Well.

He sits up and starts braiding his hair, very methodically. 

"I didn't really expect that to work," says Chua.

"It explains Rossi's sudden shift in advice," says the demon.

"Yes, it does."

"It was a bit of a handicap, explaining why we needed Swan without explaining why we needed Swan. This was a very ill-advised way to check, I hope you realize."

"I can't claim to relish having you in my house. I really did not expect it to work," says Chua.

"Does anyone else know?"

The demon shakes her head.

"We desperately need it to stay that way."

"I'd imagine you do," says Chua.

He finishes braiding his hair. "If you don't want a diplomatic incident I sincerely recommend you murder me and request a meeting with the version of me in Valinor and meticulously avoid mentioning that you did this. If you want to set this right I sincerely recommend you let me call for a ride home now."

"Request a meeting about what?" asks Chua.

"What kind of diplomatic incident?" asks the demon.

"Whatever questions remain now that you figured out the thing constraining us from answering them. What kind of diplomatic incident? You forked me against my will."

"I didn't think it would work," Chua said.

"I thought it might," said the demon. "I am prepared to deal with the consequences of having done so. Rochelle, I renew my recommendation of Sheila Reid if I become unavailable to you."

"Can I have paper and pencil, please?"

The demon looks at Chua, who looks like she's seriously considering taking the "murder" suggestion, but then Chua nods and the demon offers him writing materials.

"Thank you."

Letter to Cam: are there times of day free? 

He relaxes considerably once he has written it. "Anything I can answer for you while I'm here?"

"What's going on with all the people who look alike?" asks Chua, gesturing at the little heap of basement dwellers.

"Different universes have - we think it's more or less 'the person you would have been if you were born that species in that situation?' Not like forks but you tend to find you have a lot in common with them. And then there are also forks."

"We could tell they're not forks," says the demon.

"You said you didn't have a way to oblige daeva to take summons," Chua says.

"I do not have a way to oblige daeva to take summons."

The demon picks up a Hazel wizardry book. "Some things from this world are hard to conjure. Some are not."

"Spells don't all work on daeva, and some only work if they're letting them. If their mind-control spells work on unwilling daeva then you could recruit in Hazel for the thing you want, but I think the crew handling Hazel has decided not to tell wizards about summoning yet lest we get wizard daeva with 1802 ethical sensibilities."

"One of the people who looks like you carries a wand," says the demon.

"Even now you're weaseling as much as you think you can get away with," says Chua disgustedly. "I knew you were up to something and I'm beginning to wonder if you depend on being up to something to live."

"Timothy's in training to be a wizard, yes. So's Minor, the vlog demon, they're brothers. I was not up to anything until you captured Swan and declined to hand him over, then I was 'up to' making sure the trial forensics didn't run across exactly this, and right now I am 'up to' being mildly annoyed to have been brought into existence with loose hair in a windowless room somewhere I can only presume is in your star system."

"You're complaining about your hair?"

"This is Earth," says the demon.

"The fiasco with the arrests had nothing to do with Elf forking."

"On your end; it had everything to do with it on ours. We were not equipped to do spot arrests and competent trials but we offered anyway because you weren't budging on Swan and at any moment someone could have started running trial forensics and noticed Elf forking and we were highly motivated to avoid that.

Elves don't have a nudity taboo but we do have a comparably strong taboo on having loose hair. Please don't fork people again but should you find yourself doing so know that creating them naked is far less - frightening to wake up to - than creating them with hair unbraided."

"I see," says the demon.

"Rossi, you useless idiot," Chua growls to neither of them.

"Perhaps he thought that the information shouldn't be shared with people who might use it and tell demons about it, that being the exact outcome we were so afraid of."

"Who else knows?" asks the demon.

"Cam, the entire population of the planet he holed, those people in my government whose work touched on it, the Hazel teenagers, President Malo. The only daeva to know of it are Cam, Minor, and now you. We haven't been introduced -"

"This is Lilie Ho, the founder of the Ganymede Circle Police," says Chua.

Lilie inclines her head.

"A pleasure."

"I suppose in a way I owe your - duplicate's brother - for alerting me that I did not have to make do with random demons of no particular alliances," snorts Chua.

"I will pass on your compliments, he'll be delighted."

Chua snorts again.

"What ought we expect of the diplomatic incident?" inquires Lilie.

"- what we would like would be reassurance that this will not be shared or repeated, no matter how angry Ms. Chua gets with Elves in the future. If that's forthcoming then we can agree many mistakes have been made on both sides of this meeting of peoples and we'd be happy to move forward with all of them forgiven all around. If that can't be promised, then we have cause for concern."

"Certainly it would be a catastrophe if the anarchy of Hell became aware of this," agrees Lilie. Chua does not contradict her aloud.

"Exactly. Conveniently the Valar have that truth effect of theirs and it can be testified that all parties have every intention of maintaining the secrecy, and then there's no need for more invasive measures to assure it."

"It really should have occurred to me that if this did work the result would be having you in my house," mutters Chua in a voice full of loathing.

"Forgiveness is abstract. What concrete results should we anticipate?" inquires Lilie.

"Our complaints about the kidnapping as well as your complaints about - not employing Hazel's mindcontrol on your behalf? Failing to disclose that an alternate universe version of me is brothers with the vlog demon? - anyway, we do not take all those public and tear each other apart over them, you can go about your work without our hindrance."

"And the daeva who evaded justice in your haste to trade for Swan?" says Lilie.

"You continue to not have a way to arrest them."

"You made a convincing-enough-for-her-purposes attempt at convincing Niari that you were working on that," says Chua. "Perhaps she just can't tell when you're being manipulative slime, that would explain it."

"She called it off, thought the risks were intolerable. I was indeed prepared to go through with it. I did end up promising her that if you do recapture any of them we will not interfere or object, and I meant that. But if we are going to forgive nonconsensual forking, a crime which my society regards as considerably more serious than murder, you can drop it. They were entirely free, before. Now none of them will ever hurt anyone again. We came to you first, you communicated nothing about what you wanted for over a month, at that point we had to try them, we tried them, even if we're willing to subject them to double jeopardy you don't have a plan for anything to do with them. Give it up."

"You acquitted the fairy!" exclaims Chua.

