"I've been thinking about that and I'm considering a solution involving a fairy and some fancy binoculars," says Sindri. "I can't say for sure that flinging this Lady Reihar person into the sun very abruptly from a long ways away would do the trick, but it's the best plan I've thought of so far."

"Into the sun. Goodness me. Let no one accuse you of thinking small," says Ruava. "What is it even like in the sun."

"Toasty."

"If anything horrible happens to the sun you'd need several very well-coordinated fairies to get the planet resituated and it takes weeks to make new suns, plus orbital mechanics concerns, I think we should at least try a nicely contained pinhole or having an angel turn her to stone first."

"My concern with angels is that she might have better range than they do, and I'm getting a definite sense that we would prefer she not know what happened to her until it's too late to retaliate. Would turning her to stone work, do you suppose...? How far away can she affect someone?"

"I'm positive she has more range than she lets on," says Ruava. "And once she's got something on you she can meddle with it from anywhere - she does this thing with a specialized kind of curse where once it's on you she can cut off your senses at whim, and your magic too if you have any, I've no idea how you'd safely test whether it works on indestructible magical beings because as far as I know she's the only person who can do it at all..."

"How confident are you in the word 'anywhere', because fairy range is, like, 'write your name in big letters on the moon from the surface of the planet' but not infinite."

"I would be really surprised if it was possible to get far enough away."

"Exciting. I assume you're a recipient of this charming power."

"Yep. So if you get her and she has time to yank all her leashes out of spite, I'll be stuck senseless and so will a bunch of the Emperor's toys."

"Does she sleep?"

"Yes. Who knows what safeguards she has when she does, though."

"Yeah, I'm just trying to calibrate exactly how coincidentally prepared for powerful visitors from another dimension she is."

"She's - well, not paranoid exactly, but - she's a Wood mage, which means she can do magic to herself as well as other people, and she likes the way her life works and she has a twisty mind so she's probably done plenty of things intended to keep it that way and then not told anyone about them. She stayed home when Siurek's armies took Dianivae, so she was scared of my grandfather at least at the time, but it's been years since then and we definitely shouldn't assume she'd be put much out of her way if a mountain fell on her."

"Inconveniently, if we wind up being paranoid about all this to the point of leaving her be it might be unacceptably dangerous even to just tell people about summoning without directly interacting with the... government and personal habits... at all."

"Yeah..."

"I want a test of the afterlife thing," says Sindri. "I cannot think of a fast ethical test on the afterlife thing but I want one very badly."

"Do you guys know anybody who's dying."

"I can find you lots of people who wish they were..."

"Doesn't help. Sindri are you looking for a test of the afterlife claim or of whether it extends here, because I'm pretty sure these people don't wind up in Limbo so it might not work for them the rest of the way either."

"I want to test whether it extends here specifically, because that seems like useful information to have. Like, if it works, we could have important local players summon and then have backup summoners waiting in case of murder."

"...To be clear, what I'm suggesting is that I find someone who would rather be dead than in the palace, which isn't very hard around here, and have them summon somebody, and then immediately murder them. I'm not sure if that's what you'd call ethical but I wouldn't lose sleep over it."

"I don't have ethical qualms with assisted suicide per se, I was just assuming it'd be noticed. Am I wrong?"

"Oh, sure it will, but there's ways around that."

"Oh?"