"Of course they are."

"Why would demons be able to make Maiar, is it because they have nonsapient individual bits?"

"Yeah, you should be able to make as many bits as you want and then I have no idea how the bits become a Maia - I think it takes a long time - but you'd have one."

"Unless they're magically inert in that way like chips."

"Maybe. I assume daeva made them all in the first place, so that'd be very strange, but maybe."

"Really? Why?"

"They're millions of years old and mostly serve a Vala, if they're complicated enough to be people?"

"Huh. How do they work, mostly, I got the explanation that they're shapeshifting swarm intelligences but not much else..."

"There could be some sort of hack like read-and-writing chips. I think in my universe Maiar and Valar all happened simultaneously, though?"

"What are they in your universe, do you know?"

"Vaguely magical things of various shapes and sizes. If try to conjure up a Maia, per se, I get fuckall. I can get their forms but I have to aim at the form, not the person."

"Huh."

Huan is sniffing around the bar. Cam's unhappy, he tells Tyelcormo.

Yeah, I'd noticed. 

Cam: continues to be unhappy.

"Even if it's possible to create a Maia, that doesn't necessarily imply it's possible to fork an already-existing one."

"Yeah, it'd depend on how exactly the swarm stores personality and memory data. When the no-minds thing is operative it's operative hard, I can't even make a Silmaril as good as the originals - do you have Silmarils -"

"Yup. They can do chip backups so Mandos doesn't get a piece of us. Enemy has them. My father deliberately made them smart so demons couldn't dupe them."

"Silmaril backups wouldn't circumvent the read-write trick, so what's daeva Mandos doing if that's not it?"

"The chips just back up to something he's got and he can write new ones from there. You're not allowed to summon your own demons for resurrection even if the chip's intact, Mandos likes being in charge of it."

"Eugh."

"I know. It made resurrecting Maitimo even more satisfying."

"Yup. It was really cute, actually, the first time we did extradimensional summoning, got this guy and he was like 'your world is ruled by daeva? Fuck." and until then I don't think I'd ever heard anyone say aloud that, yeah, we got a pretty shitty draw on the benevolent saviours front. And Maitimo said Edie had almost the same reaction -"

"I kept thinking about furniture angel. I mean, I'm not saying all possible daeva would do terribly as rulers but the inherent power imbalance just screams 'in all but the most perfect circumstances this is going to turn out badly'."

"The magic version are not better."

"Well, the magic version aren't good, doesn't necessarily mean they're not better."

"...I think they are not better, but I guess I'm not caught up on all the details."