"...no, it's just a big diamond statue, though it was maybe like kind of rude of you not to be like 'by the way this will empower me beyond the dreams of my brethren, I don't simply happen to like shiny rocks and know how to identify diamond'. Uh - it's possible that getting any one of a specific subset of the dead would let that one get the rest of the million-odd ones I can't fix out. But if we're trying that, I need to fix the ones I can fix, first, in case they're, uh, mad enough at me to interrupt. - I should maybe around this point tell you the whole story."

"You have a point about the rudeness; I wasn't tracking that adequately because I didn't think it was going to turn out to be possible and now that it is I kind of doubt my ability to pay you back. Also I can't personally use it for anything that I'd expect to harm your interests. If you want to set conditions on what purposes I can give parts of it to other people for we can talk about that, but I'm not going to actively work towards using it for anything I would rather destroy it than use it for."

"Maybe I should like, consult Bar about what things it's useful for, and maybe it's all good and you merely have a massive security problem on your hands. It can wait, time's paused." Shrug. "So - Arda. I got summoned. By a kid. Some of the Elves were leaving their planet, the twin suns of which had recently been put out by the one outright evil god in the pantheon, because they had a disagreement with their not evil but rather noninterventionist gods about whether they should be noninterventionist too. Kid was one of the departing cohort. They were underresourced to do this, would've needed to make a few trips, after some ado I filled out their wishlist and went with them to the other Elf planet." He at this point pulls his computer off his belt and produces a little illusion of the binary sun system and a dotted line to another. Dot dot dot dot. "I'll pop right home if anything kills my summoner so I take a detour with the kid and his folks and a few extra people so they aren't lonely, I make them a little planetoid way off away from everything to sit the war out." This he doesn't illustrate; instead he zooms in on Second Elf Planet. "Evil god has set up here. He's got a client species, they're in constant pain, they can swear unbreakable oaths - Elves can also do that, and the gods, the big ones are Valar and there are littler Maiar - millions of these orc folks," photo of an orc from a newspaper, "they're fine left on their own, they function startlingly well around the chronic pain, he just threw that in to be a dick, but the oaths had every one of them old enough to talk, so they were the shock troops, suddenly called back into service by the reappearance of their god. He had pulled this shit before, centuries back, created the orcs back then by capturing and torturing and raping Elves till he got them to come out how he wanted, and the other Valar eventually got off their butts and locked him up, but they set a finite sentence and he waited a little while on parole and then put out the suns and did some murder and skipped the system. - how much of this are you following. I haven't tried to tell it before."

"I think I'm following the important parts," she says grimly. 

"Right. So, we have a war. He's - sandbagging - his name is Melkor, the evil god, and he's got a Maia lieutenant who's also a real piece of work, Sauron. They're... you're from some kind of sword and sorcery tech background, and the Elves had interplanetary ships better than the kind I had back home but otherwise were a ways back from where my world's at - but I can tell the difference, they're doing things that look like, say, poison in a water supply, but are actually ridiculously more sophisticated than poison, the implied capabilities make having orcs running around carrying weapons obviously just something they're doing to be horrible and inflict moral injury. There's a Maia-ruled kingdom that's under a - barrier thing - nobody goes in and out without her say-so, so they're safe, for however long she holds up, but they're not helping -

"- anyway I'm running around doing supply and also demoralizing shit like installing a city's worth of suicide devices that the Elves there can use to blow up their souls, they have these physical souls in their heads, if the bad guys get their hands on them they can use them to torture them, they can copy them a billion times and torture all of them, most of the people in the world are copies of souls they're doing this to and I never tried to get more specific on the number because I did not want to give the slightest hint that I was responding to that information -

"- and the bad guys want to make a deal. With me. I'm the only daeva in the universe. Once I showed up, the Valar decided that shouldn't be allowed and changed the laws of the universe to patch whatever fluke I slipped through, whatever weird glitch made that one summoning circle work. Nobody can get another one. Which incidentally means that the two mortal species who aren't natively immortal and don't have those physical souls - which send backups to the Vala of the dead, so he can get them resurrected whenever he feels like it even if they explode and even if he doesn't feel like it for a million years - are permanently annihilated when they die, and I can't try hooking them up to my really very nice afterlife arrangement instead.

"I say no, obviously, because I can't trust anything they say. They can make binding oaths but only if they talk out loud with their mouth words, they can also make sound illusions, they could bullshit me."

Ah. Samora can see some of the shape of where this is going. If she had a copper for every time she's met someone who had very sympathetic reasons for doing a bunch of diabolism that could be resolved by bringing dead people to life, she'd have two coppers.

"I'm still following. And--I'm sorry to hear about all of this. That it exists and you had so few options for dealing with it."

"Thanks.

"...more shit goes down but the important thing is that the Maia running her isolationist kingdom helps out with a test. See, demons are pretty good at conjuring specific things we want, with reference to what really exists. Surroundings of this, complete works of so-and-so.

"And it turns out I can separate out genuine versus illusion recordings of audio statements.

"And the thing he wants to cut it all out forever, all of it, every fucking thing he does short of animal cruelty and verbally being an asshole, for him and every evil fucking Maia who works for him, airtight oath we labored over for ages -

"- is the rest of the Valar dead, and he was willing to bet that as long as I didn't warn them a black hole would do it, he swore to pay up if I tried even if it didn't work, even if I fixed it. He didn't know, also, that I could bring dead Elves back. Demons can't usually make minds. I can make a snail, it'll be normal, I can make a dog, it'll be as dumb as a snail, etcetera, but there's a workaround, with the physical souls, that I can do. He didn't know that.

