"How does that happen?"

"When Aroden did not appear for the Age of Glory there was a civil war and House Thrune, backed by Hell, won."

"I--okay--you'd think someone would stop that--I guess maybe the giant gaping abyss-hole might have distracted them--"

"Asmodeus, eesh, I am generally pretty firmly opposed to demon lords but there, specifically, Baphomet has a point, and uh are you okay." 

"...I don't really think Baphomet has a point."

"...Not even when the point is very specifically 'fuck Asmodeus' and not, like, any other Baphometian cruft surrounding it?"

"The Worldwound treaty was an incredible edifice of Law that kept the demons contained by a cooperating mass of worst enemies until a party of archmages was able to close the portal. It required treating with every party capable of contributing to the defense and willing to do so including Asmodean Cheliax. Baphomet did not help take Cheliax back from Asmodeus at all, as far as I know."

"...That's a really excellent point and I'm sorry."

"You don't need to be sorry."

"I'm really glad to hear that the portal is closed, though!"

"It's on the whole a good thing though there were already plenty of demons on the material side of the portal at the time and the subsequent collapse in resource investment in the border would really have been better timed as a gradual phase-out over the next ten years."

"Mm, fair. I wonder if anything I can remember from my mother's and my old research on the Abyss would be helpful in putting down the demons that are left. Probably you cannot just get dretches to surrender by offering them naps." 

"I don't think I could rely on the surrender of a dretch even if it was very convincing about wanting a nap."

"They always want naps but that's so incredibly fair."

"It... doesn't seem very evil to want naps," he says dubiously.

"...Well, no? Demons are evil but they're, like, mortal evils condensed down and stripped of mortal goodness, not totally alien evil optimizers, that's qlippoths. Demons generally want things that aren't inherently evil, like personal comforts and safety and for other people to be really impressed with them, just, also, they also want things like to hurt people, and also even when the things they want aren't inherently bad they don't see anything wrong with hurting people to get them and so on."

"I suppose I did not spend much time having conversations with them."

"I did! While they were under very thorough bindings. Obviously they can't be let to run loose on the material plane or anything, but, like, finding ways to improve demonic quality of life that don't trade off against literally everything else any other kind of being might value is an incredibly understudied area."

"Aren't... other uses of those spells... things that trade off against that?"

"Oh, well, yes, but that wasn't the primary reason we were summoning them, we were summoning them to do magical research on the thing where the barrier between the Abyss and the material is really thin in Sarkoris. And then as long as we had them anyway there was no reason not to do things like talk to them or let the dretches take naps or whatever."

"Oh, I see. I'd tend to think that talking to them would be potentially hazardous but I guess I don't specifically believe that about dretches."

"None of the kinds of demons we worked with could hurt you just by talking to you; as long as you commit hard enough to not letting them out no matter what it's perfectly safe." 

"...and yet, if I heard that someone had been led to demon-backed atrocities I would be deeply unsurprised to find that their previous activities included talking to researched demons while committing hard to never letting them out, and would remain pretty unsurprised even if they also never actually let any demons out during their research."

"...Well, yes, but I think that would be more because...someone who's been doing demon-based research is more likely to use demons, if they're going to do atrocities? If you haven't been doing research on demons and you decide to do atrocities then probably you just blow up a city or animate a shitton of skeletons."