It is a bar! An empty, clean bar. With supernovae out the window.

Well that does appear to be a thing. She can't think off the top of her head how daeva could make actual supernovae, so it's...probably...not Enemy action.

It doesn't take long before her poking around takes her near the bar.

Hello. Can I get you anything? First drink is free.

"I can create arbitrary objects. I would like an explanation, please."

Of course. And the bar summarizes the bar. Also, drinks need not be anything you've previously heard of.

"I'll take a recommendation of something I've never heard of and am not likely to, then."

And the bar presents her with a swirly blue glass full of fizzy green juice. It has a festive umbrella.

And in walks another demon. Wings, tail, no other accessories; one of the phenotypes more plausibly an ex-summoner.

She looks him up and down. "Hi. This as weird for you as for me? I have some explanations written on napkins."

"...yeah, this is weird. Napkins?"

She hands him the explanation napkins.

They're so explanatory.

"...so you a demon or a coincidence?"

"Being a demon is less coincidental?"

"It makes you looking like one less of a coincidence. Not so much us being here simultaneously." He plops down at the bar, tail lashing, accepts a drink recommendation, gets something that looks like it's coffee-themed.

"Well, I'm totally a demon. You an ex-summoner too? You kinda look it."

"Yeah."

"Cool. When'd you die?

"2009. You?"

"2030. Huh, that's--just barely post-Revelation."

"Yeah, by a couple years."

"Good thing you didn't kick it just a little earlier, I guess. I mean, unless you would've chosen to be a Limboite in order to be in the same dimension as loved ones reliably given full disclosure, in which case condolences."

"Nah, I wouldn't have done that."

"I probably wouldn't've either, but I'd have thought about it. I have a twin. She's an angel."

"Sounds inconvenient. At least you've got one-way communication."

"There is that. And I've got a great long-term summon going, no gag and I'm the easiest-to-pay demon ever--well, probably not, but it's hard to find ones like me if you've got gags on! So I can see her regularly, for now."

"That's lucky, good for you. Takes forever to find summoners who don't gag their demons."

"Yeah, I'd seen her before since we died but it was always someone she'd talked into summoning me, not vice-versa."

"I'm not well-acquainted with any angels or fairies, no such luck."

"Well, if you're not well-acquainted with any why would you want that as an intangible in the first place?"

"Could've gotten them to ask someone to summon me and let me have a phone to call my parents before they died."

"Oh. Yeah. My parents are Limboites too. That would have been nice."

"Yeah. Mine got good things, though."

"Oh?"

"House, RV."

"My dad got a library and my mom got a tree."

"Kinda tree?"

"Oak. Grew in the backyard of her childhood home, great for a kid to climb on. I think people make acorn flour from it."

Nod. "My dad's kinda annoyed by the social obligation to have houseguests and clear his fridge out twice a day and have the water running all the time but he copes."

"People make little acorn cakes with the flour and the water from the bathrooms of the library and I think a couple of other things. I've tried 'em, they're okay, but I wouldn't wanna eat nothing else."

"The library's a really good thing, especially if it has a librarian breakroom or something in it."

"There is but it only has a little bit--coffee and common additives, I think some of those go in the cakes, and, like, one sandwich, it's not even competitive with the acorn cakes most of the time."

"Oh, are they near each other, that's amazingly lucky."

"I know. Sometimes I wonder if it's because Dad died first and he was really the one thing Mama would have found an afterlife incomplete without."

"That'd be sweet."

"It would! I have no idea if it's realistic, though."

"Probably not. Somebody'd have noticed if it were much more than chance, I think."

"Yeah. I'm glad they got lucky, though. Both in that and having summoner daughters."

"Yeah, care packages are a big deal in Limbo."

"Yeah, no kidding. It's a pity Concordances are so limited. And so one-sixth clogged by futile racists."

"Futile racism is very annoying."

"Though not nearly as annoying as the non-futile kind, granted."

"Yeah. Pity the futile racists can't just have LARPs on their own time without crowding the concordance for peaceful postal service daeva."

"It's really annoying that I have to route my letters to my sister through Limbo and Fairyland!"

