"We do have people who can read minds to see what is going on, if there's anyone who would consent to that."

"In both cases the problem is that they can't entertain the question, although I suppose that would allow a more educated guess from their loved ones about how they'd feel on the subject."

"Their minders can let us know if it seems like it'd be helpful."

Nod.

"Summoning can go badly. If it goes very badly the whole world can get destroyed. That's why we prefer to do it supervised, but we don't want to be supervisors indefinitely, so our aim would be to train humans to do the supervisory work eventually."

"I see; that makes sense."

"Cefax might decide to have a goldmage stationed offworld so that if someone did destroy the world with summoning they could jump back and prevent it. We'd be happy to host someone if you do decide to do that."

"That assumes locating and intervening with whoever erred will be straightforward."

"Ideally they'd get some forensics done before they went back but if that were impossible we could pause time - we can do that without a goldmage - and spend as long as needed piecing it together."

"This would combine well with the life extension solution for goldmages if it were available for this purpose."

"Yes, that we will certainly do, especially if they'd similarly be willing to jump for other worlds that suffer accidents."

"I don't see why it would be anything other than an overwhelmingly positive trade for them even not taking into account how you can purchase their lifetime services."

"That would be our hope."

"I suspect your arrival may be the most beneficial thing to ever happen to this world."

"Thank you. That's what we're trying for. We hadn't met people who died before, see, and nowhere back home has scarcity...."

"How does one have no scarcity?"

"The Valar. Our gods are - more interventionist than yours, and they provided for all our material needs until we'd learned enough to mostly provide for ourselves. Things like concert tickets and housing in desirable locations are still scarce, but - nothing anyone needs for a good life."

"People don't have - purely internal problems?"

"They have some. We solve them. When you're rich enough - if there were only one beggar in all of Cefax -"

"I didn't mean internal economic problems. I mean - dementia, depression, delusions -"

"The Valar can do a lot for that too, and medicine when sufficiently advanced can do most of the rest. Elves don't get dementia, that's a human thing, we're trying to figure out if we can help somehow. People who are depressed occasionally ask to stop existing, sometimes with a list of conditions under which they'd want to exist again, and we can do that."

"Many human depressives don't prefer to cease to exist and merely lead unhappy lives."

"We can see what our medication or Vala intervention does for that."

Nod. "It's a pet interest of my current redmage. Redmages are often very effective for those people but the condition correlates poorly with money and there are in any event not enough redmages to go around."

"We would have a lot of reservations about causing there to be more mages and are aiming to decrease the workload of mages in general, but if there's depression that's not responsive to other forms of help and there are redmages willing to help even once they have more of a choice about it then we'd happily pay the bills."