Downstairs the door opens and in walks a six year old girl with a weird animal.
"Hi, I'm Bella. And this is Zag. He's a Zigzagoon, apparently you don't have them."
"Oh, dfiferent universes have the same people in them, for some reason. Mingling and I are alternate universe versions, you and Cam and Ambela and Kib and Miranda are. - I'm going off the fact that you look like a small Ambela, are named 'Bella', and I just asked for a tiny Bell, I suppose it is possible these things are coincidences."
"Beings and/or impersonal forces who decide who gets a door."
"It is. They have my gratitude, though, otherwise we'd never have found the multiverse and there's a lot that can be accomplished now that couldn't have without Milliways." And they haven't, like, given a Melkor a door, though he doesn't say that. And they could've given Cam one six months sooner, but he doesn't say that either.
"Like the death thing? They said we could trade Zigzagoons for immortality..."
"You can summon and become a daeva when you die, yeah, at least probably. It's worked everywhere so far. Summoning works better in societies that have something to trade but we're going to make it work everywhere."
"I'm pretty sure you don't need to set a task and payment to collect on the immortality, but response rates might suffer if a lot of summonses were just 'hi, sending you home now'."
"And we're going to increase supply, eventually, but there's going to be a lag - and we might not increase supply much if people mostly summon back their relatives for good - and we're increasing demand a lot in the meantime..."
"Yeah, I don't think you can count on a lot of ex-summoner daeva entering the summonee population if their bereaved actually know how it all works."