When he sits down, an irritable not-voice that isn't the same as the tree says, "Hey! Watch where you're parking that!"

"Sorry - what - who said that?" Cam asks, getting up again and stumbling a step when he's on his feet again.

Cam sits not-on-the-rock. "You are... more talkative than typical rocks," he observes. "Have you got a fossil in you or something? Did somebody use to talk to you a lot?"

"I used to be somebody's pet rock," says the rock. "Not that it's any of your business."

"Okay, okay," says Cam. If the rock doesn't want to be friendly it can join the tree in not talking to Cam.

"Studying," says Cam.

"Studying what?"

"The Speech. Lot of symbols to learn."

"Figures," says the rock. It gives the impression that if it had a point of articulation with which to do so, it would be nodding.

Cam supposes it does figure, since he's talking to a rock. He goes on scribbling practice (true) sentences in Grace.

"So you're a wizard?" says the rock.

Cam's not clear on whether sarcasm counts as lying. "Yep," he says, instead of no, I just hold conversations with rocks by unrelated mechanisms.

"I was a wizard's pet rock," sighs the rock. "Sorry, pal."

"Sorry?"

"Never mind," it says hastily. "Forget I said anything."

"How'd you get in my yard, anyway?"

"Oh, you know how it is," says the rock. "Kicked down the street, thrown over fences..."

"I don't in fact know much about what it's like to be a rock."

"Ever kicked one down the street?" it inquires.

"Not that I remember off the top of my head. Maybe."

"Meh," says the rock, "it probably wasn't me, anyway."

"Probably not," Cam agrees.

"And there's not a lot of wizards' pet rocks kicking around," it says dryly.

"I'd imagine not. Where's your wizard? Do you want me to drop you in the mail or something?"

"Where he's gone, buddy, you're not gonna have much luck mailing me."

"Did he die or something, or do you just mean he went to Antarctica and didn't bring you?"

"Yep," says the rock.

Cam does not have a clear assessment of the personality of this rock. He's not really sure if he wants to talk to it, which pretty much adds up to only responding if it says something that prompts a response.

The rock leaves him alone, for a little while.

Cam goes on studying, peering up at the sky periodically. At one point he asks his manual if sarcasm counts as lying for wizard purposes. For that matter, song lyrics and relating acknowledged fictional stories, also important to know about, not that Cam's much of a singer or a storyteller.

"Cam," says Cam. "What's yours?"

"Iggy," says the rock.

"That's cute."

"Adorable," it agrees.

Study, study, study. "Hey, manual, is it generally a bad idea to control the weather? Can I control the weather?"

The manual informs him that controlling the weather is usually a bad idea because it inevitably has effects beyond the immediate desired changes, and those effects are very difficult to predict or control without extensive meteorological knowledge.

Fair enough. It was worth asking.

"What do you want to control the weather for?" asks Iggy.

"Weather can do a lot of damage," Cam says. "Hurricanes, droughts. If I could expect to reliably be everywhere it was doing damage I could get a lot done just by picking up rain in one place and putting it in another, but I can't, so given that I don't want weather systems to spiral out of control and be worse than they would've been, I guess I'll have to see about, I dunno, networking some wizards all over the world so we can keep patching the global weather system or something. Long term project." He writes this down.

"You sure do plan ahead," Iggy observes.

"It's not so much a plan as it is an idea that I can't implement right now and don't want to forget about."

"If you say so," says Iggy.

"Mmhm." Write write write. "Meteorology" is now on his list of mundane things to study under "nutrition".

"Should I be leaving you alone?" it asks.

"I don't really care either way. I'm in a hurry to learn this stuff, but only a medium-term hurry, not like I have to be done with any specific thing in the next five minutes. Any wizarding tips, since you belonged to a wizard?"

"Depends," says Iggy. "You had your Ordeal yet?"

"Nope. At least not so I'd notice. It's been a week, and I seem to be, you know, a wizard, maybe it was just very quiet."

"Trust me," says Iggy, "you'd notice."

"In that case, nope, I am untested. How does that work, anyway, does the local senior wizard show up and manage to ring the doorbell despite being a cat and proctor an exam or what?"

"Oh, no," says Iggy. "No, no, no - look, kid, if you want my advice, it's: quit while you're ahead."

"...Meaning?"

