- they haven't actually thought all that much about what ought to replace the Empire. It's an area of thought that's wildly more developed in Elie's day. There are some harebrained schemes, of course, and some people convinced that no government is needed at all, and some who think Galt's natural kings are very good and the only problem is foreign ones.

...Élie actually has no idea what passes for Galt's natural kings in this day and age. Catherine's family claimed the throne by right of their descent from Aspex the Even-Tongued, and he hasn't been born yet.

There was a king before Taldor conquered Galt! He died in the fighting; one son fled into exile and the other was appointed to a comfortable but powerless imperial position. A lot of people claim descent from the former, varyingly credibly. Anyway, a local king is better than a foreign one; he'd at least take pride in Galt and spend Galt's riches on Galt instead of on the Arch of Aroden or the war with Qadira or the conquest of Jalmaray or the expensive nonsense around Lake Encarthan.

Élie is not attempting to conceal the fact that he's a wizard of some notable ability – fifth circle, at least. Most of those – certainly the ones as young as he appears to be – will have spent some time with the Shining Crusade. He wonders if anyone's connecting the dots. 

Oh, they've noticed, but it takes a while for anyone to work up the nerve to bring it up, and that only by asking what he thinks of the claim that Arnisant and Iomedae and so on wouldn't intervene in imperial internal affairs.

He doesn't have any special insight into the subject, but if he had to guess, they seem – from a distance, of course – disinterested in Oppara except as a source of funds. He'd be surprised if their interests extend beyond liberated Encarthan.

There are some approving murmurs. Someone observes that Arazni didn't intervene in the last flareup of war with Qadira, eight years back, and with her gone it seems even less likely.

So they could really do it. In principle. There's no one who both could and would crush them, at least.

No one takes it farther than that. It's smarter and wiser both to talk about the opera.

Strong coffee and sedition. He'd be lying if he said he didn't miss it. 

(In six months he's pretty sure half of these men will be dead and the others will never enjoy another night of dreamless sleep. But for now, they talk about opera). 

"Welcome back - I was just about to sleep but if you're here, earlier today I figured out how to stabilize the last bit of the prophecy sense we've been working on - Let me grab my notes and you can take a look and if it looks good to you we can get started on the last steps of the goggles tomorrow."

Alfirin seems better, but he has the plain good sense not to ask if this means she'd had a chance to talk things over with Iomedae.

"You should sleep, then. I'll want a few hours to play with the spell in any case."

"Oh I don't think it will stabilize as a spell, but it should work in an item - You'll see in the notes I suppose. See you in a couple hours."

Élie spends a couple of hours playing with the spellforms. Alfirin is right – he can't get them to stabilize as a spell, but he can see how it'd work as an item. Expensive, though. Ordinarily he'd like things to be a bit cleaner before he actually starts crafting, if only out of professional pride. Cost hasn't been an object to him in a very long time. Well, he has time to make a little progress before she wakes. 

"Morning. Look good to you or do you think we need to refine it more?"

"I'd certainly like to, but I don't think it's strictly necessary. It'll work. I'm more worried about how we can test it once we've got it."

"If it won't make the crafting take longer by more than the time it would take to clean it up, or cause problems that'd require redoing the whole thing - Normally I'd take the time to do it right, but I'm worried about going too slow on this. The longer it takes the more likely it is we'll be noticed at some point."

"I agree. How much can we spend on materials before anyone starts asking questions?"

"Probably quite a lot - or, rather, people will wonder what exactly we're up to but if it's mostly spellsilver - the fact that one or both of us is working on a magic item isn't going to surprise anyone. And I've got some stockpiles of spellsilver and other reagents, if we expect to need more than that over time, we can buy some and draw some from my stocks and it'll look to people watching sales like we're working on something smaller."

"It shouldn't take me long. The spellwork is the complicated part, and I'm very good at lenses. I assume you'll want to see how it's done?"

"Yes, I would."

So he can show her how it's done. 

Élie is, in fact, very good at lenses. Most spellcrafters don't like to work with glass directly – crystal holds magic more easily – but that's not his style. Glass has better optics, and anything worth doing is worth taking the time to do right. People say the mundane optical quality of the lens doesn't matter, but they're entirely wrong – as he'll explain to Alfirin, in detail, over the hours of grinding and grinding and grinding. It's possible to just use a magical sensor and replicate a scene entirely using illusion, and that's how cheap things like darkvision goggles usually work, but for anything where precision is important one really ought to anchor the spell-scaffold in the lens itself —

It's a time-consuming process but he has a lot to say on this subject. 

She's an attentive listener and only interrupts occasionally, when Élie's explanations run into one of those unintuitive areas where magic item creation diverges from classical spellcraft or when he mentions in passing some theorem that hadn't been discovered yet in 3825. After long enough of it she's pretty sure she could make another pair, though she couldn't do the precise bits as well and there's definitely still enough gaps in her knowledge that she probably couldn't do a different item on her own.

...And then Élie stops and the explanations stop and it sure looks like the lenses are done. "...Is that it?"

"If I did it right. Want to see what fate has in store?"

"You first! You did most of the work. But yes, I very much do want to see."

...Fate is very boring, what with them being in a positive-energy-sheilded demiplane. 

"We may have to go outside. Any obvious security precautions in mind?"

"Mostly just the ones we're taking already... magic aura the lenses, so it's harder for anyone spying to tell what they do if at any point they're not covered by one of our mind blanks."