"How long have you been holding them here? Are you feeding that fairy?"

"If you want to raise procedural complaints with the system here you're welcome to have your attorneys talk to ours."

"They won't know what complaints to raise if they don't know how long you've been holding them without trial and whether you're feeding the fairy."

"Yes, they're feeding him. Our laws recognize the right to request an immediate trial, which they have not done. They have been informed they could go to Ganymede if they preferred it, and they do not prefer it, which I hope mitigates some concerns you might have."

"If they have the right to an immediate trial they should've gotten immediate trials, if you wait for criminal daeva to jump through hoops for you you'll be waiting forever."

"They have the right to request an immediate trial, the only hoop involved is saying 'I want a trial', and we're fine with waiting forever."

"You people are unqualified to hold daeva."

"They could go to Ganymede if they preferred."

"If they cooperated with you enough to tell you they prefer it!"

"Yep!"

"Look, these are criminals, they are not disposed to work with you, you need a default that works, and this doesn't hold up."

"I see your point, and we can continue to revise for the needs of new species as we encounter them. I did say we were going to revise procedures to have a trial even without cooperation, and we can make similar adjustments. In the meantime, no one can get hurt and no one is kept under inhumane conditions, which strikes me as a satisfactory state from which to develop better procedures."

"I don't think this is a dire emergency or anything, but it's not good."

"I'll tell the people involved to address it immediately."

Nod.

"Care to walk through the portal into Tirion with me and discuss the other aspect of the problem?"

"All right."

Tirion! There are offices here for daeva who do want to consult with attorneys; he finds one. He closes the door. 

"Demons can make Elves."

"You must be joking."

"I very badly wish I were. Our system is badly optimized for handling miscellaneous murderers because the thing we are trying to prepare for is possibly needing to arrest a significant fraction of Hell. It's a secret; doesn't work naively. But it only takes a few weeks to figure out, and if someone publishes how then they'll all be able to."

"How was this discovered?"

"The day we met Cam we asked him if he could do resurrections, not aware of any of the implications. He tried; it didn't work. Demons can make us new bodies around legitimate copies of our chips, and that's a healthy Elf, but a new body around a demonic chip did nothing. Later, during the war - I was dead at the time, so this is secondhand - someone thought to wonder what went wrong, exactly - whether he was making blank chips, or corrupted ones - and if they were corrupted, if there was a way to restore them. It turns out it's even simpler than that. Read the data from the chip, write it to a new one, all of which can be done with a conjurable machine the size of a chair, and making a body around that goes fine."

"My God."

"I am sure that without that context our insistence on handling Cam - and on having a system for daeva that is far more designed around scalability than due process - are damaging to our credibility. But you can imagine why we are reluctant to offer the context too freely."

"Yes. Yes, I can see that. Well. To the GCP the important things are that the daeva know we'll go for them if they hurt someone - outsourcing to you was a controversial idea for that reason - and that once we have them they know what's going to happen with us, namely trial and sentencing and internment, whether they like it or not. Even scaling up you can probably improve in those areas, especially since you seem so willing to - chat - with them."