"I sincerely do not at all expect that to happen, but if it does I am not going to murder any of my children." She looks at Hagan. " - unless they, like, grow up into murderous tyrants laying waste to countrysides, I might consider it then."

"Well, we super gotta destroy Hell if we have murderous tyrant children to kill."

He looks very concerned at both of them but smiles and heads over to Valentine.

Still teaching his dad! She's not exactly enthusiastic about this but she understands it to be the usual price of assistance from this cluster of people.

"Shoo," he says to his dad, firmly. "There are books, go try reading them."

"It's much harder without -"

"So it'll be an interesting challenge! Go, go, I'll set Huan on you."

" - do you need something?"

"Not really but he'll keep you up all night. He did, to our Imrainai, until eventually she bit through her hand trying to concentrate on the poetry he had her translating. You'd think that would've taught him a lesson."

" - gosh." This is really concerning but she can also totally see herself doing it if she were scared enough.

"Anyway, you can just - tell him you're bored. Everyone does, eventually."

"Well, there isn't a lot else to do here. Especially if you can't read Latin or fight monsters. I guess I'm also supposed to be brainstorming problems that eleventh century Norway probably had."

"Well, you can go track him down if you wanna."

"...yeah."

"But I'm going to shoo him away every hour or so so you can decide whether you do in fact wanna."

" - okay."

"Korva and Hagan attempted to explain to me what was going on with you but they didn't know very much about it."

"Oh. Uh - you mean, like, where I was before?"

"Yeah. With the devils and stuff."

"I work for an interdimensional law firm called Wolfram & Hart. They do a lot of - keeping wealthy criminals from facing consequences, arranging and covering up slave trades, illegal weapon smuggling, and murders, and probably most every other horrible thing you can think of. I'm a secretary, so - I schedule meetings and send a lot of emails and answer the phone a lot and order appropriate demon snacks for clients and call in cleaners when someone gets blood on the floor."

"Do you have ideas about how to get them to stop all that?"

"Not... really? They're really big. And they take a lot of precautions that I probably haven't ever even heard of."

"Why are they doing it, what things do they get from it?"

"They're... evil? I think. Like, the beings at the top just terminally value evil, I think. A lot of the individual people there are stuck or scared or in it for money and power, I think."

"Huh. Okay."