"I've played with ideas for getting the futile racists out of the way long enough to establish a different precedent but haven't got anywhere, doesn't help that I don't have anyone on the Heaven side to coordinate with."

"...Well, I do. We should correspond."

"Sure. I'm Cam, nobody spams 'letter to Cam' yet."

"Edie. Although, ah--what languages do you speak? There's this asshole I think is conjuring my mail, so I've got this code worked out..."

"Lots -" He picks his computer off his belt, calls up a list.

"Oh, that's convenient, I also speak most of those. Got summoned by some linguists to teach 'em demon languages."

"Huh, I got summoned by some linguists once, but they kept me gagged and just had me confirm translations."

"Sucks. Was that before or after your parents moved to Limbo?"

"Before her, after him."

"Definitely sorrier than baseline you were gagged for that one."

"Yeah. Picked up a lot of languages from the linguists though."

"They're convenient like that!"

She explains the code. It's vaguely Feanaroish in style.

Which Cam does not recognize since his Fëanáro has just been using the one-time pad. "Clever," he remarks anyway.

"Thanks. It was actually mostly my current summoner's father who came up with it."

"He's a cryptographer or something?"

"He's a something, that's for sure," she snorts.

"Hm?"

"He's lotsa kinds of genius. He speaks enough languages for the code to work with him, he invents like Da Vinci on the best stimulants known to Man or Daeva..."

"Nice."

"And he learns languages like a child in a candyshop, it's adorable."

"Yeah some people just really like 'em. I've been doing machine translation to patch what I didn't get with my summon, I don't pick up languages that fast the long way."

"Oh, I've just been patching that with getting dismissed and re-summoned."

"Nice if you can arrange it, yeah."

"Why can't you?"

"I guess I could now but the need to talk to people has diminished recently."

"Sounds like a story."

"It is a long story."

"Well, time's apparently paused on the other side of the door."

"You really wanna know?"

"Yeah."

"Short version, I'm on summon to a world where summoning does not otherwise work. Could be dismissed, can't be resummoned. My summoner's in hiding because somebody might kill them to get to me. There was a war. I ended it."

"...Huh. If summoning doesn't otherwise work then how...?"

"Not sure, I may've been a fluke."

"Well, I'm on a summon to another world where it works pretty damn reliably, to the point where someone invented trans-world summoning just to make demons easier to pay. Got any advice on war-ending? It'd be pretty useful."

"Not especially. Circumstances unlikely to match. What's your world like?"

"Well, millions of years ago there was a sentient species that looks like lizard-kangaroos, and now they're extinct outside the daeva realms and limbo, except for fifteen catatonic summoners that have been kept around all this time."

"...wow, okay. That's gonna be fun for the library of Hell curators."

"Currently there are, as far as I can tell, three inhabited planets. One of which is also Earth, for some reason, complete with humanity. And one of the catatonic summoners--the one of the worst of the lot, the one we're trying to evacuate people away from--is inside the Earth, surrounded by explosives rigged to destroy the planet if the setup is messed with or the summoner dies."

"...duplicate Earth? What the fuck?"

"I don't know."

"Circa when?"

"Which, it existing or containing a catatonic summoner?"

"I mean what's the calendar year on the Earth."

Pretty close to the one on theirs, but not exact.

"They have their own Revelation?"

"Yeah, why?"

"I'm Revelation."

She considers this.

"That's a kind of a bold claim but I can't immediately figure out what you'd get out of lying about it if it weren't true--that you currently know, anyway--and things are weird and coincidental enough already to make it more plausible than otherwise."

"I don't usually tell people."

"...Is that what got you killed."

"I taught summoning for a bit and I think one of the daeva I summoned identified me to some guy with economic interests in secrecy and he walked right into my classroom and shot me in the head."

"That's awful and I'm really sorry it happened to you."

"Well, then I got to be a demon."

"Woulda been a demon if you had died less unpleasantly too."

"Yeah. Well. It was fast."

"There is that."

"Anyway, your Earth is slightly earlier than mine - ours, if we're from the same one - so there might be another me, but I'm not sure what that nets you."

"Well, I actually went there while trying to figure out the summoner problem, and met a living summoner with my same surname and parents with names identical to mine who...was basically like a mishmash of my sister and I in a lot of ways."

