Dissemination

[ask_nicely]

Fantastic magical powers aren't the only things the daeva can provide. In fact, Adana's quite certain that in the grand scheme of things, the fantastic magical powers will be minor in comparison to the technology they can provide. Sure, she and Cam are powerful, but they are two people and they can't be everywhere at once. Technology, though? Technology is easy to scale. Get a few factories up, and over a few decades, the entire world will get access. And it's not like they're on a time-crunch, anymore.

Mind you, the fantastic magical powers aren't bad, either. Even if, as it turns out, it's impossible for Cam to make magic mirrors - they anticlimactically are ordinary mirrors. Similarly, Adana tries to turn a set of mirrors into the magical versions, but gets nowhere. It's probably safe to assume daeva are incapable of making magical items through their inherent abilities. They all find this fact a terrible pity, but it's not like they can complain, considering.

Most of her alts have started bothering her for her technology, and plans to neatly integrate it with their own levels of technology. Prime is the easiest of all of them - he is in a position in charge, has little to no masquerade issues, and Cam can make trips there whenever he likes. Cypress is the most tricky, since neither Cam or Adana can actually go to Chamomile. So Cypress and Ice pick a time to head over to Pantheon when Cam and Adana are free.

Comments

[dark_light]

And the Chamomile contingent collect notes and schematics and prototypes and quantities of some of the more difficult-to-come-by raw materials and put them all on a float platform Cam supplies, and bring them to their colony.

"We should probably disassemble the masquerade - at least partially - soon," says Isabella. "I'm not sure if it's better to go for broke and come clean about everything from otherworldly magic to zombie alts or... cherrypick."

[prodigal_miser]

"Agreed. Cherry-picking has more appeal, I think. If we tell the world literally everything there would be some - upheaval. People wanting us to search for alts of them, not trusting us with our apparent couple in charge status, and so on."

[dark_light]

"The story as it stands mostly holds together. Adding more information but not all of it has the possibility of making it obvious we're leaving more things out. Like, okay, if there are other worlds and you came from one, the obvious next question is how many are there? What's in them? Why aren't we letting scientists and explorers and entrepreneurs go have a look at them? And the answer is because there are zombie alts, but we don't want to say that, so...?"

[prodigal_miser]

"Fair," admits Adarin. "And it would help us throw technology at everyone, certainly."

[dark_light]

"We might want to limit our appearances on Earth if we go full disclosure, though, so we aren't constantly bombarded with requests. Move the offworld portals and guard the Earth-Colony portal with Juniper And Friends..."

[prodigal_miser]

"Right. Possibly also get one of the fancy Prime portals to replace the Earth-Colony portal. Either way, we need a new house that is not on Earth. Pity we can't have Cam and Adana build it. I suppose we could join the club and move to Pantheon? Or find a pretty planet with lots of moonlight."

[dark_light]

"I think I'd rather live in the colony than in Pantheon, even if we wind up hanging out in the Belfry a lot and getting relatively exotic groceries from Cam on days when we don't want to deal with paparazzi in order to purchase salmon."

[prodigal_miser]

"Fair. Okay, we'll set Juniper And Friends at building us a house. Which - we need to plan out what house we're having them make."

[dark_light]

"Yeah, they can't take nearly as much creative license as a demon could... I'm not even sure whether daeva would get daemons but if nobody's willing to risk it we'll never find out... Let's delegate this problem to an actual architect. And get humans to do the fine detail work. The robot army can lift and haul but they're not really designed for doing crown molding."

[prodigal_miser]

"I think the colony might have an architect," muses Adarin. "Somewhere. We should look. If not, we can find someone from Earth, I suppose."

[dark_light]

"So this leaves our press release looking like, what - ladies and gentlemen, while the resurrection and immortality spells are my own work, the reason I haven't told other witches how to makes portals is that it's not witch magic, it is my husband's otherworldly powers. Since this complicates his citizenship status considerably, we are going to move to our space colony. Skilled would-be immigrants can apply in thus and such a way. No questions please."

[prodigal_miser]

"They will probably want to know where the colonists from the space colony came from. So maybe I should write a - I don't know, brochure on New Kystle. Toss them at reporters before we teleport away."

[dark_light]

"All right, you write a brochure about where you're from and I'll write up an immigration policy to give to staffpeople and put on a website?"

[prodigal_miser]

"Yeah. Probably also give good reasons for why people would want to immigrate, as well. Not everyone is from New Kystle and therefore desperately wishing to get away from New Kystle."

[dark_light]

"I don't think we can absorb even ten percent of the fraction of the Earthly population that just really wants to live in space and/or figure out what we're up to, love."

[prodigal_miser]

".... Point. Damn. We need more magic."

[dark_light]

"We'll be very very picky about immigrants, maybe get some daeva summoned to see if any of them want to experiment with maybe having daemons and if they don't get them we can have Cam and Adana over to improve our absorption capacity. It should stem the tide that the colonials don't speak any Earthly language..."

[prodigal_miser]

"We already wanted Cam to make us a larger robot army - why not find a way to let them be translators, too? And that would help with absorption capacity."

[dark_light]

"All right. And the robots can walk, so he can just make them in Pantheon and they can march right over here no problem with transport."

[prodigal_miser]

"Yes. And then we throw them at building things to let us absorb more people. For - Earth immigrants, can we have a focus on people that are teachers and scientists and highly educated people, and such? To update the Kystle refugees to Earth standards."

[dark_light]

"Yeah, definitely. Teachers and scientists and doctors and possibly historians. Oh lord we're going to have to set up customs to make sure nobody brings things we don't want into our colony... and have some way for visitation to work, I don't think I want to rule out immigrants who want to have their parents over for lunch or whatever..."

[prodigal_miser]

"Oh, that'll be fun. The robots have a network, though, and they recognize people, so - we can take advantage of that? Have them politely ask people to leave after a certain amount of time?"

[dark_light]

"Yes. Politely. My scary high tech armed to the teeth robot soldiers are so polite."

[prodigal_miser]

"You should probably not advertise that they're armed to the teeth," snorts her husband. "Scary high tech armed to the teeth robot soldiers are rather intimidating."

[dark_light]

"Well, it won't be mentioned the first time they go looking for someone who's overstayed their welcome..."