"The court acquitted the fairy after making the determination he wouldn't do it again, and also he can't take summons. I don't expect you to agree with me here, Ms. Chua. I just expect you to develop some realistic expectations. We forgive each other serious errors on both sides, you give it up with respect to the daeva, we overlook this, we stay out of your way and out of the way of your institution."

Chua inhales; Lilie speaks first, still soft and level. "When do you expect your letter to be answered, and how?"

"He could be asleep, it could be a couple hours. If this is Earth I can leave Ms. Chua's house and wait for them somewhere my presence is less unpleasant. They can talk with you here, if that's most convenient, and then assuming everyone is on the same page it shouldn't be more than an hour's conversation."

"We are on the island of Langkawi, Malaysia," says Lilie.

"I won't speak the language but I'm happy to step outside for a walk if that seems best."

"It is a beautiful day," says Lilie, patting Chua's hand while Chua glowers at him.

Off he goes. When he gets outside he starts singing.

This attracts some attention from Chua's neighbors but no one bothers him.

Elsewhere:

"Jesus Christ somebody forked Afternoon."

" - somebody as in some demon?"

"Yep I just got a letter asking if there are times of day free, I don't recognize this demon though -"

"- this is in Hell? We can close the syncing circles -"

"It's not in Hell, it's some island on Revelation Earth."

" - huh. - writing asking for a time of the day is not suggestive of immediate panic - has the demon written anything about it -"

"No."

"You can't go to Revelation, I don't really want to confront a demon who's forking people -"

"What do we do instead, leave him there?"

"No, we should go get him and talk to the demon I just don't know who should do that."

"Oh, you mean you don't want to personally do that. Possibly not a you? Perhaps a Sanity Elf, unforkable... I wish they could hurry up and get that extended to more Ardas."

"They've got new people - and new forks - from those Ardas - maybe we should just not have anyone in public-facing roles who isn't covered - would Ambela want to -"

"Want to go to some island in Revelation to fetch Extra Afternoon? She'd do it..."

"No, want to talk to the demon and figure out what we need to do from there, Extra Afternoon can get himself a fairy."

"Again, she'd do it. I'm not sure she's best placed to handle an interdimensional incident though, if there are commitments that need making or anything."

"The people best placed to make commitments on behalf of the Elves are all mes. And the people who can take a daeva if necessary are all teenagers. Well, and you - I guess you could go invisibly -"

"If they know about forks they might know all kinds of things and check by parlor trick if they hear me."

"Doesn't matter if they know you're there, just whether random panicky people in Revelation do-"

"Well, that might depend on how tense the situation is, I don't think my four hundred year parole sentence was intended to sound to anyone like I might turn up on their doorstep."

Sigh. "Who does that even leave - Michael?"

"Could send more than one person. Him and Ambela or something. Ambela can at least promise to get anything they have to say into right ears."

Sigh. "Okay. That works. If they're not convincingly committed to never doing that again and not saying anything about it I think we stun them and put them somewhere paused for now - is there a better solution -"

"...not an obvious one. If they want something for their silence..."

" - depends what, I guess. Though I'm worried that giving in to demands like that -"

"Might depend how they found out, if anybody could reasonably determine before putting in the research that there might be something to extort Elves with."

"And if we don't think they'll come back with another ask in a year." Can you ask Michael and Ambela to come here -

Timothy wants you, he informs them. He's in his room.

Ambela shows up.

So does he.

"Hi. Somebody forked my Singularity alt. And let him write home for help, so it probably wasn't maliciously intended, but - seems like a good idea to go and talk to her, figure out how likely she is to mention it in public, hopefully come to a mutually satisfactory agreement and if not -"

"Yikes. Yeah."

"- ah, because I'm unforkable - all right. Can you recommend a fairy for the trip? Where are we going?"

"Langkawi, Malaysia." He can recommend a fairy who wants some replicas shrunken.

And in short enough order they reach the new fork's location.

"Hi. The director of the GCP has been having her demon dig into multiverse stuff. She cannot stand me and I think is seriously contemplating threatening to make this public if we fail to hand over the daeva she wants to punish; the demon is GCP founder Lilie Ho and I think would much prefer it not come to that but has not outright ruled it out. I want to see what's going on so I can tell if they're being truthful, but I'm not at all sure I should accompany you; Ambela, can you bounce me -"

"Yes, of course. Where are they?"

He points them at Ms. Chua's house.

There they go. Ambela keeps her senses borrowable.

Knock knock.

Chua gets the door. "You I know about," she remarks of Michael. "Who are you?"

"My name is Mirelótë Ambela. It seemed prudent to have someone other than Maitimo speak to you."

"Ambela's not princess anything but all of the relevant Elves will listen to her. Nice to meet you."

"Charmed, I'm sure," says Chua. She stands aside. Mirelótë steps in.

"I have no plan to repeat the procedure," says Lilie.

"That's very relieving to hear."

He comes inside as well. 

"Unfortunately it's not just your plans but those of anyone else who might learn what you have that concerns my species."

"I do not believe anyone else is liable to have as much motivation to attempt to discover what is underlying the various universes and their contact," says Lilie. "I do not plan to invite demons to attempt the same myself."

True.

"Thank you. I appreciate that more than I can say," says Mirelótë. "I am sorry that our scrambling around this secret thusly motivated either of you to begin with."

"Hrmph," says Chua.

- does Chua feel the same way -

Likes having leverage, not nearly high-minded enough to commit to not using it until she's confident she's wrung everything she can get out of the Elves.

Ambela may have already noticed this but he points it out anyway.

"- we're aware you have no particular obligations to or affections for Elves. I would rest easier if I left here today knowing that you were convinced that keeping your silence on this matter was the right thing to do anyway," she tells Chua.

"You people let five dangerous daeva off scot-free in an incompetent mockery of a judicial process while you were scrambling to get the black hole demon off our hands before it was allowed to tell us anything," snaps Chua.

"Elves seldom find ourselves in need of haste and are not very practiced in its use. The mechanical realities of the situation as it stands -"

Chua gestures angrily at a Hazel wizardry book.

"Hazel does have mind control magic. It is, wisely, illegal; there are, at least at this time, no exceptions."

"Not just illegal, it's an automatic life sentence. You could probably find people to do it anyway. There's the recent would-be Dark Lady who used it to make three hundred Muggles slit their children's throats in a blood ritual to make herself immortal, I don't think she'd take much convincing. Look, my world takes 'this is a problem you can solve with the Imperius Curse' about the way your world takes 'this is a problem you can solve by summoning an unbound demon', no one inclined to propose it under even extreme circumstances belongs anywhere near power. If Maitimo'd asked us we would have strongly suggested he get replaced."

