"That does sound pretty unpleasant."

"And it's not really the wings, I want to be a demon."

"I know you do." Squish. "But you probably don't want to be a failed experiment who does not in fact get to be a demon because something went wrong, so till we figure it out..."

"Thought about wishing for it, couldn't think of a backup wish."

"Well, because Gem's being careful the wish granter will still be there when you think of one."

"Yeah.

Thank you for not dragging me home or getting mad. I should've told you where I was going."

"You did tell me where you were going, you just didn't tell me when you changed plans before you got there." Squish. "I appreciate the first part and I bet next time you will let me know if the second thing happens."

"Hell's really weird and nice."

"Oh? Practically all I've heard is that it's tacky."

"All cities that aren't made by Elves are not pretty enough. It does look kind of ridiculous. But it's full of demons and they're all safe and don't have to be scared and there's nothing keeping them small - there's a demon lady who wants a child, I want to find a way to get her one..."

"Aw - that would be nice, if there were a good way to let daeva who wanted kids have them without screwing up the infosec or anything -"

"Maybe we could bring a Stork baby to Space Arda and then she could just come there on a long-term summons and make ships and terraform planets for them - Space Arda's not a secret -"

"It's not, but she'd probably notice that her baby didn't have a belly button."

He frowns. "...you could wish a baby a belly button, but that'd be sort of wasteful to wish. Could you do it with wizardry -"

"Probably, but it'd be sort of wasteful of spell development time."

"We're bottlenecked on trustworthy demons and demons who really want to have kids who we can help do that are probably going to be willing to do lots of stuff for us."

"There's lots of people I'd trust to raise kids who I wouldn't trust with interdimensional travel. It'd encourage those demons to accept the long-term summons and maybe give people a chance to get to know them well enough to determine if they could be trusted, I suppose."

"Yeah. And people we could trust with the secret interdimensional travel exists while not actually giving them a way to do it - the fact it exists is going to be hard to keep a secret for very much longer anyway - and if they know it exists they can be dropped in Edda or here to terraform planets for us -"

"It's a good idea, although sourcing the babies from Stork might turn out to be less efficient than clearing out orphanages from somewhere else. Do you want to send a proposal to Space or shall I?"

"You can but if they think it's a good idea I want to go wander around in Hell asking about demons who might want to adopt a kid."

"There's probably a more comprehensive way to find interested demons than wandering around and asking."

"We can get the word out it's a thing and ask people to put their name on a list but people who made it known in Hell they'd like to adopt child ex-summoners are probably a safer group to pull from than people who'd put their name on a list like that."

"You have a point. And you can make it look like you're interviewing potential adoptive demons, can't you. Okay."

Squeeze. "I want to go write a paper for the linguistics guild in Vanda Nossëo about demon languages!"

"Sounds fun!"