"...huh. I'm not sure whether to expect you have a me or a variant of me or what then."

"Yeah, the whole thing is really weird and I've been more worried about evacuating the planet the evil demon's on than figuring shit out."

"Reasonable."

"If we did think of a way to get racist daeva out of Heaven/Hell concordances maybe I could use it on Melkor, that'd be something," she snorts.

"Melkor?"

"The demon whose summoner's buried in the Earth and whose planet we're trying to evacuate," she clarifies.

"Okay, maybe this is a coincidence but my war involved a guy named Melkor. He's not a demon though, he's a sorta magic thing."

"Huh. Probably made communication less of a pain, he's the asshole I'm protecting my mail against."

"...The other fourteen loose lizard-kangaroo daeva call themselves the Valar."

"The other fourteen sorta magic things called themselves that."

"My summoner's genius father's name is Feanaro."

"I know one of those."

"This is bizarre."

"No kidding."

"If you ever get information from the universe I'm summoned to, you should just know ahead of time that I did not kill anyone, the Valar lied about that."

"...Okay."

"Maitimo summoned me to make light-leapers, we went down to the planet--I had to go with him, they have laws about the bindings you have to put on daeva and one of 'em's 'stay within a certain distance of your summoner at all times'--and the Valar said no one was allowed to leave so we all made for Alqualonde, which is a spaceport. They'd have alerted the Valar if we let them. Maitimo extracted a reasonable set of oaths from me and snapped my binding. I put the population of Alqualonde to sleep. The Valar found out and showed up anyway and killed a bunch of people trying to get me sent back to Hell and the remaining Noldor prevented from leaving, then claimed that I'd killed everyone, except my summoner who they'd obviously had to kill to stop me."

"You chipped yourself to do oaths?"

"Chipped myself to do telepathy, found out about the oaths after."

"Can your Valar do oaths? In a way you could really, really count on."

"I reeeeally doubt it. I don't think they're even chipped, let alone chipped and then sworn not to ever let the oath-enforcing function of the chips be interfered with."

"Okay, then I continue to not have war-ending suggestions."

"Do you have suggestions for getting a bomb out of the earth?"

"How hair-trigger is it? Could you dig down a ways, surround it with keratin attached to you, and set it off?"

"Ooh, good question. So far our best idea was to get enough trustworthy daeva to split the earth in half minus a sphere around the thing, get it out and far away, fill in the hole with appropriate matter, put the planet back together and set it back in its correct orbit."

"...yeah that sounds like a disaster. Surrounding it and blowing it up sounds like a potential disaster - if it's a planetbuster but shaped it could knock your whole keratin bubble in one direction and wobble the planet - do you have enough time to try a dummy version? Sounds like there's not room for it in Milliways."

"We think Melkor doesn't know we know yet."

"So you could make a model of it, try bubble-and-boom, see if everything on the surface is still standing."

"Yeah, that's how we found out it won't stand up to angelic interference."

"That's impressive, does that hold if you have lots of angels at once?"

"Haven't tested that."

"If you had enough angels they might be able to work simultaneously enough - but that seems difficult, fingernail thing's easier if it works."

She conjures a model of Earth about the size of a beachball. She tries growing keratin into it. It explodes in her face.

"Yikes. Maybe if you did it farther out? He can't have made it so it explodes if any plausible stuff happens on the crust, he doesn't want it exploded and people are going to drain aquifers and mine diamonds, continents are going to drift..."

She tries again. It explodes again.

"What does the bomb mechanism alone look like? If it just blows up if you try it maybe there were blueprints once?"

She conjures the plans.

Cam peers at them to figure out what they can sense and where and how sensitively.

"A lot" and "very sensitively" respectively, apparently. Theoretically the keratin-bubble could at least sort of work but the charge is shaped.

"Shaped charge. Well damn."

"If you have any ideas for evacuating--getting the people on Endore off it, or convincing humans to get off Earth so we can kill the summoner--I'd be overjoyed to hear them."

"Endorë's probably the easier target on convincing people but will, if your Melkor's like mine, be very hard to interfere with without catastrophic risk and escalation... Does the bomb react to the summoner's death? If you could figure out via model precisely where they are, a demon could kill them without having to dig so much as a well."

