Nod.

"You should be fairly sure of the plan before I do that, though, once I get people excited about sending reds to the poles I don't have full control over how it goes."

"Of which parts?"

"That you can make it a good place for them."

"I can make it a habitable place for them, and I can in fact build buildings extremely fast, if you think that's a good use of my time."

"You can ask them in Orvara but I expect that a red country, habitable and safe, would be a solution they were excited about, and if you can make the poles season then that's the best use of your talents to acquire leverage and influence short of finding us a planet."

"I think however that the best way to make the poles season would be with someone else's help for stamina. I'd also cheat some with the crystals."

"Would it be an ongoing expenditure or one-off?"

"One-off, it will be a permanent ward."

"How much stamina are we discussing, and does it need to be voluntarily sourced-"

"I do not yet know but it is possible to convert between the five lifeforce aspect types if you're not me so I don't expect quantity to matter. It does need to be voluntary, though, you can't take someone's lifeforce."

"But you could give one person youth, say, teach them how to convert it, and use it?"

"I'll need to figure it out first—I never had to convert youth to health or vice-versa so I never learnt—but yes."

"Then help should be straightforward to arrange."

"I believe it would, yes. It also seems like a generally good idea to teach people magic, it's useful."

"It sounds extraordinarily useful. Do you have in mind who you're willing to teach."

"My problem with teaching it is the same as giving people immortality—I don't want to give Anitam in particular huge advantages. I would probably be okay giving a red country particularly huge advantages to at least even the field, though."

He nods.

"What do you think?"

"I could see a red country with powerful magic being a disaster in various ways but it might depend on its leadership and on the magic. And the conventional wisdom is that reds aren't that smart, and raw intelligence of leadership does have a lot to do with how well a country does, but I don't know if the impression is accurate. Anitam has had policies with fairly strong eugenic effects for a while, too."

"I won't say it's impossible to develop dangerous things with magic but I could teach them a school that makes that harder and conversely does constructive or useful things more efficiently, and then neglect to teach the dangerous uses."

"That worries me less."

"They would eventually be able to construct dangerous things, but it's like technology that way. And I think I'd only teach them magic after I was comfortable teaching it to everyone else so what that'd do is merely give them a headstart."

"Magic will probably still be destabilizing but I think it's worth it."

"The first world where people learnt to use this... was worse off than this one in many ways, and I won't say the introduction of magic was an unalloyed good, but it did in the end cause vastly more good than harm."