Might work to achieve -

Phenomenal cosmic power that runs on people skills. Eventually. It's at least a conceivable outcome.

Fantastic.

And there's no way to know if he's started.

They wouldn't necessarily be confined to the bogeymen listed as summonable in the books. Bringing anything out of the Abyss on the recommendation of another resident of the Abyss can be dangerous even when you're powerful enough to do it, but maybe if you're him you can just casually notice who's still there enough to be trustworthy and who's just a predator.

I should have thought of this sooner .Though avoiding any books on summoning would handicap us even more than we're handicapped already -

Yeah.

It's not likely they'll actually get up to a really scary level, there are obstacles, but there isn't an upper bound–

What are the obstacles? ...he can also read minds, that probably helps as much as the people skills -

Oh right, the mindreading.

First obstacle is the rule about repetition making it easier to summon things. If he gets a recommendation for someone who's still hanging on to being a someone, and trusts it, that would be a new summon. He might just not be able to do anything with it. The other thing is, we don't have a whole lot on what society looks like in the Abyss but it sounds like everyone's forced into being a predator or a victim. There'd be plenty of people who want to be evacuated, but not many who can say "yes, here is the name of a trustworthy person who is more dangerous than me, here's something they want that you might be able to give them." Hard to bootstrap.

And the Abyss itself might fight back if he tries rescuing a lot of people. That part's me speculating.

...rescuing people from the Abyss seems like exactly the kind of thing he'd try. Possibly offering it something in exchange, I'm not sure, if he has enough information to guess that it might react.

He should. I'm not sure if there's anything it wants, though, other than taking over the world slightly sooner. If it decides he's a net loss it has plenty of things to throw at him.

It is expected to take over the world eventually?

Eventually. Anything lost to the rest of the world belongs to it by default, and Earth belongs to mortals. Most things from a thousand years ago are either destroyed or forgotten.

It's sort of in the same category as 'demons eat everything eventually.' Inevitable as far as anyone knows, but not remotely urgent. Even the immortal Others don't really worry about it.

Huh. 

I do not know what to do with this information but I'm vaguely concerned.

The demons one might actually be straightforward to fix. They destroy things irrevocably, there isn't much of a corresponding force that creates, and adding a completely unrelated kind of magic might cure that.

But I'm pretty sure the Abyss problem is supposed to be less astronomically slow.

I was actually thinking more about the 'Maitimo dealing with vast incomprehensible forces' bit but that also.

Come to think of it there is a way we could check if he's tried bootstrapping. He'd have to start from the same lists we have, we could summon everything we can and try asking if anyone else asked about other people to bring next...

They'd remember? And be truthful?

No guarantees, but probably? We can read minds too.

The other issue is that if the answer's no, it stops being no as soon as he does talk to one of them.

We don't want to plant the idea if it's not already happening, but we don't have other ways to check - sigh - how likely is he to hurt a lot of people?

With this? Not very. Failure modes are things like a powerful bogeyman running amok, which could be a disaster but wouldn't be unmanageable.

So we leave him to it, probably.

Yeah. And assume that he may or may not have large quantities of backup we don't know about.

Well, we really weren't planning to pick a fight.

I didn't mean it's completely a bad thing. We are on the same side, broadly speaking.

And the more we're hiding from each other the more broadly that needs to be defined, but I still can't think how to fix it.