"Felix won't let me get assassinated and we haven't tested indestructibility against the Killing Curse -"

"I am setting up a test and I won't actually have to go through with it Sybil can tell me."

"You don't know the Killing Curse."

"That's why some setup is required."

"So can it wait -"

"No, it can't wait, there are other ways you could die -"

"Timothy -"

"We've had this conversation a hundred times? Yes. We have. And every time you wiggle out of it? Yes. You do. Because you're cheating."

"So are you, being you's cheating -"

"I can trace my actions back to my own motivations and am not spending 600 times the average annual income of a citizen of my planet on drugs every day."

"You're not worried about the money, don't distract me with a fight about the money. It is indefensible not to create enough stable demand for Felix that every potionmaker in the country figures out how to scale it -"

"If using Felix for projects at this scale is even safe which we will not know until you successfully go off of it."

"You promised me until we'd freed all of the slaves and there are still slaves."

"I am increasingly worried I gave Felix incentive to prolong slavery."

"I wouldn't -"

"Not consciously. But since you don't know which plans which move serves -"

"Have you checked our slavery-ending pace and evaluated whether there's anything you could've done faster without Felix - you did, didn't you, and there's not -"

"I want you to stop. I need you to stop. I want to make you indestructible and safe and I want to figure out how to use this tool when it's not using you -"

"So go ahead and do that! I am not impeding you in any way from conservative appropriately cautious experimentation with Felix, I am not literally guzzling up the whole planet's supply -"

"Close."

"Which leaves enough for conservative experiments."

"Your alts said that if I tried to talk to you about it today and got deftly maneuvered out of it then they'd just come drag you off and force the point. I don't want that."

"But you don't not-want it badly enough to have asked them not to. They'd have listened -"

"I want you to stop on your own."

"And failing that you want to coerce me and failing that you'll force me but it'll be so embarrassing -"

"They're your alts! They're you! They're answering the question 'what would I want done for me if I was addicted to Felix' -"

"You promised me enough time to end slavery."

"Did not, I just - didn't argue with you."

"I have things in motion because I trusted you. You can't do them and you will break them. Go persuade my alts to wait until when you said you'd wait -"

"I can't go on like this, I can't - you could die -"

"My life is mine, Timothy, to take risks with as I judge them worth it. And I'm not going to get hurt while on Felix. And if you wanted me to be indestructible you could just make me indestructible -"

"I can't -"

"Then take a step aside and let me finish this."

"Your alts really did say -"

"I believe you. Talk them out of it."

He makes a face.

"Please."

Sigh. Pop.

He gets back to work.

I'm sort of curious if I could beat Felix in a fight, Sibyl remarks on the channel dedicated to fretting about Fredrick. Metaphorically, I mean.

It might be good to know. 

I can get you transcripts if you can get me transcripts.

Sure. I am inclined to drop it until we are done with slavery, he has a point there - or Felix does -

Jokes about roles aside you realize you weren't that far off from when Earths normally find slavery ending without help, right?

Fifty more years in the Americas and the thing that replaced it did not involve vastly more mobility or freedom. I did look it up.

Yeah, but close enough that if Vanda Nossëo shows up and does the Vanda Nossëo thing it's not going to be a huge disaster, this is not a super difficult needle to thread.

Fair enough. 

Give me warning before the next time you bug him about it and we'll see what we shall see.

Will do.

They buy out slaves, zip around to have hard-for-anyone-but-Fredrick-to-parse interactions with the indigenous Americans, invite over Vanda Nossëo to make the Caribbean a member state. Some of the Vanda Nossëo representatives are reds; Fredrick sets them to greeting and acclimating arriving ex-slaves. And Timothy writes Sybil "what happens if I bring it up with him now -"

She looks.

He shows up an hour-and-change later and bounces the conversation to an Elf so she can see the whole thing -

"I want a date and time."

      "I understand. I'm not sure how much longer this will take and I want to make sure nothing gets lost when the luck runs out - and if you're going to hold me prisoner for a month then I can't even do non-Felix-influenced followup on the things I have in progress -"

"You're moving the goalposts."