"Meaning, if you haven't had your Ordeal yet, you shouldn't be planning too far into the future," says Iggy.

"Is that a vague premonition of dire consequences for failure that explain why it is called an Ordeal with a Capital Letter, or does the ordeal just shake things up enough to throw off any plans I make in ignorance of it?"

"It killed my wizard," Iggy says plainly.

"Well, shit. How'd it do that?"

"Facing down the creator of Death will do that," says the rock. "Don't kid yourself, Cam. Adult wizards are leftovers. Young ones on Ordeal? Child soldiers, plain and simple. It's sick."

"That does sound pretty screwed up," Cam agrees. "Who set up the system?"

"Who do you think?" says Iggy.

"Well, if I were a terrible enough sort of entity to be the inventor of Death, I wouldn't wait for wizards to actually utter an oath, I'd just kill them in their sleep. Actually, if I were that horrible, possibly not even their sleep. So I'm guessing it's mediated by somebody somewhat less horrible, albeit either still pretty horrible or not all that competent."

"No, see, that's the sick part," says Iggy. "I don't know which one of them's responsible, or how they do it, but after you take the oath you're guaranteed to run up against the Big Bad itself. And if you manage to get a hit in and live, good for you, but not everybody's that lucky."

"Yes, but, like, why is the Big Bad cooperating here, why isn't it just raining... itself... down on everybody indiscriminately till everything's extinct? Is somebody or something summoning it in response to wizard oaths? Or just letting it through some otherwise reasonably consistent screen? Does it have a deal with some grand high muckety-muck? Does it have severely limited attention but it can flag wizards by when they do the oathing and pays personal attention because wizards have more leverage to do worthwhile things? In that case why isn't it also visiting Norman Borlaug and particularly effective peace activists and disaster relief and medical researchers, because they have leverage too. And why in the world would it give up if some kid wizard gets one hit in, I mean, if it's still around nobody's managed to cripple or destroy it yet, right?"

"Nobody's got infinite power and attention," says Iggy. "You ask me, it's the other Powers throwing you at the black sheep of the family, hoping you'll do some damage before it eats you. But what do I know? I'm just a rock."

"I definitely want a word with the management on a variety of counts, I'm just really unclear on the motives and the mechanisms here," mutters Cam. "But yeah, you're a rock. Maybe one of the wizards in the directory knows, maybe I should figure out how to visit a housecat."

"Are you sure you want to talk to those guys?" says Iggy. "Me, I wouldn't trust 'em as far as I could throw 'em."

"I could probably throw a housecat reasonably far," Cam says. "It's always better to have more sources, anyway."

"Not if they're the same people who're throwing you into a war without even telling you you're on the front lines."

"You think the housecat would do me actual harm above and beyond standard issue danger if I go have a talk? I'd be more circumspect about actual Powers. I don't have enough information to want their attention personally yet."

"I've never met this housecat, how should I know? But it tells you something about these people that they send kids to do their dirty work, doesn't it? Even the wizards are part of that system - you see any of 'em showing up to warn you? You're right there in the directory, they could do it anytime."

"If they're checking the directory," Cam points out. "If they can spare the time. If they think warning me would help. If they can visit a fourteen-year-old boy at home without my mom being weirded out and calling the cops - admittedly not a problem the cat one has. If they didn't already try and just happen to show up while I was in school or at the library or down the street with Leafy or out at the theater. There's not that many wizards in the directory, I wouldn't be surprised if nobody has all the right features and luck."

"Kid," says Iggy, "they're magic. If they wanted to talk to you, I'm sure they could find a way."

"If it's a priority. I don't know what they're doing with their time, because the world doesn't really look to me like it's got highly effective altruistic wizards running around doing useful things to it, but I haven't met 'em, I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt for now. Frankly even if I had staggering amounts of magic power I would not necessarily spend amounts of it on individual kids liable to encounter trouble any more than it would make sense for Norman Borlaug to go grab a ladle at a soup kitchen. They don't know that I'm planning to be unreasonably effective and therefore an efficient use of time. A warning might not help. Maybe one of them kicked you into my yard specifically so you could warn me, I don't know. I'm steepening my learning curve as much as I can but the manual was all cautionary about boosting my brain."

"I guess. How do ordeals go? How do wizards die?"

