"That is actually not a vice I've caught them exhibiting."

"Huh!"

"Yeah, I know surprisingly little about their personal lives or those of anybody else they know."

"If it's common among Elves not to have seen your personal life in thirty thousand years I can see how that might follow..."

"I think it is uncommon, but the Elves I know are a weird sample."

"How did you end up entangled in Elf business, anyway?"

"Got summoned by one. He let me talk, so I got ahold of my parents, and after that I dug around in the languages and eventually decided it'd be faster to phone him and asked what gives. Went from there."

"Pretty reasonable, I guess. Should I not ask what he wanted you for?"

"You probably shouldn't, honestly. Sorry."

"Oh, well. I will contain my curiosity. You can distract me with fantastic tales of Hell, I like fantastic tales of daeva realms."

"Most demons live on an enormous rectangle of solid gold."

"That's very silly of them."

"The enormous rectangle of gold is under all three concordances and has Earthlike gravity."

"Well, all right, it admittedly could be worse. Still. One day I will achieve interdimensional travel and peace between angels and demons and then it will be possible for the people of Hell to redecorate more conveniently."

"Peace would be nice. They're not all racist, we have some trade going through Fairyland and occasionally Earth - less occasionally soon, I expect - but it's enough to be a problem."

"I am a peacemaking sort of person. Also outrageously hubristic. Which is a slightly more unsettling characteristic to have in a world that apparently contains a nonzero number of gods, but then, they're apparently pretty shit gods."

"They are! Like, 'invented Dwarves' is a nice line on a resume but he didn't do anything much else..."

"How impressed should I be with the inventor of Dwarves? I've heard only the vaguest of things."

"They're neat! Short beardy genderless anarchocapitalists in space."

"A fine invention."

"Quite. I am excited about them. One of Elvis's brothers married one and is very excited to go back to them."

"What's the obstacle?"

"It's in space. From Valinor. It is not in space from Earth, or not obviously so."

"That's quite an obstacle. Okay, so obviously we urgently need to tell them about summoning - they don't know about summoning, right, or we'd already be in contact with them via two-way conjuration - how long's the trip?"

"About a lightyear."