"By whom?"

"Whoever catches you. Of course, if it turns out they made it up, they're fucked. Also usually lethally."

"Goodness."

"Mages have to self-police."

"How can you distinguish things after the fact, do they leave traces?"

"Yeah, and there's past-scrying."

"Which... works on people's minds?"

"No--well, yes, but you don't use it that way--but it works on the magic."

"I'm not sure I follow."

"...It is possible to tell, with magic, whether or not mind magic has been done to someone. Telling what mind magic has been done to them is much harder, when it's possible at all, which it often isn't. So any mind magic done to another person is verboten, because you can say 'well, I boosted their work ethic like they asked me to' but it's not possible to tell whether you've made any other changes, like implanting the memory of asking them to, or literally anything else."

"Ah, I see. If we can make contact with Valinor at some point the Valar might be able to help with this sort of thing."

"That would probably be helpful."

"That's why I suggested it! Chips used to have a feature that allowed Elves and orcs to make binding oaths. Now they only allow us to speak guaranteed truth, not constrain future action."

"Huh. Yeah, that--probably wouldn't go as badly if a society was used to it, but."

"It went very badly for orcs. Elves had fewer horror stories."

"Do we want to know what happened to the orcs?"

"Possibly not."

"...Sort of torn between trusting you on that and being curious."

"As you prefer."

"...Okay curiosity wins."

"I mentioned one of the Valar is not in good standing. He created orcs from captured Elves - we have blessings that give us excellent control of our bodies but they don't work under sufficient stress and a sufficiently tormented Elf given some other constraints will have orc descendants; they look different and have less functional chips, but can still swear oaths. He obliged orc children to swear him oaths of service as soon as they could talk, without time limit. Their oaths have now been broken since the Oath Reform Act of 1400."

"...Oookay, that's...horrifying but I'm a little distracted by how bloodworking as I know it does not work like that."

"We're a designed species."

"Huh. By who?"

"Eru."