That'd require going downstairs. Thank you. If he's planning on sticking around they'll probably come socialize occasionally, this is going to be a long project and it's not as if rests even delay it getting completed.

He's not in a hurry to go back very soon. Probably won't actually stay for centuries.

Fair enough. They'll be down in a couple weeks once they've sorted out how useful it is to work with forks of yourself and so on. 

Tyelcormo's on this ship isn't he, would Edie mind asking him if they can have one of him.

"Is he far enough away that it wouldn't work to just ask him to come himself?"

That works too! Better, maybe, if Huan's unforkable.

If there's a way to fork Maiar she doesn't know it.

She goes downstairs and pokes her head out the door. Tyelcormo? Weird stuff's going on, your dad wants you--and she sends him the location.

And he comes on over.

She lets him inside and hands him the explanatory napkins.

"Weird. Not that I'm complaining - I don't think you'll need more than one of me, the reason they need me is to remind them to eat and sleep and have physical contact with other people occasionally, and I can do that for twenty as easily as for two - and it's an easier sell, when people aren't dying while they relax....

Wow. We needed a miracle and we got one, looks like. Thank you. And is there an explanatory napkin for the forking -" He is also looking confusedly at Cam.

"I can produce the explanation on a napkin if you want."

"I actually kind of can't read so non-napkin explanations are even better, if you've got those."

"I am from the same Hell as Edie but got summoned to a different yet bizarrely parallel Arda. Over the course of ending my version of the war it was discovered that the data's clean on demon-conjured chips, just - magically doesn't work - but it can be nonmagically read-and-written to blanks and those work."

"Well, fuck. I mean. At least the Enemy presumably doesn't know that but I wouldn't count on it and - fuck. Okay. So we're staying in timestopped magic bar until the army of my dad and my brother figure out a way to stop him? Most obvious avenue being figuring out non-summoning interdimensional transport which demons can't conjure so we can send the Enemy some place uninhabited - or, actually, some place with different laws of physics so he can't make himself any chipped people - how'd you stop yours, kill the summoner?"

"His was apparently not a daeva."

"And you got summoned to handle him? Congratulations."

"I really don't like telling this story but Edie can if she likes."

"...He got summoned by accident, they don't have summoning naively in the world he got summoned to."

"Weird. By accident? Unbound? Wow, lucky they got you."

"I find it intensely flattering that you know to have that reaction and still have me on bindings this light, by the way."

"Most people are kind of shitty. You aren't."

"It's true!"

"If their world hasn't otherwise got daeva we're probably way ahead on some tech stuff - demon-proof communication maybe in particular -"

"Yeah, probably. Not that it means as much without regular summoning..."

"Right. We also might be ahead, like, generally, hard to guess the way the advantages of summoning propagate -

- this is so weird -"

"That they don't have summoning?"