"What will the circle do?"

"If it's wide enough for me to stand on and on a flat, horizontal surface and I'm in my world it will feel like something to me, and I will have the option to take it and then appear standing in it. The binding will prevent me from leaving the circle unless you and I agree on a deal, and then it will still prevent me from doing some other things like turning anyone into furniture even after we agree on a deal. Deals can be pretty much anything I do for you in exchange for something from you, even a token thing like a paperclip."

"Furniture?"

"Yeah, there was this one angel once, it was horrible."

"Maybe you should just go home now -"

She nods. "I won't do that, and I really think I should give you the circle with the bindings because magical people have pretty much ended most problems on the planet I'm used to, but I understand if you feel unsafe by having me walking around unbound. The bindings are all readable, too, you can write them in any language."

"...I sort of have to take your word for everything," he points out.

"Yeah, I know. I don't know how to improve on that, though. If you ask your niece to concentrate on wanting me gone for a minute I will in fact disappear and that will prove at least some of what I said is true? We could try to summon someone else with a binding without my knowing whom in advance and then you'll see the bindings work, since they'll be bound without having communicated with me."

"I realize you don't have a way to improve on that, I'm just. Making it common knowledge."

She nods. "Yeah. The binding test could I suppose still tell you stuff? Either that bindings are real or that I have a very good way of communicating with my world without appearing to."

"I - don't think getting into that would be productive."

She nods.

"In what format would you - leave a circle -"

"If you give me a piece of paper I can draw you one and then you can copy that on the floor."

"How important is it to be exact?"

"The wording should be exact, and the thing should be a circle, but it doesn't need to be a perfectly scaled up model of the drawing."

"...okay."

"Like I said, the bindings can be in any language so you should be careful with them. The planet I'm used to has university courses on them and you need a licence to summon because messing up a binding can be extremely bad."

"For... furniture reasons."

"Amongst other things, yes."

"What exactly are you planning on doing -"

"Your husband seems like someone whose head is screwed on straight about this whole caste business, so I'm planning on asking him to point me in the general direction of someone else whose head is also screwed on straight about this whole caste business and who can help me best deploy magic to solve this problem. If there is no one like that I will at least want to learn more about your history and culture and biology and so on before trying to come up with a plan myself."

"...I love my husband very dearly but he started a war and that's an odd criterion for having one's head on straight."

"He did not have his head on straight about what to do about the fact that this business is insane, which is why I want him to point me at someone rather than being the one to consult himself."

"I'm not aware of him having any similarly minded friends, he acted alone."