"HELP!" Cam hollers again, but he cannot get past the borders of the circle, not even to fling a wing in the path of the gun.

And there's half a gunshot.

And he's home.

Well fuck.

...where'd Clement wind up.

Fairyland.

The next batch of letters won't make it there for a while so he doesn't have to be in any hurry to write one. He sets himself a reminder.

...they didn't have chiplocks, which means he can read their text conversation if he wants.

Can you bring me a few books.  I have a demon here to conjure air who wants to read while he does it.

what
WHAT
clement

I'm being as careful as I can
I'm as sure as I can be that nothing worse than us all dying is going to happen because of this

I'm not trading for souls
obviously

how do you know the demon wants to read

I dismissed the first one for even talking about souls
I'm not gagging them though

CLEMENT WTF

Oh good ("good"), it is actually relevant to him and the murder he just witnessed and they weren't talking about unrelated drama.

we're on a pretty sharp timeline here
I needed to be able to negotiate
I got a book recommendation one
and he's doing the air

you Think he's doing the air

you can take a look at the binding when you bring the books over
just basically any books that are enjoyable to read, I think are fine

fine I'm getting them

Thank you.  And I'm sorry

there's something you could do to make it up to me
I'll save you the guesswork:  it's dismiss the demon

I'm not going to do that
I mean, I'm going to do that as soon as it won't kill us all
we are not there yet

or if I thought something worse than killing us all would happen
we also aren't there yet

really nonominous thoughts to be having and a really nonominous way to phrase them

🫩

if it were me I would simply not do things which were about to lead to something worse than killing us all
and just hadn't "yet"

I mean it is me.  I'm not doing that

it is not actually your job to protect the people here in the same way that it's mine
I appreciate that you feel so strongly about helping our community but I think you should leave this one to people with a little more experience

that's really condescending

Sorry.  I didn't mean it that way.  I'm just really stressed

ok

have I ever done anything that's made you think I'm not careful enough for this?

not until you summoned a demon ungagged, no

I can hear you making buddy-buddy with him

I left the door open because I don't think being secretive about any of this is a good idea, on a number of levels

is there nothing I can say to convince you this is a bad enough idea that you should stop

there are definitely things that could convince me but I don't think they're in your control

ok
sorry

be over in a sec

Maybe being quiet and more tolerant of boredom would have helped. Can't bring anything legible for gagged summonses, he won't catch randoms at all that way. If only he were into embroidery. He puts 'find illegible timewaster hobby' on the to-do list.

He eats a pint of ice cream and tosses and turns to sleep and checks on them, when he wakes up.

Everyone on the station is dead.  There were maybe 70 people, all told.  None of them young children, although there may have been more than one teenager.

If he checks for where they ended up, they're mostly limboites.  A handful are fairies, and the murderer and one other person are angels.

The concordance that will allow letters to reach Heaven care of Fairyland is even farther out. Bleah.

He writes to his mom, who won’t get the batch of correspondence for a while either.

He mopes. But mostly resumes going about his life. There is, as ever, nothing he can do from here.