"If he is then anyone can bring him back even if we find a way to kill him -"

"Annnnnd suddenly infosec is more desperately important than ever - I'm somewhat afraid to check -"

Hugs. "There are still solutions they're just all fairly monstrous and not guaranteed."

"Yeah -"

Cam checks.

Nope.

He takes a deep breath. "Well. Today: could in fact have been worse."

"Yeah. Small mercies."

"The other normal non-prehistory Arda, my alt there..."

"I didn't read anything more damning than 'probably not boyfriend material' but I'm not sure how to be sure -"

"I am wondering if we'd have read anything damning if this one'd wandered in."

"Yeah, no idea. You'd have an easier time seeing it than me, but if anybody could fool you..."

"Might not think he'd need to. I would, um, have defaulted to assuming alternate universe versions of me were like me, if he - 

- but the ones in your world aren't very accessible and the last thing we'd want to do would be call them here if it turns out that -"

"Yeah."

"I am tempted to say we can fork a me and kill him if he can't swear to not being evil but this isn't urgent, there's no actual reason to do that -"

"Also I don't, like, enjoy killing people."

"Under the circumstances I'd be happy to."

"Charming."

"Have you tried imagining - if it were you - if the Revelation on that world wore your face and had all your clever ideas but, you know, was the sort of demon who stole souls, and was only not doing anything more interesting than that because no one'd slipped up on a binding yet..."

"Yeah.

I wouldn't recreationally kill him though."

"Even if we could make copies of the definitely-evil one I wouldn't suggest we do that for stress relief, but we've talked about starting time on your world again to collaborate with more people or to do daevafying if it turns out not to work in Milliways, it's important to know if my alt there is going to - or has already - summon a different demon, get a version of his boyfriend made who hasn't slipped the leash in exchange for the secret of how to make minds -"

"Singularity Findekáno suggested getting an earlier version of Singularity Maitimo who hadn't sworn the stupid Silmaril oath, which I doubt very much any conventional leashing would permit or any conventional leash-slipping would motivate..."

"Okay, so those ones are probably just mutual disasters. Also what."

"They're a mess it's very off-putting. What specifically are you whatting about."

"Stupid Silmaril oath?"

"There was an oath. About the Silmarils. It was stupid. I may have the exact words somewhere..." He goes looking through his files. Here it is.

"That is stupid. 

Maybe there's a world where we're evil and a world where we're stupid."