"This seems prudent," says Lilie, before Chua can get started.

"The five daeva were selected because they had resisted their circles for a considerable time," says Mirelótë. "They were unlikely to respond and were able to take random summonses - may in fact have been motivated to do so to avoid what I'm led to believe is a very distracting sensation of having hundreds of circles. They are now summoned by immortal people and kept thoroughly away from this star system. Their stories will not be very quelling to any daeva who are afraid of prison in general or Ganymede in particular, to be sure, but they might be to some who fear specifically getting caught. No one will look at a loose binding and think in the course of dealing with some criminal temptation, 'well, I can probably resist a bunch of circles'."

"The fairy's sentence in particular is a travesty."

"As I understand it he currently lives among the people who were so eager to acquit him. If he recidivizes on their own heads be it. We have no grounds for complaint if you keep your circles for him open should he fail to be contained there."

"It's really reassuring that you have such a principled objection to letting people be tortured by daeva in order to achieve political gains, or you might be tempted to hold the Elf thing over their heads."

"Isn't your little brother's manifesto all about how harmless demons are?" sneers Chua.

"Uh, no, it's that demons are like humans, which to those of us who grew up in the late 1700s is not a ringing endorsement."

"Demons are lawless," says Lilie.

"There's no confusion about what happens if this gets leaked to Hell, in any event. It's good this was discovered by an organization like the GCP whose entire mission and directive is to prevent harm to vulnerable people from daeva."

"You don't sound like you actually read my charter," remarks Lilie.

"What is your charter?" asks Mirelótë.

"To bring to account daeva who transgress against the human beings they were summoned to help, and dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," says Lilie.

"They haven't been brought to account," adds Chua.

"They may yet dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," Mirelótë says.

"I can understand having 'human beings' in the charter when you thought you were alone in the multiverse but now it just sounds super xenophobic, you guys should squeeze in a rewrite. Also you punish a lotta crimes not against the summoner."

"I'm not sure this is the time to nitpick," Mirelótë tells him.

"Sure."

"So the plan to break the black hole demon out of Ganymede if we wouldn't give it over, you wouldn't have resorted to anything illegal like mind control or murder for that?" says Chua silkily.

"You're asking me? I didn't even hear about it until Timothy wrote my girlfriend asking for a telepath. Uh, at a guess he might've literally grabbed Cam and teleported him out which is definitely illegal but not exactly mind control or murder? Or tried to explain the problem directly to the summoner if he thought that stood a chance. Or maybe a complicated substitution plot with Polyjuice - like, there are laws Timothy'd break, that doesn't make him a potential murderer."

"I'm asking the people who for whatever reason have been sent to have this conversation."

"Your finding Maitimo personally offensive substantially limited the selection," says Mirelótë.

"He's a slimy, two-faced self-righteous -"

"Rochelle," sighs Lilie.

"He's the worst," he says agreeably. "You can get him to cut it out by being like 'Timothy how about you not lie' but in this case that seems like it'd possibly just make everything worse since then neither of you would be pretending at cordiality. You liked the new ambassador, right? If you don't make any more of 'em you won't have to be around any more of 'em."

"His pretenses hardly improved anything and I doubt he could have failed to notice that I was unmollified by his attempts at charm!"

" - I am pretty sure it coulda been worse. Also consider that when you are yelling at him in front of other people and he is being charming you are not his intended audience, they are? He cares what President Melo thinks of him, they might put a Godspring portal on Mars eventually. If you wanted him to be appallingly rude but totally honest that was a bad way to frame the interaction."

"If - you all -" Chua gestures broadly, "actually wanted the fairy arrested, properly, you can't expect me to believe this is what would be happening."

Shrug. "I have tortured lots of animals to death, personally, I'm not super thrilled by the court ruling."

Mirelótë is carefully neutral about that assertion. "There are a lot of tradeoffs we could choose to make if we wanted it more than we wanted what we'd sacrifice on the way. You could attempt to force us to find it the single most important thing on our priority list. I don't expect from you that you'd threaten innocent people mostly uninvolved with the decisions that have so upset you to get it, but you could."

"I'm not a monster," says Chua. "You persist in thinking of me as a monster for attempting to do my job, which is not interplanetary politics, it is capturing criminal daeva."

"No one thinks you're a monster. They think you're not good enough at your job for the GCP to be an asset in solving the problems the multiverse is going to create."

"Lilie was the first person to guess that multiple circles might succeed where single ones failed," Chua says, pointing across the room at her predecessor. "She is responsible for over a century of better behaved daeva and contained threats and whatever you think of me her legacy deserves respect."

"When no one is making Rochelle do interplanetary politics she is a committed and efficient director," Lilie says.

"Great. So then we should just arrange for her to not need to do that. Ideally by having someone else whose job it is to do that, except I think all the people on your staff who were doing it well have been fired."

Niari is good at the interworld stuff and I think would handle a promotion very gracefully, he tells Ambela.

I'd ask for advice on how to suggest it but Ms. Chua seems extremely sensitive to your stylistic tells.

"I tried having employees talk to you people and they were all variously - suborned, charmed into ceasing to ask questions -" says Chua.

"Is it, like, possible he was successfully working with them and you perceived this as being suborned. Because it would straight-up be out of character for him to make people who trust him worse off by their own lights, he's manipulative as fuck but you can trust him on that -"

"I have no idea if he made improvements to their personal lives but they became incapable of performing their jobs to their previous standards," snaps Chua. "Manipulation by an outside actor with undisclosed aims is antithetical to security."

"I don't think Ms. Chua has had much exposure to Maitimo's virtues that she'd trust, Michael," says Mirelótë. "I am sure that in most respects your job of sequestering ill-intentioned daeva has been so well done that arriving as late as we did in the GCP's history it's invisible to us. It would probably be disingenuous to attempt to thank you on behalf of all the people who you have been and still are protecting, especially since they cannot even be identified specifically. I imagine the bleedoff of employees who normally liaise for you with politicians was even less welcome to you than to us. Perhaps now that you've unraveled the mystery you could rehire them, or rearrange your organization so that you need not interact with Elves in order to search for answers any further."

