"The Valar are really furiously angry with us with reasonably good reasons and we're exiled from here, that doesn't change the strategic picture much but I suppose is worth mentioning. They've also suggested they'll delay reembodiments for a few Ages, which means we're more hesitant to risk our lives than we ordinarily would be."

"What is a reembodiment?"

"We're not indestructible. So the Vala of the Dead, Mandos, keeps a backup of everyone's mind in the Halls and if we die he can build us a new body and reinstall our minds and we can return. It's the same hardware that gives us telepathy and Oaths, which is why I inferred you didn't have the latter from the absence of the first two."

"...huh. Do you have copies of your own backups?"

"No, just Mandos. Special Vala privileges - could you make them."

"Can't do minds. ...Although I don't actually know how that applies to pure data-based minds, if they're that."

"I think they are? The Valar gloss their own abilities as magic - well, as divine power - but lately we've gotten skeptical. I'd be reluctant to hand you a copy of my mind anyway, that's very very abuseable."

"Oh yeah. Anyway, if I try to make a person, I get the body, and it'll be alive, and breathe, and stuff, but it will be disturbingly stupid."

"...and if you then instantiated the mind from backup..."

"No idea! We don't do backups, even the mortals."

"...so they just get annihilated if they die? That's kind of awful."

"Oh, no, they go to Limbo. It's not exactly nice there but they're indestructible as daeva, just no snazzy magic powers besides that and a really boring world."

"That's interesting. As far as we know if we're destroyed and all our backups are destroyed we stop existing. But we also did not know daeva existed."

"...uh, also, people who summon daeva get to be daeva when they die instead, and I have no idea how that would interact with backups."

"Uh.

That would be worth testing if we could get a volunteer but I am not sure I'd feel comfortable asking anyone to volunteer." He gestures ahead. "That's our technical support ship - by which I mean it's where my father and my technically-inclined brothers have been working - and I bet they'll have compatibility working in what-would-have-been-a-day-when-this-system-had-Suns."

"Cool. You never did say if I should stuff anything else onto the chip I'm going to conjure up, now that my computer can handle Quenya?"

"What else would you want? I can name history books, political history books - there's not much about the Enemy's capabilities, the Valar like to have their powers be vague 'we are gods' type things - a family tree might come in handy..."

"...eh, maybe it should wait until I can tell you in local terms how much data storage I can fit on one of these things, I just try to be in the habit of not making anything unnecessary because I don't have getting-rid-of-stuff powers." He makes a chip and tucks it into the computer.

And he tells his family over osanwe what's going on and please stay focused on the war effort demons have lots of interesting implications but most of them can wait a week. 

The interestingly implicated demon follows where he is led, reading his reading material.

And this ship is of the same design, with more monitors, all of which are full of diagrams and tables of numbers, and a number of men who are very obviously all related. Maitimo bows. "Father. Cam, who can make things. Arbitrary things, but not people or antimatter or things that don't obey the laws of physics."

"Hello," he says. "Where are you from and where'd you learn Quenya?"

"Got it when I was summoned," Cam says. "It's very pretty. I live on a planetoid with a personal gravity well generated by a black hole, commuting distance from the major demonic population center on an enormous stupid plane of solid gold."

"I assume there's some context that would make that make more sense."

"There is an infinite naturally-empty-vacuum expanse full of people who all have the same powers as me, we're called demons, it got really tacky really fast. We are summonable. So are two other kinds of magic winged people, angels and fairies, who respectively change and move stuff where demons make it."

"And you were summoned here? How?"