"It is customary to summon apsels without letting us talk."

" - I want to preface this by saying that we've done a lot of thinking about containment and safety procedures when interacting with powerful, dangerous extradimensional entities, and it makes a lot of sense to me that sometimes there'd be safety procedures that sound unimpressive or careless or stupid -

- but that sounds like a terrible idea."

"Oh, yeah, it's stupid as fuck, hands down, it does adverse selection and negotiation friction and does not serve the purpose it's intended to serve."

"Which was -"

"Preventing the apsels from talking their summoners into making unwise bargains."

Nod. "Do angels and fairies make things, too?"

"No, that would be redundant - I mean, I guess in principle you could have redundancy but we don't. Angels change things and fairies move things."

"At the same sort of astounding scale?"

"Apsels have the best range followed by fairies followed by angels. We can also copy stuff, they have to do their own detail work every time. Otherwise yeah."

"Your world sounds like it'd be an interesting place."

"It's lovely!"

"How're you liking it here?"

"It's less lovely but there's more scope for my talents and word is nobody's using Mars."

"Not that we've noticed. I've been asking all the questions, is that just because you can read our notes later?"

"I mean, that would take some digging around, I assume you don't title them 'Environmental Enforcement Secrets Volumes One Through Twelve', but it's crossed my mind. What questions you ask is interesting anyway."

"We do have a volume with everything we know about species of demon that is just titled Known Species of Demon, June 1998 Update'. It's very classified but it never occurred to us to achieve that with naming obscurity."

"Apsel-proof cryptography is possible but very difficult and the state of the art requires brain surgery."

"Awww, and here I thought I had a remarkably good excuse to make everyone switch to using my native language. Brain surgery we're quite good at, we'll probably do that instead."

"I can't do translation naively, it'd certainly slow me down. Kind of the Navajo Code Talker strategy."

"Exactly! But it'd mostly just be on principle, there's not much I'm desperate to keep you from seeing. There was always - enough dangerous nonsense around that we couldn't expect password-protected computers to solve it."

"I'm getting that sense."

"And everyone turns evil if they die wrong and we don't get to their body in time."

"Do they tend to be specifically interested in hacking into their old workplace?"

"Hasn't come up yet. Murdering your family is exceptionally common so I think it - might, among the kind of person who formerly cared enough about what we do."

"How common's exceptionally?"