"I only ever saw the one..." says Iggy.

"It's still a data point."

"He was doing a spell," Iggy recalls, "I forget what it was, but it went wrong... and the next thing I knew, we were in some kind of horrible alternate dimension. Big Bad seemed surprised to see us. That's why I think it's the other guys who pull that kind of thing. Anyway. We got out of there okay, but he'd overheard some of its plans, and when we got back... well, I guess it didn't want him telling anybody."

"He just - keeled over, or was there a more typical cause of death?"

"I guess you could say there was a fight," says Iggy. "It wasn't much of a fight. He said half a spell and then went up in smoke."

"That sucks. ...How does sensing stuff work for rocks? You don't have eyes. Or even a vestibular system, how can you tell when somebody kicks you?"

"I am a magic rock," Iggy explains patiently. "I was a wizard's pet for a while; that kind of thing has effects."

"Sure, you're a magic rock, but, like, Grace can't feel it when I pat her, she doesn't have a nervous system. I assume magic is involved in how you could tell that I was sitting on you or that somebody picked you up, but that doesn't tell me what it's like."

"I don't know what it's like for you either," says Iggy. "Why don't you try turning yourself into a rock?"

"I don't even know if that would yield the same experience," Cam points out, "leaving aside all the other reasons it seems like a poor choice. Are you discerning roughly the same facts about your environment that a human would be, though, even if you're doing them through funky magic senses?"

"Sure," says Iggy. "Tree, sky, ground, chatty human who doesn't watch where he puts his butt."

Cam snorts. "I'm chatty? Anyway, if the Big Bad can just literally set people on fire, and it pays attention to every newly oathed wizard, why are there any leftovers?"

"Hey, if you wanna know how people survive their Ordeals, I am not the rock to ask," says Iggy.

"Yeah, I think I'll go visit that cat," Cam says, flipping to the directory in his manual.

"Good luck with that," Iggy says darkly.

"Thanks," says Cam, snorting at Iggy's tone. "Look, I'm apparently already at risk, I'd rather have more information than less when Death comes scything along for me, you know?"

"I hear ya," it says agreeably. "Figuratively speaking."

Nobody, feline or otherwise, is home.

"That tree is a snob," Iggy says sulkily. "Better than being wedged into a storm drain, but not by much."

"I could put you someplace else," offers Cam. "Leafy's nice."

"Oh, would you?" he says, wistful.

"Sure," shrugs Cam. He picks up Iggy.

There is a subtle effect, like someone briefly dials down the brightness of the sun when Cam's hand touches the rock.

"...Do you have magic properties that activate when people touch you?" Cam asks Iggy slowly.

"You're asking me?"

"You're the one who may or may not have those properties," Cam says, holding Iggy at arm's length with one finger and a thumb. "Did your wizard cast something on you, or something?"

"No, he just talked to me a lot," he says, aggrieved.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I mean," says the same voice - or is it the same? - "how would you like to be immortal?"

"...That sounds very nice. You know what also sounds nice, knowing what's going on, that would be nice."

"A smart guy like you, I bet you can guess," says maybe-Iggy.

"I'm developing a hunch, except then you asked me how I'd like to be immortal, and I don't see how that fits."

"Don't you?" it asks. "Kiddo, who else do you think can give it to you?"

"Well, yes, but, confused on motivations. Why would you like me to be immortal, given what I pretty much intend to do with any amount of life I happen to have?"

"We-ell, there's the catch," it says mock-regretfully. "You'll have to tone that down a little."

"And you'll owe me some favours, of course. Nothing that goes too far against your better judgment."

"I don't think I'm going to do any things that go against my better judgment, since that's what better judgment means."

"Are you sure?"

"Of what I just said, yes, quite, of what currently constitutes my better judgment, not yet, feel free to address the members of the jury."

"Heh," says probably-not-Iggy. "We'll just have to see, won't we?"

"What do you want?" Cam asks. Because he doesn't know. This is not how he would operate if he were anything horrible enough to invent death. If Cam were horrible and also powerful enough to invent death, everything that was not Cam would already be dead.

"What do I want," it says musingly. "Well, a little appreciation would be nice."

"Bewilderingly enough, people appreciate the hell out of you, there are practically odes to death, people have to rationalize their way into sanity in the face of such an eventuality. There are all kinds of books where being immortal inevitably leads to misery, and stuff."

