"I also don't know about orcs but expect lots of people'd prefer, if they've been killed anyway, to be brought back without oaths they were coerced into."

"It sounded like mostly soft coercion, but yeah."

"I should have my people all file advance directives on things like that.

Anyway. Game?"

"Sure."

It's a good game.

He coordinates a team to try to figure out reading and writing to chips and from there perhaps how to make ones that have fewer serious vulnerabilities, or how to erase oaths.

And of course none of Findekáno's research is written down but Cam can say what he knows about the process.

And the team is very confused that he's not being brought in, and Maitimo tells them they're really trying to fork as few people as possible.

They get to work.

Cam kills time, and makes things, and tries to think of more useful occupations for himself.

Does he want to help plan for sudden access to the multiverse, because the Fëanors have confirmed that in a few subjective centuries they can definitely have non-conjurable tech that can set up portals and an empire spanning dimensions should be very workable.

...yes. He would like that.

Great! They've yet to find anyone in Bar's books who's significantly ahead of them, though there are some inventions they'll be aggressively copying, and they're actually probably going to start first on dimensions that are pre-industrial both because the gains are greater and because it's more straightforward for a demon to drop modern infrastructure on them - there are decisions to make on portal locations, on how to exercise authority locally, there's the question of whether summoning works in worlds where there aren't references to it -

Cam's got all kinds of ideas about terraforming if they want to do any terraforming, and infrastructure notions from his If I Ever Travel To Limbo folder. His opinions about portal locations and the transmission of authority through them depend substantially on how subject to sabotage or other failure the portals might be. He suspects summoning does not work by default in his own Arda, that there was something stopping it from working most of the time and he got through by some coincidence, and then the Valar hedged it out, and now, well, now it works...

"So the something stopping it from working most of the time was probably a generalizable protection they had in place, and then narrowed, and it would work by default in dimensions without powerful beings present? Maybe we can check by dimension for circles with bindings, there'd be some valid circles anyway but it is vanishingly unlikely anyone'd do circles with bindings unless it works.

...maybe we should check for materials from other Ardas, if there's two..."

"Multiple Ardas, multiple sets of daeva worlds..."

"Oh, the latter we knew about, we developed cross-dimensional summoning on purpose. We actually thought all worlds had the same magic system and each had accompanying daeva worlds until we got here, or we'd have tried dimensional transit sooner."

"Oh, how's cross-dimensional summoning work?"

"You add a ring to the circle, looks like this -" he pulls one up. "Can't aim for characteristics of dimensions but can aim for specific ones if you know how to specify them, just like you can't aim for characteristics of demons but you can summon someone in particular. It makes payment a lot easier, we've got entirely different media here, and shiny technology - I'd have had a hard time paying anyone local enough for 'a fleet of starships', and I thought I only had the one soul..."

"You know that's a myth, right?"

"Sorry, what's a myth?"

"Stealing souls? ...I guess with the chips it might be less so."

"It happens. Not on Valinor, the minimum legal binding is enough to prevent it, but it happens."

"Okay, with human summoners it's a myth."

"And yet it's still a concept? Weird."

"There's a lot of weird cultural baggage around daeva species."

"Most of our baggage comes from being ruled by them."