"Oh, no, for that you need me personally. I'm glad you're on board."

"I like having the option of having several hundred years of healthy living ahead of me. Other people should get it, too. Both for the altruistic reason of not liking people dying, and also because I imagine it would get extremely lonely after a while, if no one else could stick around."

"People should definitely stop dying. I'll start with my dad if I get a spell draft the alethiometer approves of."

"Good, uh- do they not work well together?" he asks, not looking judgmental, just confused.

"They're... they get along. It's not like they fight, they get along perfectly well, they should be great friends, maybe they should even date. But being married isn't that good for them. Charlie - my dad - is absolutely glued to this little town near my clan lands. He's the chief of police there and he hates traveling and never wants to move and doesn't do anything interesting in the way that Ranata - my mom - thinks things are interesting. She likes dropping everything on a whim to spend a week on another continent picking her way through a phrasebook and sampling unidentifiable food and trying to get wild animals to eat from her hand without using magic to coax them. She likes spontaneously deciding to take classes on bookbinding or knitting or obscure human religions or martial arts. They work together, but their lives do not work together. They got married young on impulse because they didn't get how deep the differences ran, I think, and they're still together because she's terrified he'll die and she'll regret not taking all the time she had, and he can't let go of her on his own initiative."

"Ah - I'm sorry. I hope it all works out for them. That sounds like a terrible situation to be in, and I wish I had an idea on how to fix it."

"Some problems are fundamentally architected to resist the appropriate deployment of magic, even theoretical, unavailable-in-practice magic."

"When I say even theoretical unavailable magic wouldn't fix it I mean - the problem here is that these two people have incompatible personalities. Changing their personalities would be a worse thing to do than anything that is currently going on there. So it's not fixable per se, you could at best replace the problem with a worse problem."

"I know. I wasn't - that wasn't what I'd meant. I apologize."

"It's okay. Anyway, maybe I'm wrong, maybe even if I make him immortal they'll stay together, who knows?"

Adarin shrugs. "Maybe. Sometimes, I suppose, people are just going to put themselves in bad situations. It's sad and depressing, but... Well. Very obviously better than taking away choice entirely."

"Very obviously. Thank you for not being a badly written villain from a dystopian science fiction novel, I'd be so disappointed."

"The badly-written ones usually don't go into much detail on motive!"

"I cannot recommend either course of action, Adarin, sorry."

"Darn. I guess I'll need to think of a better way to be a villain," he says, in a monotone. "Should Iiiiii.... Take over the world, and then run it really badly? Bwuah-ha-ha?"

"Well, the use of germ theory also can lead to the invention of biological weapons, I'm just going to go ahead and warn you on that one."

"Oh! That's good to know. Thank you, some idiot will try to use that, calling it now."

"So if that starts happening you make the affected population boil everything they are going to ingest, is usually the first low-tech line of defense."