complications. And my guess that if they treat metamancers even a tiny bit better than 'behead at earliest convenience' then the three nations on this side of the storm would react badly. Does the storm goes all the way around the globe? All the way to the upper atmosphere?"

"Yes to both, and my guess is if they treat metamancers better then they have metamancers and the Three Kingdoms don't really have the power to stop that."

"Possibly. I still would prefer something less... extreme than removing the storm if we can manage it? Wait, can you manipulate the storm's magic?"

"I don't know, I've never tried, but if it were easy some metamancer in the past few hundred years would have done it. Why not remove the storm, though, the standard result of equally powerful nations meeting should be either open trade or war, and we can prevent the latter—and maybe we should try just crossing the storm and seeing what's on the other side, first."

"I am not categorically opposed to removing the storm. I just want to be careful before we do anything world-changing. We-we have to stay alive."

She shudders. "We're not going to die, we have the power of gods—" Pause. "Could sorcery do immortality, if it does permanent things?"

"The main problem is that it doesn't stop aging... But we have more than enough to ward ourselves a lot. You might figure out a way to covert youth between different species or alter how our own works so it doesn't erode with time."

"And other than aging sorcery can deal with other causes of death?"

"Yup, with enough lifeforce around you can create wards for nearly anything, heal nearly anything, even improve your memory. Resurrection has yet to be managed but it seems more like a resource limitation. Our plan before meeting you guys was to figure out a way to..." they don't have the concept of virtual reality, "copy people's minds into a lucid dream."

"Copy people's minds? How? And where would this lucid dream even be?"

"Sorcery can copy mental information as long as you specify enough and have the power to fuel it. The lucid dream would be done via an artifact. There is a theoretical non-magical solution, but it wasn't invented on my world yet."

"So the idea is to bring back a... simulation of the originals, without the physical body attached? How do you secure the artefact?—and this is academic, we should focus on making ourselves immortal."

Nod nod. "I have some warding rituals with me, which we can make stronger by just applying more lifeforce. Can you edit wards? Might be easier than just casting different versions over and over."

"Maybe? Lemme check."

She squints at him.

She can in fact mess with the wards, maybe a bit harder than Galatean magic since they are meant not to come off when poked by outside forces, but she can definitely do something.

"This will probably take a few days to figure out," she declares.

Nod. "Where are we going to stay? ...If we leave we should leave a message, maybe they can find some way to find us from Milliways."

"We could stay here, I have camping gear in my backpack that should last us a few days, we'll hash out the details of dealing with the delegation."

Nod nod. "We should think of a presentation that maximizes the notion 'sorcery is actually a good thing' and possibly other sorcery and Galatean magic interactions. Are we sure mages can't detect sorcery-related magic? Or maybe it can activate sorcery-gifts."

"Mages other than metamancers are actually uniquely bad at detecting magic at all—detecting magical effects is difficult and costly, detecting artefacts and other mages impossible, so I'd be surprised if they could." She opens her backpack and starts rummaging through it. "Don't know about sorcery-gifts, though."

"Could someone make a spell that directly affects lifeforce? Or generally someone's biology? ...People sometimes get them under very lifeforce stressing circumstances, which is to say, life-threatening circumstances. Even if mages can't affect lifeforce directly if they could keep someone alive they could create sorcery-gifts by various uncomfortable means, like suffocation, keeping someone awake or just... damaging them."

"I mean, making a spell that affects someone's biology is pretty trivial and magic would easily affect lifeforce inasmuch as it's tied to that. That said, biological magic is typically very expensive, mana-wise, and keeping someone alive when they've been damaged a lot is not in general easily feasible."

Nod. "We should probably fail to mention that is a way to get sorcery-gifts."

"Yeah, probably."

She removes a long wooden stick enveloped in cloth from the backpack. It is in fact much longer than the backpack should be able to contain.

Felix goes over to the door and starts absently opening and closing it, not at superspeed and only enough to see what is on the other side.