Voting is pretty solidly for:
[x] Let The Council Decide. Yes you are very, very influential, but let them vote and follow that decision as to your next course of action, cementing their trust.
You consider the council members then, including those who have not spoken up, then give a slightly dramatic shrug. "I am here as a member of this council for only the second time, I shall follow your decision as to how best my knowledge and abilities can help advance the mission."
That seems to be met with universal pleasant surprise, even the admiral is not unhappy though he fails to look particularly pleased when the vote results come in and the consensus is very much that the Benefaction Mission needs their own uplift.
You do not concentrate entirely upon this of course, you collaborate with Edelmira Hanes on broadcasts to be sent to the surface and to your priests, holographic messages to be displayed during sermons, direct from Etorix himself. You record these mostly in your full draconic form which has difficulty fitting into one of the ark's translucent sapphire observation domes, leaving you rather cramped even if the backdrop of high orbit is suitably dramatic.
Your first order of business has to be magic of course, you can advance their technology but fundamental integration of magic can even at this level of ambient mana make quite dramatic changes. You hear that the top mages of the Khangai colony are being sent to the ark but right now you are teaching them.
They are surprisingly capable, Benefaction Mission implants allow them to have an inhuman degree of focus and memory not to mention the subjective slow down of time. Their magical theory is still crude though, the implementation simplistic. They can feel it as well, though you wear human form you are not at all shy about being a god and with no attempt at veiling your own power they can feel themselves like guttering candles before an open blast furnace.
"First of all, you cannot directly emulate me. As a dragon I draw in surrounding magic and focus it, refine it, intensify it by burning the mana to fuel the fire that is my soul. Added to this my godhood ensures I have a constant flow of power from my worshippers. I do of course also require a dense mana level to exist, if I was not a god then I would still be hibernating and inactive."
You continue your lecture. "As humans you can exist regardless of ambient magic or even in its absence but as mages you can take advantage of it. Thus far you have been using mana in its raw, diffuse form though, what I am going to teach you is how to refine it within your own spark of soul, store that power over time, then unleash it as you carry out acts of magic for a dozen to ten times the potency. The quantity you can hold in your own body is limited but still a significant advantage, later we will cover ritual collection and storage and the binding of these into artefacts."
There are several hundred of the Ark's most magically gifted individuals in attendance physically present rather than attending remote, given you need to be able to personally supervise their magical development. Damien Stockton the Ark Administrator is one of them and probably in the top five for talent, paying rapt attention even though you know he is still far from your proponent – you did kill quite a few people when you visited the first time after all.
Still he is as good an example as any to begin with and you call him to the front. He approaches, somewhat warily, you smile disarmingly. "So to begin with you need to manifest this mental structure in side of yourself, use flows of spirit at minimal intensity to begin with, as weak as you can whilst still visualising the structure clearly." You sketch the intricate structure in the air, your finger leaving a faintly glowing golden trail in its wake. This is so boring, facts about the universe that are as obvious to a newly hatched dragon as gravity is to one of them, yet they cannot work them out on themselves without it taking centuries.
By the end of your first week of lessons you have the most capable mages able to refine and internally store mana though, something still beyond your students on the surface, their flawless memories and conscious control over their subconscious from the implants really rather effective.
Technological improvement is less straightforward. The Benefaction Mission's systems and designs are already very sophisticated after all even if they are not limited by the resolution of their molecular printers, you think they should ultimately be able to replicate almost anything there. Where you focus is on adjusting several hundred of their key design templates to allow fairly simple magical enhancement post manufacture.
Medical multitools adapted so that they have the basic structures for ritual amplification of healing magic, simply requiring enchantment, industrial drones established to that they can be empowered by enslaved sprites, which you demonstrate with a few examples. Railgun rounds redesigned to incorporate armour piercing and seeking enchantments.
Everything is still rather incremental and is going to be heavily reliant upon the throughput of their mages, which is likely to be minimal. Already as the implications become clear, as they really realize that right now ambient magic is still only at half and that so much more can be done with huge reserves properly channelled, the Mission's strategic planners are apparently concentrating on 'How do we get more magic?'. This is a question you are asked increasingly.
[] Tell Them To Wait. You are not going to clue the Benefaction Mission into ways to accumulate large quantities of magical power, at least not right now.
[] Tell Them To Recruit Mages. There are over fifty times as many people on the surface of Arafan as there are in the Ark and the mission's various colonies, get them to recruit mages from your priesthood. This would weaken your priesthood but could be spun as 'rapturing' or similar and concentrated on old priests who can then get life extension technology.
[] Tell Them About Soul Harvesting. Teach them ritual magic to allow soul harvesting, then as the full horrible implications of just how it works set in tell them this is what their arch enemies do, you are fairly certain this will cause them to recoil in horror and not bother you again.
[] Teach Them Mass Scale Mana Harvesting. They could set up huge scale orbital arrays to harvest ambient mana, with your help that is. This could gather magic on a scale significant for you as a terribly potent god and given you can use it vastly more efficiently than the mission you are sure you could get a share.
