"Sounds good. He might take some steering to focus on inventing spells instead of running around gleefully learning all the things but I bet he'll be steerable, given."

"Maybe Milliways will give him time dilation in which to learn all things."

"It has seemed kind of friendly with the time dilation!"

"Good magic bar." She pats a wall.

"Much appreciated magic bar. Do you have an invisibility -"

"Yes."

"So then my preferred option is to see if he can get somewhere on that, and if he can go find them and make them indestructible, which does not anger the Anitami government unless they try to kill them."

Nod. "It'd be several trips for all of them."

"Yeah. Getting them out would be easier but - it's such a big government, so many moving parts, I'm not sure what to expect if we do that."

"Yeah. They could write Cam, right?"

"I don't know how they're keeping them from summoning but it might involve keeping them from writing."

"Ugh."

"Cam could check."

"Yeah, let's go find him -"

Cam checks.

The house has cameras everywhere but no other restrictions on writing or summoning.

"He can't write for a rescue, though, they can conjure for that too."

"Well, there could have been something we could interpret that they couldn't..." He checks just in case.

Aitim has written a bunch of letters to Telkam. They carefully avoid telling him to do anything but make the case that he should let his country elect people to handle international relations stuff, which will hopefully make Anitam feel less threatened, and Aitim knows that it's infuriating how many countries are openly not prosecuting any crimes against ex-reds but the disadvantage to Telkam doing it himself is that everybody will freak out even more than they already have.

"Mitros, you wanna examine this for hidden meanings..."

Mitros examines. "...so, places announced it was open season on their ex-reds, Telkam said 'no', everyone panicked, Anitam arrested - Aitim and Kan and Isel and their parents and the rest of my family - no, looks like they didn't arrest Makel, people would probably have fussed about that - Aitim's trying to discourage Telkam from doing something in response as he's no doubt tempted to do - this is the letter I would write if Telkam were in fact my primary audience, so he's more worried about Telkam triggering something than about the people reading his mail..." 

"Okay. So probably not desperate to be rescued?"

"Unless something external goes wrong I think he thinks they're safe."

"How long are they liable to be stuck? Till Telkam's country has an elected head of state who isn't him...?"

"Anitam makes absolutely no sense to me, that I couldn't guess."