"Nelen Utopia, Tanaka Natsuko, Tarwë, Zanro, Cassiel Jones?"

(He gets them all right and even manages to attach them to the right people.)

"That's us, it's lovely to meet you! People without souls are basically the same as people with souls, we just do all the soul things with our brains alone and we're simpler to resurrect. Morph works a little bit for intelligence enhancement if you morph into a being with more processing power and stay that way long enough to pick up the habits you need to use it, but while it's certainly a lot cheaper than buying an intelligence-enhancing headband - those are a thing, but an expensive one - it's much more inconvenient in every other way. You do get the occasional person who's decided to change species but usually intelligence is only one factor among several in that decision."

He showed up partway through and will just listen.

"Simpler to resurrect?"

"People without souls can be resurrected by conjuring a replacement body - that's simple with the magic system common to the inhabitants of this world -" Hell lights up. "And then someone with a power wished on in this world," Wish lights up, "can awaken the body, which otherwise would be alive but not a person. People with souls - it depends on what kind but in general you have to locate the soul and by some means convince it to stick to a body, which has been figured out for Zanro's species and similar but not for, say, people from this world." Dreamward lights up. "More generic resurrection is in development with the same magic system my illusions are from, but it's slow and there is one qualified developer - she fortunately doesn't have a soul - and it's expected to take decades if not centuries."

"- So, in this world, everyone who dies reincarnates in a new body, so resurrection is a solved problem - it's memory recovery that matters. We've got it, but it's difficult and not retroactive - it's just a matter of making your memories go with you when you reincarnate in the future - so if you can slow down death rates that would help."

"Also if whoever's doing the developing could use time off I can ask Sorimer and his team to take a look at it and they can probably sort it out." Sheeeee wants to do that but she has a country to run. "If there's a list of magic systems and what they do that'll probably go much faster?"

(Also when the team gets time off, they need to go over all those TO ONLY TALK ABOUT IN A CRISIS arms-race preventions, they seem to be seriously outclassed and Ari doesn't think a disintegration spell is going to cut it if these people turn out to be nasty.)

"I believe she does take time off, the problem is that she was granted the ability to work intuitively with the system by a temperamental magic rock which won't repeat the trick on demand," Edda lights up, "and to everyone else it's so much gibberish. But if you have local magic that does information handling and they turn out to synergize, it's not one of the systems that can only be worked with in its own world, so maybe there's something there! Anyway, death rate slowing we can definitely do. Even if morph turns out not to work for you folks for some reason, there are magic items that do anti-aging more generically. And memory enhancement of various sorts, too, though none of it is specifically rated for reincarnation. We've seen reincarnation before but it's not common at all and nothing seemed to affect it where it did crop up." Stork glows.

She nods. "Hacking the wheel of reincarnation isn't that hard to do for an experienced sorcerer, it's just very easy to cause yourself permanent damage if you make a mistake somewhere - what do you mean by information handling?"

The third member will now show up, because she paused to get the five-second briefing. "Mirimer, Minister of Prosperity." And once introductions are over she will faaaaaade into the background.

"Information handling isn't a particularly technical term, but the spells I'm using are composed with a sorcerous alphabet of a few hundred atomic magical concepts and no one except Loki, the spells' inventor, can make heads or tails of it. I learned the spells by memorizing millions of words of complete gibberish by brute force."

"Not something we have a magical advantage at, then. Might still be worth taking a look, but probably not our first priority."

Oh stars Arimer what are you doing have you gotten into MAGIC DISCUSSION with terrifyingly powerful foreigners did you forget that our chief interactions with foreigners are PIRATE RAIDS.

I've been doing this for three hundred years and have leaked nothing that they could not get by talking to random grad students. "You were talking about a matter conjuration power - how does that work?"

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

"There's a species - it's actually both a separately occurring species and, for people who don't have souls and are born in one of these two worlds," Revelation, Space Arda, "sometimes also an afterlife. Everyone of the species can create arbitrary material objects. Not people, even soulless ones, which is why they need help to perform resurrections, and not magical things or a few other exotics, but books, materials, buildings, entire planets. A lot of the matter on your planet is too magical to conjure, though they can do things like 'a model of this otherwise unconjurable thing, but in glass'."

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH oh good good good good good not apocalypse.

"Interesting," she says. "If some magic works even as far away as different worlds, how do you define what's magical and what isn't?"

"There's actually some pretty lively debate about some edge cases but a lot of the categorization we do is based on magical detection spells that successfully register magic from other worlds."

She nods. "So what are the size limits for the conjuration? Should I be thinking that you've solved precision manufacture, solved hunger, solved construction, solved land shortages..."

"All of those, yep!"

"Huh."

Oh good, she has all sorts of ideas for experimental societies if she doesn't need to put them all on the same planet...

... I mean, in fact this is terrible, because they can conjure Stuff That Is On Fire to cover the entire zone, assuming they aren't bluffing which they hopefully are.

"It can be a lot to take in. Also it tends to make economies go a little squirrely - if you're currently using metal-backed currency we can just buy it from you, and membership comes with universal basic income for every citizen."

"Huh, how are you funding that?"

Their entire currency is going to explode! Also, the aliens seem to not know economics, which is perhaps not surprising, because Mirimer had to invent the whole stupid thing herself through trial and error!