"Oh, it does," the not-a-rock says carelessly. "I should know. But that's not the kind of appreciation I meant. Not that it doesn't give me a special little thrill when people lie to themselves."

"Okay, that's really not how I'm wired personally, so what do you mean, then, what do you want from me, what am I looking at here?"

"Did you know I also invented time?" it asks. "That's entropy's job. It gives the universe something to point at."

"That's actually really interesting," says Cam, and he means it.

"You won't get that kind of thing in your propaganda," it says, meaning the manual. "But it's true. I didn't just throw it in there so I could feel special. It solved a problem."

"Sounds like it. I am at least provisionally in favor of time."

"Without the ability for the Universe to distinguish one moment from another, you wouldn't exist," it points out. "You seem like you're in favour of existing."

"Well, yes, but I haven't had very long to think about this problem and there might be a better way to distinguish moments than aiming the universe at entropy," Cam suggests. "Unless I think of one, having time-as-I-understand it seems like a reasonable approach."

"And what would you do if you thought of one?" it asks, amused.

"...Write it down," says Cam. "And keep an eye out for implementation opportunities."

Cam will be over here, wincing and running his fingertips along Grace's spiral binding.

"I think I like you, kid," it says eventually. "How's this sound? If I make you immortal, you swear off the run-around-causing-me-trouble part of wizardry and spend your time thinking up a better way than entropy to solve time."

"For forever? Because that is a long time, in that length of time I might wind up proving it mathematically impossible or something. In fact, if you have already done the mathematical impossibility proof, that makes issuing an offer like that way more likely, unless I am completely misunderstanding your interests somehow."

"If you prove it mathematically impossible, I'll let you rethink the bargain," it says generously.

"And does 'rethink' mean 'cancel and do something else with immortality', and if I do think of something, does it happen?" Cam asks slowly. "And for that matter, do I have any particular reason to consider you a trustworthy negotiating partner, 'Iggy'?"

"I'm not going to make you immortal so you can spend the rest of eternity getting in my way," it says. "That would just be silly."

"What do you want? Why do you care about doing the things that I'd be inclined to get in the way of?" exclaims Cam.

"I'm proud of what I made," it says serenely. "It's not very nice, but it gets the job done."

"You explained entropy. You didn't explain death."

"It's all the same from where I'm standing," it says. "Without death, there's no life. Nothing moves forward. Complex life requires death to survive. Do you want to know how many things died to feed and clothe and shelter you for the handful of years you've lived on this cute little ball of dirt? It's a lot."

"That number would in fact be mildly interesting since I could extrapolate it for grassroots activism later depending on how things go. But I don't mean, like, grass, though, grass is stupid, I mean people. By which term I include trees and so on, as of a week ago. And if you tell me we need death to power evolution my opinion of your creativity is going to take a nosedive; evolution happens when things run around dying and breeding and nobody's minding the store."

"Nobody is minding the store."

"Well, somebody should be minding the store, give me a key to the metaphorical store and I will mind the store."

"Ooh, you should tell my siblings that," it says brightly. "I dare you."

"I'm almost guaranteed to get around to it if left to my own devices!" Cam replies, equally brightly.

"Won't that be fun."

"Quite possibly."

"Not for you," it says helpfully.

"Perhaps you have helpful suggestions on mitigating that."

"Nope."

"Then I'll probably do it anyway."

"Good," it snorts.

Cam looks around to see if the world is moving again yet.

"That's the one where you make me some unspecified kind of immortal, and I do think about alternatives to entropy and don't do some underspecified class of other things, and if alternatives to entropy provably don't exist, some unspecified form of rethinking happens?" Cam inquires.

"I think 'don't get in my way' is pretty well specified, myself," it says.

"Does that apply solely to things I might do by magic? Does it prevent me from talking to anyone or anything? Are you personally monitoring all forms of death such that if I save a drowning toddler at some point this will constitute breaking the agreement or is that out of the bounds of what you have in mind and it only counts if I do something on a large scale? What about large-scale things that have nothing to do with magic, like, I don't know, making a lot of money and giving plenty of it to an organization that fights iodine deficiency in the Third World? Can I make tradeoffs that technically decrease net life as counted in individual organisms in order to help organisms that I consider more valuable and still be cooperating - like, some people have lawns, even around here, this is wasteful anyway, if I start anti-lawn campaigns and lots of stupid grass dies does that give me permission to magically help research on cancer in humans? Maybe I could skip the grass part if the cancer research is going to kill enough mice?"

