"There is one blue mage in the first batch. The green ones it's harder to guess their career trajectory and past that - some of the purple mages are incredibly talented but they cannot afford in any sense to stake out an eccentric stance on reds."

"Shapat has not exhibited any inclination to be distantly benevolent, although she's not a discipline problem either, I'll give her that."

"It's purple. And grey but only in the sense greys'll always be the bulk of your discipline problems. The farther removed you are from it the better you can cope when it comes up - it's hard to have a crippling phobia of people you only see through the windows of midnight garbage trucks..."

"And an improvement in the status of reds isn't threatening to a blue's capacity to feel better than everyone else."

"I like you," she tells Telkam.

"You seem all right."

"Are any of the greens being distantly benevolent?"

"Eh, if convincing their castemates to show up to class counts."

"I guess it's something. We'll be spoiled for choice if we just wait a little longer, maybe some of the next batch will be - and you can filter more heavily -"

"I can! I'm going to have Juin sitting in the corner of my office working on stuff while I give interviews."

"I'm not sure that filters for the right thing but it definitely filters."

"It filters for a lower risk of my having to teach while enraged, I hate having to do that."

"Fair enough."

"How hard are we expecting magic cleaning to be on the technical side - forget getting it accepted, how hard is it to do magic gene therapy, how hard is to do magic with effects equivalent to  transfusion or transplants, how hard is a filter -"

"Naively I'd think you'd just apply Water healing, it does poisons, pretty low on the detail work, bam. Since the thing you want to clean is in fact completely fictional it seems like whether that does the trick or not depends on how good your spiel is. Earth should be able to do genes and transfusions and transplants but it might be insanely difficult to learn how. A filter for what -"

"Ideally for pollution but I take it this magic system does not interact with pollution. Would Water healing do anything about someone born with an extra chromosome, say, does that happen sometimes with humans..."

"...writing was invented within my parents' lifetimes. We do not know how many chromosomes we have. Or if we operate on chromosomes. Or what cells are."

She makes a face. "Water healing probably fixes uncleanliness, the question is whether it fixes hereditary uncleanliness - I suppose we could do a study of sorts, Water-heal some reds and have some consenting volunteers hang out around them and see how they feel about it..."

"People'd be ill at ease around perfectly clean people if they had red hair."

"If you want to quibble over experiment design wait until we have approval for the experiment in the first place. Is there documentation on what sort of things Water healing does work on -"

"Mix in local Shines and Shadows with red hair, have their halos turned down," suggests Maurabel. "It'll do snake bites, heavy metal, ate the wrong mushroom, poison ivy, week-old fish, the works, I can get you a more complete list."

"Please do."

Maurabel writes that down.

"And then what's the plan, magic 'em and let them integrate and do robots once it's not a mass death sentence?"

"Yes. Before magic entered into the equation that was what I wanted - everyone, including them, will be so much better off with them gone if only there were a safe way to achieve it..."