"By which time it'd probably be too late.

More tempting is to try negotiating, but we don't know enough about the situation on Endore to even know what to negotiate for, and once he knows we've found his summoner then the orc problem is in full force."

"Yeah. I'm not fully sure how to find out what's up on Endore; I thought about summoning newspapers but I assume they're not in the same language."

"Nope. We can try learning it. The Elven languages at least will share a common ancestor with ours."

"Memory blessings are handy," she says, and conjures some newspapers.

"I will put some people on learning it and extracting everything useful."

"Lemme know if I should conjure any more written material."

"...tempted to say complete works of the Enemy but there's no way he'd be careless..."

"Couldn't hurt to try." Complete written works of the Enemy?

Lots of content. Most of it very very old.

Probably worth looking at anyway. She hands it over.

"Thanks. What does a forced evac of Earth look like, if it comes to that?"

"I'm not sure."

"Are people going to shoot at us. Are they going to fire on starships. Do you have the drugs to just render the planet comatose, how's the population concentrated..."

"People are likely to be inclined to shoot. Theoretically I could put the whole planet under but there are probably people in airtight places." She starts describing population distribution as she knows it.

"...so, a disaster. We might be able to take more time but the minute he notices us, the hope of destroying and then trapping him vanishes..."

"Yep."

"Maybe we can sneak emissaries onto Earth, in a way that doesn't create conjurable records? And trust in the discretion of Earth's leadership? And start planning the evacuation quietly?"

"...Maybe. Earth has a lot of leaders, though."

"And if I were Melkor I'd routinely conjure 'model of non-humans and non-daeva in the star system' or something else hard to work around. And I take it you're too distrusted to go it alone."

"Furniture Angel," she sighs. "I mean, we could try. If we took our wings off and Emily hid the blessings or put 'em back in a necklace instead of the fetching embedding arrangement she's got now maybe no one would realize."

"Or you could pretend to have summoned her or something? And claim you noticed the planet's rigged to blow while doing some research or other?"

"Hmm. Plausible. On the other hand, at that point it might be better to find a cooperative summoner and have them make that claim."

"Great idea. How would we identify one?"

"...First thought is to make all demon summoning circles that don't include a gag within the last--some short period of time."

"...good idea. Go for it."