"You ask a lot of questions," it observes.

"Yes," says Cam. "We also still haven't addressed the question of whether I can believe any answers you supply, but I'm asking anyway."

"Has anyone ever told you that you have an attitude problem?" it inquires.

"Yep," says Cam. "Usually people who don't think they've got answers I'll like."

"Are you going to specify the offer in enough detail and with enough verifiable sincerity that I can evaluate it, or not?"

...What, really?

Really!

In a word, no.

And the others he can get to, also all no? Does the directory do phone numbers? He will try calling the ones who are not cats.

Curses. Can it do wizards farther afield? He'll deal with the argument about long-distance calls later.

It frequently does things that cause large numbers of wizards to be very busy.

The television offers no special clues.

No danger, as long as he stops before he mispronounces something vital.

Tired as he is, he probably won't notice when a shell of air around his bed hardens into rocklike solidity. Nothing is getting in or out of that, other air included.

"Last I talked to it, it was trying to tempt me into taking some really vague deal..." Cam manages to say for himself. "Wouldn't describe it as scared. I think. What's it like scared?"

"Scary," says Jellybean. "They all are. You okay?"

"I'll be fine, just my luck none of the defenses I cast handle suffocation, how did you know I needed help and what is with the Sailor Moon outfits?"

"I don't know who'd want to hide me besides you-know-who. Is it relatively safe to name it, do you know? I haven't been in touch with wizards besides you. No one was home."

"It told me its name was Iggy when it was posing as somebody's orphaned pet rock. Put out the sun? Again?"

"Stars and star-centred cultures call it the Starsnuffer," says Matilda. "It's an old trick. But as you can see, it hasn't managed it yet in this solar system."

"And no one has figured out how to prevent this from being such a systematic problem?" Cam asks, filing away the information that stars are people too.

"What do you mean?" says Matilda.

"I mean I'm really confused about what Iggy wants and what it can and can't do and how much attention it's paying to what things. I am not coming up with any explanations that don't have it incompetent at using its powers, incompetent at directing its efforts, motivated to achieve ends that are not completely described by 'kill and entropize things', or playing by approximately gamelike rules for no obvious reason. If it wants me dead, why am I not dead? Why didn't it choose a faster method so you wouldn't have been here in time? Why isn't it trying again right now? If it has any chance of successfully putting out the sun - if extinguishing stars is a thing it routinely does - then why did it spend a couple hours talking to me? How much does it know and how does it find it out? If I knew the answers to these questions and had been studying magic longer than a week I would probably be able to come up with some reasonable things to do about stars, but my manual is not all that forthcoming about some topics."

"Okay, but," says Cam, "when Iggy stopped pretending it was somebody's pet rock, it was like everything around me stopped. Is that not expensive? Because I can sure think of uses for inexpensive time pausing... I did do all my wards before I went to sleep, I was spooked. You keep saying them, is Iggy a bunch of people? Isn't it supposed to be all Lone? Also, please tell me what a fight over a star looks like, how do wizards notice before the star snuffs it, what do they do to interrupt the process?"

"Well, I don't know how most wizards do it," says Matilda. "We've rebooted a star once. It wasn't inhabited, but it went out while we were passing through."

"And, what, you just tell it 'wake up'? Do you - actually, you know what, my question about how you knew I needed help has not been answered, do your manuals helpfully update your directories in real time worldwide so you can show up when kids are Ordeal-ing or do you have some other kind of sensory network set up, also how did you get here, I want to learn to teleport too."

"You guys share a manual? I'm not sure why the Powers would interfere unless they've been paying - again, inexplicably allocated - attention. And if my various grandiose ideas have more substance to them than I'm quite sure of."

"The Powers pay personal attention to every single person who takes the Oath," says Matilda. "That's how you get your wizardry in the first place."

"Speaking of how things work, the way you busted the air shell thing - that didn't sound very spell-like, it was all freeform, does that work for everybody or just you?" Cam asks Jellybean.

