"Vast cosmic power sounds like a pretty good consolation prize! And anyway the thing where it's totally impossible to have power over other people is most of what I care about." 

"It's not totally impossible but it's so inconvenient that practically no one bothers outside of voluntary club organization type situations. But that's apsels, the other kinds are less anarchist."

"What determines who goes where?"

"I don't have a definitive answer to that. Most people are movers. I think it's some kind of loose personality sympathy with the class of magic, only as fuzzy as you'd expect from it being a tripartite division."

"If you can make raise dead diamonds I should probably kill myself, just to see what happens."  

"If you die I go back home and we don't know what happens with respect to future summonings in this universe, remember?"

"Fine, after we've done a more other experiments to see if we can summon other daeva and what happens when they're dismissed." 

"I guess if you want to perform this experiment after we have ascertained some other information I don't have much business stopping you but it does seem perhaps not decision-relevant today."

"It's going to matter eventually. If summoners on Golarion become daeva when they die then the most important thing we can do might be making sure every Evil person in the world is a summoner – more important than Cheliax, maybe, if it can be done."  

"...I see where you're coming from but this would mean that their Evil friends had extremely powerful indestructible daeva summonable at their convenience."

"Yeah, for this to work at all we'd have to be pretty careful about limiting knowledge of how summoning really works, or we might have to kill them all immediately afterwards or something."

"I am not currently convinced that this is the best option going forward but it's good to have it under consideration sooner than later, I guess."

"My own preference would be starting with Cheliax until we know more about how summoning interacts with my world's magic, at a minimum, but I think it's good to have one's ultimate goals in mind so we don't accidentally create obstacles for ourselves down the road. What else would you need to know to feel comfortable with that course of action?"

"Well, uh, what would happen to all the other people who live on the planet, for one."

"If we overthrow Cheliax?"

"Are we talking about overthrowing it now and not getting everyone there to perform a summoning? Uh, I'd want to know what Cheliax's current government would be replaced with."

"Most likely? Civil war. Galt is a republic" – or at least gesturing in that general direction – "and so is Andoran, and they'll help, but we don't have the resources to rule it. Even if we could hold the place together, it's going to be materially worse for almost everyone who lives there, while they still live. But, you know, significantly reduced chances of being tortured forever once they die, that's the trade." 

"...okay, so, uh, Earth having summoning, has also resulted in the end of material scarcity?"

"I still think war is almost always worse than peace, even if you can conjure enough food for everyone twenty times over. War with our kind of magic is very destructive – but, I suppose war with daeva would be too. I'm curious how handle that without making the planet uninhabitable. It seems important. 

Realistically, if we conquer Cheliax and subdue the dozen-odd warlords who'll spring up afterwards using your powers, I think you get to decide what we do with it." 

"I'm not going to say I have never fantasized about sticking a crown on my head but 'resentful evil civilly-warring citizenry' was not my best case scenario. I don't think I have the expertise for that."

Élie twitches. 

"I think there is a cultural misunderstanding. It sounded like you were concerned that the government Galt would put in charge of Cheliax might do things you'd disapprove of. But – in situations where you're responsible for our victory, we can't actually prevent you from making us do whatever you want. So if we did do anything you didn't like, we'd have to stop. ...It's also possible you don't have enough power to force our hand, but in that case I think we just lose the war anyway." 

"...I have a lot of power but not a lot of attention, I think I could easily be distracted by some other global event so I'd like things set up to work out without expecting my own indefinite availability. Also, you're my summoner. I'd have to get weird with it to force your hand."

Élie can't tell if this apsel is trying to be extremely threatening or if he's just confused. 

" – Can we try this again? I can't tell if you're trying to be extremely threatening or if I'm just confused." 

"Uh, quite likely we're both confused! I feel like both of us are trying to do different very large sets of things at once and that's never good for clarity. What's your top priority right now?"

"Short term, verifying your intentions and figuring out the scope of your abilities and how they interact with our magic system" and how to explain this situation to Lucien and Jean-Grégoire and the National Assembly. "Medium term, depending on how that goes, securing your aid in liberating Cheliax. Long-term liberating Hell but I've always assumed that would be a ten or twenty-thousand year project and I'd understand if you don't want to stick around."

"The reason you sound threatening right now is – okay, from my perspective, I asked you what concessions you'd want from my government in exchange for helping us with our Cheliax problem, you said you'd want Cheliax to be ruled according to your specifications, I told you I thought we wouldn't have the resources to do that, you said you could provide those resources but didn't specify what you wanted us to do with them, which in my culture is a way to communicate that you don't actually want us to know what you want so that you can retain the option of punishing us whenever you like without violating any explicit contract."