Two weeks ago there was a massacre at Alqualonde. The articles are ugly. The pictures are worse. Thirty thousand dead. 

Christ.

"I assume you have some questions," Maitimo says.

"Yes. My first question is whether it's okay for me to go perform medical experiments on mindless Elf bodies so I know whether I can, say, put people into harmless reversible comas with the drugs that work on humans."

"That's a really good idea. You can do that with humans? You'd be able to tell if there's damage from mindless bodies?"

"I have a full course of medical demon training under my belt, nothing says I have to make stuff outside of people, and working on basement dwellers will impair my ability to discern many things about the effects of the drugs but they will give me enough information to get informed consent from volunteers."

"Then yes, you have permission to do that."

"Okay. Where's good?"

"You could walk away from camp in any direction, Araman's not inhabited and you can fix the air. I can send you an earpiece so you can reach us if you think of more questions."

"Walk," snorts Cam, and he shakes out his wings to full span.

A smile. "You can also fly in any direction, Araman remains uninhabited."

"Okay. I'll be thataway," point, "warn whoever you send that basement dwellers are creepy and that's why polite demons keep them in their basements if they're going to have any."

And he takes off and wheels around in the air and goes thataway for a bit.

Araman remains windy, unpleasant, and uninhabited. 

So Cam finds a flat bit of windy-unpleasant-uninhabited and lands and makes enough of a building that his basement dwellers will not be windburnt and he doesn't have to constantly make new air and then he makes basement dwellers. (He cosmetically alters all their faces so they won't look like anybody in particular because he is a polite demon.) And then he sets about performing sinister medical experiments.

Standard coma drugs don't do anything. Upped doses work somewhat normally. 

Hm. Cam tries some other things he might want suddenly - basement dwellers do respond very rudimentarily to pain, do painkillers work...?

Nope. Something physiologically weird here. 

Cam is gonna go ahead and vivisect one. It'll be just like med school.

This will not show any particular physiological weirdness. 

Huh.

Cam runs through some more drugs. They mostly don't work or work really badly. It is in all unpromising.

After a while Maitimo contacts him. "Hey, how goes it? I thought to ask some of our own medical people, they were all not optimistic at the prospect and can explain why if you like, but you might have some advantages background-wise on them. We're leaving in twelve hours. There are others leaving later if you aren't back by then."

"I've basically come to the conclusion that drugs, at least human-efficacious drugs, do not work on Elves - I can put a basement dweller in a coma but it takes a big dose and reversing it was weird too. I'll come back now."

He torches the place and flies back to the shipyard.

Maitimo meets him. "I'm sorry to hear that. Our medical people are happy to work with you on something better, though they think our bodies can't run without our brains for any real length of time and expect the coma thing won't work. Though if your interest is in nonlethally stopping a fight, you don't need the option of a protracted coma."

"That was my interest, yes."

"So you might not run into the problems that'd arise with trying to keep us unconscious for days. I can make sure you're jumping on the same ship as the medical people, at least. D'you know enough to make orc mindless bodies, test what works on them?"