No one seems to have much to say, or a desire to keep the strangers on their ship very long.

"Thanks for the help," River manages.

They disappear. Off in space, so does the portalsnake.

A fairly short time later, River sends in multiple wish wording candidates.

The first assumes she and the Reavers fundamentally work the same way, and that the Pax fucks up people like her's powers in such a way as to cause Reavers (she has loose proof for this from Alliance officials' minds). Accordingly, she wants to change how psychic powers work in at least her species. She suspects she'll feel more strongly about this than the other options because she hates her power's manifestation (this is crammed in very small print under the wish). The proposed wording looks like it was gone over by someone who's worked in contract law. It'll change River-like psychic powers to be default off, so that psychics are usually ordinary humans, and to be much more under control when turned on, with psychics able to turn individual components and senses on and off, choose who to mind read, ask for consent to read minds even at a distance, and chose what thoughts and memories they receive. Offensive psychic powers will be unable to hurt people on accident. Telepathy, precog, postcog, and other extrasensory perceptions will work conveniently.) It has an easily removed clause that will revert mental damage done as a result of possessing powers in order to heal current Reavers.

The second and third are just for the living Reavers to be reverted to how they were prior to the Pax - one wording for with memories of being a Reaver intact and one wording for without - and put in the healing place mentioned (which River knows the name of, despite that not having been mentioned out loud).

The fourth version is complicatedly worded to undo the effects of the Pax without invoking actual time travel or erasing memories, so that all the Reavers and everyone who died on Miranda will be restored and resurrected and everyone killed directly or indirectly by Reavers will be resurrected.

River would suggest that she wishes the first one without the mental damage reversion clause and someone really upset about Pax specifically wish the fourth one. She has a file with notes on how the Reavers work, what experiments the Alliance has done on Reavers and psychics, how reliable her knowledge (usually from mind reading) of those experiments is, how her own powers work, and her logic on each wording, which she gives the title of.

Her powers involve involuntary mind reading at highly variable distances depending on the other end's own psychic sensitivity - a few dozen miles for non-sensitive people and apparently people outside her universe, and a few hundred thousand miles for Reavers. She has uncontrollable precog and postcog, usually extending a few seconds. The postcog has ever extended decades, and the precog sometimes gives her farther future glimpses. The farthest she's confirmed is fifteen minutes. Danger is more likely to trigger precognition. She can sense physical objects in her surroundings, and sometimes get glimpses of their history. She can mentally impact people, making them disoriented, confused, or outright killing them. This is easier if they're psychically sensitive and harder if they're skilled. She can access memories but this isn't on by default. She probably has more powers but they're all hard to experiment with, use, and focus on, and it's hard to tell what is and isn't a hallucination sometimes, so these are just the ones she's confirmed. Some people are immune to mind reading and influence but not to featuring in precog and postcog.

She suspects Reavers are in a feedback loop reading and attacking each other's minds. Reavers extremely separated from other Reavers act more confused and less aggressive but get violent again if there's any psychically sensitive humans around them. Reavers can turn other psychics into Reavers.

After she submits this someone knocks on the windshield about twenty minutes later.

She's piloting, curled up in the seat while she mostly watches the alerts generated by the basic autopilot.

She waves.

Wave. She teleports into the cockpit. Weirdly pale person, moves with unnatural precision, blank mind. "The logistics of knocking before teleporting in are awkward on spaceships. Am I shielded enough?"

"Yeah. Like you're not there." It's kind of creepy. River's on a slightly adjusted dose of her meds, though, and pretty sure she's not hallucinating. If she was the person would have blue hands, after all.

"Oh, good. Then I'll be able to shield the Empress of Mîr, if and when you make your wish."

"That sounds smart. Were there any problems with my suggestions?"

"How were you imagining toggling powers off and on would work?"

"Mental action driven by intent. The thing I'm imagining is - kind of a mental motion that would turn them on that takes practice to do but that turning them off just requires wanting them off or doing the same action again, so it's harder to turn them on accidentally but easier to turn them off. Most people's powers are different enough the toggling individual powers on and off would have to run on people's own definitions and intent. I think the Reavers could figure manipulating them pretty easily since the thing they do to attack people's minds is in the same brain space. Like - holding a knife and pressing a button are both actions I can do with my hands, and right now my brain's only action is 'knife' and I want to add a bunch of buttons and sliders that'll do what people hook them up to within limits."

"Okay. That seems like a clear improvement but I do note that it leaves a bunch of people nobody has vetted running around with psychic powers."

