"I mean, sure! Fairy stargazing trips are very cool. But having to take one to get away from light pollution isn't. Oh, also a bunch of species have gone extinct, which demons can fix, and a bunch of languages have too, which we can't."

"You can't? ...I guess if the language didn't have a written form..." 

"Most languages in danger don't, or they just have a crappy attempt to transliterate into Latin orthography."

"And if they don't have a written language, they're probably not summoning?" 

"Right. It's not a priority next to all the public health and anti-war stuff that needs doing but it'll be nice if I can do a full summoning rollout and incidentally some Osage speakers summon somebody and some immortal daeva get their languages in the process."

"And they wouldn't become immortal daeva themselves," she sighs. 

"Well, ideally they will, but weirdly enough languages acquired through summoning stick better than languages learned the long way."

"They do? Really?"

"Yeah. There seem to be a few things going on there - one is that a summon-acquired language is sort of a snapshot of a dialect in time. It can be used to participate in the language community as it develops, someone with summoning-acquired Portuguese is just as good at it as whoever summoned them in that regard as in anything else, but the summoner's Portuguese will adapt over time to the new vocabulary - they'll have all the new associations with words that change in meaning over their lifetime, they'll forget vocabulary that falls out of fashion, they'll feel awkward using sentence constructions that are no longer popular. The daeva can revert to Portuguese-as-spoken-at-time-of-summon any time. And there doesn't seem to be a limit to how many languages we can hold that way. I only know a handful of languages the long way but I've got dozens from summonses."

"Being a daeva sounds so cool," she sighs. 

"It's pretty great. I'll check my mail on the hour and see if anybody wants to be a test subject and you can summon 'em if you want."

"Yay!" 

Further background reading ensues until Cam's reminder to check his mail goes off. "Got one! She's gonna want to go adopt a baby. Apparently she has recommendations from six different baby-related interest groups, wow."

"Should we maybe have an adoptable baby sourced before we summon her?" 

"Do you have one in mind? It didn't sound like she'd mind prowling orphanages on her own."

"I don't have one in mind, I'm just...concerned what might happen if she stands out in the wrong way. Not anything specific, just a sort of nebulous sense of unease." 

"The thing that's worrying me a little is that she's - well, she looks like a naturally occurring daeva, but in a dark-skinned way, so she'll probably get read as black."

"--What do naturally occurring daeva look like?" 

"Uncorrelated mixes of ethnic features. Here's her picture on one of her recommendation letters." He displays it. "So at a glance she looks black but the hair looks more like what you'd find on an Asian person, same with the eyes except they're green, the nose looks European to me, if for some reason I were just looking at her skeleton I think I'd guess Polynesian build? All blended up like that, matching human patterns only by coincidence."

"--Yes, she'd be read as colored. She does look oddly mixed, to me, but it's not like people with mixed ancestry get the benefit of the doubt." 

"Yes. Might make adopting a baby hard, at least in the United States. I guess I could suggest she bleach herself."

"Maybe--but given that she has no legal identity, it might be easier to find an under-the-table adoption if she presents as a wealthy colored woman looking for a colored baby than an odd-looking white woman looking for a white baby." 

"Maybe. I don't know how much she's going to care about the exact details of the baby, some folks of this type build up weirdly specific fantasies about the babies they imagine they will one day have if demon/human relations ever improve, maybe she wants a Vietnamese one in particular or something... or, more likely, she wants one whose birth mother was eating decently and not under a lot of stress during the pregnancy, because that affects lots of things..."

"I can't say as I know much about adoption, but she's not going to have much luck getting a baby in this country who isn't the same color people think she is." 

"Maybe she's already frantically researching 1928 adoption practices in South America."