"We'll get on it, then." She grins, still looking a little stunned.

"Apparently Raafi already has a demon friend and everything!"

"Mmhmm! Okay, that really isn't what I'm here for, and the sooner we get this sorted out the sooner I can get him to help me figure that out. Is here anything else you need?"

"Uh, it'd go over better if next time somebody needs to take a step back you put it more gently than that."

She nods. "Do you have a suggestion for the wording?"

"I would have gone with something like 'can we reconvene another time, I don't think I need to take more hours of your day on this right now'."

"-right. Okay, I see what I did there, sorry about that."

"No big deal, Tomas cools down fast."

"Good. Is there anything else you need from me while I've got the translation? I only get one spell of this tier a day, when I'm casting it myself."

"I don't think so, but thanks so much for stopping by."

"Thank you!" and she goes to find Raafi.

Letter to Cam: What can you tell me about the feasibility of keeping people safe from hostile daeva who are allowed to move around with  enough freedom to navigate inhabited places, particularly if they can also talk?

That really depends on how hostile and how creative the daeva are, whether they're recognized and people are on guard about them, etc. There's somewhat more flexibility if they're also tasked but I wouldn't recommend that for a situation with a hostile for other reasons. The fundamental problem here is that bindings can only prevent, not force, actions. That means that if a daeva arranges to be in a state where inaction going forward is harmful, a binding can't ever save you - this is why you make sure shuttles can hold atmo and don't crash if your fairy quits on you, why pro demon summoners get specific about what order to make things in, why angels work in hospitals staffed with human doctors by default. And if they can talk, then outside the scope of, say, a clause about not misrepresenting task-relevant facts or something, they can lie, threaten, hire assassins, etc.

It's for the Ganymede daeva, we're still working on that. In particular I can't guarantee they'll be hedged out of Oerth entirely, so we need something that works if they aren't recognized, individually or as daeva, if we're going to bind them so that they can be around people by default at all. I don't want to assume it's impossible to make that safe, but the people I'm working with seem pretty sure it is. On the other hand they seemed pretty sure about the souls, too.

The souls thing has its roots in a guy who wanted book deals about it a hundred fifty years back and some inconvenient mythology that existed pre-Revelation he piggybacked on. I think the only-prevent-never-force thing is absolute and frankly if that were changed somehow it would have a lot of problems of its own. You could probably still do it, but you'd have to sacrifice a lot of other freedoms - you can put a speed limit and a force exertion limit on fairies, it can be really low, that'd probably also work for angels and demons, that'd prevent them from flying or even picking up a medium sized rock but they could walk very slowly wherever they wanted. The talking problem is the one you can't fix at all without tasking them as far as I'm aware. I do keep up with basic research in the field but maybe somebody's got something really cutting-edge? It'd have to be recent and secret for unclear reasons including from the Library of Hell.

Allowing them to talk came up as a way to stop them from harassing each other with the movement restrictions eased, to let them tell each other to leave them alone; it sounds like we could put that back if we got the rest of the binding right. Are there any other complications you know of with it? (It does sound like the binding would have to be restrictive enough that they mostly wouldn't choose it over their old situation, but that's not a problem; we just have to give them a choice at all.)

My friend Kat also wants me to ask if you can recommend any demons to help us end scarcity in Oerth. She's a cleric of the goddess of pleasure, so I don't expect them to have much trouble figuring out payment - traditional or otherwise - but as novice summoners it seems like a good idea for them to start with someone known to be safe.

I'm not sure you can reasonably let daeva pick and choose between sets of bindings when the circles are issued nonconsensually and intended to hold indefinitely.

I can recommend demon organizations to talk to but don't know the individuals. I can also do it myself if you want to hop somebody to Limbo to replace me; there's people helping me organize train requests on the Hell end and one of those could swap in fine.

I can definitely hop someone to Limbo. That spell takes seven passengers if we don't care very much where we land - it'll put us within 500 miles of our target but I have no control within that range. I can take five with my accurate in-world teleport and I need to see where I'm going for that. I can do some interviewing if you'd like to stay there but I'd definitely be more comfortable with you.

I'm assuming that if they can hostilely summon the daeva in the first place, they can dismiss them and summon them again with a different binding; is that not how it works?

500 miles off is fine, short hop the rest of the way with a shuttle. I'll get together some volunteers.

Taking summonses is voluntary. They can't guarantee somebody will grab one, they can only heap so many hundreds of circles on somebody, and add more often enough, that they eventually take one just because it's so annoying. Some daeva evade them for a long time. Recapture isn't guaranteed.

All right, thanks for your help. I'll write again when I'm free to go world-hopping, probably in the next few days.

Raafi and Kat have a nice dinner, and she talks him into venturing out to Danica's under cover of a disguise spell aging him down a few decades.

Danica's is having a party in the entry room tonight! Still no intoxicants, but there's cake and ice cream and twelve kinds of salty snacks. It would seem it is somebody named Josue's birthday and feeding him enormous amounts of food for kink reasons is not one of the things that has to be stashed in a side room. Herb is there and he waves at Kat when she comes in.

She waves back and heads over, Raafi in tow.

"Hi there! Wow," says Herb, "you look way better than your photos, man."

"Disguise spell," Kat grins. "I figured it was better to let him get comfortable before we risked getting mobbed."

"Oh, okay, yeah, that works, you'd have to be looking. Danica'll know, of course."