"I understand you to be an autotroph comfortable sleeping in a park, and I understand a hidden space for experiments to be a necessary and reasonable expense. My concerns about wildlife are primarily about the ecosystems as a whole, and secondarily about ongoing magical effects; do you need to purchase and kill some reasonable number of animals, or something along those lines?"

"I don't know why a hidden space for experiments would be a necessary and reasonable expense. I am comfortable sleeping in a park in the short term, but in the long term I want to be in a space I can make changes to and put up lasting visible illusions in."

"I expect to need to take risks with some reasonable number of animals which could cause brain damage or death, because I want to try to change their actions with magic, and I don't know if that will be bad for them. It would not be bad for them if they were from my home but they are not. I don't need large animals, just things with brains more complicated than an insect. I can start with one animal, and if I use magic on it and it gets hurt, I can stop. I do not want to hurt the ecosystem as a whole nor do I expect to. The magic itself should really not stay on the animal for long, if I do magic I expect I can turn it off."

"Depending on the changes you would want to make, and how long it takes you to finish your experiments and be called here again, I would not be surprised if you could afford such a space. Wildlife is not tremendously expensive; I only hesitate to say that you can expect reimbursement for arbitrary numbers of creatures, and of course would sooner they not be left to run around if altered in some way that would cause harm to any citizens."

"I will not expect reimbursement for grosses of animals. I will hold onto animals if I do not know if they are altered in a way that would cause harm. I still do not know why a hidden space for experiments would be a necessary and reasonable expense."

"So that the results would not necessarily become public knowledge immediately. Do you think it's unlikely that this would present a meaningful barrier to Asmodeus or his slaves accessing the information?"

"If I can do a test slowly and carefully they can probably get a future-information-now-thingy of the information they need immediately. Or just figure things out by looking with more magic than I have. The entire planet is not warded." Griffie looks awkward. "The future-information-now-thingy is very useful and I am not a future-information-now-thingy mage and do not think I can learn. Which is not the best thing given that I cannot tell someone else who can do it to do tests."

"...That seems potentially very important to know about. What else can you tell me about it?"

"There is a phenomenon known as the god-like flow. Gods can interact with it a lot. Gods can help other people interact with it. A very few people have some interaction that may not be from a god. When a person interacts with the god-like flow, a thing they can do is ask it for information about a topic, which gets them a future-information-now-thingy. Sometimes the god-like flow will cause someone to get a future-information-now-thingy even if they did not ask."

"A future-information-now-thingy is often in the form of, uh, you probably have a word for this, text-that-sounds-nice art in the receiver's language. Sometimes it is an image or something else, though. It is often hard to understand, because it has to be true, and if it is too easy to understand then it might be not true? I can try to translate one that is not too very secret and explain some of the parts I know if that would help, but I still do not want lots of people to know it."

"Information provided to us in this conversation may be willingly divulged to those tasked with the necessary functions of an imperial audience, to other imperial ministers, or to imperial employees tasked with responding to it, such as police. It would be unrealistic to attempt to offer a guarantee that none of these people will leak anything, given how many people will be involved in responding to the information you have brought us already. Some tradeoffs may be made in the direction of involving fewer people and taking fewer actions, if this seems wise."

"That sounds like a lot of people to share it with. How useful would having this information be to you?"

"I don't know."

"That makes sense but is not very helpful for deciding whether to take a risk. Want to ask more questions?"

"Most of the value of this example to me would be as an illustration of what this phenomenon is like. If you have many examples, a false composite example that sounds plausible to you would also be useful."

"Actually, now that I think about it, I got a future-information-now-thingy that straightforwardly came true, and the incident where it came true was well-known to parties like Asmodeus in extensive detail. I'll share that one. 'The second queen has to be restrained with eir own shadows, in case ey escapes even if you think ey is dead.' It had an associated probability of nine tenths at the time we received it. The word queen refers to either a kind of female ruler, or a female consort of a ruler, or the egg-laying member of a eusocial group. I got the thingy after someone else who was there with me also got one about a queen, and the way in which I got the probability for it was weird. It was not directly spoken to me, though I got it at the time it was given."

"Does it make sense in your world to use shadows to restrain people?"

"Yes, very straightforwardly. Shadow magic is a kind of magic some people have. It probably shouldn't be a research priority, though."

"Was it apparent how you would identify the second, or for that matter the first?"

"We don't fight entities one would call a queen very often. In fact, this person's slaves went around telling people that she was a queen while making threats and such, so it was pretty obvious. If this person was the egg-laying member of a eusocial group she'd have physiological differences, and if someone is a ruler they tend to tell people they are. And if having a consort is an important part of rulership such that the consort has a special job name, then the ruler will also tell people they have a consort. Does that answer your question?"

"Not entirely. How would you identify which such entity was the first and which was the second?"

"Well, the first one we encounter and have some relevant interaction with is probably who the future-information-now-thingy called the first one. So if we encounter another after that and it seems like we might need to bind her, then she's probably the second one. Does that help?"

"It does. And how did this come true?"

"Well, the person turned out to be a very strong and skilled shadow mage. She attacked us, and we looked for resources for defeating her. A previous coalition had left instructions for if she got out of the bindings they put on her, and the instructions said we needed to get a shadow-magic tool from her to bind her again. Also, when we fought her, she was impossible for our capabilities to kill – me trying to break her brain into unusable mess didn't even stop her from doing more magic and attacking us more. Do you need more detail?"

Griffie's tempted to reiterate that ey doesn't plan to assault people in Har, but this is probably not a good use of anyone's time.

"How surprising was this and what aspects of it were most and least so?"

"If someone is threatening, it's not particularly shocking that a way in which they are threatening might be their strength and skill as a shadow mage. Tangent, I'm also talking about learned forms of magic, not just ones people are born with, a person learning to be a shadow mage without any innate talent for shadow magic would also not be surprising to me."

"Return to your question: Being attacked was not surprising, lots of people attack us. The hostilities began with someone attacking unrelated people we were visiting over a personal dispute with them using a surprising amount of force, that was surprising but also not prophesied to us. Binding someone with their own shadow is straightforwardly somewhat doable with shadow magic but not a long-term containment method that I know of, though I wouldn't be surprised if someone used it in a long-term containment system. Binding someone with their own magic is more unusual. Needing to take tools from our enemies to handle a threat is pretty normal. The extent to which this person was impossible to kill was extremely surprising to us."

"Was this person at odds with the omnicidal faction?"