"Why, what happens then?"

"The process for slowing people down, if you can't settle all their debts, takes a night. Has to start at night, specifically. So if you miss it you'll have to stay another day."

"Okay. I should be able to figure out a check to distinguish the stiuations in that time if there is one - how long does that leave me exactly -"

"I don't keep very close track. We could go outside and check."

"Good idea."

So he pushes Cam's chair outside. 

It's mid-afternoon.

"All right, that gives me a while. I should be able to check news sources on the time scale of a few sidereal hours and see if they're from later than they were when I left. And if they are, then that'll tell me that either this is an alternate universe, or this is a form of time travel that lets me pull information from the future and the future is fixed even after the point of traveler's exit."

"And therefore it's safe to go do whatever you want with the humans?"

"I hope so. I'd want to mull it over for a while first, make sure I'm not missing any coherent possibilities according to which that's still a really bad idea."

Nod. "And what would you want to do with the humans?"

"Eradicate a bunch of diseases, for starters. They're not literate enough yet that I can just teach them all to summon to eliminate scarcity but if I had a couple trustworthy humans available I could summon some daeva through them and make a lot of headway in an unfortunately centralized fashion."

"Their existing rulers aren't much good."

"Yes, I know. Bad human rulers are really bad."

"You think you can do better?"

"I mean, the locals probably have me beat on things like the perceived legitimacy of their dynasties and, uh, Papal approval or whatever? But I'm conveniently unassasinable and probably the moral superior of anyone currently sitting on a throne."

He makes a thoughtful noise.

"What?"

"Just more momentous than most choices we usually make."

"I suppose it is. Anyway, I don't think the first fifteen things I did would involve taking formal political control. Like, thing one is malaria, do you have any idea how many people die of fucking malaria? I could get it on its way to gone in a day."

"What is malaria?"

"It's a disease that may have killed as many as half of all humans who have ever lived!"

"You'll have to back up more, what's a disease?"

"- you don't know what a disease is? Your brother had medicines for humans on his wishlist, even if you guys are always fine."

"I don't really have an interesting in keeping humans, personally, I haven't done much reading about keeping them alive."

"Okay, well, diseases are... kind of like numerous very very tiny injuries or poisonings that add up into a general unwellness, discomfort, and loss of functioning, which are caused by very very tiny creatures or by malnourishment or by other stuff. Malaria's the tiny creature kind, there is a tiny creature that mosquitoes transmit when they bite people."