"Do you know what you could do to a daeva, just in case we can find some other way to replicate it -"

"I don't know what daeva are," says the sorcerer. "When somebody starts something on my shift I just teleport them into the Security cells to cool off and barely have to do anything else ninety-five percent of the time, the cells are pretty solid."

"I think this would be one of the other five percent of the time. Demons can make stuff. Arbitrary stuff."

"I'm a demon but if your magic's not good at information I don't expect that to mean much to you."

"She could make a black hole."

"Yeah when I get called out to break something up I just sort of generically don't let things surprise me, if you're here on my shift you probably can't make a black hole if I'm not letting you."

"Demons are supposed to be indestructible, do you know if you could dent them -"

"Dunno, that's not actually something I have to do on the job. 'Could take you' doesn't mean 'could injure you', means 'could stop you and make you wait out your cooling-off time'."

"Okay. Thanks for your time."

It was a long shot anyway, she sighs.

Yeah. It's confirmation there are dimensions without daeva and with different magic systems, though, makes it likelier that if we end up having to hop around a lot we'll find something that can take a demon.

True, that's definitely something.

We'll figure it out. It will probably take a really long time, but we'll figure it out.

She hugs him.

We're really lucky. This could be so much worse.

Yeah. Poor Cam. Poor Cam's Valinor.

Yeah. Evil fucking Enemy, they'd better find a way to murder him. Maybe go murder Cam's too even if that one's harmless.

Harmless until he finds a loophole.

Exactly. I'm not a big fan of killing people for revenge but in the case of that monster I haven't exactly got scruples about it either, and I can't think how we'd be sure he was safe.

I'm not fully comfortable with it becoming possible to kill demons, for obvious reasons, but I won't argue that it's worth it.

Once he's gone it definitely joins the list of secrets we're not sharing. But - if it's possible for demons to make minds it's probably necessary that it be possible to kill demons - I'm sure most of you are lovely people and everything but -

Yeah. At least for my personal comfort there's the fact that chipping myself means that if anything happens to me, as long as you have one trustworthy demon I'm basically okay.

Yeah, we'd definitely get you back.

I should probably spend some time in Hell encouraging the use of the chips at some point when it's convenient.

Assuming it's not an easy inference from there to 'we can create minds' - I suppose it'd be a very unusual person who wanted to torture their fork -