"What are your thoughts on this, Governor?"

"How difficult would it be to figure out how to summon magical beings without being tutored?"

"Sans safe bindings, not very. With them, might take a while, my planet has licenses for people to be allowed to summon."

"...how difficult would it be to figure out how to summon magical beings without being tutored or exposed directly to the magical beings?"

"...difficult, I think. They only became public knowledge in my world because one person organized a rollout all over the world, before that it was secret and very few people figured it out over thousands of years."

"How customizably may magical beings be bound?"

"Extremely—it's very common for makers to not be allowed to speak or communicate anything other than 'yes, summoner,' because people think makers can talk them out of their souls."

"Their souls?"

"One of the most common names for them in many languages is also the name of a mythological being that in certain stories can do that, and it—stuck. And since people don't allow them to talk and don't trust them to tell the truth, and some makers get a kick out of pretending they can do that, well."

"So this is not actually a hazard."

"Oh no not at all, and you'll probably get much more helpful makers if you let them talk."

"- do makers also obey lightspeed?"

"No, they can conjure whatever from whatever distance."

"So they allow correspondence and even in a sense the transmission of physical goods? Can they copy people?"

"They can make people but they come out—braindead. Anything smarter than a goldfish doesn't come out right, and it's probably part of the magic, because the conjured brains and all that are indistinguishable from the originals."

"That presents something of a limitation for colonization if there's to be conventional farming. What is the population of magical beings?"

"A few billion, but I'm not entirely sure how many. Makers can in fact conjure entire meals, factory farming—no longer exists on my planet because conjured and artificially grown meat are so easy to come by."

"I'm just concerned we will eventually run out of them. Not soon, but an unrestrained population will grow exponentially."

"...right, so about the afterlife..."

"Mm?"

"...I used to be human. Then I died. And I woke up in the changer world."

"Is that common?"

"Not very. Most humans who die go to a fifth world, and they're as indestructible as daeva are but don't have any magic other than that, and they also bring something with them. Most daeva just appear fully formed as adults with no memories and no language."

"Do you have any reason to believe the quantity of daeva will usefully scale with our population?"

"I... have a hypothesis, about what causes a human to become a daeva, and it might count for you, too. I have the vague suspicion that ex-summoners become daeva when they die."