Sigh.

"I don't need advice from you on how to handle my staffing," says Chua.

"I apologize."

"You can have your damn jurisdiction split. Figure out with Niari what to do about it if some daeva kills some of both before getting caught, she seems to tolerate you," she says, waving at them like they're irritating flies. "If you come up with a way to hand over that fairy without illegal curses that is not a good time to bicker with us about double jeopardy or any suddenly invented Elf law that comes to the same thing, you just turn him in. You stop complaining about my organization behind my back to every president in the solar system and you tone it down with the Elves swarming my prison and you tell your little brother to take his acquittal and call it done and I won't tell anyone demons can make Elves like a vending machine makes pizzas."

"I understand."

"Now get out of my house."

Mirelótë ducks her head politely. Anything else need covering -

Don't think so.

So she leaves.

"It didn't seem like a good idea to ask but I'm not actually clear on what she wants from Minor, should he stop whatever EU activism thing he's currently up to..."

"I think that's not about the GCP in particular but maybe we can ask Niari."

"Works." Shrug.

"It's not just that she was incompetent once the Elves showed up, you know, Celendra didn't get a fair trial and that was well before that."

"In what way would asserting that have helped?"

"Not at all, so I didn't say it. It's still true."

"Yes."

They go home.

"Evening" is available if the new fork wants to continue the noon-afternoon sequence.

He'll do that. "We should have people checking regularly for unauthorized forks -"

"Cam was checking Hell. Obvious oversight in retrospect. I'm so sorry."

" - I mean, checking would not in this case have resulted in anything different happening to me, they let me write you. Debated it for a bit first, I think, but - it seems unwise to hold temptation against people."

"True. I do imagine it was frightening."

"Terrifying.  I asked if anyone else knew and Lilie said 'no' and I said 'that's important to us' and Ms. Chua just said 'I imagine it is', and I wasn't sure - plus, like, now I exist and would have preferred not to." Sigh. "Maybe Lilie'll convince her she can stop gagging demons."

"I'm not sure Lilie thinks very highly of other demons."

"No, but she could confirm that they can't take souls."

"There's that."

"That is the whole ostensible justification for the gagging, as far as I know."

"...having spoken to Melkor I am not certain that it's a completely ridiculous concern that people might be talked into trusting people they begin with a bias against but in generic form that applies just as well to angels and fairies."

"And isn't best handled with gags. By all means don't let them talk at length to their summoners alone lest they get their sympathies, but not letting them communicate anything at all for decades -"

Nod.

"I will ask the interpreters at Ganymede to keep to one or two at a time."

Nod.

Meanwhile:

Kib gets really good computer syncing set up and allows Aydanci out of his sight for thirty seconds. He does not repeat the experiment for two and a half weeks, during which Aydanci is relentlessly quizzed about whether it is possible that anything awful might have happened in those thirty seconds. Aydanci does not report anything concerning about the temporal order of his memories, or anything.

...Kib tentatively lets Aydanci out of his sight for half an hour.

Well, that's progress. 

Nothing bad has happened. Nothing interesting has happened either. It is very weird. He says as much to Kib.

"For me it could still be a holding pattern till my dreams are all in, I dunno what to tell you."

"Are the dreams close?"

"I think a few years out."

"Long time for them to be nice for no reason."

"Have a better guess?"

"Thauron got himself in trouble? But no, not really."

"I'm starting to think you were just plain wrong about computational expense being a thing, too."

"Yeah."

"Either that or this is real and we're just reaaaaaal paranoid. I might actually buy it if I were you, what with the whole opened with a plausible rescue thing."

"And Ruviri, it would have been exceptionally easy to not do Ruviri, I wouldn't even have thought to find that implausible. I've - thought about it. Doesn't make sense there are just two worlds..."

"And door thievery isn't inherently less plausible than a giant snake but come on, this whole -" Gesture. Anxious check of his Aydanci monitor.

"Yeah, exactly. It's just ridiculous and full of plot.

Which, I mean, we would be, wouldn't we, if the war had never happened and we'd found a place like this -"

"Yeah. The mes are uncanny."

"I like alts. Doesn't make sense but -" Sigh.

"I - there is a way it is obvious to be alts, for mes, and they were already doing it before they got me to entertain the concept."

"Well that's -

If it's real you got captured."

"I have to take it as a given that both of us got captured either way."

"Well, I didn't, when everything got absurdly implausible again I got to take comfort in the fact that meant you were probably safe at home."

"Being safe at home while you were in Angband was in fact pleasanter on a daily basis than being, myself, in Angband, but I don't think I'd elevate it all the way to 'comforting'."

"I'm sorry. We could've - been more paranoid, had more backups, made sure everyone had a way to suicide on hand, settled farther away, stayed in Valinor and intervened remotely..."

"I had a way to suicide. Charp was right there. I hesitated."

Hug.

Hug.

"How's Aydanci -"

"Almost as nervous about not being in the same room as I am but this is looking like it'll go on a long time, human standards..."

Nod. "Useful to be able to go around the corner, sometimes."

"Also, if I wake up first and need the bathroom I have to drag him out of bed and when he's groggy he sometimes resents that."

Giggle. "In that case I will applaud your progress."

"Thanks."

"If this is real I think I'll be okay, eventually."

"That's good."

Nod.

"Is it mostly Ruviri? You didn't seem optimistic before."

"Mostly, yeah. When she's doing the magic thing existing is not moment-to-moment very unpleasant and also she can tell Findekáno how to sit so as not to scare me and then I have - space to work on my head."

"Maybe Findekáno could bounce posture stuff to me too."

"I bet he'd be happy to. Redmages would have such a great set of powers if not for the cost -"

"I can't say it appeals to me but I can see why you'd like it."

"I don't know if I'd choose to be one, even if there weren't a cost. Depends on how many people my decisions were going to affect and whether I could know them all, I think, and I'm worried it handles conflict badly. But I'd be very glad they existed, if not for -"

"It doesn't appeal even client-side, I want anybody with that much information to - come by it honestly -"

"You could, just by being very observant, and that makes a difference for me."

Nod. "I'm glad she helps. It's cute how she does your nails."

"I'm glad she still gets to mostly be fifteen - sixteen now. Felt bad about that with Lári. Which probably prompted her to ask about the nails, but." Shrug. "Couple people have asked questions back home but I do not have the energy to avoid that."

