Cam accumulates a handful of little Ingwës.

"- huh. All right. Pretty sure I can swing this, then."

"What about that is promising?"

"If there's a bunch of him there's likelier to be a helpful him, and he's likelier to want to get off on a good foot with the rest of the universe."

"Thanks for doing this."

"Just doing my job."

" - are you?"

" - my job is to do and enable as many important things as I can."

" - huh."

Cam writes to Amriac and sets about checking his mail for a response. "Summoning might ignore your beetle shell like Promise's gates do," he remarks.

"Worth checking. - I am very annoyed how many things ignore my beetle shell but I guess it says unambiguously good things about our odds against the beetle."

"Promise and whatever nonsense dumped us here, so far? Am I forgetting anything?"

"Just those, but two days ago I thought it was totally impossible for anything to affect."

"My intuition is to do with none of us traveling spatially through the beetle shell but I guess local teleportation and plane shifts also don't and now that I think about it I'm not sure if I expect the shell to extend underground."

"It does! And the effect works on divinations as well as on teleportation and plane shifts and so on."

"But only in one direction, in that case."

"We figured out a workaround for scrying out, in my grandfather's day."

"What is it?"

"Paired crystal balls, one in and one dug into a crack in the shell, set up to behave identically."

"Pricey."

"Summoning could interact with your afterlife setup. I don't know whether to expect that or not, maybe it would only kick in if somebody got eaten by the Abyss or won't interfere at all, but where I'm from if you're a summoner you become a daeva when you die."

"Got any trustworthy folks who ping evil?"

"One or two but they're working on it, they shouldn't by the time they die."

"Got any trustworthy folks who don't like where they're set up to go - like, it'd split them up from people anyway, say - and aren't working on that very fast?"

" - could talk Hagan around, probably."