"Funny story - they prohibited sex with daeva because of concerns about coercion on one end or the other, but I guess the Vanyar are all very innocent because they only prohibited penetrative intercourse between a man and a woman. When it eventually came to their attention that this wasn't curtailing the behavior they were worried about, they made a law that all bindings must prohibit daeva and summoners from touching."

"...Well, demons sorta have a not-universally-undeserved reputation as rapists, back home, so I have a hard time actively objecting to that. I mean, I don't think it's the best possible solution to the problem, and it doesn't seem like it would do anything about daeva and other non-daeva besides their summoner, but..."

"Really? Are people at home just very bad at the bindings they actually want?"

She snorts. "People back home usually don't let demons talk because they're worried we'll talk them out of their souls. Anyway the rape thing typically comes up when you have a summoner who's really desperate and a demon who's an enormous asshole."

"...and the desperate person has the expectation that all demons are terrible, presumably - if you'd wanted sex for the ships I would have filled in the next circle..."

"I am neither that hard up nor that much of an asshole," she snorts. "The desperate person often doesn't have anything better to pay with. Transdimensional technology boosts aren't something most people have. And expects most demons to at least potentially be terrible."

"Unfortunate. It's not obvious then that the situation is resolved by prohibiting sex then, though, even if the prohibition is respected."

"Yes, but out of the things you've told me about your government so far, 'implements a well-meaning if misguided attempt to avoid something that's a genuine problem where I'm from' is so far down the list of things I'd want to yell at it about that it's not really worth bothering with."

"Fair enough. I haven't even told you many of the bad things about my government."

"I wasn't assuming that the list only contained things I had heard."

The computer guides them towards Tirion's shuttleport. "I'm going to be sitting in the palace doing logistics for most of the next week, there's a room adjacent that's within the binding and I would be happy to set someone to data system compatibility or just interface compatibility so you can entertain yourselves."

"That sounds fine."

"If you want to go home early just let me know. Please don't annoy anyone enough they want you home early, Mandos would totally hold up my resurrection with months of paperwork and I'd miss the whole war."

"That reminds me, please explain resurrection, we don't do that at all except insofar as becoming daeva or limboites counts."

"We all get chips implanted in our heads at a very young age - it's safe to do at three, and most people obviously don't wait - that among other things contain complete backups of our minds. If our bodies are destroyed but the chips are intact, a demon can give us a new body around the chip and we're back and running. The chips are hard to destroy - they'll typically survive even a shuttle accident which is the worst sort of thing that happens here. Summonings break on conventional death, so if someone shoots me in the head you two both go home even though I will be back eventually.

It's illegal to summon your own daeva for resurrection, you have to use Mandos."

"Of course. How hard is it to catch someone who does it anyway?"

"Mandos routinely conjures all summoning circles drawn within this star system in the last day to make sure everyone's being careful and obeying the law."

"Within this star system."

"The Valar are much less strict about what people outside Valinor do. He might conjure those too but I've never heard of him bothering anyone over them."

"Talk about good enough reason to leave on its own."

"Not too many habitable planets nice and terraformed for us. I might end up calling you back."

"I am okay with that!"

They land. It is a spectacularly pretty shuttleport, like concept art from some designer's fantasy project instead of a galactic civilization's major transit hub. He has sent in their manifest and it includes the angel and the demon. "I apologize about everything being dark. The Enemy doesn't usually feed the Suns into a black hole, that was a new one."

"Don't worry, if some demon had fed my solar system's sun into a black hole we wouldn't be doing half so well."

"The Valar were very quick on stabilizing our orbit and generating temporary sources of light and heat and blanketing the place in reflective clouds to keep it in. They like Valinor, they were pretty devastated and would I think be pretty disinclined to scrap it and start over." People leave them rather a wide berth.