"My intuition is... no destruction? Like, fireballs and lightning bolts are definitely out but... lights and small flames are probably fine? I think that Guardie Forestali (Park Rangers) sometimes need to intentionally start fires to control forests... so controlling the weather yes but tornadoes, hurricanes, and other extreme events no. No teleport, or weapons. And the magic is probably more intuitive than mathematical."

Hammond scribbles attentively.

"Okay! I think I have a pretty good understanding of how you want druidic magic to work; are there other important questions that come to mind, or other things you'd like to clarify? About druidic magic or about, ah, academic magic?"

"Mr Hammond, you said you're interviewing other people too, right? I would feel really bad if I missed something as important as... the possibility to end famine and diseases. I'm smart but not perfect."

"I think I'd like to have more than two kinds of magic. Probably something ritualistic would work well in China and Japan?"

"Oh my god, I'm being racist. To be clear, none of the magic traditions should be restricted in any way by country or sex or skin color or any such bullshit!"

"I am interviewing other people, yes," he agrees. "... but my bosses are pretty strict about not trying to share answers between people. Both for bias and confidentiality reasons. So I can do my best to help you think through anything else you may be missing, but I can't really share if anyone I've already spoken to has ideas in that area."

He taps a flipper to his lip in thought.

"I've done this before for other worlds, though — I could tell you about what happened when magic came to them, and you can see if that gives you ideas of more things to cover?" he suggests.

"Yes, that would be very valuable, thank you."

"Well, the most memorable is probably this world that was being menaced by pre-existing shadow monsters — it had actually had magic in the past, but the magic had gone away because of a big cataclysm, and I was there surveying to help magic come back ­— and the shadow monsters were powered by negative emotions. So there would be a shadow monster attack, and people would be scared and hurt, and that would power the generation of more shadow monsters, and so on. Eventually the whole place was crawling with them, despite the best efforts of the native monster hunters."

"Anyway, mostly people there wanted magic that would be useful for fighting the monsters, for obvious reasons. But one young boy I spoke to had another idea: he wanted magic to be able to redeem the monsters, and make them powered off of positive emotions instead. Well, the Will of Magic incorporated his idea, and the new magic practitioners managed to flip the polarity of this big bird monster. So it turned bright gold and went around hunting down the shadow monsters, and people were happy to see their new protector, so it spawned a brood of little happiness-birds. It took a few years and a lot of effort from the monster hunters, but eventually they got the polarity of the whole planet flipped, and now the place is full of roving golden happiness and beauty creatures that go around constructing gardens and statues and secret grottos."

He has other anecdotes lined up, but he pauses first to see if this generates any follow-up questions.

"So I should probably think about my world's problems, and see if there are ways to win better than just making them go away."

"Is it fine if I check Wikipedia?"

"Yes! By all means. I'm not technically paid by the hour, exactly, but I'm happy to stay here as long as you need to work out your answer."

"Ok, let me see..."

"I... would offer you a chair but I still think I shouldn't open the door to strangers - sorry - and also... I only have human chairs."

"Poverty, diseases, desertification, malnutrition, regional conflict. These seem decently covered by druidic magic. Which should definitely include controlling or improving plant growth... possibly without consuming the terrain? I remember something about crop rotation... It seems that 'make this terrain rich in nutrients again' should be a druidic spell. And probably also spells to control fertility in animals."

"And I guess in humans." She blushes furiously.

"Ageing population, demographic transition. Healing people is most of this, but also fixing damages done by aging. In particular - but not limited to - Alzheimer and Parkinson and general cognitive decline."

"Sustainable agriculture, food security. This is covered by druids, definitely."

"Prevention of HIV/AIDS, HIV and pregnancy, HIV/AIDS denialism. Prevention would be nice, but if we can cure it completely and at scale that's also probably... fine? As long as we have enough people who can create healing potions with local ingredients (oh, that's important! Potions should require skill but not rare ingredients!) I think we'll be fine long term? A disease that doesn't kill you very quickly is way less scary if you can cure it by just drinking something. Denialism though..."