She checks. "It does."

"Ugh. - Are the lizard-kangaroos chipped?"

"Nope. And humans who aren't daeva can't be, it kills them, so I'm not confident that's changeable."

"If you could chip the lizard-kangaroo there's something that might work."

"The summoner or Melkor? Because it worked on me just fine."

"The summoner."

"Well, like I said, lethal to non-daeva humans. What good would it do if it worked?"

"I have been very careful about leaking some information to Hell for reasons, but this is kinda high-stakes. You good to keep infosec on it?"

"Shan't say a word to my own fork on it if you ask me not to."

"You have a fork? How'd you do that?"

"If a daeva chips themself the chip copies down their brain well enough that if you go back to Hell where Mandos doesn't get backups, dig the chip out, and make an Elf body around it--that's how I found out it doesn't work for mortal humans--you can fork yourself. And if they summon something and die they daeva-fy just fine."

"Okay. So. Secrets time. The inability to make minds is not absolute."

"You have my undivided attention!"

"If you make a chip the data is all there. It just magically doesn't work. But if you copy it - not with demon powers, just, you need a chip reading thing - and print it onto a blank - that works. If you can chip and fork the summoner the fork might be able to dismiss Melkor. I don't know if this would work."

"...Well. I'd want to try it on some other kangaroo-lizard first, since, if I try chipping the summoner and it kills them..."

"Yeah, exactly. And you would also have to be able to place a chip correctly without going deep enough to trigger the bomb."

"Even if that doesn't work, if I can finagle it right, this could be invaluable in saving Elf lives. Maitimo is alive because I happened to grab him before a Vala killed him and managed to drag what was left of his body back to Hell with me, which included his intact chip. Making me the first demon ever to actually steal someone's soul."

"Yeah.

Won't do anything for the humans or Dwarves on Endorë though."

"There aren't any humans on Endore."

"Aren't there? There were some, very new, when I arrived. Like, weeks old, orcs were teaching them to write. I guess maybe if your Valar are daeva your Eru can't just casually install species with lousy timing."

"There's tree-people, though. Who's Eru?"

"I haven't met the guy but reportedly he is to Valar as Valar are to Maiar - do you have Maiar?"

"...Maybe?"

"Valar are big magic things, Maiar are a range of smaller magic things, and Eru is, like, God. Elves claim to be a created species, humans-on-Endorë certainly look like they are, I didn't meet any tree people, Dwarves are great though have you met any Dwarves they kind of shot me a lot but I don't hold that against them there were signs posted and everything..."

"Ada may have. I haven't been to the surface of Endore, personally."

"Ada's your fork?"

"Yep. We decided to take advantage of the fact that of necessity the forks look like Elves."

"Makes sense. What's she working on while you try to route around the Earth being rigged to blow?"

"Figuring out more about what exactly Melkor is up to."

"Mine was having a deceptively low-tech war because if he escalated too much the Valar would have gotten off their asses. - I should give you the design for the chip-melting suicide things, I assume being caught by your Melkor is bad even if it's not as bad as being caught by mine."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. What happened if you were caught by your Melkor?"

"Destructive uploading, arbitrary number of forks sped up arbitrarily much, horrifying torture." He rummages in his files and de-chiplocks the plans for the thing. "Computer lock chips work on my Elves, you might want to double check for yours."

"That sounds like a good idea. How do I check if my Melkor is doing that."

"Mine was not particularly secretive about it, for psychological warfare reasons, but if the Elves on Endorë don't know about it it's possible yours isn't, you could conjure up his servers and look them over or something..."

"Yeah, probably a good idea. I think I'm going to try that now in the backyard, wanna come?"

"Sure, I'm planning on abusing the fuck out of this time-pausing feature anyway."

Backyard. And Edie conjures--any servers that Melkor is using to torture people.

"Oops," she says, as the entire spatially available backyard fills with computer, and then, "Fuck."

"Yyyyyep."

"Well now I guess I get to explain to Aegnor that it is in fact worth it to evacuate the Earth."

"Worth it yes, feasible to do, not necessarily."

"Yeah. Argh."

"You could publicize on Earth that ex-summoners get to be daeva, give them a bit, and blow the place."