"She acts like you're her favorite weird uncle, you'll probably pass inspection."

"I can live with that. Can't have people thinking I'd take up with teenagers from other universes."

"You, never."

"Would you have been safe if we had never -"

"How would that have helped? I mean, I guess it could have had some ripple effect and I might have been standing somewhere else, but I think I was plenty appealing enough from a strategic perspective."

"And conveniently there are detailed books downstairs about how it goes if you don't land on us." Sigh. 

"Yeah."

"Has to be kind of flattering how much Bells do for Ardas."

"Taken at face value, absolutely. I mean, I'm a little braced for the part where orcs giggle about how arrogant I am that I thought that made any sense, but that wouldn't be an unusually bad instance of the thing, even, I am at peace with my arrogance."

"None of the paths I go down are at all flattering."

"Well, we sort of knew that to begin with."

"Yeah. Must have been challenging coming up with a narrative that strung all the prophecy fragments together, unless he just knew all the details to start with..."

"Lack of creativity does not feature in this one."

"And not even towards anything. It's very disconcerting."

"Maybe I'm so boring when I don't think that I'm getting cozy downtime in which I'm encouraged to think so I'll be more responsive in the future."

"Would that even be necessary to get you to be responsive - if they had Aydanci -"

"If I wasn't thinking I couldn't evaluate his likelihood of being himself in the first place and now I've gone and done that. This didn't instantly lead to catastrophe though." He checks his time-syncing thing.

Squeeze. Sigh. 

Snuggle. "They've tried that a few times, but not with Aydanci because they can't fake him, they say they've got you or Findekáno, but when I'm shut down I'm really shut down."

"The shutting down is honestly brilliant."

"Thanks. I'm not positive it wouldn't've happened even if I hadn't been trying though - it's sort of a - I just attach a flinch reaction to everything I think until I stop, I don't think I could do it if I didn't think I was being mindread and I'm not sure I could have not done it given that I did, although I definitely sped it up."

"But you still think you're being mindread, right -"

"Well, yes, but now I've actually tried the thing and in this environment it conclusively does not help and fuck is it ever boring."

"And Aydanci missed you for such a long time anyway."

"Yeah." Check. "I'll go back to it when it starts hurting again. Almost did when I hit my elbow on a doorframe, he panicked."

...he nods.

"There was this one not-particularly-intended-to-convince-me hallucination where I woke up extra clumsy one day and just kept accumulating injuries till it bled into one of the torture ones, it was hilarious."

"He liked setups where I chose it for some reason. I was a very idealistic young idiot, before, wasn't hard to come up with them..."

"I'm idealistic but usually hard to convince that I don't have overwhelming strategic value."

"And now we have alts but there're still no hints of -"

"Invitations to sacrifice ourselves for the greater good? Yeah."

"No hints of anything. I - don't quite believe it but I'm curious what happens when I start."

"If I start I assume they take Aydanci and I have to believe really really hard that no choices presented to me are there for my benefit."

Check.

"No one'll hold it against you, whatever you'd end up doing -"

"I know. Still."

Nod. Shiver. 

"I need to go back to him now I love you see you later."

"Love you. Take care."

He messages Niari. Spoke to Ms. Chua again recently, we had a productive conversation but one of her requests was that we tell the vlog demon, with whom we're now on very good terms, to 'take his acquittal and call it done', do you have a guess about what concretely I should be pushing for, there? No visiting your dimension, no more videos, no more unflattering expansions of the GCP acronym? 

Can you get him to pretend we don't exist? And not in a 'gosh, what a pity there are no daeva law enforcement organizations' way. He can make videos and take summons and we don't even care if he affects EU escort laws.

That I can definitely do. 

Great. I've been replaced as AU liaison and now I'm interstellar coordinator, you can consider me at your disposal for anything of GCP relevance!

I'm glad to hear it! Status with the daeva remains that if you figure out how to hold them I will figure out how to transfer them and in the meantime I'll let you know if the one not presently under arrest leaves the dimension where he's staying. It seems like the GCP might want to make sure all your bindings are resilient to various kinds of interdimensional magic, so I've asked for you to be top priority to hear about discovery of any new worlds with magic systems that might be persistent on daevafication. There's a summary package attached.

Our bindings consultant is on that now for all circles currently out. Can't update the existing bindings without a resummon; in your opinion should we risk that? The daeva themselves don't have extradimensional magic but if someone might try to break them out...

The most plausible avenue by which someone would try to break them out is probably using extradimensional magic against the summoners, not the daeva. We don't know of a way to protect against greenmagery; there's a way to protect against Hazel mind control but I take it it's a logistical nightmare to arrange to learn it. If you think it's plausibly worth it anyway let's discuss in person. 

Possible. I'll be moved into my new office Tuesday afternoon Singapore time; might be a bit jetlagged still but I'd be happy to see you then.

I'll look forward to seeing you.

And she's there then and Chua has her office door closed so Maitimo need not impose his presence upon her.

It's a better outlet for frustration than vaguely racist press releases, that's for sure. He has an outline of Hazel magic of interest:

memory charms (erase or with more difficulty alter memories, usually of the last few minutes but with sufficient expertise of several decades); detectable with Legilimency, no known counter unless the spell was cast to be reversible

Legilimency - mindreading, mostly inferior to the Elf kind but not perfectly so (for example, can be used to extract and review memories). Typically requires eye contact. Counter is Occlumency, which seems learnable by everyone with six months to two years of mental exercises

Veritaserum - truth potion. Occlumency counters it. Works on daeva only if they're permitting it.

Polyjuice potion - changes the appearance of the drinker to that of another person, for one hour. Works on daeva if they please. Popular in Hell these days mostly for sex; it's how the Hazel representatives have been paying demons when the ones they have interpersonal access to aren't sufficient for something.

Stupefy - renders the target unconscious for two hours in the case of a human or ninety seconds in the case of a daeva; Hazel wizards have been advised not to demonstrate efficacy against daeva except in a dire emergency lest it damage confidence in security.

Confundus - leaves target confused and suggestible, Occlumency counters it, ensuring daeva cannot cast this on summoners is a major priority to resolve before the Hazel rollout. Likely to work on daeva but has not been tested. Almost certainly insufficient to get a daeva to take a summons, common use cases in Hazel are low-stakes deceptions like 'you already took my ticket'  or 'no, remember, she's expecting me'.