"It works for me a lot better than it does for most people," he says. "I'm just really persuasive, I guess. Anybody can do it, but most of the time stuff just doesn't listen to you unless you work the spell up properly."

"So it's a matter of persuasion and I can probably freeform little details on Grace but not the jerk tree in the backyard?" hazards Cam.

Jellybean grins. "Yeah, exactly."

"Hmm, okay. So is it just the two of you or is there, like, a vigilante hey-kids-dying-because-they-wanted-to-be-magic-is-screwed-up organization here I can sign up for?"

"...Are the Sailor Moon outfits required?"

"Everywhere," Jellybean says cheerfully.

"You don't have someplace you reliably sleep in? My manual was pretty clear that I could not put off needing to sleep forever."

"Oh, I can talk myself out of it for a week at a time if I have to," Jellybean says carelessly. "But Tilly can't, so we find hotel rooms or camp out or whatever. Sometimes we go back to her mom's place for a while."

"Your parents fund the hotel rooms, or you're getting money on your own somehow? Or just teleporting into empty ones, I guess, and confusing the housekeeping staff. I don't think Renée would be on board if I told her I was going to wander the universe and needed cash to stay in a lot of hotels. I might not have quite as much freedom of movement as you guys."

"We have one parent-like figure between the two of us," says Matilda, "and we mostly try not to lean on her too much. When we're on Earth and not staying with her, sneaking into an empty hotel room and cleaning up after ourselves when we leave is usually the way we go. The same when we're other places, if they have hotels there."

"...Other inhabited planets, let's hear all about that," says Cam.

"There's lots," says Matilda. "We visit them sometimes. Looking for kids in trouble on their Ordeals, or fixing other problems, or just wandering around."

"Cool. Well, that maybe explains why Earth is so badly run, if everybody's dividing their attention not only between it and endangered stars but also between it and other entire civilizations. Maybe Earth's comparatively nice as these things go."

"I want to hear all about your exploits on the problem-solving front," Cam says. "Sketch the space for me a bit, you've had longer at this than I have. I was thinking pretty Earth-centrically. ...Say, if stars are people, are planets?"

"Yes, please," Cam tells Matilda.

"I've spent a lot of time figuring out what makes the difference to how smart things are," says Matilda. "In creatures with complex nervous systems it's brain activity, mostly the way you'd expect. I haven't figured it out for plants, but it might be partly dependent on size or length of life. In celestial bodies, it's thermonuclear fusion. Stars talk, planets don't."

"What about objects? Grace's component notebooks were pretty clever even before I zipped them all up into one. My manual's not as bright - or at least doesn't have as much initiative and personality."

"Objects seem to be more case by case," says Matilda. "But I've almost never found one that seemed to have been really smart before anybody started talking to it. Maybe writing in a notebook is enough like talking to count."

"Grace has got a lot of me in her," says Cam.

Jellybean giggles.

"...Because I write a lot. There's forty-nine volumes of thoughts composing her."

"That's cute," Jellybean asserts.

"What's cute about it?"

"Dunno," he says cheerfully. "Just is."

"How did you come by a name like Jellybean, anyway?"

"Hated the one I had," he says, "so I picked a new one."

"And you hated it enough that 'Jellybean' is an improvement. Okay. So. I'm Cam, the notebook's Grace, and I'm actually still really tired, so if Iggy's not likely to try to off me again perhaps we can meet and talk universe-fixing after I'm out of school tomorrow? I'm getting the impression you guys don't attend school."

"The local public library, at three-fifteen?" yawns Cam. "I'll tell Rénee not to bother meeting me, that I'm meeting some friends and I can walk home myself."

"See you there," says Matilda, and Jellybean convinces the wall to let them walk through it, and Matilda casts an invisibility spell on both of them, and they go away.

Matilda and Jellybean are reading a copy of the Iliad together.

Cam plops down in the seat across from them. "Hi," he says.

"Hi!" says Matilda. Jellybean waves. They close the book.

"About how often do you rescue kids from Ordeals?" Cam asks. He has Grace out, ready to take notes.

"A few times a year, maybe," says Matilda. "But it's not regular. We had a dry spell of almost a year until you."

"Not that many wizards, or not that many needing to be bailed out?"

"Fewer wizards than usual, and none of them needing our help except one we couldn't get to in time."

"Any idea why fewer wizards, how does that work?"

