"Trust me, we do not want to kill billions of people we are trying to do the exact opposite of that. We also might not become daeva when we die, since we don't really die."

"Yeah, no idea how that interacts. Seems best to test with somebody else. Summoner kid's mom maybe, so they'd wind up in the same multiverse if it does work? They might be different kinds of daeva but there's overlaps between the realms every few years and they can correspond."

He blinks again. "She's on her way. Though they'd be leaving his father behind. He died at Alqualonde."

"...It was just a suggestion, if she'd rather not do it, but she already knows the key infosec hazard and has some reason to maybe want to be a daeva."

"No, I think it's a very good idea. Just. If we ever do figure out how to bring him back." He shakes his head. "People who become daeva as children, do they grow up?"

"Yeah, they do."

"That's good. Oh, if you're not travelling with us then exchanging medical notes about ways to put us to sleep at need will have to wait, or can everyone just send you letters by putting in the header 'letter to Cam'?"

"Everyone can in fact send me letters by entitling them 'letter to Cam', ideally numbered. Doesn't work in reverse unless you have another demon with you. ...If you don't have informational FTL then how are your backups going to work?"

"The backups are FTL but we don't know how they work. The Valar say they're magic."

"If they are then that could separately from my no-minds limitation explain why resurrection didn't happen."

"I think the Valar are lying about having magic because they want to control us," he says, "just like they give explanations about souls for lots of other things when there's no real reason to think we have souls. But I suppose it'd be interesting to check, if there were a way."

"I didn't think I had a soul until I simultaneously left a corpse and woke up in Hell."

"Fair. But we don't think we do that. When we die we can be restored from backup. You've never met any of us in Hell, right?"

"Nope. But none of you were summoners. The real tell is that I've never heard of there being any of you in Limbo, but if you were just sixty octillion miles away from all the human Limboites you wouldn't have noticed each other."

The woman Cam met earlier comes in. "Is everything all right? I heard there was a fight -"

"An argument," Maitimo says, "which brought to the fore my inexcusable failure to think about whether the Doom could affect Cam after he returns home and which was therefore all for the good. He wants to test whether summoning works normally here."

"You don't have to actually do anything," Cam says, "apart from draw a mark where I tell you and concentrate on getting rid of the daeva if you get one when I tell you; in fact, you shouldn't say anything else at all because if you accidentally say something agreeable you wind up locked into whatever the daeva can construe as a task/payment pair and then you might be in trouble. I suggested you because in my world, summoners become daeva after they die, and if that applies to Elves too then your son would have you accessible eventually."

She nods. "I am happy to help. Draw line, shut up, concentrate on sending the daeva away if we get one."

"...you don't want to know more about becoming a daeva or anything...?"

A slightly confused look. "I mean, I am curious, but I serve my King, I trust the prince Nelyafinwe's judgement, I gather your time is very valuable..."

"...okay. Uh, if you do become a daeva, please don't take any random summonses in case the Doom's contagious to other worlds; I'll leave instructions on how to nonrandomly summon you here."

And he makes an intricately calligraphed deliberately completely illegible circle on the floor and hands her a marker. "Just fill in there."

She does. 

"Well, this is definitely taking a suspiciously long amount of time if it's going to work at all, there's billions of angels and one of them oughta take the bait in the first second of a circle's validity."

"What does that probably mean?"

"That probably means that summoning does not work under the standard rules here and it means the kid should be considered a vital strategic asset because if anything happens to him and I go poof that may be it, no calling me back, no replacing me."

She looks uncertainly at Maitimo. "Perhaps we should send him back to Valinor," he says, "his physical safety will not be in doubt there."

She looks steadily ahead. "If you think so. I am - not sure, growing up in Valinor, knowing why, listening to what they say about his father, he won't sometimes wish for a moment that - he wouldn't disobey you on purpose but he's only a child -"

"You know him better than I," Maitimo says. "If he's likely to dismiss the summoning in Valinor then we don't send him to Valinor. First settlers of the refugee planet, maybe. Are we sure dismissing even works the way Cam assumes?"