"I mean, I'm pretty sure that's true. And it's clearly important to her to stay here. And - he can't be someone who's trying to prevent her from coming back here, right, he helped her write the letter and everything. He couldn't have known we'd summon her on our own eventually."

"I mean, if she decided she didn't like him, he'd be out of luck, nobody gets to hold onto a demon kid they can't get to like them, the kid can jump ship to the next eager adoptive parent. So he probably had to help, although he could have chosen to do a good job of faking it if he'd wanted to pretend instead."

"That's... good? That you can't get stuck with someone you don't like. I think... let's just summon him and figure out what his take is, we don't have to work the whole thing out today."

"Sure. Any special requests for his circle or does generic ungagged work?"

"Generic ungagged's good." She feels like she should at some point start defaulting to writing up her own circles, but Cam has more experience with daeva than she does and can conjure circles instantly, and at least one of those is probably a good excuse for doing it this way.

He presents her with a generic ungagged circle.

"Thanks! - uh, we should check your mail first and make sure he hasn't sent anything, I'll look weirdly negligent if I write and then don't even check for a reply."

"Oh, yeah, good point." He checks.

Rozben has sent a letter asking if Zana is there. Cam shows it to Kalia.

" - yup, might as well just answer that one in person."

She summons Rozben.

Rozben appears, after a delay of two and a half minutes. "- hi, you must be Kalia and Cam."

"Hi! Yeah, that's us. Sorry about summoning Zana without being clearer about where she was, I'm still getting used to the communication channels thing."

Across the room, Zana lights up and waves at Rozben before going back to tackling her brother.

"Hi Zana! Is that Connor?"

"Yeah! This is Rozben!" she says to Connor, before pulling her brother over to him. "He is a demon and he lives up where you need a ladder to get to and he knows how to make purple spaceship wagons."

"Hi," says Connor, cautiously, like he's not super sure how you're supposed to interact with stranger-demons and is trying not to break any of the rules he doesn't know.

"It's nice to meet you," Rozben says.

"It's nice to meet you too," says Connor, seriously. "Thanks for helping Zana and stuff."

"It was my pleasure."

Connor does not seem super sure where to take this interaction from there, which is kind of unsurprising given that he knows, like, fifty people and hasn't met a new one in quite some time. After a moment he turns to Zana and asks if she'd like to explore more of the station.

Zana would ABSOLUTELY like to explore more of the station. She happily waves goodbye to Rozben and then darts off.

Rozben watches them go, sighing a little, then looks back in Kalia's direction.

"I wanted to thank you, too. I was really worried about the idea of her being in Hell without anyone she knew around, but it seems like you've done a great job helping her figure things out. She doesn't seem scared of the place at all. And of course we really appreciate you helping her write that letter and get to see her brother again."

"It was the least I could do. Most kids who wind up in Hell, their families don't know what happened till they die too."

"Yeah. That'd be - I mean, I hate to think about her not getting to see her brother in all that time. Glad it worked out this way, if she had to die at all. And now we just have to figure out what the optimal environment for the raising of this particular tiny demon is, I guess."

"... I was honestly expecting you'd just keep her here and maybe I'd see her for a few hours if you had to dismiss her to look squeaky-clean for somebody who'd notice she was a demon."