"You're welcome. You have to pay royalties for it?" Cam wonders, producing the desk drawer.

"Legal gray area. You can have whatever you want but if you serve it to us we're stealing. I spent several decades hammering out an intellectual and creative property law that satisfied everyone where daeva were concerned; it was very interesting work at the time, but now it's hard not to look back on all that as wasted time..."

"I consider it fairly important that people be able to summon and pay daeva, ideally without having to weigh whether it's worth legal trouble."

"I find myself very hard pressed to say nice things about the Valar but their enforcement on that was straightforward, reasonable, and uniform."

"Good for them. After I let everybody know daeva existed on Earth IP law was kind of a mess for a while, that just didn't seem like a priority compared to ending material scarcity."

"What." He has ever done things besides commit genocide you know, he doesn't say.

"You're Revelation?"

"I don't usually mention it but this is not a usual social context," Cam shrugs.

"Congratulations. That's - amazing. Good for you. Lucky, for Earth, to have someone with the perspective- and the nerve-"

"And the abandoned house outside of town with the books on summoning, that was essential."

He really wants to kiss him. It is really really such a shame that this is not an option, why is it not an option, it's a high-pressure situation but only sort of distantly so and Cam can't have complaints about his priorities - it's not that Cam's straight - he has never wanted to kiss someone and not seen how to pull it off before but he's also never met someone who ended material scarcity on his planet before -

- well, he can end material scarcity on as many planets as required -

"You drew a circle out of a book you found in an abandoned house? I hope it was a thorough book."

"It was pretty thorough, yeah, once I deciphered the handwriting, although the first one I drew I was just killing time, I was surprised as all get out when it worked."

"A handwritten book. Wow. Do you keep a count of how many lives you've saved -"

"...I'm in the black by most estimates. If you don't dock me credit for the fact that the people would've ended up in Limbo and continued to exist."

"...wasn't what I meant. But. Congratulations. That's quite seriously the most impressive thing I have ever heard of. Uh, I'm tempted to hug you but I don't have relevant cultural context, pretty much all I've read of Earth are the history books..."

"...it'd be a little weird but not super weird, I guess?"

Short hug. Minimal weird. Maybe for his own sanity he should just pretend Cam is straight or something - he is personally commanding his heartbeat for the time being so he doesn't flush, or look at him too strangely - "Congratulations on ending material scarcity, I hope you have lots of opportunities to top that in the future, I'd better take these snacks upstairs while they're still warm..."

"Sure," agrees Cam. He picks up his violin.

And he distractedly climbs eight flights of stairs despite the fact his targets are on the third and then curls up in the stairwell and eats half the snacks himself and leans his head against the nearest cold stone surface and practices perfect bodily control and whimpers over osanwë directed at people who are safely in a different dimension.

Cam obliviously delivers a concerto to the giant squid, and reads a book, and goes and sleeps because he can justify sleep, here.

Okay, I'm back to brainstorming intervention ideas, if Maitimo's mopey enough for me to notice he's probably internally a puddle of attraction and despair.

Yeah, okay.

She goes and finds Maitimo.

"What happened?"

Maitimo eventually successfully delivered half the snacks. "Oh, nothing happened, I'm just letting irrelevant things occupy more of my attention since we're here for a century and it's getting out of hand. Did you know Cam is Revelation."

"Oh, yeah, it came up before you came in."