"He wasn't just acquitted, he was acknowledged to have done the thing and let off with a defense the court just made up."

"And I'm furious about it and I think you're right to be furious about it."

"You offered to hand them over? She makes it sound like that didn't happen."

"Varda went straight to Ganymede and told them the arrangements that had been made and placed a portal so they could look at the arrestees and make suggestions on further handling. They got upset with her and told her to go away. I wish I'd been there personally to handle communications better but I assure you that Ganymede knew as soon as the arrests happened and were immediately offered all the resources at our disposal to help verify that and handle the arrestees. After they refused we had to develop our own procedure for handling them, which was admittedly ad-hoc and had serious flaws. But Varda went to Ganymede immediately."

"If you told me you were going to arrest a few of my criminals and then what I got was permission to look at them I would be mad at you too."

"She would have happily arranged from there whatever kind of access they suggested. I expect you would have said 'thank you, now I will need the following things for my officers to safely take them into custody' and then she would have provided that."

"Elves don't have prisons, right? You know the cops and the prison guards are different people? You don't show up at Nairobi Detention Center and say 'oh look, over there, gang members! What next?'"

"Yep, that's one of the miscommunications that made the situation such a disaster. I have offered and will continue to offer any restitution we can make, Ms. Chua couldn't think of anything but maybe you can."

"She wants the daeva, give her the daeva, if you were all set to do it then you can do it now."

"She wants the daeva to answer their circles, which we were never able to do because it is not possible."

"You want to talk to my GCP liaison, see if she can figure something out?"

"I'd appreciate that tremendously."

"Sure, sure, she's in -"

"Room 206, ma'am."

"Thank you."

"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."