Imperius Curse - indefinite absolute mind control. Works on daeva even when they're unwilling. One of the three Unforgivable Curses (the other two do torture and instant death; the instant death one has no effect on daeva and the torture one has not been tried; no one familiar with it is accessible and no one trustworthy is willing to learn it.) A feature of the Unforgivable Curses is that they must be cast with malicious intent; you can learn to throw off the Imperius through repeated exposure but someone cannot cast it on a target with the intent of helping the target learn to throw it off, the Killing Curse cannot be used for painless suicide, etc. 

"This part it would have been unwise to commit to writing but daeva can give themselves wizard genes if they want, after which if they can acquire a wand magic works fine for them. As you can see that dimension's a bit of a potential disaster."

"A bit, yes," she says, frowning at his computer projection. "That's chiplocked, right -"

"Of course. That's why we had to meet in person. But most of it can be found by conjuring for Hazel's written works anyway."

"We should see if a binding can hedge out a wand the same way it can a slogan on a T-shirt. Probably not, but it's worth checking."

"Minor'd be happy to participate in experiments to that effect, if you need him."

"Specific summonses usually don't hedge things out in the same way. I'll talk to our bindings expert."

"It's possible to grab a specific general summons within four or five tries, these days, with response times down. Specific I doubt does anything. If you find yourselves arresting wizards you should disarm them."

"Fairy, or is there some other protocol you'd recommend?"

"Fairy can do it. Maybe endeavor not to destroy the wands until they've been convicted, Timothy told me quite emphatically that should it come up cutting a wizard's arm off was much kinder than breaking their wand."

"Having the wands around at all sounds like a risk."

"I can ask if there's a safe way to contain them. I suppose if you declaredly have a policy of snapping them they can be expected to leave theirs at home."

Nod.

"We're handling it by keeping a much tighter chokehold on summoning than is tractable for you to do, so you're in the harder position by far. The Hazel natives are willing to answer questions, should you have some, and willing within some constraints to do training and experiments and so on."

"What constraints?"

"Local law - which is disturbingly indifferent about memory modification and so on but does take the Unforgivables very seriously - lack of expertise - these are mostly spells it would be highly suspect to know at all, and they're all teenagers - informed consent..."

"Which of the concerning spells do they know how to perform, collectively?"

"They can stun people, they can temporarily erase a few minutes of memory, one of them knows some Legilimency, Timothy picked up and taught his partner the Imperius and the Killing Curse for use against our evil god - doesn't work -"

"Swan?"

"Yes."

Niari finds this questionable but isn't sure how to formulate a question.

"- more context: Way was attending magic school in Hazel in 1802 when he encountered an interdimensional portal to a location called Milliways, which is a - library of worlds, with the published works of any dimension anywhere in the multiverse. Swan was unbound on the replacement Valinor halfway through fifty-five million resurrections when he encountered a portal to the same location. Swan noticed the resemblance to me, and asked for an overview of Hazel magic in case there was anything that can do time-travel or resurrections or kill Melkor - at this point he disclosed that he'd recently holed a planet - and Way asked for 2180 medical technology and infrastructure and so on. Swan taught him how to do summoning safely; he summoned a demon and requested documentation to verify Swan's story about the circumstances surrounding the destruction of Valinor, summoned a fairy and evacuated Azkaban in favor of a prison arcology on the Moon, rounded up all of the Dementors and put them in deep space somewhere, and had a bunch of elderly non-magic and not-informed-of-the-existence-of-magic people summon daeva in order to check whether they, like Revelation's inhabitants, would thereby become daeva when they died. 

They then decided that their top priority was checking interactions between their magic systems, in particular whether daeva were vulnerable to mind control or to murder and additionally whether the Imperius could override a binding. If daeva were safe against magic, it seemed possible to roll out summoning in Hazel; if not, it would have to remain a secret. Though I think they were still considering using it personally to end slavery and so on."

"That doesn't fully explain teaching Swan the curses."

"Not at all. - incidentally Swan's summoner was at this point on a planet whose location was known only to Swan in a dimension to which Swan controlled access. If you're inclined to find 'had he desired to make trouble there is nothing anyone could have conceivably done about it' persuasive. Anyway, one of Timothy's younger siblings is murdered by a fairy he summoned, and becomes a demon; this provides confirmation that summoners daevafy even outside your dimension. When he becomes a daeva he is to his grave disappointment no longer a wizard. This is, from a strategic perspective, good news, as it means they can roll out summoning in Hazel without the fear of adding wizards to the daeva population. But Minor is terribly upset over it. Swan takes a few weeks looking at the genetic basis of Hazel wizardry, does a bunch of self-transplants, and becomes a wizard. 

They check whether the Killing Curse works on daeva; it doesn't. 

And at this point someone wanders into Milliways from yet another Arda. It transpires that there are four hundred million of them - there are even more Earths, if you were inclined to wonder. Now it seems urgent to know whether Hazel spells can stop Melkor - Swan, of course, already has a way of solving this problem but it has appalling collateral damage; teaching him the spells just gives him a cleaner one. Swan contemplates whether to turn himself into the local Valar in the hope that after executing him they'd fix the Valinor he destroyed. Timothy is opposed - they're involved by this point - and proposes instead that they look through all four hundred million and find a set of Valar who won't execute him and enlist those ones for help fixing the black hole." 

"This is a really... fantastic, in the literal sense... set of events."

"Most of why I didn't lead with it is because it is all-but-impossible to believe. You are welcome to come to Milliways and check it out for yourself."

"I will... try to make time."

Nod. "They find a set of Valar who seem qualified. Those Valar invite Swan in, interrogate him about the events, conclude he should face a war crimes trial but is not a danger to anyone pending that, let him go, go resurrect everyone who was not yet resurrected, and capture the local Melkor so the effectiveness of Hazel unforgivables against him can be tested. Swan attempts it; it fails just like it fails against daeva. They come up with a way of using Vala magic to cancel black holes, so Swan can kill Melkors while everyone else on the same planet is uninjured. They employ this at need in other Ardas. I've elided lots of other interdimensional interventions that don't touch on Hazel or Swan especially.

Now that everyone has been resurrected and the black hole set to rights, Swan goes to get his summoner off the hidden planet. Summoner is horrified and dismisses him; he arrives back in Hell to several hundred Ganymede circles open for him and the rest I think is familiar to you."

