"No, I just don't in fact know the details. I don't think it can be permanent exactly because she's had her arrangement with them before she was even very remarkably old for a magical girl. They couldn't have really planned on her being around forever and ever."

"That makes sense. It's just pretty important here."

"Because you can't take back your payment and don't expect to come up with anything as compelling in the next thousand years?"

"Because if it's not hers to sell there's always the option of going to the Kyubeys and then presenting it to her as 'well, you can keep granting wishes to a bunch of people, we're not really interested in limiting your ability to do that.' It is pretty hard to imagine what would be more compelling than taking almost all the limits off her magic and the first idea I've got for how we'd do that in a thousand years is rings of power and we're already planning to let her know enough that she could theoretically eventually maybe make those herself - I kind of wonder if, even though it'd take a long time and require that she or one of her people put a lot of work into it and doesn't at all resemble what you said about good gifts, it might be a good idea to just start off by offering lessons on making magic jewelry as a general goodwill gift."

"It isn't a traditional gift but it might be fine anwyay... how much time does it take?"

"A few weeks to learn and a few lifetimes to master."

"Wow. That does sort of place it awkwardly as a gift per se."

"Yeah. So, you the way you brought up the next thousand years makes me wonder if that's a duration you'd expect her to agree to."

"It seems a lot easier to finagle than eternity! Will a thousand years be enough for you? I don't know how many of you there are or what kinds of wishes you plan to make."

"Well, it'd be something. My lord might not like any suggestion that the specifics of the wishes we'd want to make should be decisive and, from the other direction, we'd need to put a lot more thought into them than we put into deciding it'd be good to contact your planet, and it actually is pretty likely we'd all listen to the Empress if she had anything to say about it. But all that being said, I think we'll probably focus a lot on defensive powers, at least at first - mental defenses, defenses against teleporters showing up where they're not welcome, I'm not sure if the wish-granter can protect people from others trying to take away their powers if those other people have their own wish-granter but it might be worth a try. And we might want to get more of our own teleporters or see if we can wish on copies of other kinds of magic, and we might also want to offer wishes to some of the aliens who aren't colonizing this planet - " (gesture at Katme) " - because they have emotions and some pressing humanitarian problems."

"The Empress is also sometimes busy, and might not always be available for arbitrary numbers of wishes per day."

"Is she likely to take it poorly if anyone points out that we have enough trustworthy people to have someone babysitting the wish-granter constantly."

"That sounds like a very different proposition than the one where she retains custody of it and grants the wishes for you. I don't know if she'd take it poorly as a proposal but as a way to execute the original proposal it does not seem quite sincere."

"Thank you. I don't think we, on our end, have strong preferences about who holds the wish-granter as a thing in itself - it’s the kind of thing anyone would want, but it’s not existentially important. It does seem possible that my lord might agree to a rate limit; I don't know if he would agree to a shorter amount of time than forever but it might be worth asking for."

"Do you have some idea of what will happen if no agreement can be reached?"

"It depends on what you mean by 'no agreement can be reached' and just guessing rather than promising anything right now - I expect we'd fall back to trying to get a useful finite number of wishes, maybe in exchange for clarifying a certain finite number of gems. If that didn't work, I wouldn't be surprised if we tried to feel out whether hiring some magical girls would insult the Empress - I don't think we'd do it if it would, though. I expect if actually literally no agreement could be reached, we'd leave - might monitor this place for a while because the most similar place we know of had a world-ending problem we could solve if it happened here - it's hard for me to imagine why an agreement couldn't be reached, I'm inclined to imagine it's because I'm not competent to handle diplomacy, which I guess isn't that unlikely since I was chosen on the basis of things that probably negatively correlate with being good at diplomacy - we were worried about sending someone vulnerable to witches - so I guess you might receive some kind of assurance that any accidental insults I deliver were unintended, in case that helps. I think it matters a lot to us that having met us doesn't give the Empress or your people in general fewer choices or oblige anyone to agree to anything under any kind of threat, and if you all hate that we showed up we're prepared to walk away."

"That's very good to hear - you're invulnerable to witches?"

"Probably not. But I'm a good balance of maybe less vulnerable than average and definitely less of a disaster if a witch does catch me than some people would be."

"I hope you need not encounter any."

"If I know I'm facing a witch, the gem clarification works fine on them, but I'm given to understand that if I'm not a magic rock I won't be able to sense them any way other than being mind controlled."

"Yes, it's subtle, it usually strikes like an attack of some kind of mental illness."