Temperance composes a letter to send home explaining the concept of a printing press and then goes to sleep. She wakes up early and starts doing magic research on her own. Comparing what she knows and what the book tells her. She has a late lunch and then remembers to actually send her letter.
That done she sits in the library and proceeds with her research. She ate enough at lunch that she decides to skip dinner and wait for Kaede while reading.
"We can't naively recognise other metamancers, they just look like mages to us unless they have multiple kinds of mana at the same time, and if she keeps her mana hidden in a battery artefact no one will notice."
"Oh. So that's how—okay. So I think first of everything you should tell other diplomats about this—ensorcel phe Bez, make him forget, and then us again, so he won't suspect anything—"
"Which diplomats? Are you sure you don't want to keep the memories and attack him now?"
"I'll give you a list, and yes I am very vehemently sure of that, that will go wrong on an incredible number of levels."
"Is there any contingency in case we are captured again...? It might be worth it to make me forget nuclear weapons."
"I don't think you know enough to reconstruct the tech in less than, like, two hundred years, at minimum. Besides, anything having to do with brains is extremely expensive, that spell I used to make us forget was ridiculous and we can't just spend that sort of mana all willy nilly even with what Sadde gave us. I have three goals here, roughly in decreasing order of importance: to make sorcery a force for good in the world instead of a tool of oppression, to ensure phe Bez won't do whatever it is he's planning to do which required him to ensorcel us, and to prevent the political disaster that would be caused if anything happened to him that couldn't be properly explained and might be connected to us." Pause. "Time. Temperance, can you go to him, give him back his ring, get him to forget the interaction with you and act as if everything's alright, but be compelled to come here by the time he'd retire for the night? We're gambling about how long he can be missed for and I don't like our odds."
Good, she lowers him down and casts the memory spell. He should wake up in a moment or two. She leaves before that.
And he goes on to do whatever it is he was going to do, only slightly confused.
They're snuggling and discussing strategies.
"...so any show of magic is enough, see, and they know I am a mage so it won't be too weird if we broadcast stuff and they get to see with their own eyes while phe Bez is unaware."
"Thank you," she sighs. "His public face is important to him; if it weren't, he wouldn't be holding this position. But if we do destroy his public face he won't have any reasons to hide anymore and, thanks to us, he has a ridiculous amount of mana. So we need to separate him from his mana storage—that ring—after he's used it to be revealed. And I don't know enough sorcery. Can this be done? Or can the ring be rendered temporarily inert, or something like that?"
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