There are plenty of declining local churches looking to sell, especially to someone who will let them keep using the place for services on the relevant day of the week, or they could go with something more like an office building or an apartment block - Ramona suggests this should depend on whether they expect a lot of their function to be as a gathering place, versus a healing place which people will expect to look more like a dentist's office or something, or a hostel type situation for Oerth tourists or down-on-their-luck parishoners, in which case they'll want the residential situation.

Well, all of those, really; they'll probably want something custom-built in the long run. It seems like it would be easier to convert offices to sleeping quarters and community areas than apartments to correct-looking offices, in the nearer term. The idea of taking over another church's building is a little strange, but sharing with one of them might be good for their image... she'd want to find out if anyone has heard back about whatever it was Raafi was supposed to be looking into for them about that first, though.

Ramona helps them find a real estate agent who narrows it down to a few nice office buildings with big conference rooms and plumbing situations that aren't too hard to convert later for residences and friendly zoning.

Nobody has heard back from Raafi, and they can always get a secondhand temple later, somewhere else. They pick a nice-looking office building and have Ramona help them put together an email to the local government about it.

The local government of White Plains, NY is willing to receive them.

Excellent. They buy it, and get started on figuring out how to convert offices to bedrooms.

And Raafi and Zanel go to their meeting with Leonor.

"Good morning! Cocoa?"

"Thank you."

"So before we continue I want to apologize; I hadn't realized how I was coming across. I'll try to be better about that. What do you need from me to make this go smoothly?"

"So what we need is a really clear understanding of what the limits of the solution space are - more precise is better, in case there's something you might not think of or didn't know was possible that turns out to be part of a great compromise. You can get really arbitrarily elaborate with explaining those limits and exactly what's imposing them and why and what all the words mean, I worry we're losing possibilities because entire avenues are dismissed out of hand. You can ask me any questions about our end of it too. Then once we know what we're working with in terms of what is possible, we can try to choose a best option."

"All right. The absolute requirement is a concrete plan that definitely leads to the daeva either not being confined at all, or having some alternative available that removes their confinement - it doesn't have to be one that you expect them to take but it does have to be one that you can deliver if they ask you to, and they have to have a way to ask. -they don't necessarily have to have a way to ask frequently, there's precedent for situations where clerics of Fharlanghn handle that every year or so, though I expect you'd end up in trouble that way if something happens so that we stop being able to. I do separately think that you're going to want to stop gagging your demons at some point, so you might want to have a plan in place to roll that back without interfering with anything else, if you can. I'm also obligated to make sure that the part of the plan where the daeva are confined with no recourse is kept as short as possible; that's up to my judgement but it's a matter of devotion for me, if my honest feeling is that a plan will take unnecessarily long I can't actually approve it, I'd lose my clerichood for that."

"Can you define 'confined'? Does it matter what worlds they can travel to, or how much absolute physical space they have the run of? Can you also tell me what would make a length of time seem unnecessary to you?"

"The general idea is that they can't be limited to a place, only limited from places, unless it's a natural limitation that they won't be stopped from overcoming if they can - someone living in a mountain valley who's too weak or frail to take the pass out is unfortunate and I'd want to prioritize helping them but they aren't confined in a way that matters for this, and someone here who's forbidden from hiring a fairy to take them offplanet is confined in a way that matters, if they don't have some other way of doing it instead. What would make a length of time unnecessary... people being confined is an emergency and needs to be treated as one, more or less. If there's something you could do that you don't want to because it's inconvenient, or you don't want to spend the resources on it, that's not acceptable. If it would cause an actual problem to do, that's more negotiable, I do understand that this isn't your only priority and I don't have to ask you to treat it as if it was - in that sort of case we'll need to try to find a solution to the problem that frees you up to take care of it but if we can't, that's okay."

"Is the sincere felt attitude on our end towards the confinement an actual limiting factor, or do you just have a model of how we'd behave if we saw it as an emergency and need us to conform to that?"

