"But the ones that don't are - infinite torture, right, that seems much worse."

"Not infinite, typically, eventually you get eaten and then you're gone."

"What I'd like to do is get my Valar on the scene - and get them to go talk sense into all the other Valar - and see what they can do about it."

"And they can probably do more for civilizations outside the - field of influence - of the local gods."

"It might take them a while, they have a much easier time acting in places they've been invested in long term."

"Huh. So should we maybe be thinking about having future colonies and so on be in your world?"

"Oh, maybe, we have space, but it's a little more local than 'the entire world', more solar system and smaller scales."

"Maybe everybody should settle in my world and become daeva. No aliens, easy terraforming."

" - I'm pretty persuaded."

"I mean, it might for whatever reason not work on non-natives."

"Hey," says Rubelite to Anaander, "you can stop spying on everyone because you can have daeva make all the flerghenti precursors and stuff like that and then go find where they are instead."

"We could!"

"...if you go home, I guess."

"I'm not as pitiable as you about it so I don't know if they'll go for it."

"Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm."

Pelape nudges Cam, gets a paper copy of the letter to Promise, and lays it out page by page near the site of the gate.

"Lohte, she says yous are bad at nicknames, don't you find that a terrible handicap?"

"Bad at - remembering them? That's actually pretty surprising -"

"No, at coming up with them for yourselves. You can't even pick just one and keep it! You have to have lots!"

"Oh, I have an advisor who made me a list of a couple hundred to cycle through."

"I see. So the mes did all pick nicknames, and they're all safe by my standard and yours both, is it safe for me to refer to them as individuals rather than being nebulous about it? Some of the yous' nicknames are safe for me but not for you and the letter writer has kindly assigned them new ones."

"Yes, please please tell me all about them."

"The me's are Signal - she wrote the letter - Spaceship, Concerto, Tengwa, Ring, Point, and Glossolalia. Ring is the one from the world they're all in now. Yous are Blue, Number, Magic, and Tirion, those being the ones who safely if not cleverly named themselves, and Fraction, Jurisprudence, and Statue, those being the one Signal renamed for this purpose because they're too well known by their usual labels. Jursiprudence and Fraction are going by their titles with me and Signal's not sure that's safe for you, and she thinks Statue's just had hers too long. Jurisprudence is the native.

"Apparently Magic and Fraction are evil in a way which may or may not be a matter of ongoing concern, Signal's not sure how to predict them going forward, and Statue registers as evil to evil-detecting spells that Ring's world has but is not ongoingly concerning. Fraction's problem is that she killed twenty five billion people in a fit of temper. She's the one they were okay with killing, but mostly not because of that - she has millions of bodies spread across hundreds of planets back in her world and they're not sure it'd be safe in an infosec sense to send this one back to join the rest, plus insofar as this one has learned things they'd like the whole of her to know they could store that knowledge in a separate device so that if they decided to kidnap a second one of her bodies to have around instead of just doing without, she'd be caught up. She doesn't consider any single body very important."

"Huh. ...that's a lot of people."

"The ones of us or the twenty-five billion?"