"That's a hard one. I guess... ways to make people smarter? I think I read something about malnutrition making people less bright... oh, and lead. We should remove lead from everything. Which means that we need a way to cheaply make... pots and pans? Ah... alchemists! Transmuting simple clay into metal or something like that..."

"So — healing magic should be able to handle aging and cognitive problems, and HIV specifically but probably infectious diseases in general ..."

"For Alchemists, you're imagining using them to offset the need for hazardous chemicals such as lead; do you think magic should have a way to address hazardous chemicals that are already present in the environment? Which discipline does that fall under?"

Hammond is immune to a lot of poisons due to the particulars of his magic system. But being hired for a job on Earth is still slightly buffing his microplastics resistance.

"Yeah, aging and related issues, and definitely all diseases. Like, even including radiation poisoning. I've read an article about Chernobyl once... not a good way to go."

"That's part of it but also... imagine if you could, in fact, transmute elements. It would solve so much of the scarcity, make mines obsolete - mining is a really bad job for people."

"I think dealing with bad chemicals in the environment should be druidic... maybe alchemists get some of that too? Like, for removing asbestos and extracting oil... yeah, I think they should both have it. But alchemy definitely sound more dangerous than druidic, and I think it should also be granted by the kamis, like academic magic."

"Nuclear weapons, nuclear waste."

Well, fuck. How do you solve this one?

"Nuclear waste can be solved by either druids, removing pollution, or alchemists and academics, negating the need for nuclear energy. Nuclear weapons... that seems like a hard problem."

"Maybe," Hammond allows. "But if you can clean up the long-term effects with druids, nuclear weapons are 'only' huge explosions. There are a few ways I could think of to deal with that. Again, I'm not supposed to suggest things, but there was this other world I worked with a while ago ..."

"So they had been relying on an increasing amount of nuclear power. No weapons — they were weird people, not anything you'd recognize as a 'country' exactly, and if anyone had proposed building a nuclear weapon they probably would have gotten sent to a hospital — but they had a serious energy problem because their world was going through an ice age and they refused to burn large amounts of coal for ideological reasons. Anyway, they had all this nuclear waste to deal with. And they had been burying it in geologically stable salt mines, but when I was interviewing people about magic, someone asked for nuclear waste to become the food of choice for a set of culturally important spiritual creatures."

"Well, they started selling the nuclear waste to the creatures — like I said, weird people; even their mythological creatures were willing to trade for things — and eventually they actually had to spin up more nuclear plants because the price of nuclear waste rose due to demand. Eventually, you couldn't find a scrap of nuclear waste anywhere on the planet, because it was all being sold off in exchange for magic gadgets."

"Of course, that's not the only world that had a similar problem, and their solutions can end up quite different. This other place, everyone was very concerned with privacy, and their magic ended up making it very easy to create isolated demiplanes, that weren't connected to their planet through normal space. The planet eventually ended up an irradiated nuclear wasteland, but only because nobody really minded because they had all moved into custom extraplanar bunkers."

Hammond shakes his head and refocuses on Bonnie.

"Anyway, forgive an old Walrus his ramblings. You were talking about nuclear weapons?"

"Only huge explosions??? People would die!"

"... should we have resurrection as part of magic?"

"I feel so unprepared for this."

"So. Yeah. Resurrection. Totally, and probably unlimitedly. Do you have information about... whether afterlives?"

Well, Hammond had been trying to hint that magic could deal with the explosions. But this works too.

"Afterlives are part of Magic — different worlds have their own systems. When I die, I'm going to get sorted into this big tree-cum-filing-cabinet where I'll slowly merge with the universal unconscious until my husband gets together the big ritual to get me back," he explains. "Do you have any thoughts about what the afterlife here should look like? And about how you'd like people to be able to get back and forth?"