"So the Powers are personally intervening every time a manual lands on somebody's head, there's no automation?"

Matilda shakes her head. "Yes and no. The Powers... nudge the manuals toward the sort of people who'd be useful. And when you take the Oath, it's the Powers who give you the wizardry to match. But sometimes the manuals find their wizards without a lot of help."

"Useful in combating entropy and that sort of thing?" Cam says. "Where do the manuals come from? Are they hiding wherever a sufficient mass of books hangs out, or do they spontaneously generate near appropriate wizards, or what?"

Matilda shrugs. "If I had to guess, I'd say they're planted in bookstores and libraries. There's probably wizards who do it."

"Do you know a lot of other wizards?"

"Why not? You could be more effective if there were more of you."

"At anything. Your affiliation, what's that mean? And that is a stupid policy that presumably gets people killed, surely the other kids you've saved get that even if others don't?"

"Wizards work for the Powers," says Matilda. "We don't."

"Because of policies like that one, presumably? And the Powers can't revoke or haven't revoked your wizardry?"

"No kidding. Iggy said it'd be tremendous fun for it if I went up to the Powers and complained about how they're running this place," muttered Cam. "I guess it decided that it wouldn't be enough fun to risk having me run amok."

"Even we've never tried that," says Matilda.

"My manual says a substantial fraction of its content is written by a Power. Does your manual still pull content normally?"

"Smart cookie," says Jellybean approvingly.

"Grace at least won't defect on me," snorts Cam. (Grace is presently soliciting information on automation and on turning over the fine control of complex spells to objects.) "Can you hear her? I don't think I've seen either of you react directly to anything she's said."

"Kind of," says Matilda, and Jellybean nods along.

"Awwwww," says Jellybean, leaning his head on Matilda's shoulder.

Cam flips a few more pages to find his long-term plan notes. "So, I had some things I was planning to learn to do enough magic to pull off, but like I said, pretty Earth-centric. Can I get a summary of conditions on other planets?"

"There are a lot of other planets," says Matilda. "And we haven't visited all of them. But I can give you an overview, I guess."

Cam listens, and asks questions. He's particularly curious if there are planets where magic is common knowledge, unlike Earth.

There are some! Jellybean and Matilda avoid them most of the time. It's the same problem as they have with wizards, except with entire populations.

"So the Powers have a pretty good approval rating," Cam says. "For some reason."

"Conventional wisdom is that they're the good guys," says Matilda. "Very few people seem to think they're insufficiently good."

"But it doesn't sound like Earth is even significantly below average, here, do you have any idea how many people die of iodine deficiency and other stupid things like that?"

"Presumably the argument is that Iggy causes all that, and the Powers are doing as much as they can to stop it. For all I know, they are," says Matilda.

"Are the various Powers all pretty much just souped-up wizards with lots of experience, or do they have extra abilities beyond that?"

"We're pretty sure they're fundamentally not the same kind of creature as anyone else," says Matilda, "but it's hard to say how that affects their abilities exactly."

"They're immortal, right? Do they have bodies? Was Iggy most likely being a rock or just resembling a rock or talking through a rock?"

"Probably talking through," says Jellybean. "There might even have been a rock named Iggy once, that it was impersonating."

"I suppose I should actually scope out my backyard and see if there's still a rock hanging out under Jerk Tree."

Matilda shrugs.

"Does Iggy tend to attack you? Since you keep swiping wizards it's trying to kill?"

"Are you dripping with wards like the ones I started doing or did you come up with a shortcut?"

Cam briefly considers Jellybean's approach, then turns to Matilda. "Tighter? What do you mean?"

"It might threaten 'em," says Jellybean, "but it doesn't just assassinate people because they hang out with somebody it doesn't like."

"So I don't have to convince Renée to hold still while I convince her person to forbid a long list of nasty eventualities. Or at least not because of Iggy. I might want to find a way to do it just because she's all mortal and stuff."

"We warded Jenny," says Matilda. "But, yeah, not because of Iggy."

"Jenny's your mom? Does she know about magic?"

"More or less," says Matilda. "To both those questions."

"She adopted me when I was six," says Matilda. "I'll call her my mom in casual conversation, because it's mostly accurate, but I think of her as just Jenny. And we've told her that magic exists, and some stuff about it, but mostly she doesn't ask."

