"I don't know if she even thought of it, it was a split-second decision on my part and I wasn't even sure it would work until it did."

"Well.

We all know what we're risking.

Want me to summon your sister back anyway? Is she going to want to be along for the ride?"

"Yes."

She misses her sister so much, so much of the time.

He would feel exactly that way about his brothers.

He explains what he did with the light and the gravity - "don't know if it'll work, or if it'll matter, but..." and Maitimo requests they go somewhere else to do that please he is trying to coordinate ship transfers and getting tossed around the room will be distracting.

Oh, that's clever. Neat. Since they're in less of a hurry this time could they maybe set things up so that Emily has something more comfy than the floor to fall onto?

"Definitely! You wanna make her the floofiest cushion ever?"

"I don't know if I can outdo thousands of years of demons on floofiness--I don't know about your Hell, but mine is so tacky, it's ridiculous, did Maitimo tell you about the plane of solid gold? But I can sure as hell--pun intended, it's an idiom in my native language--try."

"Maitimo did not tell me about the plane of solid gold! I'd yell at him for omitting it, but he's busy." That is one floofy cushion.

Yes it is. "Some demon decided that it would be a fun idea to create a plane of solid gold big enough to exert its own gravity and live on it and for some reason living on it caught on."

"I can respect that kind of illogic. 'Why am I going to do this? I want to, and I can.'"

"Yes, and I can't really say he has unusually bad taste, demons in general don't have unusually bad taste but we have all the resources we want to ostentatiously display any particular errors of taste we may have, it's like--your capital city, sort of, only done badly."

"I can't stand Tirion, it's okay to call it tacky if you found it such." And he projects the summoning circle, toys the gravity -

"No, no, Tirion was way more tasteful than your average Hell-city, it's just that it had a comparable number of gemstones," she explains.

"Aule can't help himself, he gets so excited about rocks that would be scarce on a geologically normal planet." And he summons her sister.

Who squawks and falls onto the highly fluffy cushion.

"--Maitimo's brother!" she recognizes him after a moment. "Fuck, I'm sorry."

"No, it's okay, I managed to drag his corpse back to Hell with me and now he's fine. Oh, and the Valar killed a bunch of people trying to keep us from leaving and blamed me for it."

"They what."

"Yep. Said that everything that happened at Alqualonde was - well, they were really saying it was Maitimo's fault, breaking the binding on a demon, but they said she killed everyone."

"You know I'd expect rulers who are themselves unbound daeva not to take the 'an unbound daeva is a natural disaster' stance."

"That'd be expecting the Valar to make any fucking sense. Anyway they had incentives to pin it on Maitimo, people adored him, killing him would have gone over really badly otherwise."

"I don't suppose there's any way to get solid evidence of him publicly swearing that's not how it went down back to Valinor."

"We're still in range, right? He could record a message and we could drop it on people. You can fake swearing over a recording, though, and I bet that's what they'd claim he did."

"Bet they'll be surprised he's alive to do that."

"...true. We probably don't want to invite the wrath of the Valar until we've leapt clean, though. Maybe we can come back and set the record straight after the war."

"Fair enough, I guess."