"The fact that the lizard-kangaroo-fairy who wasn't even an ex-summoner was pretty zen about the extinction event several million years ago does not make me thrilled with the prospect."

"Yeah."

"I'm going to want to explore a lot more of option-space before I go with the one that irrevocably sunders families."

Nod.

"Especially with Milliways time-stopping meaning no one's getting tortured while I dither."

"Yeah, that's a perk."

"So what horrific choice did you have to make."

"Well. My Valar are magic things. They're not immune to black holes unless they get warning. And Melkor really, really wanted them all dead and he can swear oaths and I can verify oaths.

And I can bring the Elves back - that's what pushed it -

The Maiar and Valar weren't chipped though."

"What the hell did you get him to swear."

Cam hands her the text of it.

"Wow," she says, looking it over.

"Worked. He's been quiet as a mouse. There's peace treaties underway between all the incarnate political units - they're rebuilding - I got the binary star system right on the first try and haven't done anything but put chips through a read-write machine and make bodies around them in months -"

"Want some help?"

"You'd have to come back to my New Valinor and my understanding is this would lose you the door to here."

"Unless I'm badly mistaken, Mandos can't reach this place."

"You're offering to send a fork of yourself back with me?"

"I'm probably going to need to fork more anyway. We should confirm we're from the same Hell, first, or at least that she'll be able to fork my twin once she's demonified."

"...okay, we could check our indices of mail sent to Fairyland in the last concordance and see if we're both on it, me writing my parents and you writing your sister?"

"Sounds about right."

Cam searches his.

They do in fact appear to be from the same Hell.

"Okay, same Hell. ...Weird that there are other Hells."

"No kidding."

"It's probably also important if you'll be able to correspond with the rest of you from where I'm at."

"Yeah...not sure if I can meaningfully send her home with you if summoning doesn't normally work in that Arda..."

"Oh, it does now, I just didn't want to explain at the time - once the Valar were dead it worked. The dead humans and Dwarves don't have an afterlife or chips but they can summon. I think before that the Valar had some general interdict versus -" handwave, "stuff - that hedged out most summoning but didn't lock it down specifically, and then I showed up and they were alarmed and tightened it up so no more daeva could be summoned, and then -"

"Yeah. You can copy over a my chip if I conjure it, right, I don't have to dig it out of my skull again?"

"Yeah, although the apparatus to read-and-write it is a little elaborate."

"How elaborate?"

"Bout the height of that server rack. ...We should get rid of these servers somehow."

"Fire?"

"We'd burn down all the trees... Maybe we should ask Bar whether she prefers the trees burned or the entire place heaped with interpolated silicon dust."

"Good idea."

Bar prefers the silicon dust option, please, it will blow away eventually.

Interpolated dust!

Coughing! "I was expecting you to scale down the servers," he remarks.

"I really should have done that, yeah."

"I'm not immediately sure who I'd have summon your fork. There are people around - explaining things to everyone I resurrect - not sure they'd summon an unbound demon on my say-so though -"

"Oh, technically I'm not unbound, just bound lightly enough it might as well be the same thing."

"I'm loose. Kid didn't doodle his way into a binding. Are you envisioning being summoned to New Valinor or just walking out my door?"

"Well, since there's no one here to summon new me..."

"I don't know what the mail protocol between you and Ada and any other demons who may be about is, you could've been planning to come with me yourself and send your fork back there or something - how are you seeing this working?"

"I was planning to go back and send Aoide with you. I figured it probably couldn't be insurmountable to find someone who'd summon her with light enough bindings. Tyelcormo comes to mind, he's my current summoner."

"Tyelcormo's pet Maia hasn't stopped howling since Valinor got holed."

"...Oh."

"Yeah I'm not super popular some places."

"What about Maitimo?"

"He's not convenient to New Valinor but might summon you, yeah."

"Well, that's something."

"I can try the people he sent me to help get everybody acquainted with being alive again first, one of them might do it, it'll save the lightleaper delay."

"Probably better than nothing even with the delay, but yeah."

"I'd probably send an unmanned drone or something rather than wait ten days. I wasn't planning to stop working until every Valian Elf was walking around again; I'll use this place while I've got it but after that nope."

