"Do you have an overthrow plan?"

"Not yet!"

"I am skeptical of the 'meet new planet, spy on and usurp its government' M.O."

"Would you rather I let them keep torturing political prisoners?"

"A lot of Earth governments also used to torture political prisoners and improved on this baseline without violent overthrow, like, I understand the urgency but you haven't tried 'establish trade and set a good example and loan them an ethicist'."

"...yes," he says, "the purpose of the spying is to find out exactly what the problem is, at which point I start considering possible solutions."

"I'm not sure spying on them opens in good faith!"

"Neither does running an empire where if you openly criticize the government you will be arrested for sedition and never seen again and the way in which people carefully avoid discussing what happens to you will heavily imply you're being tortured for the Emperor's personal amusement!"

"They don't know they're auditioning for the goodwill of a more advanced society! I don't know that the world would be a better place if someone had annexed Belgium over King Leopold and I don't think you do either!"

"Discussion of whether it's appropriate to overthrow the government is very premature until we know what the situation actually is. I just don't think I gain anything from refusing to consider the possibility, or from being exquisitely polite about how I find out what's going on given what I already know - and I'll be very surprised if you tell me you've never joked about taking over the world for its own good -"

"What you know is three weeks of rumor, sounds like. You could send a daeva suitably immune to substantial amounts of the category 'torture' to go say hi instead of running the risk of telling a merely unpopular emperor you've been reading his diary."

"How willing are you to be the test case for the interaction of daeva indestructibility with local magic? I wouldn't send anyone I liked to Akaiet, daeva or otherwise. Not as a first resort."

"I can't perform any independent check on how worrying your rumors should be," Cam points out, "you've got me a bit sewn up, the best I can hope for is a slide along the curve between privacy invasion and flying blind when your BATNA is finding somebody who says 'sure summoner just name your top ten movies'."

"Yes, well, some joker's been going around telling everyone that demons are universally evil and thirst for human souls, you may have heard."

"Yeah, fuck that guy."

"I know if I were a demon I wouldn't touch a summons with a ten-foot pole in the modern social climate. Say, what's your name, anyway? I'm Sindri."

"Cam, pleased to meet you. What can I say, I live in hope that someone will let me terraform Mars."

"Ooh. I'd say you should talk to my parents about that, but I'm not yet fully convinced you're not an infohazard."

Sigh. "Rar."

"I'm family friends with the Grand Duchess of Thule," he explains, "which I assume is more national governments than you had an in with ten minutes ago, even though Thule is not very internationally important. And 'hey let's terraform Mars' sounds like exactly the kind of thing that I'd refer someone to my parents for if I was very sure nobody's souls were on the line."

"I don't want your soul! I wanted to terraform Mars and now I want to not fuck up first contact with the planet of improbable mountains! Please feel entirely free to not give me your soul!"

"I could call you back in a day with the capacity to conjure for verification," he suggests.

"If you send me back I can just check up on whatever I like in Hell," Cam says.

"Yes, you could duplicate the entire planet if you felt like it, but to my understanding that would take longer than a day, I still have a better grasp of the search space. And it would be really annoying to dismiss you for two minutes every time I made an assertion you felt like verifying."

"I don't have to dupe the planet full size," Cam says. "I could check out the mountains, run machine learning on the language, make the castle and see if anybody in there looks tortured at the moment..."