"All right. The situation I had in mind with revocability was - imagine you have someone in a city who steals something, and gets caught, and is tried, and is given a choice of jail or exile. They choose exile, and a week later they sneak back into the city and steal something else. The fact that they chose exile doesn't mean that they can't be caught and brought to trial a second time, or that they have to be offered exile as their alternative again - they do still have to be given an alternative but it wouldn't be exile in a case like that, usually. But if the city offers them exile and lets them loose, and decides later that they don't actually want to give them an alternative at all and puts a bounty on them, the fact that they let them go for a little while doesn't make that acceptable."

"Hm. I wouldn't have actually thought of that as an analogous situation on the relevant axes but I suppose if you brought it up it must be as far as Fharlanghn's concerned."

"It's not identical, but letting them go with the plan already in place to recapture them is worse, and that's pretty equivalent in the ways that matter - I'd consider it crueler to let someone think they were free when you were planning on confining them again but that's not something Fharlanghn looks at particularly."

"I wasn't imagining the escorting summoner deceiving the daeva."

"I was assuming that. In the case in my example I'd expect them to."

"I got the idea by thinking about daeva escort in polities that require it, where if you pay a daeva in the opportunity to go somewhere you have to accompany them. The daeva are aware they're being accompanied and that they'll be dismissed when their task and payment are both up."

"And in general things like that, where it's agreed to, are fine - in the case I was thinking of where people are asked infrequently if they want their freedom, most of them never do, and they've gone several generations that way. That's, ah - there's a species of people in my world called orcs, who are generally very violent, not welcome in civilized places. There's a city I've heard of that has a specific orc tribe that lives there, confined, to compete as gladiators; there's a few clerics who go every so often to check on them. Orcs live short lives, about half what humans do, and it's been that way for close to a hundred years."

"...huh."

"There are plenty of other people who never leave the place they were born, too. I don't understand it, and we do encourage people to get out and see the world, but in the end their choices are their own. All we can demand is that they have the choice."

"I can see how this would have grown into a really beloved aspect of the social infrastructure."

"I hope in the long run we can make it work for you."

"Do you have the sense that in any way you might be limited here by an understanding of summoning, or the constraints our governments have accumulated in our history, or anything like that?"

"I've been working on learning about summoning - I keep getting called away from it, there's plenty I still don't know, but I have the basics. Government - I'm sure running things by vote has affected things, but I don't have a good picture of how at all."

"I think not just democracy but also technology has probably changed things here relative to how they are in Oerth. And our distinct history, and the lack of magic."

"Mmhmm. I can guess and infer things about the technology and lack of magic but I'm sure there's a lot I'm missing. There is a point where learning about it is an unacceptable distraction from the task at hand, though."

"Yes, I'm hoping that rather than a whole college education here there's anything you've noticed being puzzled about or surprised by at all which can be cleared up."

"It's possible that knowing more about the history of human interaction with daeva would help - I don't have anything specific in mind there that would be useful but the fact that you gag demons and only demons looks strange to me."

"I'm not a summoner but the layperson understanding I have is that demons are hard to pay - they can make most of the things we'd usually give an angel or a fairy for a routine summons - and therefore have a habit of asking for people's souls or occasionally sexually threatening them instead, and to sidestep that, cut the risk of being talked into something they shouldn't, and make driving a hard bargain unrewarding, the summoners choose to only let them accept or reject summoner-driven deals."

Zanel looks horrified.

"I'm skeptical that they can actually take souls."

"...they do sometimes take souls. They can't be dismissed till they get what was agreed to, so we can be pretty sure."

"Taking someone's soul kills them; we have magic that can do it. But I'm more interested in - how you came to the decision that this was the best way of handling the situation, particularly what it means about what role daeva take here."

"Maybe our souls are different? Our afterlives are," says Leonor. "Demons are summoned less often than the other kinds. But they are used for long distance communication, forensics, infrastructure, supplies, and some emergencies. Mostly they are not paid in souls; professionals keep trying till they find one who'll agree to something else."

"Not so different that I'm not on track to become a fairy. But I meant more - as people, and not just demons, all daeva. I've spoken to daeva who seem to live here more or less full time, how is that worked into things?"

"The Martian power grid is run by fairies who want to live here full time and raise children on Mars," says Leonor, "as perhaps the most famous example. I've met one briefly and she seemed like a pretty normal person but I'm not closely acquainted. They're all under bindings, of course. I know less about other long term setups - there's some service that summons them in huge numbers and screens them for hostility and skills and publishes that information, I think probably a lot of the long term ones are screened like that even if they aren't all going through the one service."

"It sounds like they're not really considered part of your society, even though they're here and contributing to it."