"Very! It's nice when they're reasonable."

"Are they often otherwise? I think you mentioned trash in the streets..."

"I mean, sometimes they're unreasonable, but usually it's pretty straight forward. I was just thinking of the people I have to deal with most often, and... Eeeugh. If they didn't have magic I have no doubt they would be completely useless. Some of them manage to be completely useless to the world even with magic, and I'm not even sure how they pull that off."

"What's wrong with this population, that they manage to be so thoroughly unhelpful?"

"Being use to general decadence and expecting nothing less even now, even after barely getting out alive. A large number of them are used to getting their way, and don't have moral issues with trying to get what they want now. Thus, why I have to check my food and drink for drugs regularly," he says, a little bitterly.

Isabella shudders. "Right, I'm going to look up general protecting-mortals protocols and see if I can get you something about that. Protective tattoo, probably."

Isabella makes no objection! Path trills contentedly.

"Is the average one really that unpleasant? How many samples do you have? Maybe you just barely missed a highly functional utopia with friendly omnipotent people who strew every floor with chamomile once a morning."

"The average one is usually pretty boring, some have some original inhabitants but not all. If I barely missed a statistically unlikely friendly omnipotent people then I'll just have to console myself with one that has pocket libraries, objective truth-tellers, and helpful witches."

"Fair enough. I'm sure not complaining. Although if you ever do find that utopia I want an entrez."

"Of course."

"The impression I have of your world is a bunch of loosely organized people trying to retain status they can no longer realistically maintain and otherwise running around haphazardly, but is there some formal political structure? Like, I'm formally subject to the queen of my clan, and also the democractic republic and its appointees of the United States and whichever of those states have a particular claim on me - this one is Maine and my legal residence is in Washington - plus wherever I am at any given time, like when you found me I was in Canada, a neighboring country."

"Your impression is reasonably accurate. There was a more formal system set up, but most of us don't recognize it anymore considering many of the people who ran it died with my mother. We don't have any countries set up, but my sister's - you recall how she quit the political field? She'd won over a large number of people by saving their lives so when she left they went with her. I can try to explain the political structure that used to be, if that would help?"

"It could. I'm curious, anyway."

"Well. They'd set up a sort of... Puppet monarchy when I was a child, but I later learned it was actually run by an oligarchy made up of older and more powerful mages. They did not all get along, but they'd agreed to not kill each other, and try to make some decisions for mutual benefit of mages present."

"Very mage-centric, this setup."

"Annoyingly so. There's a bit of history with mages going on long crusades to conquer non-magic setups. Since they had no defense..." he winces. "It was rather one-sided."

"I suppose witches could have done that, but my various relatives have never been interested in governing humans, just in collecting appealing ones when they felt like it, which I suppose is a mild improvement for the majority of the nonmagical population."

"A mild one, yes. I suspect that since our power is renewable but finite, many mages wanted an army to hide behind while another mage attacked them, so they could recuperate. So, conquest and conscription."

"Yeesh. You're probably going to want to lay down the groundwork to enfranchise non-mages sufficiently to make that at least inconvenient to retry."

"So - radios, let's learn how radios work and get everybody radios. Somebody starts throwing power around over here, and all six other locations he was planning to hit hear about it and have time to melt away. Maybe not the first place he tries, since he can teleport presumably - but the other five. And he can do property damage and scoop up stragglers, but it'll be harder and slower and everyone will do whatever they can with warning. Radio you, maybe, or any other sympathetic mages."