There are articles about agreements with the dragon; about talks between the governments of New Jerusalem, the Dead Republic and the Kingdom of Ultimate Beauty (on a plane colloquially called the lowest hell); about diplomacy in general and what it’s like; and about whether demons are ever worth talking to.

She'll look at a couple of the articles on whether demons are worth talking to and one on the agreements with the dragon.

The dragon doesn’t want to lose its favorite toys but has agreed that when it gets someone new they can offer its least favorite the chance to emigrate and that they can install amenities that might tempt people who like the idea of being eaten to move there.

Some people are concerned about demons optimizing their words to cause problems and having no genuine common ground with any humans except the desire to see other humans suffer. The jury’s still out on whether all demons are actually like that and it’d be unfortunate to give up powerful potential allies because of racism.

Do... some people like the idea of being eaten and move in with the dragon?

Some people on the internet think the idea is hot, or weird in an interesting way, or very noble, or more than one of those. Fewer like it enough to want to leave wherever they are now and move to a sad cave ruled by an inhuman tyrant.

Super valid of them not to want to do that.

Is there a, like, canonical or representative example of a conversation with a demon she can read?

There’s a documentary that includes an interview. They also sometimes publish books, if she’s just looking for examples of them saying things - not very many even relative to their population but there’s a book-length poem about the desirability of suffering and something like a romance novel and a book about how cool books are.

A demon wrote a book about how cool books are? She'll check that out.

Books let you communicate with people asynchronously and they're free of the constraints of memorized works so they can be exactly what the writer thought was most correct instead of something that rhymes or has assonance or is the right length and they can be less repetitive and you can work on them a little at a time and you don't have to worry about losing your train of thought. If you write a book, no one will ever ask you to back up and repeat yourself because they forgot to listen. They happen at a speed of the reader's choosing. They are so cool. You can even skin someone repeatedly and then use their skin to write things they hate, which is like torturing people into saying things they hate, but also different. (There's an excessive amount of comparing and contrasting of these things.)

Wow, she doesn't know why she expected better but at least she did her due diligence. Is there any suggestion about.... why... the author likes the torturing thing.

Well, they're not super clear on this point, because that isn't what the book is about, but in their digression about torture they mention things like driving people to despair and watching people react to overwhelming sensations.

Is this just like the evil opposite of limerence or something...?

What is the breakdown of souls landing in each place?

The internet is not really sure. There are dozens of worlds and most of them really suck, and they don't necessarily all share statistics with each other. Reliable enough birth and death records to know how many people aren't accounted for are very new. New Jerusalem's plane gets the very young and not a lot of others; Elysium, home to the Bastion of Peace, seems to be the most populous single plane but a lot of that has to be immigration; the Dead Republic also gets a lot of people. Of known adult deaths in 2002, which is a year there's decent data for, about a quarter and about fourteen percent went to the Bastion and the Republic and about one and a half percent to New Jerusalem. There are worlds where double-digit numbers of people are known to have wound up immediately after death (there's one that gets called Heaven sometimes, just to add a little more confusion to the mix, and some people have also moved there). Some of these planes are big enough that there might just be other people very, very far away. (Some are not.) And then there are the ones that don't share their census data with the New Jerusalem internet, if they have it.

Do they get data out of rescues?

Yep! But those people tend not to have been in any position to take censuses, so they only have estimates that might be off in either direction.

So does this end up looking like most adults go to the bad place(s)? Shiiiit.

Depending on whether she counts, say, authoritarian countries with corporal punishment that aren't trying to maximize human misery as among the bad places... yeah. If she googles the answer to this question she may also find some examples of arguments about destroying the Earth.

It sounds so much more reasonable now but still the sort of thing where if you're like "hm maybe we should destroy the Earth" you should recheck your work until it outputs something else. Still, so much more reasonable with this context.

Agnieszka's shift ends.

Bella goes home with her.

The place is mostly blue with gold accents. The couch is just a regular couch, not a sofabed, but it's really remarkably soft; it's right under an interior window that looks out on the hallway, and a few feet from one arm of it there's an exterior wall with a window that looks out on the city. Agnieszka's going to make curry and offers to make extra if Bella wants any.

"I don't know how much I like curry, so maybe not a whole double batch, but I'd love to try it."

Then she can try a little curry. With cheese in it.

"Huh, this is interesting, thank you." She doesn't like it that much but it's okay.

"You're welcome! Sweet dreams," she says, heading for her bedroom.