The chiplock inventor's boyfriend emails with a picture of a lab.

Thank you, he sends, and schedules the meeting for the following afternoon. He rebooks some of his healing clients, too, for the morning, and - can he find out whether he's allowed back into Europe without writing them to ask?

He could choose to assume that their open migration agreement with Federated Stations applies to him.

Well, if he has to teleport out he has to teleport out; he schedules a few patients there.

And then - anything else interesting happening on the internet?

A member of the Canadian Olympic curling team has died suddenly and people are talking about whether he could maybe compete anyway.

That's pretty cool.

He doesn't have anything else to do, and doesn't especially feel like random touristry at the moment, what else has he been meaning to get around to - oh! What actually is the story with gagging demons, there's a question.

Shortly post-Revelation, a pre-Revelation summoner wrote a series of books on how demons are out to get you and shouldn't be allowed to talk.

...does there seem to be anything to the books?

They sold a lot of copies! Also, sometimes demons do in fact try to get summoners' souls.

...are there any well known cases of them managing it?

People tend not to advertise that.

Okay, that complicates things. He'll have to keep an eye out for opportunities to do learn more about that one. (It's definitely not all demons, at very least; he's not too worried about tomorrow's meeting.)

While he's thinking of it he signs up for a self-paced online summoning class, and finally remembers to email the professor of the other one and let him know that he won't be back, and works on that for the rest of the day.

Summoning class is about bindings and negotiations and making sure your task is well defined and when to pay up front.

During one of his breaks, he finds an email from Pelor, asking him to set up an appointment with a historian to talk about the plague; he looks into it.

The first search result for "plague historian" gets a Dr. Nilsson.

He emails.

Hello, this is Raafi the cleric of Fharlanghn from the new world; I'm writing on behalf of Pelor. We recently learned about the HIV plague and he has some questions about how that was handled; I expect him to be particularly interested in how various religions reacted to it at the time and afterward. Can we meet with you sometime to talk about it, or can you recommend someone who would be better to ask?

My area of specialty is flulike illnesses and the Black Death but I can probably answer relatively simple questions and refer you to a virologist or other historian if necessary.

Can you recommend another historian based on what I've already mentioned?

You might want a religious historian like Anne-Margaery Vogt who has done work on Abrahamic religions and homosexuality, rather than an epidemiological historian.

Thank you.

A bit of prayer and another email from Pelor later, he emails her with the same request.

May I ask why you/Pelor want this information

It's been suggested that he work with local churches on some local projects, but we have little enough context that it's not clear whether that's a good idea or he'd be disagreeing with them too often for it to be worth trying, and it would be good to know more. The HIV plague in particular is of interest because it seems like the sort of situation where he'd be most at odds with them, as a god of healing; even if he does decide to work with him it might help him to figure out what situations he might want to be prepared to handle on his own. He doesn't practice retribution, if that's a concern.

HIV hasn't been a major concern in living memory so I'm not sure how it is relevant to his associations today

I don't think he's especially interested in HIV particularly; he's interested in what the church's handling of it can teach him about them. If things have changed significantly in the last few hundred years I expect he'll be interested in hearing about that too, or at least I will.

There are hundreds of meaningfully distinct denominations of the Abrahamic religions and it is not correct to refer to "the church" to refer to them collectively

If you are specifically asking about religious attitudes towards queer populations the trend has been over time mostly in the direction of greater tolerance/acceptance