"It puts the visitors he received in more context."

"And my insistence that we'd have no trouble recapturing him. I'm unsure how best to explain to the world at large that the Elven empires are actually clusters of parallel worlds - I've had to be evasive about things as basic as our population because it jumps a few billion whenever we intervene in a new one."

"Well, if there are more Earths then that will eventually provide a usable analogy."

"Trillions of them. They might not smoothly integrate, though - the most recent Arda we found is a thousand years ago, and I'm still running it, so it was no trouble to tell them how to restructure their government to be part of a multiverse usefully. Humans don't have as much continuity of rule."

"That part follows pretty naturally from your being immortal, I think."

"Oh, absolutely, I don't think it reflects anything deeper than that. But the Elf multiverse is going to mostly be a coherent political unit, and I don't think the Earths'll do that."

"Probably not. Might come across as intimidating."

"Little bit. Anyway, you now have as much of the picture of interstellar affairs as I do, though I'd be happy to put you in touch with people with more expertise."

"It seems like the kind of thing I'll need to be up on."

"Absolutely. Do you know where you want to start?"

"For the GCP's purposes Hazel and Godspring and procedures to address magically - extra - daeva seem like the priorities."

He can deliver a detailed summary of the Godspring summoning rollout - "humans can't see ultraviolet light, so they don't have any information about how to draw circles outside the dots -"

"Unless they take apart a projector."

"Yep. The circle's microscopic but they could of course get a microscope. Or they could ask a daeva, we think that's the more likely avenue for it to get out. The Valar can restrict summoning to only working in certain locations, that's what they're doing in Ardas, but they don't have the attention to do it everywhere and haven't done it in Godspring. My fork there has been conjuring for summoning circles outside the permitted locations but that of course doesn't catch stolen projectors, of which there's been at least one incident. Local infrastructure is maintained by demons on long-term summons to raise children, which has gone very well so far."

"Like the Martian power grid?"

"Yes, exactly. There was only one incident, one demon decided to end slavery and supplied some underground rebels towards that end. There was nearly a war and we had to relocate her to somewhere without any atrocities she'd be tempted to end. - we finished abolition in Godspring eighteen months after first contact, we were prioritizing doing it peacefully. There's an internal review now evaluating whether we should have moved faster."

"How many mage daeva are we talking about altogether?"

"Right now there are two hundred sixty-four, many of whom are not capable of safely using more magic. There are about a hundred thousand living mages worldwide and nearly all of them are now summoners."

"And some of the magic is harmless - the greenmages are the only really concerning ones in your opinion?"

"Goldmages - the timetravellers - lose the magic when they daevafy. Whitemages, who do healing, inconveniently do as well. Redmages will almost certainly never take summons - neither would bronze - bluemages and silvers could be a danger by accident, greenmages avoid most of the disadvantages of their magic type by daevafying - they forget to eat, sleep, use the restroom, and breathe, but none of those matter to a daeva - and could be a danger on purpose. Copper could be a danger on purpose but less of one, they do increased strength -" and so on -

Niari is very diligent in taking chiplocked notes about all this. "Is there a reliable way to know before we'd arrest one if they're a mage?"

"One has not yet been developed. There are records in all the temple-guilds, those are now available electronically, but if someone dipped a young child and got away forensic conjuration won't help us notice. Precautionary measures should probably be taken for all arrests of ex-residents of Godspring. And I don't know what the laws surrounding disability accommodations in prison are here, but dwindled Godspring mages are mostly disabled with lots of support needs."

"What's the standard there?"

"They have a caretaker assigned to them in childhood who can have an expanded role in care as they become further dwindled. For blue and redmages this is a lifetime contract; I don't know how they plan to handle it after the death of one or both parties." Bright wrote up descriptions for him of mage types and the responsibilities of their caretakers; he flips through countries giving examples.

"Assuming the caretakers are themselves nonmages we can handle them like long term visitors to the prison if necessary. Is transit feasible?"

"Right now there's no way for people in Godspring to get here except via our dimension or Milliways. We're considering setting up a portal on Mars so you can have normal trade relations with them unmediated by Elves, but that's likely thirty years out."

"Milliways doesn't work as a way to get caretakers to Ganymede?"

"Works as a one-off, it's less than ideal as a larger scale solution because the Godspring door is inside someone's personal house and not suited to much throughput."

"If we find it comes up a lot we could consider buying the house - probably not the GCP per se but a subscriber."

"I don't expect it to come up much, I expect Godspring daeva to mostly go home to their families when they die. - they actually have a very, very high rate of suicides-in-order-to-become-a-daeva-in-order-to-feed-your-family, we're hoping once they're mostly post-scarcity that will stop."

"How high -?"

"In one country it was eight percent of adults last year. Most of them aren't that bad, overall rate's just under three."

"That - you don't need that many demons to feed people, or even angels, are they mostly fairies? How does that work?"

"They're mostly fairies - ex-humans from here seem to be mostly fairies too, actually - and they're not all sharing - some areas are very fragmented along religious or tribal lines, some just don't yet have the infrastructure, people want to take care of their own family instead of counting on the goodwill of a neighbor, people want to be the provider - we're doing an analysis of which countries have the worst problems, see if we can identify which economic and cultural factors produce that outcome, see what we can tinker with to avoid it."

Nod. "I have no idea how it's been more than a century and a half since Revelation and no one here knew."

"I don't know how much of that was a consequence of your forensics demons's determination to keep it quiet and how much was a consequence of people saying it, not being believed, and deciding it was unwise to bring it up again. I'm glad it's known now, though, so fewer lives can be sundered by accidents and illness and so on."

"Summoning's getting a lot more popular. We're hoping to be able to issue revised safety guidelines to account for magic before everybody makes sure to summon something at least once."

"That sounds like a very sensible priority. I can have people on call to quickly answer any questions you might have while designing revised bindings."

"We're working with the Pancelestial Safe Summoning Authority, since it's not really our area but they haven't been quite as involved with all the new wrinkles - have you talked to them at all -"

"Please do introduce me, I think an associate attended a talk but it sounds like we should be on closer terms than that."

"Yes, definitely. Their office is in Edinburgh, but I can email you and my contact there, break the ice?"

