"It's nice," agrees Cir, snuggling up.

"So, stay or go, since I'm trying not to bristle at what people think?"

"Do you need me for anything? I've seen the Queen before, she's not going to awe me."

"No. I just don't want you to feel like I'm keeping you tucked away where you won't embarrass me while I tamper with your country."

Kiss. "I won't feel like that."

So he waits until a few more necklaces are done, gives one to Cir, and heads back to Cefax.

Liatsi is of course happy to receive him.

"I have a present!" Necklace. "We do it with chips but humans can't be chipped so we had to find a workaround."

She looks at the necklace. "What is it that you do with chips?"

"Memory, attentional capacity, reflexes. We call them blessings."

"How does it work?"

"I'm better equipped to explain the chip ones. But pretty much - the brain is where we store memories and make decisions and process input and pay attention to things, and there are biological limits on how much of that it can do - how much it can store, how fast it can communicate between parts - and the enhancements let your mind use more space and do things faster. You can take it on and off if you want to get a feel for it."

"It doesn't have drawbacks the way magery does?"

"Nope. Blessings are just convenient. I've been using them for several thousand years without any problems and we've checked that these work safely for humans too."

Liatsi nods and puts on the necklace, considers, takes it off, puts it back on. "Thank you very much. It's customary here to give things to visiting ambassadors as well but I have much less idea what you might appreciate than I do when the Caplari come by."

"I actually have a favor in mind but my hope is that it would be a gift to both of us. I want to build embassies equipped to do vaccinations and to teach people in Cefax summoning."

"...I'm not sure how that constitutes a favor to you at all but I'm more than happy to enable it. What do you need from me?"

He has maps! They'd like land and dispensations from the local government and - "summoning has a lot of legal implications that you should be apprised of now, even if they could remain a secret from the populace indefinitely. People who summon daeva become daeva when they die."

Land can be provided in many of these locations with more or less finagling. The Minister of Intelligence has opinions about the daeva thing. Liatsi wants to know if they happen to know what happens to daeva mages.

"They keep the magic if the tradeoffs are still applicable. So red, green, and bluemages keep it, whitemages and goldmages just become daeva who can't do any extra magic."

"...Inconvenient," says Liatsi. "And it doesn't reverse existing damage, in red, green, or blue?"

"It does not. Greenmage drawbacks are less pronounced because daeva do not need to eat, drink, sleep or use the bathroom, but we don't know if they'd hit another costly instinct loss. Goldmages the Valar might be able to help individually, by extending their lifespans a lot; they have done that for some humans on our request and are stretched quite thin right now but could do more, it's not as if there are many goldmages. They'd likelier be willing to do it as a humanitarian intervention than as a way of making them work for longer. We're going to be spending money, once we have some, on trying to pension people out of the temple-guilds.

I got Cir one of the memory necklaces and it helped him a lot; they're expensive but we can probably get them for all redmages eventually."

"....That would be good, yes."

"If they don't help redmages who are more dwindled than Cir we might be able to design something custom that does, but the development process for these things is unfortunately very slow by human standards."

"It's inconveniently difficult to ask particularly far gone red or blue mages what efforts should be made to arrange that they could see distant results."