"Go ahead and explain why I should let you do that."

"Because in the first place, she's the best and most trustworthy person I've ever known; in the second place, I've sworn an oath never to lie to her, and I don't care to split hairs about deliberately leaving out relevant information; and in the third place, you don't 'let' me do anything."

Ari hisses through his teeth. "The idea of Sally doing anything that could endanger the world... is absurd. She has worked harder than anyone I know to prevent our reality from crumbling to pieces around us like it desperately wants to do. I trust her infinitely more than I trust myself. And she's had the resources and information necessary to intentionally or accidentally destroy this world since she was twenty-three, and astonishingly, she hasn't done it, because she is a reasonable and extremely cautious person."

"That sure is a paragraph that you just said. I don't have demonic truth-detection powers. I have approximately human-grade judgment. As far as I can tell, so do you."

"And you won't give a shit if I swear upon my magic and my name, because you have no idea how our magic works. Great."

"I mean, I might after learning how your magic works, but in the next half an hour, not likely. How impatient are you? Relatedly, how would you feel about letting me actually meet this person who you're so damn keen on telling and telling her myself?"

"...And if you decide she isn't trustworthy? Does she get put tidily out of the way until you've sorted out our world?"

"Do you believe that your friend here will not be able to convince a reasonable sort of demon that she has an IQ above room temperature and doesn't want to end the world?"

"I have some trouble gauging your standards of judgment. For instance, you apparently think I'm unqualified to decide that my best friend, who I've known for ten years, has an IQ above room temperature and doesn't want to end the world, despite the fact that she's personally saved the world multiple times."

"It's not that I think you're unqualified, it's that from where I'm standing you are a random dude saying words. If what you are saying is true, she sounds great, let's give her Introduction to Circles and tell her to go nuts while I have way more fun than this conversation with terraforming Mars, yay. If what you are saying has any of the things wrong with it that may go wrong with Utterances A La Random Dude, then maybe I get as far as putting atmo in and then I get balcony seats to oh look the Earth is being sucked into a singularity or I come back to find oh an angel has turned most of the population of the eastern seaboard into spicy garlic eggplant."

"Great. You severely underestimate our world's ability to take care of apocalypse, but fine. I'll introduce you to Sally. And while I'm sure that my threats if you decide she needs a three-year-long nap are already implicit, I'd like to make it clear that they are not empty, no matter how invulnerable you are."

"Random Dude, I have no information about how good you are at handling apocalypses, but I have a pretty poor opinion of how good you are at handling infosec," mutters Cam under his breath. "Let's hope it doesn't come to that," he says at a more normal volume.

"Yes, let's. It's very endearing, by the way, that you think I can't hear you when you stage-whisper. I'm sure that if you weren't an asshole I'd be delighted."

"Oh, if I cared that you could hear me I'd speak Ecvora'h or something, I just wanted that part to remain closer to the level of subtext."

"Yes. Delightful."

"I can feel the hospitality like a plastic fork through a watermelon, dude, lead the way."

Cam remains silent. Pensive, even. He makes himself a cup of water to sip as they approach a trash can, then discards the cup when they get there.

"Mm."

"You're scared? One day I'm comfortably immortal and my biggest problem is that I never get the cool public works project summons, the next I'm in an alternate universe with magic I know nothing about which may or may not be able to dent me or kill me or for example explode the chip in my brain without you even trying, I'm wondering if it would stick if I got murdered a second time and you were the one pulling the trigger, wondering how literal a mind-reader you are vis a vis that most recent comment - you're scared? You have big guns to call in. My big guns have to worry about this being an inhabited locale to the point where I may as well have none. I'm fucking terrified and if I didn't know approximately the population of early twentieth century Earth I would let you do whatever you damn well pleased with the fact that you nearly got somebody, anybody, less friendly and more inclined to running rampant than me."

"Well, color me paranoid about eye contact," mutters Cam.