     "You're the one moving the goalposts, I said when slavery was ended everywhere and it's not, not yet. But yes, a cost of doing things this way is that it's very hard to abruptly vanish on your plans, one doesn't know all the dependencies clearly enough to tell someone else how to follow through. And yet the results are good, I have not talked anyone else into an addiction, I have not done weird things that make the world dependent on my continued Felix-sustained involvement. There is no rush."

"I don't know if you have done weird things that make the world dependent on your continued Felix-sustained involvement! I am not sure how I'd tell and I don't think you'd know!"

      "All of the damage if I stop will be of the ordinary 'relationships I was cultivating were harmed, treaties that needed my continuous nudging to go through fail, people who would have grown up into extraordinary assets to their community die in random accidents I would have incidentally prevented' -"

"Do you know how often you do that last -"

     "I think about a tenth of what I do is about something like that."

"None of those will stop being true when slavery's ended."

    "They won't. It is going to be a costly month. I think I'll be miserable. But -"

"But if Felix is that good, the sooner we know it's safe to use like this the better, so we can leverage it everywhere -"

    "You could test that without me. You could even test that without any Felix at all, you have Sibyl -"

"Your present state rather deters people from experimenting."

     "That's absurd and you know it. My present state is 'getting lots of things done very fast with fewer resources than you have' and it has in any event very little bearing on the sort of experiments you'd want to do."

"It's given you different priorities than you usually have."

    "These have always been my priorities. Thinking you were dead might have made them more salient, but this is what I always wanted."

"Your alts -"

     "Are willing to sacrifice a few years' progress in this world for the information that Felix can be quit. I understand why they are and even why it's right but these people trust me and it's very hard to compromise them to prove something that's already obvious to me, which is that not being on Felix will be deeply unpleasant but only because being on Felix is so useful. We had a deal, Timothy -"

"Vanda Nossëo can take it from here!"

     "They don't know how much they're losing through institutional clumsiness but it's a lot -"

"Then quit, and convince everyone, and then they can start using it."

      "I don't really believe you that you'll be convinced. What'll convince you -"

"- depends. If you go back to normal and nothing explodes here that'll help a lot."

     "Then hire a long-term precog and check that and stop putting me through this."

"I also want my actual boyfriend, off drugs, not just the information that he would handle withdrawal tolerably."

     "I think it's a mistake to mix the personal in with the strategic like that."

"Maybe Felix shouldn't have maneuvered me into kissing you."

     "Do you regret it?"

" - I wish I hadn't left you, I wish I'd - I'm sorry -"

     "I love you. I thought - forever -"

"Please just give me a date -"

    "Please stop asking."

So it doesn't kick her out outright. What Elf wants to carry this back to Timothy?

She'll bounce it. 

" - so I guess we could try a hundred conversations, though I have kind of already had a hundred conversations -"

"You could hire someone longer-term to ask about whatever you're curious about, that's not a bad idea -"

"I'm a little worried that as long as he's actually in the real world on Felix things will 'go well for him' in a sense that includes our success at hiring a precog or the specifics of what we ask them or how we parse what we get."

"Then I don't know. I'm sorry."

He expresses this worry to Fredrick. 

"I think it maybe has an adjacency limit or something, it hasn't been giving me miscellaneous multiverse advice at all, not even of the 'tell this person who can teleport to go fix this' variety."

"That could be the explanation or it could be that you don't care the right way about faraway things or it could be that it's saving some skills in reserve in order to give you more reason not to go off it -"

He rolls his eyes. He Disapparates.

" - going off only thirdhand reports here I think we should probably kidnap Fredrick," he says a little while later in the relevant channel. "If there's a chance it's skewing things outside its range that's a big problem and if it's not then the worst outcome really is slightly suboptimal handling of a preindustrial world with a magic system that does not pose an existential threat."

"That sort of poses an existential threat, you all are vulnerable to Imperiusing."

