"Bush. Close, though."

"Yeah, there was that whole thing about the Supreme Court deciding."

"Do we wanna swing that?"

"Hmm, maybe? Bush is more religious, I don't know if that makes him more likely to object to rescuing all Americans in hell."

"He's gotta have family -"

"Probably, yes, but would he trust us on that?"

"You're getting everyone out of hell? - or, wait, you're getting everyone who's an American out of hell?"

"We're getting everyone out of Hell. It's important to have somewhere to repatriate them so we're getting all the Americans out first."

"Oh. That's. Great, I guess. Hell is pretty bad."

"Yep, we think so."

He opens his mouth to say something and then does not. 

And the science team comes back!

"You guys! This place has access to published materials across the entire multiverse. I could spend a lifetime in here. I mean, I can't, because then I'd die, but apart from that."

"Oh. That's great. But we do have a lot of work to do."

"Yeah, I know. But that's the great thing about it, if you have the door closed then supposedly time doesn't even pass on the other side. Actually, I was thinking, if we can adequately demonstrate this enough to be really sure it's working, then since everything we're doing right now is so time-sensitive, we might want to move some of it in here? It's complicated, because of course we don't want the Senior Partners to catch wind of it, so if we want to be really cautious about things we probably shouldn't tell Gunn, let alone any of our new team members, but we could speed up drafting memos, sifting through anything that needs sifting through, taking a vacation from constant fourteen-hour days - or sleeping! We can sleep in here. It'll be a real timesaver. The only side effect is that it'll reduce our apparent lifespans outside by around thirty percent."

"She'll fit right in."

"OK! Well. That's what I've got. I'll just be over here asking the bar about everything it remembers ever happening for the next, I dunno, a while."

She goes ahead and does that.

He goes upstairs.

Karen is hanging out scribbling something in a notebook. Azalea's not in the room and Wishbone is asleep.

"Hey. We met Angel and his buddies."

"Oh. How did that go?"

"He's stupid. That's it, that's the whole thing, he's stupid and in over his head and hasn't got enough sympathy to go around."

"Oh. Well.

"I guess I've been stupid and in over my head before."

"This is the problem with power, everyone's in over their head sometimes but if you're not in power there's a limit to how bad it can be, and if you have power there really isn't."

"I guess. Everyone pretty much has some power, though."