"Pleasure to see you again."

"You too, you too, say hi to your family for me."

"I will!" And he goes off to talk to the GCP liaison.

"So the problem here," says the GCP liaison, "is that the entirety of Ganymede is architected for daeva who can't get too close to each other without permission, can't make things or move things or change things, etcetera. Nice wide hallways, we bother having a cafeteria, that sort of thing. Being bound by a circle is not technically necessary, but if they're going to access the existing facilities they need to be prevented from harassing each other, escaping, damaging the facilities unless they want to do it by banging their heads on the walls, etcetera. Can that effect be duplicated?"

He takes notes. "I can't think how to do it but we have a lot of resources at our disposal, so probably. Suppressing the magic is easy, preventing escapes - well, I will take the problem home and throw my best people at it. And we can keep exploring for new dimensions until we find one that has a magic way to make them take summons, that's the other possible avenue."

"Yeah. I think she'll calm down once the five of them are in custody, you know, she just thinks you're up to something. Maybe a little paranoid in her age."

"I imagine it's been a stressful few months, that'd get to anyone."

"Oh yeah."

"And if we were on better terms I expect I could help with some of your other problems, but as it stands she doesn't trust me enough for that to work out very well. All the more reason to find a fix to this as quickly as possible. It'd be nice if my people working on this at home could run ideas by you in something resembling real time, without the lightleaper jump to stick ten days' delay into fine-tuning anything workable we come up with. Does the GCP conjure for mail?"

"Not directly but the Singapore office gets priority dispatches in the batch packets. I don't think you can piggyback on that unless you pay for the slot or the message is 'quick, arrest this daeva'."

Notes notes. "I'll ask my people to look into that or alternatives, then. Thanks so much."

"Yeah, no problem."

"In the meantime do you suppose there's any way future news releases could indict me, or my government or for that matter my planet, rather than the whole species, as utterly untrustworthy? We were working on a tourism arrangement and a new trade deal and people trust the GCP, if you say we're a species of pathologically scheming liars -"

"I could tell whoever's on press since Chua purged half the office that it sounds racist, maybe. Not like they've met other Elves."

"Well, if the tourism agreement doesn't fall through they'll get the chance. Thank you. Take care."

"Yeah, have a good day."

"My alt confirms that the director of the GCP has decided to double down, purged half the office - including all the moderates, he thinks - told him that he was lying about being unable to force daeva to take summonses - which could be really poor instincts or really good ones, honestly -"

"She thinks he's up to shenanigans. He is in fact totally up to shenanigans and pulling a huge snow job."

"I mean, I think the full extent of his aims with the GCP was until this week 'get them to have slightly more humane procedures so we can let them handle things, since the Elves suck at it' and now it looks like they might not be reformable into an organization with vaguely humane procedures so now it's just 'handle daeva personally ad hoc out of Milliways because the Elves continue to suck at it, try to limit damage done by GCP'. She doubled down before their goals diverged, and that's why they did."

"She was in fact being sabotaged by her forensics demons, I don't think we can hold the position they took about Minor's claims against them..."

"I don't blame them for that, but I do think it's indicative of - hmm - some procedural steps that would have prevented that include 'have a line of communications with daeva', 'answer Minor's repeated messages to you', 'phrase your forensics carefully if you're using them to exclude witnesses from murder trials' - 'don't treat your forensics demons so badly that they'll lie pretty much just to fuck you over', 'let the defense present forensic evidence' - then Silva could have presented it in Arati's case -"

"Oh, yeah, they're not handling things being suddenly unlike what they were designed to handle well at all, but they're not bizarre monsters."

"Sure. Just - not capable of becoming an organization we can trust to handle daeva incidents in the multiverse. Which really isn't a scathing indictment, the Elves aren't capable of becoming that either and I like the Elves fine."

"Sure. Instead of this ad hoc thing maybe there should be a competing organization, see if they can get all the GCP's subscribers to switch. But this would require being less ad hoc. By a lot."

"Yeah. I don't think I'd be personally very good at it, the rule of law means sometimes permitting injustices for procedural reasons etcetera etcetera and I would be so tempted to meddle. 

I have no idea what we should do, though. I can ask Minor to stop provoking them but honestly I would have wanted the information that this is how they handle a vlog's worth of provocation."