"Yeah, that's fair."

"Eventually there'll probably be an ex-Dwarf demon or something and we can set up comms that way. For now I think it's all me. ...Might not even be a good idea to have your fork come to New Valinor, there's dead people on Endorë too."

"There is that, yeah," she sighs.

"And I stand by my priority ordering but if there's another pair of metaphorical hands..."

"Yeah."

"So I can send Maitimo a drone message and he can summon Aoide and she can put some populations back where they belong minus their prion diseases."

"Minus their prion diseases?"

"Enemy got real cute with ways to kill people."

...Scale model of all the people her Melkor has killed with prion diseases?

"Well, fuck."

"Locals didn't understand it past the river being poisoned, didn't look escalatory..."

"Why was he trying to avoid escalation?"

"Valar wouldn't show up and ruin his fun if it looked like a fair fight."

Snort. "Naturally."

"The Valar were kind of aggressively unhelpful, yeah."

"Doesn't surprise me in the least."

"I guess yours at least couldn't issue a Doom, that not being a daeva power."

"Doom?"

"My Noldor had to fight their way off Valinor, they weren't supposed to leave, and the Valar got pissed and cursed them. I went to the Valar and was like 'have you considered that based on the wording of this thing it could leak into other worlds' and that's when they interdicted summoning. Did limit the Doom to the bloodlines and not literally anyone who followed the Noldor in some way whether they'd been warned or not, though."

"Ours did send us off with a few parting ill-wishes but I wouldn't expect those to have any particular metaphysical effect."

"Mine didn't definitely do anything but them being magic kinda things and not daeva I didn't want to chance it. Also meant I had to avoid being particularly follow-y at the Noldor."

"Well, I have definitely not gone out of my way to do that."

"They're pretty followable if you don't have a reason to avoid it, they have serious organizational competence going on."

"And they're really likeable on a personal level, too, or at least the ones I've met so far are."

"I may not have been relaxed enough or something to appreciate their personalities thus."

"...Well, if yours had to actually kill people at Alqualonde, that might have dinged their personability. And my primary reasons for liking Tyelcormo, for example, wouldn't necessarily apply to you."

"Yeah, they were probably under more stress in my version."

"Dunno how much of that is our different interventions and how much of that is different starting conditions."

"I didn't show up in time to avert Alqualondë."

"I'm really glad I did. I mean, people still died, but--it's going to do people a world of good that they didn't do it, I think."

"Yep."

"I'm being horribly insensitive, aren't I."

"My feelings are a few million slots down on 'list of things that are problems related to my having black holed an inhabited planet'."

"Well, yes, but until we're out of Milliways and Aoide happens I can't do anything about those higher-slot things."

"Yeah, I'm just - not prioritizing self-soothing, here, I'm not going to get on your case for talking about it."

"That's alright, I'm used to having higher standards for my own behavior than the people around me do. Comes of being a demon who takes summons."

"Amen. So to speak."

"And I do not prefer to be horribly insensitive so if I am being so I would prefer to be informed for my own sake so I can teach myself not to do that better."

"I don't want to get into a habit of being precious about people being insensitive to me on this one..."

"Fair."

"But I appreciate the thought."

"I have the dubious comfort that anything Melkor might want my powers for he could do himself."

"Yeah, if he tries to make a deal with you it won't be for that."

"Given the forking maybe I should make it policy that if one of me tries to make a deal with Melkor the others should gang up on her and prevent it."

"Yeah, yours can't swear sufficiently bindingly, it'd never be worth the risk."

"I don't think one of me would try to deal with Melkor but since mind-altering oaths are a thing contingency plans are a decent idea."

"Oh? What if all he wanted you to do was unsummon the Valar in some way that he can't for some reason - and then he'd shut down all those servers -"

"...It wouldn't surprise me at all if the Valar are in some way a restraining influence on him and since he can't swear thoroughly enough to be satisfactory that he wouldn't just start back up again with the torture it seems obviously not worth it."

"Yeah. But if he came up with a way to swear."

"I really don't think there's any method of swearing he could use that I'd trust enough."

"Probably for the best. I'd worked out a way to verify swearing in advance, Melian helped - she's a Maia Queen on Endorë, if you don't have Maiar I wonder who's there -"

"Tyelcormo...does have a dog."

