This isn't where Raafi went to sleep. He'd set his bedroll up on a comfy patch of moss under a tree, and now - he still has the bedroll, at least, and his pack, but the tree and moss are nowhere to be seen, replaced by a strange metal room with still, stuffy air and an implausibly clear night sky out the window.
"Hello?" he calls, getting to his feet.
"Mmhmm. We should probably do it in stages, I only have so many spells of that tier a day and it's not good practice to leave them waiting longer than necessary, but that's just logistics."
"There's probably a priority ordering someone's put together if they're doing something like forensically conjuring all the circles and checking them for who they're for - I don't know if they are, I'm not involved in that end of it."
"All right. Who should we talk to about that, or would it be better for you to handle it?"
"I can handle it but if there's any miscommunication about whether it will work out on your end it will cost me some career capital to have gone around telling everyone you signed off, so if possible I'd like to go over it in more detail, cover some contingencies, maybe do the whole thing again in Portuguese."
"Sure. Maybe we can take a break first? There's a chance I can get my question about demons taking souls answered before we have this finished, I'd like to try."
"Sure, let's reconvene in... two hours?"
"Sure."
Letter to Cam: Is it true that demons can take human souls? If not, is there a way to prove that? It's slightly urgent, we're working on a plan to re-bind the Ganymede daeva and it seems like it will be hard to fix it later if they're gagged unnecessarily now.
He takes Zanel and Katrianne out to lunch.
We can't; or, if we can, it's a really big conspiracy to pretend privately in Hell that we can't and I'm not in on it. Re: proof: if necessary I can go public myself to assert it which might work better than not that but perhaps you could make do with looking up people who sold their souls in the various daeva realms? Also willing to consult on bindings; used to teach summoning.
I'd definitely appreciate the help with the bindings. I've already looked on the internet for information about people who sold their souls, and couldn't find any; do you know of another way I could find out about them?
Thank you.
He updates Ramona on all of this, and they spend the rest of their break at the art museum and then get back to Leonor.
"Good news! I made a preliminary inquiry with the Mars GCP liaison and she thinks the idea has potential."
"Good. And my contact thinks that demons can't take souls; he didn't have any direct proof but he found me a list of people who'd made the sale that we can do forensics to or try to summon."
"That's intended to be background on the question of gagging them?"
"Mmhmm. I can hire someone to look into it, but I assume you're going to want to do it yourself anyway so you know it's trustworthy."
"I'll pass it along," she nods.
Eventually Leonor is satisfied that no weird pitfalls will open under her if she advances this plan to more emphatic consideration and they can get the GCP liaison in there to consult on the binding.
Raafi mentions that he's going to want to have a third party look it over, before they get started.
"Who's the third party?" asks the liaison.
"I'm still not used to that," remarks the liaison.
"Eh. What are they?"
"Demon, but they made a good impression. Last I heard they were in Limbo doing something about the resource shortage. The limboite I had a chance to talk to about it was very enthusiastic."
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post