"Are there demons you trust enough with the knowledge your kind can make minds after all?"

"Not categorically."

"And a way to get the servers done without making it clear that what you're running are uploaded people? No, I suppose the read-and-write step'd be fishy..."

"Quite. If there were a concordance coming up - no, that would be a terrible idea and there isn't anyway -"

"Have the demons send the servers through and someone else do the pressing 'start'? If only we could summon you back...

I think we destroy Valinor. There are too many points of failure, trying to wait. The Enemy figuring out summoning is the most obvious - a Vala might be able to circumvent a Vala ban, if it wasn't a fluke in the first place, and if it was a repeatable fluke they can have a billion people attempting repeats. Maitimo saw that circle you drew testing whether an angel could safely be summoned, which means the Enemy should probably be assumed to know it by now."

"I should demand that he leave daeva alone as part of the oath I extract for the deal," Cam says. "Maybe the summoning ban will end when the Valar die even if it's in effect for the Enemy here and now." He starts a list of demands.

"No dimension-hopping, too, in any form. If they do end up in the daeva afterlife no summons."

Nod, nod. "- this is going to constrain what they do so much I'm not sure whether to expect them to want the Valar dead badly enough. Presumably they want the Valar dead so they can do something?"

"What are you going to do if they refuse?"

"...probably a bad plan to go in prepared to negotiate down."

"I'd walk in and swear on the spot that it was this or nothing. You don't have that luxury, sadly."

"I do not. I wonder if it'd help to identify myself as Revelation, that being the handle I used when I was telling humans about daeva anonymously."

"Has he done enough reading to appreciate the significance?"

"Well, he knew who Hitler was, although maybe he's just indulging personal taste in his choice of material and hasn't read any other history."

"I bet he read everything written about summoning."

"Then he'll know who I am if I claim it."

"And that gets you? Does he have a reputation for being uncompromising?"

"I don't know if it would be helpful at all. The Revelation persona had no personal reputation to speak of. I'd be trying to communicate 'I'll swing around enormous leverage to get what I want but it'd better be for a really good cause I can be smug about indefinitely' but it might do something else."

"You can always send the oath text, announce that you're in a lightleaper headed for Valinor and that if you have their oaths by the time you arrive you'll hole the place and otherwise you'll petition the Valar for aid in the war effort."

"...that would be an interesting strategy. It is not my style but it may be a good plan."

"The stylistic problems are?"

"I don't know that they're problems per se, I just definitely would have taken longer to think of something that dramatic and commitment-demanding if I'd thought of it at all."

"Dramatic and commitment-demanding are my favorite genres. Even more than 'smart' though I typically permit it to do the steering."

"They might call my bluff, and then I have to wreck my Enemybait or look like my commitments aren't worth expecting me to follow through, and it only works if they expect the first one and the oath I pick won't ruin all the fun they were planning to have with the Valar dead to the point where they don't even want the bait that much, and they have no overwhelming reason to expect the first."

"Fair enough. I am unsure how best to constrain future mischief of the 'talk heads of state into wars' form, like what he nearly pulled off in Valinor."