"...and what is the nature of the dog."

"It never occurred to me to ask!"

"Well, my one's Huan is a Maia, they come in a variety of things-they-do-with-themselves and that one decided to be a dog. Can talk, by magic-not-chip osanwë so I could hear it, but doesn't usually."

"I will inquire into Maiar when I leave Milliways. Actually, I can probably just conjure something to check but I need to think it over to avoid needing to interpolate a room full of paper."

"Or you could ask Bar to loan you something? Sounded like she can do that."

"That's such a better idea. Bar?"

Maiar in the world you have been visiting are shapeshifting swarm intelligences.

"Whoa. ...Cool."

"Swarm intelligences?"

They are made of many pieces, which individually are not sapient, and assemble into groups, which are.

"My friend's dog is a shapeshifting swarm intelligence. Huh."

"It's also possible he's a dog. Don't know how the parallelism works."

"Bar, do you have access to any relevant information?"

According to what I have available he is a Maia.

"Cool."

"Do swarm Maiar do osanwë?"

With one another. There is an interpreter available for chip-loading.

"Ooh, I don't think I got that one."

"There's some tempting stuff - do you also have the non-chiploaded blessings?"

"I might sort of have every blessing on Maitimo's list."

"Nice."

"Emily looks...very angelic, with hers."

"Does she go in for the halo too?"

"Yeah, but I meant more in terms of 'no one else goes in for that kind of body modification that casually' than 'Earthly images of the divine'."

"Ah, gotcha."

"Granted she looks much less tacky than usually happens when daeva try doing things with gems."

"I'm not forming a clear mental image here."

Edie conjures an image! Emily has an actually attractive design of various blessing-jewels set into her skin.

"Ooh, nifty."

"She has very well-developed aesthetic sensibilities."

"Bet she likes Elves."

"She does, in fact!"

"Once somebody, maybe Fëanáro, compared the idea of an Elf saying they'd build something pretty to live in after the war with the idea of a human saying they'd sleep after the war."

"Well, being a daeva obviates the need for sleep."

"Yeah. I usually don't sleep even when I'm not trying to repopulate a planet."

"Yeah, it's just so much less interesting than almost anything else you could be doing with your time."

Nod nod.

"Dreams are enough fun that I do occasionally take a full night's sleep but not terribly often."

"I'm usually not that interested in dreams, it's more of a 'comfy, not in the mood for coffee, don't wanna get up and play the violin' situation."

"Huh. Dreams can be really fun, though."

"Sure, just, seldom occurs to me to seek them out - might be that I don't tend to remember them in much detail."

"Ah, that'd explain it."

Nod.

"...We're making small talk. About sleep."

"Well, we could do unremitting shop talk but we're on paused time."

"No, it's just, Hell doesn't so much have weather, this is possibly equivalent..."

"My understanding is that demons mostly small talk about media but I guess that's less generic, if there's no overlap."

"Overlap?"

"In what people've seen. If I start talking about Atriama and you've never heard of it..."

"Oh, I have, actually, that was good."

"It's my favorite."

"I like the one with the incompetent Dr. Faustus better."

"That one's cute, I don't know, maybe I didn't see a very good production..."

"It's not as aesthetic as Atriama but I liked the plot better. Might be down to differences in taste."

"Yeah, probably. I made a refugee planet to hide my summoner and some other people on and they were threatening to take years to name it so I was like 'or we could call it Atriama!'"

"I would not have threatened to name a refugee planet Faustus but I see your point."

"Nah, Gretchen."

"Better, but probably still not up to elf standards of pretty."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Maybe I'm wrong, it just doesn't seem to match their language aesthetic as closely as Atriama does."

"I'm not sure if their language aesthetic is that strict or if that's just what Quenya and Thindarin happen to sound like and they could also appreciate Yiddish."

"Well, Feanaro could."

"I was warned not to bring up how many languages I know at a time when he couldn't afford to be distracted."

"I will be surprised if he doesn't at least want to fork into a daeva once the option's available."

"Yeah, probably. Put ten of him in a room and have them figure out how to travel to Limbo."

"After Melkor's solved."

"Yeah, then."