"...I think Miranda's exchange rate here is gonna be different."

"I will give her lots of opportunities to rack up amazing accomplishments she need not feel at all complicated about."

"Thank you."

"I'm really glad there are several of you."

"We're enjoying it too."

And he returns to reading.

Cam's tail swishes once and then he does too.

Approximately the next subjective day he has hundreds of catalogues from hundreds of worlds and is flipping through them to check for things that might make them a bad idea to offer to demons. (Uterine replicators: no! Sentient locals who hatch from eggs: no!)

Artificial intelligence: no! Stun weapons: ...maybe!

"Put everyone who wants to muck up the Hell-Heaven concordance to sleep and see if you can invent something better?"

"That was my thought, but it'd destabilize other detentes."

"Yes, suppose it might. Ones that knock a daeva out for thirty seconds have less potential for abuse than ones that'll do half an hour, if there are any of those..."

Probable no to this extremely addictive drug which modifies your personality permanently! No to another egg species - "that's multiple sets of hatching humanoids, weird -"

"It wouldn't be hard to set up automatic firing for brief stuns and someone could engineer an improvement."

"Is Revelation all that far off from developing something like that anyway? You'd think they'd be motivated to get it working on daeva specifically..."

"They try sometimes, nothing too promising yet."

Nod. "...the other thing I want to check is whether you can in fact take chips back with you, it affects what we need to tell people about being careful. Do you know anyone you'd trust to test that?"

"...not to quite the necessary standard. To test it sure, to not let on they had a secret..."

"They wouldn't need to know the bit where we can make them, but if you think the idea might otherwise not be getting around and we'd be risking introducing it..."

"It'll occur to someone but I'd rather it not occur to someone who might notice I was involved in experimenting with it."

Nod. "Could also test it with an angel, they presumably have fewer avenues to do anything malicious with it even if they wanted to."

"Yeah, that'd be safer. I am less able to make personal recommendations."

"Timothy has a bunch of friends, I'll ask him. 

Had any success at stringing together a sentence?"

"No. I'm increasingly tempted to skip it and go with 'drop book, flee' but that seems like a bad plan."

"Suboptimal plan, maybe. How do people do this in Hell, 'let's sing a duet' is presumably not the answer."

"It depends on what they're trying to do and what they're trying to do is never 'date a wizard from 1802'!"