"I'd appreciate that!"

So to Mars he goes.

Where President Melo is delighted to meet with him. "Come in come in - I am so curious to hear how the entire mess with the daeva has gone from your perspective - would you prefer we take another walk for this?"

"Oh, no, this I've nothing to say that isn't all over the news back home. What a mess. I couldn't possibly have concocted a defendant as sympathetic to my constituents as Celendra - did you hear about that case? - and since then it's been hard to salvage the confidence of my allies back home in the capacity of the GCP to deliver justice."

"I heard the general outline, yes."

"We were hoping at one point to develop a unified-across-the-multiverse way of handling crimes by daeva, so that no matter where they got into trouble - and often they hardly have any idea what jurisdiction they're in, really - they could expect the same reaction. That's not going to work, because I will never persuade our courts or my King to accept the gagging, the lack of an appeals process, the inability to hire their own attorneys, everything to do with the Way case...given that, the thing worth fighting for seems to be a noninterference policy, where we prosecute crimes against us and you prosecute crimes against you and Godspring and Hazel can eventually set up their own systems or start reporting problems to whichever extant organization they are most philosophically aligned with. Since there are still hundreds of circles out for Swan, who was distinctly in our jurisdiction and is currently serving a four hundred year sentence in our world, I can't persuade my allies that the GCP is interested in such a noninterference policy, and I think the Vanyar are now inclined to offer asylum and accountability under our law to anyone facing prosecution in a jurisdiction with procedures they consider inhumane."

"That fairy they've been after for decades, though, that's not very noninterference policy."

"That fairy they asked us to grab, as a trade for Cam, because they'd been looking for him for a century with no success. I am less than delighted with the court decision there but they're looking to precedent. Someone gets accidentally summoned to an Earth in 1941, goes and tortures Hitler and six of his top leadership to death, are we going to prosecute them?"

"I think it would amount to a show trial if that, if they were just killed, but torture is..."

Nod. "It was discussed at length in the trial transcripts, has anyone gotten you a good translation?"

"One of my aides summarized it for me. It's an elegant argument, but it's not one anyone is eager to present to the surviving children of the victims."

"I understand. It isn't the decision I would have handed down, but so it goes - there're a couple Elven jurisdictions where the monarchs do in fact wield relevantly absolute power but somehow I don't think that'd be any more popular. So there are a couple approaches we can take. One, I can have my staff put a ton of pressure on the Vanyar to abandon the idea of offering asylum to prisoners who they don't think will get a just hearing in the jurisdiction where they committed the crime. We are their biggest trading partner, with the wholehearted cooperation of the GCP I probably have the leverage to get that agreement.

The reason I haven't thrown my weight behind that solution is because I have a sinking feeling I know where it goes. Hazel announces in ten years that they're keeping wayward daeva in Azkaban - have you heard of it -"

"No?"

"Hazel has these things called Dementors. They're magical creatures, and they feed on positive emotions. Their effect on everyone in their presence is to make them incapable of experiencing happiness, and to slowly erase their joyful or peaceful memories until all they are left with is the worst moment of their life, experienced over and over again. Hazel used these creatures to staff their prisons, until recently, when a vigilante went around with a fairy and grabbed all the Dementors they could find and threw them into deep space. Azkaban was the largest such prison, with a few hundred Dementors and enough human staff to prevent the invariably suicidal occupants from starving or harming themselves in their cells."

Melo frowns. "I feel like if the Elves believe Ganymede is inhumane there are better ways to express that than to develop new legal apparatus specifically to acquit someone who by his own admission committed what were unambiguously in the relevant location serious violent crimes."

Headshake. "We're talking about four or five different actors with different motives. The Vanyar decide Ganymede is inhumane and other places might be even worse and they want to have a legal framework to try people themselves, as an alternative. The Valar are asked to do something about a fairy who Ganymede has been unable to arrest for a century, and they arrest him. The fairy's defense attorney decides to take advantage of the lack of precedent to establish footing for a defense of his client. The courts consider the legal argument persuasive. No one acquitted the fairy to make a point about Ganymede, and everyone aware of Ganymede was very upset about the ruling because it so obviously precludes future cooperation."

"Do you think this conversation might be more productive if I invited the head of the GCP in? She's been in town, complaining to my justice department till she's blue in the face."

"I would be happy to relieve the burden that has unjustly fallen on your justice department, being at least of the same species as the people she has a complaint with."

"It's a mess, isn't it? I can wait to ask her in if there's anything better said without her here. She's a bit long-winded."

"I can't countermand our courts but I agree that this decision speaks poorly of them. If Ganymede doesn't want lots more instances of this it'd really help if they revised their procedures; they could even make an end to such interference a condition of the revisions, I think I can talk Ingwë into that."

"They won't like that, looks like knuckling under to strongarm tactics. I can tell you now she'll take a paragraph to say that just because you can have gods perform your arrests doesn't make you right."

"I appreciate hearing it from you and without the paragraph." Sigh. "By all means let's talk to her."

So the president invites her in. "Maitimo, this is Rochelle Chua; Rochelle, Prince Nelyafinwë."

"Good afternoon," says the elderly Singaporean lady.

"Thank you. It's a pleasure to meet you."

"I wish I could say the same but recent events have been among my least favorite experiences and I only dimly hope that you'll be reasonable about this. I've just had to gut my organization over a demonic vlog and a sabotaged forensics department and to the best of my ability to tell the international community thinks the Ganymede Circle Police exist solely to offend them personally, or maybe they think we persecute daeva at random for entertainment? As though there are no real threats, no real constraints on our resources that mean we cannot be judged as though omnipotent, no real reason to react strongly when indestructible extradimensional creatures terrorize the people they were summoned to help. The GCP was willing to work with your people when it seemed like you were willing to perform good faith trades, when it seemed like we were all on the same side, but the buck keeps getting passed to other agents who always turn out to have their own motives and no useful accountability at only the most inconvenient times and frankly I will need very strong assurances to believe that anything you tell me today is more than empty platitudes easily ignored by anyone who could decide that you are not relevantly entitled to make agreements for them this week!"