"Different because I didn't make it. I want mango, mango is the best."

He gives her a cone of mango ice cream.

"Thank you!" says Zana, and then she quietly eats her ice cream. She can eat all the ice cream she wants because she is magic. Rozben said.

"Just let me know if you need anything else."

Zana does not immediately need anything else. 

Connor is less freaked out by his sister being back than one might expect; she's only been gone for a day and a half, and it's clearly something that his Aunt Kalia has fixed somehow, so that's probably all right. Zana is phenomenally bad at keeping secrets, which is fine in this case - Kalia's not going to let Connor leave the room until after they've worked something out and explained it to him. So they tromp off to the other room, where Zana explains that demons can make dragons but that they will be STUPIDER THAN BABIES.

"Well. They seem less mentally scarred than they could be. That's good."

"It might hit them in a few days when their parents still aren't here."

"Yeah. That part still sucks. I may or may not realize that it really sucks in a few days, or I might just continue thinking that it's - bad but not as bad as dying so what is there to complain about, y'know?"

"There's lots of things that aren't as bad as dying to complain about!"

" - well, yeah. It just seems sort of ungrateful to learn that people aren't actually being permanently removed from existence and still be really upset about it. Like if a teacher is like, 'technically, miss, I'm supposed to have you fail the course for this, but I'm going to let you off with a zero for this one assignment,' that seems like not the time to be really upset about the unfairness of everything. You can still, like, figure out what went wrong and try to make sure you don't get any more zeroes, but it's weird to be mad at the world for treating you better than it promised it would." Pause. "Pretty upset at the pirates, though."

"They are very badly behaved, the pirates. I mean - yes, they're not erased from existence forever, and I will grant you that this is great news, but you're still never going to see your sister again, like I'm never going to see my parents again, because I was a summoner and they're in Limbo."

"Yeah. I wonder if it's harder, in some ways, knowing they're still out there somewhere and you just can't see them. If they were totally gone you could just let go." 

"I mean, there is correspondence. I can conjure mail from them whenever I like, and they get big batches of letters every concordance."

"Azalea is not ridiculously huge on correspondence. I am now picturing being a thousand and two and insisting that I have a loving relationship with my sister based on half-page letters spaced six months apart, which I get as often as I can convince a summoner to summon my demon friend who can conjure mail from the secret afterlife."

"You can get conjured mail if you sign up for a service that does it," he says. "They have one long term demon and have them conjure a bunch of people's mail labels in batches and then pass it on from there."

"And nobody has noticed yet that there's a secret afterlife?"

"I'm sure plenty of individuals, like you, have found out. But - it's not overwhelmingly common knowledge. Demons know more about it than anyone else because we can conjure from it; for angels and fairies, Limbo is a foreign country with no interesting exports that they can only contact every decade or so. The ex-humans can find out, certainly, but for a surprisingly long period of time none of them have told anybody alive who went on to make a well-publicized attempt at advertising the fact - demons just don't get to talk enough, I'm not sure why an ex-human angel or fairy hasn't though. One reason which gives me some pause is that if it's disclosed badly, it becomes a bizarre unbelievable conspiracy theory you'd have to be a moron to take seriously, and then future attempts are poisoned."

"I suppose uncredentialed weirdos on Pluto are not the most trustworthy source. I could become a credentialed non-weirdo on a non-Pluto celestial body, though, it's probably not actually impossible to get enough cred and enough evidence to be taken seriously."

"Probably not. Just - be very careful. Have evidence laid out, maybe confirm privately with some particularly influential and serious people of some kind..."

"I'm not gonna do it without you. You just seem like you're going to have a somewhat hard time talking to reputable - to anyone, actually."

"Yes. I have that problem."

"So. Step one, figure out some sort of medium-term tolerable Zana and Connor arrangement. Step two, end death as we know it. Step three - 'profit' seems like an anticlimactic ending to this plan, but I'm sure we'll think of something."

"Do you want a space station?"

" - you know what, that would make several things much simpler. But this one needs to have pirate defenses."

"I was thinking you could join Federated."