"That'd be good," sighs Cam. "Does any of this go faster if you can have demons who are safely in Hell doing experiments for you, I may get a reply on my request for a correspondent at any time."

"I suppose that'd be a safe-enough way to run a battery of planetary-takeoff lightleaper attempts that my simulator estimates leave a giant crater in the surface of the planet, but I don't have any reason to doubt my simulator on that. You are welcome to invite them to pull everything we've got and start working with it. If anyone can figure out how the Enemy does destructive uploads, that would do it."

"That they will be hindered in experimenting on for obvious reasons. Even if one gets loose on Earth and wants to perform dubious experiments on humans. Who don't have thought-collectors. But they can replicate his hardware and pick it apart." Cam makes an update to his curatorial submission.

"Have demons gotten loose on Earth? What do they tend to do? At a guess, if you do lightleap a lot of people off the surface he'll be angry, and you'll then be gone several weeks, so we should probably be prepared for interesting flavors of retaliation. What's a prion disease and what's the subtext of your exchange with him over that?"

"Demons getting loose is rare and generally somebody will kill the summoner before they get up to much. Same with a loose angel or fairy, although they're less suspected on sight. Prion diseases are infection-like agents based on contagiously incorrectly folded proteins, I was insufficiently thoughtful when I listed horrible things that could happen if the war escalated, you can't even just boil them."

"Well, if we decide we want to play their game, I have designs for some things that should only affect Maiar and not incarnates. Not instantly lethal and so probably a bad idea, but we have them."

"That'll be endearing to Doriath," Cam mutters.

"I know. There seems something uniquely atrocious about targeting a whole kind of being for destruction over and above the loss of lives. And Tyelcormo'd never ever forgive me. I have it anyway."

Nod. "If Quenya has a word for 'genocide' it didn't come in my vocabulary."

"We're short on words for war crimes, I cannot imagine why. I'll suggest to the linguistics guild that they coin one."

Nod. "Should I go talk directly with people about anything or no?"

"Engineering will be helpful but short with you because they'd rather be spending their time engineering. People can point you at the three people who've taken over Maitimo's responsibilities if you find yourself needing anything he'd have helped with. I have more FTL experiments next time you get a chance."

"If they'd be better done now than when I've got demon physicists on it, I can just do them now."

"Like I said, it's at least two years out. We can wait on the demon physicists, if you don't think they'll take that long."

"I do not think they'll take that long. Weeks maybe depending on current backlog and volunteer density, not months."

He sighs enviously. "I am eventually going to find a way to go to Hell, just you wait and see. But that means FTL experiments aren't a good use of your time."

"You want to standardize filenames now for demon collaborators so they don't have to wait for a back-and-forth with me on hand to get started?"

"Yep. We'll adopt their conventions if there are some."

There are some standards! Cam explains them. "There used to be a lot of competing curation organizations but they were each other's best resources so they were always pretty friendly and now it's mostly just this one."

"I'll send out orders. Whatever you're doing, please do it with an eye towards buying us time. We're all sleeping once a week and we've copied all the blessings for accelerated perception as far as they safely stack, but we fundamentally need time."

"I don't know what to do at this point. Besides wait for more confidence on the results of the suicide trigger tests and then install those en masse, and wait for a Hell correspondent to get back to me."

"There're a bunch more Elven kingdoms, we're ready to land support teams there. It'll take them a few days to get a good picture of local needs for you, but I am sure they'll do it."

"I can fly them out, then. See if anybody else needs a water supply because theirs is full of prions."

"Good skill." And he turns back to his screen.

Cam goes and fetches teams and brings them where they are going and asks the locals if they would like any material objects. Nonescalatory material objects.