"Perfect, thanks. I'll stop by. The persistent Milliways door to Earth opens to Forks, Washington, incidentally, we purchased the space and have offices there should you have the time free to drop by."

"I'll make a note of it, what's the address?"

He gives the address. 

And she writes it down. "I'll get that email out as soon as we're done here, then."

"Thank you. - oh, Minor said that another way he'd used magic to cause trouble was shrinking his circle, so it appeared to be a foot or so smaller, and then people'd step too close -"

"- oh no, what'd he do -"

"You'd have to ask him, he mentioned it in the context of 'ways magic daeva are dangerous' and I wasn't present, got an outline of the conversation afterwards."

"Did he hurt anyone?"

"I very much doubt it."

"But he actually did this, he got someone to step into his circle -?"

"Yes."

"...you understand I can't just send him an email asking why he did that, even a human that wouldn't be how it works -"

"With humans you'd have a procedure for interviewing people prior to arresting them, yes?"

"Prior to trying them. Not necessarily prior to arrest unless it was really trivial, the sort of thing where even if they obviously did it they'd probably get off with a warning."

"I understand the importance of sticking to your procedures. It seems like the likeliest consequence of arresting him is that he gets off since the only evidence is his own word and then he doesn't tell us the next exploit he finds."

"I might be able to finesse it like ex-burglars consulting for home security companies or something but maybe that'd be better done through the Safe Summoning Authority."

"I can suggest it to them. Can you finesse it as 'you don't have enough evidence to make an arrest but you have enough evidence to warrant further investigation', of which the most obvious form would be sending him an email?"

"We haven't received a formal report about it and I can therefore justify leaving it alone. If it got out of my hands - I'm not eager to reopen that can of worms. How about I just introduce you to my PSSA contact and you introduce them to Minor and he can do pentesting for them."

"Sounds good. If there is a formal report I do expect I can get him to turn himself in."

"What makes this different from last time?"

"Last time a large share of his complaint was that you were factually mistaken about a question fairly central to the case, and also that you'd added laws so you'd have one to charge him with breaking, and also that you didn't have a case and knew it and were determined to see it go to trial anyway. This one - and mind I don't have any details - his concerns about your forensics have been assuaged and the law was in place anyway and the thing he did was a problem, thus his mentioning it to us so protections against it could be developed. If you'd let him write he wouldn't even take any prompting. Since I take it that's a nonstarter, he will take prompting, but he'd be promptable."

"Good to know. I don't think there's any call to push for it now. There obviously is not in fact already a law against... circle shrinking... but we're probably going to rush something about hostile use of non-daeva-exclusive magic in general."

Nod. "Anything else I can do for you right now?"

"I don't think so. Thanks for coming."

"My pleasure."

And before he's gotten very far out of the office he has an email from Niari to a PSSA expert called Trevor.

He would be delighted to stop by to consult with them too.

Trevor is delighted to receive him. He comes up with experiments he'd like to do with cooperating daeva and has the idea of a gagged fairy circle to test randoms - "I know it's not fun, but many fairies taking random summonses bring star navs, with writing on them, it'd cut down on extraneous answers."

"If you have some cooperating fairies in mind, that makes a lot of sense." And he explains Hazel magic again and Minor's circle-shrinking trick.

"I was hoping you could get us in touch with a greenmage fairy who might be willing to help. The wand test should work whether or not the fairy's a wizard though. I can run through our preprints collection, recall the ones that phrase staying inside the circle in a way that allows that..."

"I'll ask our team in Godspring if they can recommend a greenmage fairy. Do you have preprints for ungagged demons?"

"There's some generic circles where you fill in which kind of daeva you want yourself."

Nod. "Because people'll be summoning their relatives back, and they're not going to gag them, and it seems important to have a safe selection of circles..."

"Oh, yeah, definitely. We've got a preliminary relative-retrieval circle recommendation out but we're taking feedback on how that's working for people."

"Sounds good. I will make sure you hear about any new worlds as quickly as we do, and I'll try to find a greenmage fairy volunteer for you as soon as possible."

"Excellent, thanks. And keep in touch about someone willing to try wand screenings."

"I will see if any wizards can be persuaded to surrender their wands for such a test. Thanks so much."

"You're welcome!"

It transpires that Hazel wizards are very attached to their wands.

A greenmage fairy for testing he can do, though.

"It's a good idea to do something about the circle trick but it'd also be a good idea to do something about the cult with flamethrowers."

"Now that I have the whole story I will share that bit when relevant."

They don't need a specific person's wand, right, just a wand, Karen can make one with a Potion-quality unicorn hair and a conjured wood bit.

He will return this to Trevor along with greenmage fairy recommendations. 

Trevor sets about testing.

Bindings cannot hedge out wands from random summonses. They can prohibit greenmagery.

Well, that's something. Bindings can prohibit doing wizardry, right?

Does Minor want to test that?

Yeah sure.

Yes, bindings can prevent doing wizardry.

Awwwww, but he was having so much fun. 

(He takes more summons before everyone improves their bindings accordingly.)

They mostly aren't in Revelation these days anyhow.

And the ones that are mostly do not involve kidnapping. Nonetheless.

Would he like to take any of these specific circles?

Well, are any of them terrible?

Nope! None of the five conjured circles out of the six he has open are terrible!

 - and the other one's unconjurable? That's intriguing. Sure, why not.

A twelve year old viewer of his channel has summoned him to ask what happens to non summoners when they die. "I thought it's maybe horrible so you didn't want to say on the extranet but I can take it."

"It's not horrible just not as good. They get to be indestructible but they don't get magic powers, and they get one thing which is also indestructible - the one thing you'd want most, or something...but there's no food and the ground is just flat dust you can't grow things in and it's kind of boring. The Elf gods are gonna make a portal there next chance they get and then maybe they can make it nicer."

"Can you summon them?"

"No. Sorry."

"How do you know about them?"

"Demons can conjure for things. We've known about all the afterlife stuff for ages, angels and fairies only found out more recently. And there are concordances, which is when this little bit of Hell overlaps with Limbo and we can send them things. The whole space of the concordance is full of train tracks and we send them supplies, as much as we can squeeze through before it closes again, and we read some of their writing and music and stuff."

"Oh."

"It's an okay afterlife. Some worlds don't have one at all."

"I guess it's better than nothing."

"Yeah. And hey, now you'll be a daeva. Can I get you anything?"