"I'll keep it in mind. You came out to ask why I gave one to Fredrick?"

"I have a couple of guesses, but I don't know which if any is right."

"Go ahead."

"It could be that you just miss having a Findekáno uncomplicatedly pleased to receive attention and presents."

"And Timothy's - they were best friends, but Timothy is not going to maintain a best friendship with someone who has a crush on him who he marries in other universes, so he's just kind of been ignoring him -"

"That's - surprisingly clumsy of him, I wonder if I should have Cam remark that he's not going to read into it or something -"

"Someone should probably say something, yeah - but spending more time with him's not the solution if he wants Fredrick to in fact get over him -"

"Presumably there is something less unfortunate to be had than dropping him altogether."

"Probably. It's also a waste of resources. Findekáno's brilliant, and very practical, and very good at his job."

"He is, and Fredrick seems similar and very excited to have useful things to do."

"Yeah."

"My next guess was that you just thought he was underutilized, although giving him a necklace wouldn't have been strictly necessary to fix that so it's only a partial guess."

"I did think so but the necklace was mostly wanting him to feel valued, more than - wanting wizarding patches to the gaps in the Godspring rollout."

"I think it worked."

"It did," he says smugly. "And I also got wizarding patches to the Godspring rollout out of it."

"Magic fertilizer is clever."

"There were a bunch of other things - wizards have a train that's a coal/magic hybrid - runs on either - which would be convenient for handing out tech that people can replicate but that doesn't have all the drawbacks of coal. They can do selectively visible bridges and tunnels if we wanted to help slaves emigrate while maintaining ties with the relevant slaveholding governments. Owls don't just carry mail you can also ask them to keep an eye on things for you."

"Ooh. Can owls do this for arbitrary people? The creatures from Bella's world seem bright enough to do things like that but it appears one needs to be from her world to get them to perform tasks."

"Even if it's wizards-only gene therapy to become a wizard looks to have potential. And they can do it for Squibs, so he expects it's not even wizards-only. Anyway. There's a charm you can place on two objects such that if one changes the other one does too, which is a much cleaner alarm system than 'write Cam a message' and might scale such that we can distribute it to everyone, give them a way to contact their nearest clinic in an emergency..."

"I have to wonder if that's easier than distributing phones, but maybe it is..."

"Might vary by region or country, but not requiring charge has its advantages in some of them where we're not expecting to get anywhere with electricity."

"Makes sense."

"Reassured?"

"I am convinced that my innocuous guesses would have sufficed to explain the gift."

"I'm not trying to manipulate mine, he doesn't even know about it and I intend that to continue being true."