"That's how math works. How do you catch them? How'd you catch Talon in particular, she wouldn't likely have been trying to bite somebody and that's how I caught her."

"Breaking into a liquor store. We have patrols out at night, we have cameras in hot spots, but often you can manage if you're just fast enough to the site of all the particularly flagrant crimes."

"She did mention she was going to rob a liquor store but I didn't want to reinvent the justice system over it and it didn't seem to deserve the death penalty so I let her go anyway."

"I'm glad. She'll probably be free again in a couple months, less murderously inclined."

"Still able to rob liquor stores?"

"As long as it doesn't involve violence against living things."

"How was the 'violence against living things' rule chosen and parameterized?"

"Limitation of the magic we're using. You could either pick species or pick a broader category than that; picking species doesn't work very well because there are so many different peoples running around and many of them would have a justified grievance if we released vampires who can kill them and pretty much only them. There was an effort to restrain it enough that they can stomp on anthills, but it introduced some weird vulnerabilities. Magic doesn't have a concept of personhood, while living is nice and concrete. 

It only proscribes physical violence directed at living things, so they can actually still poison people or start fires in inhabited areas, but making it more expansive than that turned out to be a bit of a nightmare."

"Aren't some of them going to go ahead and poison people or start fires?"

"Yep. We're tracking an initial batch to see how many and how frequently."

"Fair enough."

"My best guess is that about half will be releasable with a chip because of personality traits that make them predictably not very murderous once chipped. Some definitely won't be."

"You think you'll have a good enough screening procedure on that?"

"Depends how well it has to scale. If it's small-scale and a couple highly trained people can do it all, yes. Do you think we should be doing something else?"

"Hm, what's the drawback of doing a more - PSA oriented thing, don't invite them in, don't go out after dark -"

"Either gets ignored - there's something that makes people fail to notice magic or accept obviously nonsense mundane explanations until they've been exposed enough in different ways - or is explicit enough I'd worry about mass panic and witch hunts."

"Something? What kind of something?"

"Good question! I don't have the slightest idea. I do have examples, though. A demon got into a fight with a different species of demon on the metro in New York last week. Both of them are like vampires in shifting faces when they're fighting; one bled purple and one punched through the walls of the train in three places. Witnesses said they thought the guys were probably black or Hispanic, heavyset, averageish height, don't recall what they were wearing. You can look up a picture if you want; one had horns."

"What the fuck!"

"In even more blatant incidents you'll get 'guy in a costume' or 'guy with some kind of skin condition', which can be attributed to not wanting to tell the cops 'it was a demon!'. But I don't buy that that explains all of it."

"It would not seem so. Yikes. What constitutes enough exposure -? And how do people who get enough exposure after having seen an incident they wrote off remember the incident later?"

"What constitutes enough exposure varies by person. When we select agents for this program we tell them that there are secretly demons, tell them we'll take them to look at captured demons, take them to look at captured demons, and then ask them to affirm afterwards that they saw captured demons and to describe them. That always works."

"Have you experimented with leaving steps out?"

"If we don't take them to see the demons they assume it's some kinda hazing. All the other steps seem necessary for some people but not all of them."

"I guess that would be a reasonable assumption for any but the hardest core X-Files fans. - Do you have the X-Files yet?"