She could maybe explain it to them when she ducks out for a moment but she's not sure she'll be in shape to do much of that under those conditions and anyway they might be worried about the concordance changing its mind.

Yes, that's the problem with not being in harmony with people, you can't trust them.

Yeah. Does it have to be all-or-nothing?

They can have probabilistic assessments of threat, it's just that (when dealing with mentally very different entities not in harmony with them) they expect that the probability that the entities might just destroy them to use their resources or out of a brief fit of emotion or by being very offended by them to end up dominating all future concerns. They're used to planning for thousands of years in the future, and if prevalence of psychotic breaks is one in fifty thousand thousand among humans, and there's dozens of humans with the power to kill them all, they should probably expect to die. They certainly can't start new thousand-year-plans if the humans might destroy them, and they don't understand what a very alien species will object to.

So they'll do what they can, and they'll try to cooperate with Vanda Nosseo, but they see all these opportunities to improve things, and they don't know which of them Vanda Nosseo will ban, and which of the ones Vanda Nosseo will ban it will destroy them for having wanted to try.

Kiszet's pretty sure it won't destroy them for wanting things, just maybe make it harder to do things on their own. ...they don't seem nonreductionist so probably if somebody snapped and killed them all they could be gotten back after, if the precogs didn't catch it first.

I mean, making it harder for them to do things on their own is also bad, because then they can't maximize total utility as well. And probably it won't, but the probability it will is still right there, very visible.

... They are pretty sure they're reductionist!

Okay, so, only a few people would have to be compromised in a remarkably specific and coordinated way to murder them all, but many more people than that would have to be compromised to leave them all dead after that forever.

And this is good but - 

Wow, so much of their strategies were based on the universe being finite. They keep finding these cached thoughts that depended on limited accessible time and space. An infinite universe is very strange.

Yeah, they're not the only ones! There was a civilization in Wish that was harvesting the emotions of humans because those are magical there, to stave off entropy.

... This sounds really strange to them, but, alternate universes.

They should read more about dangerous and/or profitable alternate universe alternate laws of physics, if she has suggestions for what pages to go to for that?

Okay! The line in places between alternate physics and outright magic systems is sometimes blurry - not all magic systems are portable, which makes them sort of like a neighborhood of altered physics - but she can read about important neighborhood properties: Wish, Eclipse, Cube, the Materia-cluster's environs, the daeva worlds.

... They will do research into them.

And then they will do research into daeva, and magic rocks, and precognition, and... honestly morphing seems sane compared to the rest of those...

How do any of these worlds still exist, with daeva? Are they so much nicer than the humans they used to be? They don't think all the worlds are new...

Many daeva - still most, though the gap's closing - didn't use to be human, but yeah, they're usually pretty nice or bound or just not interested in going on the offensive and stay home.

The Concordance has not actually gotten a sufficient impression of average human judgement from Wikipedia to expect typical bindings to be reliably used, but maybe they're better at this sort of thing.

(The Concordance is really quite unambiguously sure it's outgunned, to be clear. This surety is rapidly increasing.)

... It would be really cool if they could get a demon to build them more worlds, though. Especially around this sun, or around other nearby uninhabited suns. (Maybe they could even get a demon to build them more suns, once they've filled up this one's orbitals? Worth considering. A dedicated subgroup of the Concordance is now calculating the most efficient use of recorded demonic powers to build them lots of planets so they can increase their total population so they can get more utility-per-second and implicitly more utility for the entire future.)

(The subgroup working on utilitarian calculation suggests that the best working model is that the universe switched from having a time limit based on entropy to one based on Vanda Nosseo accidentally wiping itself out, which looks very unlikely but so long as they can put a % chance on it happening each year still means that all expected utilities sum to a finite number, and that preliminarily non-confidently the best way for them to increase it is to try to come up with plans to increase Vanda Nosseo's life expectancy.)

((A third subgroup gets started on using information gained from studying Wikipedia to make preliminary suggestions on how to design human-and-elf-interaction-specialist-ambassadors who can interface with Vanda Nosseo to try to protect it. It would be very bad for these ambassadors compared to being in harmony with everyone else, but it would still be net-positive utility for them and it might be the best way to increase the total utility of the universe.))

At long last, Kiszet is released from the Concordance, and recalled to a Vanda Nossëo ship to give her report.

(It's awful, it's the worst, out the ears of her millions of new friendselves into not a pool but a dreadful sucking vacuum - but she will get through it and she will go home and she will sing forever.)

We surrender, Kiszet says. We would like some more planets if that can be arranged, and a way to stay all together with all of ourselves, and we are going to be ever so cooperative and helpful in the meanwhile, and can I go home now please please please -

And she's back.

And she's back and they love her and they will love her forever, or at least until the universe ends, whichever happens first.

Kiszet loves them too <333 and will read Wikipedia for them as much as they want, and send emails to Vanda Nossëo as needed.

She is their Vanda Nossëo specialist, and she will be forever. <3

Once Kiszet is reinstated, Vanda Nossëo relays to the angels that the demons have surrendered after some initial misunderstandings, cleared up by a volunteer joining the concordance for a higher-fidelity explanation of the situation.

The angels are... kind of worried about the demons still be around, since they wiped out quite a lot of species, but they acknowledge that given that all the damage is being repaired and the people are being brought back, it's not an unreasonable response, though they hope no one too important joined the concordance.

They do hope Vanda Nosseo isn't going to let them get access to any really dangerous magic, though.

They're not, yeah. They have added "the concordance picks up magic it wasn't supposed to" to the list of things the precogs should alert to. Maybe in the fulness of time it will be possible to trust them but not until a lot of things have changed.

The angels think that it is worth remembering that they and the demons are used to thinking of "tens of thousands of years" as a long time, and hundreds as really quite short, and so any plans that are not urgent may well be timed to go off two thousand years in the future, especially if the demons know how precognition works. But from the sounds of it Vanda Nosseo will have accomplished quite a lot of other things in those two thousands years, and the future then will be quite difficult to predict.

Meanwhile, back on the planet with humans on it, stuff has been happening! The war has not ended - the Holy League has sent diplomats to the Coalition nations, and the Coalition has sent back a complete unwillingness to negotiate without the Holy League giving back all the territory they conquered and permitting the restoration of all the governments they overthrew and letting the Coalition depose and imprison the Grand Admiral.

And, meanwhile, Ljudizem is attempting to hold a referendum on joining Vanda Nosseo. What help can Vanda Nosseo offer in this plan?

They can send pollworkers to explain any points of confusion and explain the voting process!

Instantly teleport pollworkers into every relevant town? Can they take representatives of Ljudizem with them, or would that be unreasonable interference? Can they make the ballots, Ljudizem has paper shortages (because it has everything shortages)? Can they demonstrate that they do in fact have magical powers capable of protecting the villages if the villages vote to annoy their occupiers?