"You could probably find something in Artefact Storage that mind controls people to do something that people disagree on the definition of, but it might be harder to find one that does that and...... wouldn't violate research ethics to put on people."

“Yeah, I’m preeetty sure most things in Artefact Storage are... not the safest to use. Honestly, the Institute should probably be doing even less research on its artefacts than it does, but if we can’t stop it we can at least refrain from encouraging it.”

Kiss. "See, this is why you are the best boyfriend. 'No experimenting with rape necklaces, Lev.' --Man, a point in favor of objective morality existing is that magic definitely seems to be aware of what evil is."

“I guess that’s true. Does magic have to be evil, do you think?”

"I have no idea. Maybe there's some other thing going on that makes magic all seem really evil to us. Maybe our universe is just fundamentally evil for some reason. Maybe the evil spirits killed the good ones. Maybe humanity got its morality detectors installed backwards and actually serial killing is, like, the most ethical thing. Maybe we just got really unlucky and happened to get all the evil spirits, and somewhere else there's a planet haunted by the spirits of, like, Being Kind To Other People and Obeying Just Authority and Loyalty To Your Friends, and that planet's Lev works for the Sugnam Institute which serves the spirit of Research Integrity and is talking to his Martin right now about how weirdly lucky they are that all their magic is so nice."

Martin starts with a very serious expression but ends up giggling at ‘the Sungam Institute’. “I love you so much.”

"You know who I don't love? Those lucky bastards at the Sugnam Institute."

“They come across a non-digitizable statement and it’s like, ‘my aunt miraculously survived her illness’ and follow-up research confirms that she lived to be really old and didn’t get murdered under mysterious circumstances even a little bit!”

"All their digitizables are like 'and then my boyfriend was murdered by the creepy doll in my living room' and followup research confirms it was a drug deal gone bad."

“You can quit at any time and the magic is very careful to only respect your fully informed consent!”

"It mind controls you to give you ethics. Suddenly I will feel this desire to give a tenth of my salary to the poor and help little old ladies across the street and go to protests against transphobia."

“I bet their employees have a longer lifespan than average.”

"Fucking bastards," Lev says, and flops dramatically onto Martin's chest.

“I love you,” Martin says before kissing Lev. 

Mmm kissing.

Maybe Lev will allow himself to be successfully distracted this time. 

Mmmmm distractions. (Martin has the best boyfriend.)

Lev has the best boyfriend, because his boyfriend puts up with it when he interrupts kissing to go "I wonder how magic interacts with physics. Like, is there a new set of internally consistent laws and the reason it seems like it violates physics is the same as the reason an airplane would seem like it violated physics to someone from 200 AD? Or is it an external force that acts on the world and violates the laws of physics but everything else works in according to physics? Or is it all like 'lol nothing matters'?"

“You’re really good at thinking about these things, you know. I guess you can... try to figure that out? Along with all the other stuff you’re trying to figure out?”

"I'm not sure how though. --I guess if faster-than-light travel turns out to be possible then we can travel through time and I will go to the year 3000 and find out what their physics looks like and come back and tell you."

"Wow. Well, tell me what everything else is like in 3000 too. ...If time travel is possible."

"Unfortunately, I don't think there's been a statement that involves breaking the speed of light yet. --Magic can clearly warp time, the skydiver statement shows that, but that's totally allowed by the normal laws of physics. Presumably the skydiver was just moving much much much much much much more slowly than everything around him."

“Huh. I... guess that makes sense. And I’ll, uh, keep an extra eye out for statements that break the speed of light, I guess.”

Lev kisses Martin's cheek. "I'm not sure we'd get one, anywhere on Earth it'd be impossible to tell apart breaking the speed of light from getting very very close to the speed of light, remember we're only eight light-minutes from the Sun. I guess a time travel statement would be more likely, although honestly I kind of expect magic is going to play nicely with the laws of physics about this one."

“I guess we’ll find out.” Snuggle. “Any time travel statements, I tell you right away. Uuuuunless they’re digitizable, I guess.”

"Similarly, I think magic's going to just ignore conservation of energy. It's not going to turn out that, I don't know, the ocean gets a little bit colder every time magic does a thing. --Do you want me to explain why that's similar? It's not actually very complicated."