He is reading a summoning textbook - it's not as interesting as the electrical engineering textbook but it's just as important and he wants to pester some daeva about the languages spoken in Heaven, Hell, and Fairyland. It has a background chapter on Revelation.
He asks Bar for Cam's obituary.
"They die before they're ten, Cáno, they never get a chance -"
"Also occasionally the state of education is bad enough that they literally don't know about the sex/pregnancy connection, or sometimes not all participants in the sex were thrilled to be having it, or, odd as this may seem given the state of preindustrial human societies along various axes, people want children. Or less pleasantly they need them for complicated socioeconomic reasons."
Humans are extremely common, as are assorted variants on the theme, well past my ability to keep count.
"That won't actually help with infant mortality, you can't reliably get a newborn to complete a circle, it doesn't count if you hold somebody's hand and move it for them."
"Not directly but it can change the underlying conditions. - how does it evaluate who is responsible, if Timothy's mindcontrolling people does that count?"
"The mindcontrol thing has some pretty serious drawbacks and I'm not even sure it'd work on babies."
"The form of feeling evil I do best is 'I will acquire this accessory for personal convenience', babies are not very useful accessories, but also I'm just not sure - it works by making my will overwhelmingly appealing, and I don't know if that'd even do anything, I don't know how much volitional control babies have."
"Yeah, and the ones who are liable to die young are liable to have the worst motor skills."
"There's a wizard spell that does mind control. It's very illegal, not because wizards are especially high-minded about mind-altering magic but because you can only cast it with actively malicious intent. I've been using it to pay demons because some of them enjoy it?"
"It's sort of floaty? Dunno. If that's your thing."
His audience is staring blankly. "I can't tell if Elves don't catch this sort of comment because your society is so open or because you haven't invented anything more complicated than pining and hairpetting."
"There's a blessing for all kinds of weird stuff but at least by 1370 no mind control, that'd be - it'd inspire a lot of discussion, to put it mildly. And - there have been one or two cases of someone being forced to have sex, in Valian history? But it's ...present as a hypothesis... in a way that'd make no sense back home."
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