you took your time with the call | Glowfic Constellation

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls.

Yes. It should be possible to summon a demon and, depending how their powers work, either get a Silmaril from them or get the location of the patch of ground closest to the Silmaril from them or at worst do binary search over conjured models of parts of the planet to find the Silmarils. Yes, it should be possible to summon an angel to then dig the thing out of bedrock. And then they won't live life walking against the currents of fading, they will be whole again, they can summon some more for spaceship plans and head away from Earth much sooner, and much more powerful, than they imagined.

Also, the curious demon might go back to Hell and conjure some more Silmarils, if their powers happen to shake out that way, and might start handing out Silmarils to anyone on Earth who wants one, because why not, and the oath might still be in force, the risk is unimaginable -

- they can of course get a Silmaril and then, if it turns out they can be conjured, not let the demon go home, that is merely incredibly rude and might strand someone a dimension away from their family for centuries. It at least does not risk unleashing the oath on this innocent world that has, at last, left the scars of the last time that happened beyond the reach of living memory.

For three months after Revelation he ignores his father's calls because he is childishly frightened, because his well-polished coping skills are fraying, because if he feels the tug of that oath on him again it will be too late to kill himself and therefore he wants, very badly, to do it now. For three months he wavers.

And then he answers the calls, and takes some vacation, and goes home for a Fëanorian planning session. He doesn't remember what loving them felt like but he remembers that he loved them, that it was once very important to him, and he knows he would do this for someone he loved. They plan and they read and they learn and they practice - without summoning, because daeva get the languages you speak when you summon them and so the first daeva they summon will know, if observant enough, they're not of this society -

- he gets two weeks vacation a year, they plan very very slowly -

- and six years after Revelation they have a binding and a few possible options for payment and a plan for the case where Silmarils turn out to be trivially conjurable and conjurable ones oath-relevant. Maedhros is terrified, and miserable, but no one can tell. He prides himself on that.

Curufin doesn't want to do it because he speaks Khuzdul and the Dwarves who taught him it in confidence did not give him permission to share it. (They did give him permission, when it came up one optimistic night, to share it with his father should his father ever return to life, and so Fëanor speaks Khuzdul too.) Maglor's pretending to be a currently-dead pop star and that invites its own host of complications.

Maedhros does not speak Khuzdul. He speaks the Black Speech in addition to a few human languages and Thindarin and Quenya, but the language won't scare daeva in itself (if they get his exact vocabulary, they might be frightened.) Maedhros picks a place in the castle in Canada that could be a room in an unusually wealthy human's house, unremarkable, and he painstakingly copies all but one bit of the circle they decided on together, and he calls in everyone to look and make sure he did it right, and he dismisses them all - one Elf alone is not obviously inhuman, two or more together raises suspicions -

- and he completes the circle.

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from_scratch

Cam does not mind!

Toddler tugs on wings. "Woah," she declares. "Your best demon."

"He really is," Claire agrees. "The best person, even."

from_scratch

"Aww."

Claire's father is curious about the Proxima Centauri project and what prompted it - "we haven't even settled Mars yet -"

from_scratch

"The advantage of Mars is mostly that it's nearby. Summoning allows instant exchange of everything except people, so once the cost of getting people to Proxima is paid for it's just as good for all non-commuting purpose, and it's the sort of thing humanity's going to want to do eventually anyway. Also, Proxima Centauri B might actually be easier to terraform than Mars - hobbyists in Hell have done both projects but their results are confounded a little by not being able to do all the orbital mechanics and the stars just right on a blank slate, but that's the guess."

"Can't make a solar system to play with in Hell?"

from_scratch

"You can, if you get far enough away from everything and do some tricks with frame of reference. Most people aren't patient enough to get far enough away from everything just to play with terraforming, and we've only had the propulsion systems to allow the frame of reference tricks for a little while."

"That makes sense. Do you have someone lined up for the terraforming?"

from_scratch

"Yeah, there's a small team who're really excited about it."

"It's pretty exciting!"

from_scratch

"Mm-hm! One thing I really like as a side consequence of the turning into a daeva thing is that it means traveling somewhere from which travel is impractical doesn't mean permanent cutoff - sure, if you settle Proxima you might not leave till you die but after that you can go wherever -"

"And you can hop over there and watch colony setup, if you want -"

from_scratch

"I in particular have the problem that there are hundreds of circles out for me, but maybe that will die down by the time they get there, in which case I'm absolutely going to do that."

"Oh, you can't distinguish them?"

from_scratch

"Randoms can be distinguished from specifics. No way to tell them apart beyond that except by timing - recent timing, then they fall into the mess with the others - and I have enough that I might take one by accident before a timed one was completed."

"I suppose that problem wouldn't have come up before you. Well, five years is a long time, it might well die down."

from_scratch

"That's the hope. I would really love to be there."

There's another ship launch. The ship launches are not as cinematic as would be optimal; the colony ships themselves are assembled in orbit, and the passengers fairied up to them, so there's no event to film. They still get a lot of play.

Nothing happens to the Moon.

The appeals court rules that daeva are not entitled to daeva jurors, but that daeva who are permanent U.S. residents are eligible for jury duty. Elsewhere a different appeals court rules that Mrindeh can adopt a baby.

Valinor summons another demon. They've changed up the binding, and this one's obnoxious, but the demon does manage to tell them there're, like, a few specific interested parties they should talk to, and get them a list.

They summon one.

This binding does not let the daeva go within ten feet of anybody, or yell things at them, or go outside with loose hair, and is otherwise a pretty standard careful demon binding.

from_scratch

Mrindeh gets on an agency's waiting list only to be privately offered a baby by somebody following the case. She adopts that one; open adoption.

An architecture nerd demon appears. "Oh - hi - this is a different circle than before -"

"Hi! We're looking for someone to handle correspondence with the daeva worlds, and someone recommended you."

from_scratch

"Yeah - Revelation sent my architecture club a note since he thought architecture people might like it here - but he sent us a copy of the circle you used before too and it was different. I can't go near people? What's this about my hair?" She currently has no hair.

"We, uh, had problems, so we had to revise the rules we were using. You shouldn't have to worry about that, you, uh, don't have any..."

from_scratch

"Sometimes I do, I change it a lot. Not going near anybody at all would be really hard. Do Elves not like hugs or something?"

"There were problems, so we had to change what we were doing."

from_scratch