"Osanwë makes that really hard to miss. We've got them coordinated cautiously. And it's not obvious Felix is making us safer, there -"

" - I don't think he'd listen if it suggested he Imperius an innocent person."

"Would he assume anyone it told him to Imperius wasn't innocent?"

" - depends how much it's messing with him? He didn't explain how Giacinta - the woman who started it - ended up dead but even presuming he murdered her he didn't have better options at the time."

"...which you know secondhand from talking to him while he was on Felix."

"I don't have any details of the situation at all, I just know from having grown up here - options for containment of a dark wizard were 'Azkaban' or 'murder'."

"If you say so."

"I can ask him. But I would probably have killed her if I'd had the chance, including if I already had her prisoner. There are better options now, but -"

"I was able to get Felix to use words, does Fredrick ever do that -"

"I haven't seen him do that, I could ask."

"It seems like it might help. We keep talking about it like it's a person, maybe it's got something to say."

He describes what Miranda did. "Try it?"

" - yeah, okay. Not with you looking over my shoulder, whenever you're around I think it changes focus to trying to get me through that specific conversation without being kidnapped."

" - sorry."

"It's okay." He Disapparates.

...Timothy reports this conversation.

"Can somebody else look over his shoulder? Someone with few kidnapping proclivities. Rebecca or something."

"I don't know exactly where he is. I can text him and suggest it."

Still has the problem where it skews answers to what is most advantageous to report rather than what I want to know.

"I am no longer sure this was a good idea."

"I continue to think we should probably kidnap him."

"I'm not going to stop you."

Timothy paces miserably for a while. "Yeah, okay. Where is he?"

A teleporter is fetched. 

It transpires he is somewhere warded.

"Oh for fuck's sake."

Fredrick what are you doing escalating just means more resources get wasted on this and there's less reason to think it's safe -

I'm not escalating. I haven't hurt anyone and won't hurt anyone, you have precogs, you can check. I'm declining to cooperate with my kidnapping, because I'm not done stabilizing everything.

Please.

I told you at the very start when I'd be okay with taking a break.

"If you happen to feel more strongly about this than the average magic rock..."

Fredrick I'm going to resent spending irreplaceable peal resources on kidnapping you.

Then how about you don't do it? This is ridiculous. 

" - what would I even wish for -"

"Standard teleporters are good enough for most purposes, I'd be inclined to see what you can get in pure divination, try and beat him at his own game. Whatever would work that you feel strongest about though."

"What I want is insight - what Felix does but knowing exactly what gears are spinning -"

"I think the oomph you could maybe wring out of spontaneity is, with Sibyl as backup, worth a little carelessness in wording -"

"Then unless Sibyl appears to tell us 'no, it's a disaster' -"

He heads over to Wish.

Gem is waiting.

"I want to have what Felix does but with complete and accurate information about how it generates suggestions and I want mine better than the potion kind so where they compete I am luckier."

And his wish is granted and his magical girl outfit does a pretty good approximation of dress robes and his gem is Felix-gold and Sibyl doesn't interrupt.

And Fredrick is at his house and will explain himself if Timothy just knocks and makes polite noises at his parents so Timothy does that. 

- Fredrick blinks at the gem. Then he starts laughing. 

"What."

"Well. For the last couple weeks it's seemed like a good idea to push you on this kidnapping thing but I didn't because I couldn't think why it would possibly be a good idea -"

"I see."

"And then you had the writing idea so I asked and it said 'magic dependent on mental state of the caster' and I thought maybe this was related to the thing where you can't teach any of us the Imperius even though we need to learn it, but this is better."

"You have your own now, right? Isn't it lovely?"

He does not actually need it to tell him that he should hug Fredrick and teleport him a few hops away to a guest room in Vanda Nossëo and hug him with less caution and mumble 'you scared me' and 'after a month you could maybe wish it on also, if you miss it so much, wished version explains itself' and 'you scared me' and 'if I promise to hold it all together will you stay' -

Sigh. "Yeah. But it's going to be so unpleasant -"

"I know. I love you. I'm right here."