"I will keep an eye out for opportunities!"

"If I find one I will definitely invite you to collaborate."

"Thanks!"

"In the meantime, hmm - are there any artifacts whose drawback takes the form of a physical injury that could be subsequently trivially healed by a light - or pain, that could be totally ignored by a shren - I'm trying to figure out where the low-hanging fruit are on the interaction between these worlds. Hmm, if I get a transworld scry with the right kind of targeting parameters or an analysis attached or both, that could be helpful in finding or identifying artifacts, but there's kind of too much dev time involved to call that a low-hanging fruit. That fruit is upwards of the middle of the tree."

"There's one that makes touching water agonizing and one that dissolves all the bones in your feet."

"What are their positive contributions?"

"Teleporting and super speed. Respectively. So the first one's not especially useful to you."

"Depending on how the teleportation works exactly, I might still want it! Super speed sounds interesting. —Are there any artifacts that directly grant flight—"

"Yes, although the university doesn't have one. There's a wheelchair in a country overseas from mine that does flight and - maybe that's the one where you can't heal from injuries but I might be mixing it up with another one, it could also be the one where you can't eat plants."

"I bet someone would be willing to test how 'can't heal from injuries' stacks up against lights if it meant saving the babies."

Nod.

"And there might be spells or potions that could help with some things but I don't know offhand if potions work outside Elcenia, and my recollection of interworld theory is that wizardry definitely doesn't, you have to cast everything here and if spells leave they break. Not sure what would happen if the spell was designed to be cast in Elcenia to affect things in other worlds, without being strictly a summon or a send, but that's definitely a top-of-the-tree problem, I'd have to inhale all the literature on interworld theory before I even started thinking about designing something. Who am I kidding, I'm going to inhale all the literature on interworld theory anyway."

He grins at her.

"And we've got decent leverage on this end because my father works for the government of Esmaar, he's a - what's the phrase again - he solves miscellaneous problems that no one else can get a grip on - National Applied Policy Authority, that's it. Sort of the perfect thing for this occasion. Is there an equivalent on your end?"

"Maybe, but I don't know, I've never really interacted with my government."

"Well that's markedly less convenient than 'yes and I have one in my immediate family', but I bet we can figure something out."

"I'm sure they'd find somebody upon being presented with - magic aliens."

"I'd sure hope so. Imagine if magic aliens showed up and the government just sort of threw up its hands and refused to deal with them."

"I would be ashamed of my representatives!"

Giggle.

That is a good smile that she has.

It is the smile of being adorably mindcontrolled!

The mind control is a problem but the smile is still very cute!

Yes. "What's the Esmaarlan government like?"