"Does Hell have its own unique cuisine traditions involving things you could not possibly make by conventional means, it seems like it might."

"It does! It gets really weird, honestly, considering I grew up on tuna casserole and Chinese takeout, but some of it's not bad."

"I will try something that is not really weird. Or at all horrifying, please let's not eat people even if technically I will acknowledge there's no ethical complaint to be had."

"That I haven't wanted to try either. There's a thing where, you know how fish is composed of flakes, they put sauce in between the flakes, that's neither horrifying nor really weird." He produces some of that, and perfectly ordinary mashed potatoes and roasted zucchini.

She pronounces it delicious. "Do you know how some people end up demons as opposed to angels or fairies -"

"I have a guess, but it's only that - something to do with personality affinity with the magic. Somebody I've been working with summoned a few ex-human demons at approximate random and one of them was an entrepreneur and one of them was an ex-student of mine who minored in sculpture, which combined with my aggregate impression of what the demons in Hell are like leads me to suspect demons are people who make things - and accordingly angels are people who change things and fairies are some combination of people who move stuff around and leftovers, more ex-humans seem to be fairies. What d'you think you'd be?"

" - hmmm. I haven't started any businesses or made sculptures once I got past the cereal-box-apartment-blocks-with-playdough-people stage - is, like, lobbying and advocacy the relevant kind of changing things or would it be more concrete than that -"

"I'm not sure enough to put a quiz on the internet, let alone make pronouncements about it, but it might be the relevant kind, or a relevant kind."

"Then maybe I'd be an angel. Will be an angel. There being an afterlife kind of changes a lot of things about how you plan your life."

"Oh?"

" - well, like - I'm from Kentucky and I was really active in an anti-death-penalty group there - and last week one of our staunchest opponents took the floor in the House to say that obviously now violent criminals should be kept alive as long as possible, considering -"

"- oh joy. I'm going to guess this wasn't from the 'someone might summon them inadequately bound if they were a summoner' angle but the 'they might not suffer enough in Limbo' angle."

" - yeah, the latter. They'd be free, can't have that - and I don't know where we're going to go from here, we're obviously not going to switch to trying to get the state to execute people but I think right-to-suicide for prisoners might be the wrong angle to start on that - might just work on humane conditions, do you know the kinds of shit they're doing to make sure people can't summon in jail?"

"I bet it's not good. Went on the 'con' side."

" - I didn't mean to - it was obviously the right call, it was a brilliant call, just - we're not done -"

"- don't worry about it, I'm not trying to, like, avoid the concept that sometimes people do bad things in response to good things. I did think of it in advance - they might have come up with stuff I didn't. It'd probably be conceptually simplest to just put prisoners in zero g, you need a floor to summon and then you don't have to worry about what counts as a writing material, or keeping them all under constant watch."

"If you built them floating prisons I bet they'd take them but there are health effects of extended exposure to zero gravity. Kentucky's presently just installed lots of walls so there aren't any sufficiently large spaces - what kind of slanted is slanted enough, that might also suffice -"

Cam has to look it up and reads her the figure. "- not untenable, and you could still have the beds level if they weren't very wide, or give people hammocks maybe."

"It's less catchy than 'the state shouldn't be in the business of murder' but that's promising, maybe we can hire some architects to submit drafts to the state at the same time as they get sued for inhumane conditions and they'll pick the path of least resistance."

"Let me know if it seems like having a demon to put up the architecture is looking like the deciding factor."

"You'll definitely hear about it! Much better than having people on staff endeavor to demon themselves, and they would."

"Being a daeva is nice but I wouldn't have died young to accomplish it on purpose."

"Are there drawbacks?"

"My default location is Hell and my method of transit is indistinguishable circles. I'm hoping people cut it out with the gags now in spite of that asshat with the six-book deal, but I took a few gagged summons trying to get a chance to get ahold of my parents, before I got the Elf one, and that wasn't fun - that being a thing people can do to you isn't fun, and it's not impossible to gag or excessively bind fairies or angels either. There was briefly a zoo with some of all three, bound gagged and untasked, until they all dropped their wings and were boring-looking so the proprietor dismissed them. The last time somebody had it in for me they took it out on me; if that happens again my summoner is for unalterable metaphysical reasons in harm's way. I wouldn't have personally benefited from the option to go to Limbo instead but some people might prefer the relatives they could find that way to the smaller populations of the daeva realms."

...nod. "There'll probably some 'daeva are people' cases in the near future and once those wind their way through the courts making gags illegal really shouldn't be hard, for what that's worth - just fuss at Congress a lot about how the inability of some summoners to take responsibility is making it harder for decent folk because the demons can't tell us apart -"