"Fair enough. I bet Charlie would mostly not ask. Renée on the other hand would totally ask."

"Is that bad?" asks Jellybean.

"Not especially. I should probably tell her. She might write me notes to get out of school and stuff if I explain and tell her I'm off doing wizard things. Just sounds like a weird conversation."

"You'll get used to those," says Jellybean.

"Sounds like an occupational hazard, yeah. Can people who haven't found a manual and said the oath and everything ever learn Speech just for conversational purposes? Talk to stuff but not cast spells?"

"Yeah," says Jellybean.

"Renée will find that really fun, I bet," laughs Cam. "But it might start being impossible to talk her out of getting a pet."

Matilda giggles.

"So how do worldgates work?"

"But if you're at a locus you can gate to anywhere without extra power?" Cam asks. "How do you find loci?"

"What do they look like?"

"They look like worldgates," says Jellybean. "I dunno."

"Maybe you can show me one sometime," suggests Cam. "Are other planets generally pretty habitable or do I need to snug up my wards before I can go offplanet?"

"Earth seems to be pretty normal in terms of atmosphere and radiation and so on," says Matilda. "But unless you know where you're going, you should be pretty sure of your wards before you go there."

"Makes sense. Is it necessary to go about invisibly on other worlds or are they pretty human-friendly?"

"Depends on the world," says Matilda. "Some places you'd be fine. Some places you'd get about as much trouble as, well, an obvious alien walking around on Earth."

"I think an obvious alien walking around on Earth would be okay in many places or certain times of year."

"...Some of them, maybe," says Matilda.

"Some of them would stand out in Disneyland on Halloween?"

"Considerably."

"Noted. Is the Earth setup of one species that can talk in not-Speech and lots that can talk in Speech pretty standard?"

"That sounds interesting," Cam says. "And everybody just talks to the local equivalent of trees as a matter of course?"

"Yep!" says Matilda.

"Neat. How long have you two been wizards?"

"Lucky. How come you got your manual so young and I didn't till last week?"

"It's probably because I'm smarter," Matilda says matter-of-factly.

"Don't feel bad," she adds, "I'm smarter than most people."

"What's the average age these things get dropped on a person's head? Does it usually scale with intelligence?"

"Giving out IQ tests?" inquires Cam archly.

"Have you guys got any pending inroads on those or related things, or educational historical background of wizards meddling in world affairs that I should learn, or helpful notions on methodology that I shouldn't pollute with my own ideas before everything's been written down so we have a good diverse brainstorm?" Cam prompts.

Matilda shakes her head. "We've never been so systematic. But I'm interested," she says.

"Okay. General categories of potential actions include motivated capitalism, sabotage-and-superheroism, and activism-type stuff. My naive guess is that the first is the most scalable and probably the most long-term productive unless one of us turns out to be really good at getting petitions signed or it's easier to do large amounts of magic by enchanting objects or whatever than I currently think it is. Inconveniently, it's also the hardest for a fourteen-year-old to do, because kids taking an interest in environmentalism or world hunger is cute and anybody doing sabotage-and-superheroism doesn't have to worry so much about whether anyone takes them seriously, but if you start a company to sell doctored potato seeds or whatever you have to be taken seriously."

"Hmm," says Matilda. "But we do have access to adults."

"Yes. I don't think I want Renée managing a company for me, though - she's very scattered; even if she were only doing approximately what we told her she'd wind up dropping the ball somewhere. And she wouldn't want to give up teaching. Charlie's even less of a good idea. Would Jenny be more helpful?"

"Probably," says Matilda. "She's busy - she runs a school - but if I asked, I bet she could find someone else to do that for her."

"Okay. So that's a possibility. Magic up some true-breeding really idiotic high-yield nutritious food, sell it, turn enough of a profit to outright give it away in key areas. Or pharmaceuticals, but that's probably harder to scale if we are in fact relying on magic for the purpose - except I think some pharmaceutical chemicals are actually made by bacteria, so maybe not that hard."

"Chicken," says Jellybean, and giggles.

"Beg pardon?"

"Chickens are only barely smarter than grass," Matilda explains.

"Oh, thank goodness, I can add chicken back into my diet," laughs Cam. "I didn't know anybody who kept chickens, I was basing everything on a goat I quizzed."