"So I went."

The Illusion, which has been flipping through occasional illustrative slides, winks out rather than show it.

"And I made them new suns somewhere else, and a new planet, and I'm about halfway through putting the Elves back, but there were about a million Maiar."

Okay. That's. Kind of the best case scenario in terms of working with him? Terrible in a lot of other ways. But as Evil beings go, 'made some deeply questionable decisions under a lot of stress and is working to fix it' is really good.

"I am suddenly realizing that it's possible our resurrection magic won't work outside Pharasma's Creation if the souls go somewhere different when they die, but I think it's still worth trying. I should probably give you some context on what's outside my door, to start with. Also, did the Evil god verifiably stop or is He still a threat?"

"He stopped. The orcs are free. The copied souls are paused. I did have to allow self defense."

"And--all of their Good and Neutral gods are dead? That's going to be even less likely to work, even here there's nothing to be done when a god dies--how much of an immediate crisis is that, if all the gods died here there'd be shortages of clean water and no-one to bless the crops--?"

"No, not all of them. Some, uh, good and neutral Maiar, were on the other planet. They're grieving. They weren't using their gods for... crops or water?... they were using the god of the dead to back up the souls, so I need to do the resurrections myself and I don't know if the backups will be in working order if he shows up again and I don't know if them not being so would give the Valar any pause in interdicting summoning again. Also there's a stage of pregnancy I can't restore and have the baby turn out right, I can restart it from an earlier point once anybody's recovered enough to ask me but that's not really satisfactory to an Elf. Also all their animals smarter than snails, that's recoverable with some work on the population level but it'll take a while and doesn't help for anybody's pets. Also the planet had an anti-decay effect I couldn't replicate where they could just, make the next fifty year's worth of sandwiches in one go and leave them all out on the counter and they'd all be fine."

The extent to which Cam has taken over the functions of a dead pantheon is pretty disturbing, but, well, it's better than those things going undone and he is trying to get them back.

"What's happening to the babies' souls? There's magic items for preserving food, though not enough to deal with an entire planet that's used to having the effect everywhere and it will take time to make more. If the Valar interdict summoning again do you go back to your home plane?"

"The physical soul forms partway through the pregnancy. After that point, I do the trick I do on everybody else's souls to make it come out properly and they're fine. Before a few weeks' gestation, I make them naively and they're not past the snail threshold yet and develop normally and they're fine. In between I'm just making the replacement bodies for their mothers not pregnant so they can decide when they're ready to pick up again from pre-threshold. Also doing that with some of the others if their families recommend it, they're going through a lot and it's not, you know, great timing. I think the Vala of the dead cannot actually improve on this even if he really wanted to except that I think he might be able to pause a pregnancy midstream and I can't do that. They're not going to go hungry, they're just out their conveniences. I have no idea what the Valar would or could do with me regardless of whether or not they interdict summoning."

"Okay. So you want to finish resurrecting all the elves before trying to resurrect the Valar in case you get banished--is there anything you want help with on that front, and how long is it likely to take? And then in parallel we can work on getting in touch with the people in my world who can cast True Resurrection and Wish, which are the spells that might be able to help bring the Maiar and Valar back. The main problem there is that the door is currently impersonating the only door out of the room I was in and that if I understood you correctly it will disappear if I let it close while I'm outside."

"The Elves and the orcs, orcs have physical souls too. I'm going about as fast as I can, I guess if 'as fast as I can' can be faster I could be done in a smaller number of months. And then I want all the extant Dwarves and humans, who don't have physical souls, to do a summon, at least until such time as one of them who has done so dies and then I guess we might find out it won't help. Do you have a window?"

"Sorry, why does everyone doing a summon maybe help in a way you'll only know about if someone dies? Is that the thing you said about getting people into your afterlife arrangement?"

"Yeah. Where I grew up it turns out that by default if you die you go to Limbo, but if you summon anybody you turn into a daeva, one of the three types. Arda humans and Dwarves don't show up in Limbo but I have not ruled out that they could be daeva."

"Hm. My world's afterlife situation is a bit of a mixed bag. I have every reason to believe I'll see my ancestors and get new powers and continue working towards my goals, but a lot of people are going to end up much worse off and maybe redirecting them into your system would prevent a lot of suffering. Or maybe the Creator won't allow it. Also when dead people die a second time they just cease to exist, so having them summon to get another go could be good if it doesn't come with mental changes or anything."

"It does not appear to. We are very indestructible which some people consider a drawback. Though the Valar have not had a go yet so I don't know how absolute it is."

"I hope they don't try to execute you after you were necessary for bringing them back; that would be terrible incentives."

"Yes, well, expecting they might obviously isn't stopping me."

"I'm not saying it should, just that it would speak poorly of them. But nothing to be done about it this hour, I expect. I should get on figuring out how to get out of the room I was in without letting the door shut or having someone kick it down. I don't suppose 'an additional door in what was previously a solid wall' counts as something you can make?"

"I could interpolate a hole in the wall."

"That's going to alarm people but it's probably the best option. Are you willing to hold the door while I get someone else to trade off on it? It might take a while; the building is a fortress defending against our kind of demons and everyone else will be as suspicious as I was."

"Can't, if I hold the door it's my door."