"You don't need to feel that it's an emergency, you just need to take it seriously. I don't have a specific expectation of what that will look like in this case, I'm just not allowed to ignore it if that seems not to be happening."

"That's... I'm worried that we'll wind up feeling that we are taking it seriously, and you'll feel we aren't, and we won't have a way to predict that before we have another catastrophe due to mismatched expectations and poor communication."

"I have a year's leeway to get any problems like that cleared up, now, I don't think it'll be a catastrophe if it happens."

"You have that leeway; I'm not sure we have a way to exercise it if you yourself form a negative impression, is that right?"

"-if I get to the point where I honestly think there's no chance that we'll come up with an acceptable plan and get it implemented, yes. But I know we're prone to that kind of problem and that it can be worked out."

"I'm seeing a pattern here where you're pretty comfortable with things being vague and subjective, and we aren't so much. I'm an individual who can do things like 'act in good faith' or not, and maybe you're a great judge of that. Our government is a big cumbersome institution that contains lots of people who mostly do their jobs for the paycheck, or for motives that just happen to have nothing to do with whether daeva are in jail or not, and part of how we and other governments - we're talking to them since you can only be so many places at once and we happened to have meetings scheduled first - part of how governments make commitments and plans is by not being at all vague and subjective and not relying on individual good faith. If we agree to something it's important for us being able to follow through on that for us to be also able to communicate, exactly and in words, what it is we're committing to. Is that something you can help me with here?"

"I'm not sure I can. Or - not with my current knowledge; there are places where I would know what taking things seriously looked like, and I could specify that, but I don't here. -this might be a situation where a truth spell would help, once we have  things more figured out."

"What are you imagining there? I don't know anything about truth spells, though I can make guesses from the name."

"There are two kinds, but the friendlier one is an area effect that applies a mild compulsion to anyone affected by it - it doesn't compel you to speak but it does compel you to speak truthfully if you do. It's possible to throw off, to not be affected even if you're in the area, but the caster can tell if that's happened; the usual way of using it is to have a mutually trusted or at least neutral third party do the casting and inform the negotiators if someone has managed it, or I can just cast it myself if you don't need to hear anything from me. I think we'd just need to do it once, at the end - you can say 'I'm doing the best I can' or 'I really can't do that' or things like that as many times as you need to before that, and I can take you at your word, knowing that I'll be able to confirm it later. I might want the option to do it more than once if we really seem to be having a problem, though."

"Hm, I foresee a problem here where it might be possible to accomplish some things by, say, corruptly abusing the power of an office. President Melo has broad emergency powers, which on the books are intended for things like if a meteor is suddenly headed for Mars - presumably due to enemy action, normally we'd see one coming in plenty of time - and he needs to order the power grid fairies' bindings snapped so they can go deal with it immediately even though this interrupts power base load generation and that's bad and also involves unbound fairies which is potentially worse, or something like that. He's supposed to use those powers to enact the will of the Martian people, for their benefit, and not for other things, he took an oath about that when he assumed the office. If he doesn't feel something is actually the will of and for the benefit of the Martian people, is that something he 'can't' do? Similarly, there are lots of positions you might wind up talking to the occupants of with privileged access to data, or broad discretion, that is intended for narrow purposes. I have diplomatic immunity in any foreign jurisdiction in the solar system; outside Mars I could commit most crimes and get away with it, at least the once. Is that something I 'can' do for this purpose? What if I couldn't get away with it? It's just not as clear as it might need to be how deeply you're asking people to shift their values and commit their resources towards those values."

"I can answer a lot of those specific questions but in general this is going to be subjective, yes. I think it's important to remember that from our perspective you're asking for an important rule to be relaxed for you - if you'd rather find a way to handle the situation that doesn't involve confinfing the daeva you won't have to worry about convincing anyone that you aren't asking it to be relaxed more than is necessary."