"Can't you just check that?"

"We can get the first valid circles, but we don't think they were answered, so we can't match them to daeva."

"Has the rate new daeva start existing changed over time? Is it the same by type of daeva - when did Limbo start catching people -"

"Increased some, close to it, and well before anyone knew what year it was but probably fifty or sixty thousand years ago."

"Huh."

"Do you have an idea of what we should read in order to - think of things humans would think of - well enough to summon safely?"

"...I can teach summoning but I'm not sure I know how to fill those gaps and be sure I got them all."

"There's lots else to do, anyway - we were going to come up with a plan to get everyone in my world summoning, unless your Valar can just fix things..."

"Not fast enough, they build up their power over time. We can take immigrants but that sounds like also something that'd require a good model of things we don't know."

"Yeah, taking refugees is praiseworthy but not risk-free."

"It seems obviously worth it but if there are sufficiently many horrible things that haven't come up yet then doing it more carefully is definitely worth it. - do human societies sometimes do that, what goes wrong -"

"They do. Sometimes the refugees are opportunistically used as cover by attackers, sometimes they overwhelm the resources of their hosts, sometimes they have values differences that are particularly troubling in democracies but even if they don't vote they can lobby and make disagreeable neighbors, sometimes they resist assimilating and reproduce the problems that led them to flee..."

"So maybe we make another planet for them somewhere, Valinor's orbit is a bit delicate and I'm not sure we could have another habitable planet in our star system but the Valar can extend themselves better within our world than to new ones, and the status of backups would at least be clearer -

- are humans hard to rule -"

"I am unclear on what rule even entails among Elves. If someone disobeys you, do they get into trouble?"

Blink. "Uh, you might need to be more concrete? If they were hurting people and I asked them to stop and they didn't then they might get into trouble..."

"But that's for breaking the no-hurting-people law, right - who sets the laws, who enforces the laws, does 'you are the crown prince' mean anything except 'people will voluntarily do what you tell them'-"

"...what else would it mean -"

"Elves are kind of surreal."

"No kidding. Uh, I am aware of exactly one case where a human's status as royalty meant exactly and only that people would voluntarily obey him and it was a crazy guy who spontaneously declared himself Emperor and was humored on smallish matters by many of the people around him because they thought it was funny. Usually with humans being in charge means having the ability to enforce rules by retaliating against violators in some way."

"We have about a dozen laws and we have courts - just, not very often, it really doesn't come up - if I wanted to add a new law I could do that, if there's a disagreement my word settles it, but that's more a point of fact than of law -"

"Maybe you should have a planet built somewhere where the Valar are relevantly powerful and then have Miranda run it for you and then if you really want to rule humans you can watch and learn."

"Humans don't usually love being ruled by thirteen year olds but it's been done."

"...I was not at thirteen up for running a planet -"

"Could you have got that way in a hurry if someone handed you one anyway?"

"...I suppose."