"Considering she can't sell minds or magical objects we would have to trust them with literally anything she can sell and some things she can mention, including things we haven't thought of."

"What sort of things would be a problem-"

"Maybe some dimension has a conjurable mind control ray, some do have ways to incubate children outside the womb -" 

"Aside from that being really weird, what's wrong with demons having children - we're not going to make humans stop having children even though some of them aren't married and can't give the children a good life -"

"Hell is an anarchy populated entirely by indestructible people who can make arbitrary material objects and the equilibrium could get nasty fast if there were people there who were not indestructible, or even who just couldn't make arbitrary material objects."

"Timothy -"

"Yeah, you are experiencing an Elfiness-related failure of imagination."

"If you want to do a project where demons get to have kids vet individual demons and have them do so outside of Hell."

"- okay. Is this, like, 'in a billion people there will be one Melkor so it's not worth it' or - some more fundamental thing -"

"Some of that - though you've got the numbers wrong - and some 'in Hell it does not constitute particular unneighborliness to have extremely radioactive things around, occasionally torch your entire block, or express that you're in a bad mood by dropping an anvil on anyone who says hello'."

"So people would presumably not want to have children who aren't resurrectible but why would anyone want that anyway -"

"Personally, I think I'd object to radiation poisoning even if it wouldn't permanently kill me. Anyway, nothing about Hell's norms or setup is designed for destructible people, and some demons - not that many but more than one in a billion - find destructible people's destructibility interesting, and there should not be nondemon children in Hell. There's a setup where most of the electricity for the Martian grid is produced by fairies who have that as their day job for very long-term summonses, and raise children given up for adoption, do something more like that."

"What are you planning to do if someone does have children in Hell?"

"Don't have a plan set up for that yet but if they belong to somebody with any business having children probably attempt to extract them and put them somewhere else."

"And if they aren't."

"Separate child from unparental demon or demons, put child somewhere children who have been removed from unparental adults go."

Shiver.

"...to give you some context, Bells who are not Elves are clumsy enough to routinely trip and fall. I had bruises a lot growing up. My mother taught the first year of formal schooling I attended but the year after that, when I was six, a teacher noticed I was frequently injured and wanted to know if she was hitting me because this seemed likelier. She wasn't and I was sufficiently convincing on that point, but as far as the other teacher knew, she could've been. And this was a substantial improvement on the child discipline of a few decades earlier where if someone thought my mother was hitting me they would have figured I was misbehaving and this was a legitimate way to punish me."

"I trust you that it is sometimes the least horrible thing. Just."

"I mean, I suppose if we manage to harness Milliways's time-stopping procedures more usefully we could pause the kids, put the parents through intensive not-being-a-horrible-person classes, and then reunite the families, but sufficiently brutalized children do not actually want to go back to arbitrarily tearful promises to do better..."

"Obviously kids who want to leave should be able to, that's - different from taking them -"

"...some complications, one is that kids are not super good at knowing what's good for them and if the parent doesn't either the kid can want to stay and the parent can want them to stay and this can be a disaster. Another is that bad parents can psychologically warp kids and you wind up with children saying they are bad and deserve whatever's going on. Another is that unfamiliar things are scary and a kid who feels competent enough at navigating abuse might not want to abandon it for supposedly benevolent aliens."

"All of that makes sense, and it's not that you should just...leave...children whose parents are hitting them-"

"There's just going to be a lot of monstrous-but-necessary and it is not pleasant to anticipate."

"...has anybody told Elves about speckled milkweed yet - or the Muggle equivalents, are there Muggle equivalents - maybe not in 2179 -"