"I don't really trust vetting groups. People in that other world had a good opinion of their empire but the Core worlds people like the Alliance and the Alliance is evil. Also I don't actually want to take away people's powers or prevent people being born with more powers. 'Anyone in the verse can just decide to be immune to psychics' would be good, but it's going to be really really weird and probably distressing to have the majority of my senses turned off until I can figure out what I want on at what intensities."

"So, the problem with doing it as an immunity is that it means we wouldn't want to let psychics leave this world-neighborhood." She illusions up a map. "You're here. Mîr, the place with the wish magic, is there, right next to you. But if one day you want to come visit me, say -" She pokes her world. "Then the wish magic allowing anybody to decide to be immune to psychic doesn't reach that far, and random passersby you meet on the way are subject to psychic powers. We already have this problem with this world," she pokes another, "where some species - they've got lots - have various amounts of psychic powers, some under good control and some not, and this one," she pokes a neighbor of the last one, "where people of any of the species there sometimes have them, occasionally incontinently - we don't travel there, but we're trying to evacuate it. And with all of these," a bunch of worlds light up, "where Elves, they may have come up on your excursion, can read minds. And this one." Another blinks. "Where some people acquire the power to learn to read minds. If you start as we do from the assumption that somebody going about their life shouldn't have to be subject to psychic powers this is pretty bad, it's not just us being authoritarian for no reason."

"Are people from those worlds not allowed to travel either, then? What would you do if most of the people in a universe you found were blind and really objected to having sighted people around them? And would some kind of way you could tell if someone was using a psychic power, so you could just make it illegal some places, work? Or could someone make it so my type of power can't be turned on outside of this neighborhood?"

"Continent mindreaders who state under lie detection that they aren't going to read anybody outside designated emergencies or consensual situations are allowed to travel if they don't have anything else stopping them. We haven't encountered the sightedness analogy but somebody'd dig up a blind agent to do work there if it came up. The last idea has promise but might be the kind of thing that'd take two wishes - one to turn them off, one to make them locally conditionally turn back on. It's one wish to a customer so there's a wisher-finding step that gets worse the more complicated you make it."

"Dunno what your thresholds for emotions are but I know people who're generally more emotional and empathic than me - the wording I figured out for the first wish is something I made sure my friend Kaylee felt just as strongly about doing as me, though she doesn't know what the mental stuff would look like. She's mostly just really nice and emotional, so 'this would help me' is enough I think. She feels bad for how often I get overwhelmed, so should be able to turn powers off, and I could turn them back on with limits. And for fixing Reavers - I know a number of people who feel as strong about undoing the Pax as I do about fixing my powers. Some of them almost definitely wouldn't decide to do other things, and I checked the specific wording with someone whose husband was killed by Reavers and she felt strongly about it. - Assuming I hit the threshold, if I don't then screening probably gets more complicated."

"Gem can check you. How many total psychics are we talking about here?"

"Population of this solar system's around forty seven billion. Psychics strong enough to become Reavers are about a tenth of a percent, so about forty seven million. I think most people vulnerable to becoming Reavers don't have all the powers, so they can't all read minds, and there's psychics too weak to become Reavers, but I dunno the numbers there or if weaker Psychics ever get mind reading, and once someone's a Reaver they get everything on blast. There's also usually at least three thousand Reavers around their planet, probably some thousands more working around the edges of the system, but they almost definitely have less than a hundred thousand and are probably nowadays closer to ten thousand overall. I also dunno how many aliens we have and if they have psychics, and we're probably not the only human system - not sure anyone still lives around Earth That Was but the Alliance has records of other ships fleeing in other directions."

"...I'm going to guess your Earth isn't there any more because we do check for those."

"Dunno exactly what happened to it. The nice sanitized story in the history books is that people left unchecked got into wars and polluted it so we made the Alliance to keep everyone under control, and the planet became uninhabitable so we left. Alliance maintains we're the only humans out here but pretty sure that's a lie. The Alliance can't blow up planets, but someone else might be able to."

"We can look into it at some point and then it'll be online. What's a good way besides knocking on your spaceship to get ahold of you when your wish is through vetting?"

"I can tell people someone might teleport into the cargo bay. We're usually not in there. I also have a computer that can hook up to a net and get messages but usually doesn't. I also don't mind having my mind read if someone else psychic wants to get in my range and contact me that way."

"Noted. I'll see you when it's wish time if that happens. Questions, comments?"