"Ah. That kind of thing comes up every once in a while at home; I don't think we've ever seen it go well."

"I don't know that much about it, just enough to unconfuse folks."

She nods. "I'll keep it in mind, but I don't think we'd want to start there, anyway."

"Nothing else really popping into my head."

"That's all right. I'm not in a rush, and it's not like I'll get bored in the meantime."

"Big world, lots of stuff to do."

"Mmhmm. - so what else should I see around here, anyway?"

"Museum of Spare Time. It's a little place devoted specifically to hobby projects by people who've got other stuff going on, kids and careers, not just volunteer work or six more hobbies besides the one. They've got some great stuff."

"That sounds delightful. Do you have a favorite exhibit?"

"Whole section full of Rube Goldberg machines."

"Ooh."

Matt sets up his first morning Internet class in a very short time. He wants to inventory everybody's devices.

That's easy: They all have the same one. Assuming the case color doesn't matter, they're not absolutely sure about that.

"Case color doesn't matter," he assures them. All right, here are what all the hardware bits do and how to pull up context menus and so on to get around with in the phone, if you're lost go back to home like so, etcetera.

They're very attentive.

This section of the course used to be shorter but people have so many ways to get confused so he goes over everything from a few angles and it takes two hours.

They don't manage to invent any very new ways of getting confused about it. Not for lack of trying, but also the ones who do get it step up to help out the ones that don't, so the class doesn't end up running long.

And after class the cleric who went to talk to the angel cultists stops Raafi and Kat on their way out: The cultists don't have any specific requests for the diplomacy, except that they'd like the angels to have access to any objects they ask for; Raafi says he'll check on it.

Eventually Raafi gets an email saying it turns out that it's possible to do a gag that can be suppressed or reinstated and they have results suggesting it'd be fine to have the demons default able to speak but tracked down for reinstatement if they start trying to steal people's souls, since they can't commit to assuming that's always impossible based on this little research but want to get moving right away.

He goes to Leonor's office as soon as he notices the email.

"Raafi, hi! Mango juice?"

"Ooh, thank you."

"So, it sounds like this is enough to be moving forward with, but we'll also need to talk about what happens if you wind up reinstating the gags. It was - just to make sure I'm remembering correctly - we're going to change from preemptively forbidding them from getting too close to anyone to having to stay back from people who've told them to, for some period of time, and that leaves a gagged demon vulnerable to being harassed by the other daeva; is that correct?"

"I don't think we actually finished covering that," says Leonor. "A lot of objections were raised in the meantime - children, people who can't talk either in general or while uncomfortable, people who don't share languages with them, plus anything leaving it up to subjective understanding of whether something constitutes asking them to go away is at some risk of creative interpretation. Leaving the presumption giving people plenty of space means that in cases where communication is impossible nobody's getting approached or touched by one of these daeva and unable to stop it, plus it makes it more obvious that these are violent criminals in case they're not recognized; it does make it harder for the daeva to move around especially if their gag is reinstated, but their gag would be most likely to be reinstated in the case of them trying to commit more crimes, so that seems like a softer response limited to those cases. We can also issue them phones with preloaded phrases and machine translation apps so they can ask people to pass them in halls if they get stuck; it was more of a problem in Ganymede when everybody in the facility had this restriction."

"It sounds like it would be possible to bind them so that they can't touch people without express permission even if they can approach them - making them stay a foot or two away from other people seems much more like something I can allow than ten feet. I'm less sure what to do for people who can't talk - how do they usually manage, here?"

"It depends a lot on why they can't talk. Touch isn't as good a boundary as approach distance - honestly, a rapist hovering ten feet away from someone is already really unpleasant, but - hm, personal space norms vary a lot culturally, I wonder if you expect less of it than we do? Ten feet is very generous, I'll give you that, but one or two is borderline claustrophobic."