"It would not be hard to hide that you let time elapse. Or to spin that as making it likelier that he'd show up."

"Sure, as long as it's dealt with before we open our door."

"But allows correspondence with Maitimo first."

"Yeah, fine."

Sigh. Hug.

Hug. "I should probably recalibrate how strongly I feel the need to signal that murdering people I care about will be a choice you regret now that murdering people is significantly less bad. But. It's still bad."

"To be fair the guy would've expected Minor to be a daeva. Or at least a Limboite if he hasn't made that connection."

"But he would also have expected that Minor's family wouldn't know that and that he'd never see any of us again. And he didn't have any of those excuses when he murdered you."

"And when he murdered me he did not resist arrest, was tried and sentenced and jailed, earned time off for good behavior and was released even earlier upon the passage of the 2037 Prison Reform Act, had no further trouble with the law for the rest of his life, died of old age, and has caused no discernible trouble since then as a fairy until just recently."

"Well, I wish your society had had laws that would have dissuaded him from murdering you in the first place."

"Such as? He was caught instantly, it wasn't a question of immediacy and surety of punishment."

"I don't know, I haven't met him, perhaps he will just undeterrably murder people for causing him mild annoyance and nothing can make him less likely to do this or likely to experience remorse for it. Or maybe it would take Azkaban, and that would be a bad trade. I do think it's bizarre that Revelation lets people out of prison for murders they don't regret and would commit again, though."

"Well, empirically, he did not in fact commit another murder until after he died - well after - and they didn't know they needed to worry about after that."

"Sounds like the only reason he didn't commit another murder is that no children asked him why he committed the first one when he was in a bad mood."

"- okay, how much of a cooling off period do you need before I speculate more charitably on his motives."

"Go ahead."

"A summoned daeva is trapped. Until one of two things happens - the summoner lets them go or the summoner dies. People can and have just kept daeva for arbitrary lengths of time. He showed up to a specific summons, which could have been out of curiosity but probably wasn't, probably means he had somewhere to be. Summoning somebody to complain about their behavior is a threat and doing it with a bad circle at age 13 is a worse one because it means no due process and no visits from your mom. I wouldn't kill somebody like that without exhausting alternate options but if I were, oh, interrupted while reembodying Elves or governing Mars or something by a summon masquerading as the one I intended to take, and it really didn't look like they'd let me go..."

"I doubt the interaction lasted two minutes."

"I said I'd speculate charitably, not reinterpret him as a saint."

Sigh. "Shall we ask the security guy or the infirmary guy if they care to learn summoning."

"Sounds like a plan."

And do they care to learn summoning, once it is explained.

Yes they do.

Cam gets a decent textbook - well, his notes from when he taught this as a class - and sets to explaining the basics on the theory that they won't need the textbook translated till they go home.

And he goes to ask Minor for a bunch of demonic small animals.

"Why?"