"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."

"A vlog's worth of provocation they link to a bunch of suicides."

"For a society with the right to suicide they sure do act like it's the worst thing in the world."

"There wasn't always a right to suicide and it became a high profile issue at around the same time harassment did. Somebody who was on record stating that they wanted to give their meds a shot and stick around at least till some movie came out said something inflammatory on the Internet, and got flooded with messages that just said over and over 'you have a right to suicide'... His boyfriend was a lawyer, it snowballed."

" - ah. That's useful context, thanks. Minor's not guilty, is he, he hasn't said anything aimed at a specific person and all he's said in general is 'summoners become daeva when they die'..."

"I do not think he would be convicted even with a lackluster defense."

"Which makes it look kind of like they're just prosecuting him because he stresses them out."

"They're probably under pressure from Arati's government or something."

Sigh.

Minor goes to Tirion and makes eight videos with stunning Elven backdrops, talking about Elf history and culture and attitudes towards daeva - "they're pretty cool! Also a lot of them had already heard of me, which is weird, apparently they're super fascinated by Ganymede since they had a few high-profile daeva trials themselves and I come up a lot in Ganymede debates. People randomly give me hugs and tell me to stay safe, which is - nice? People usually don't tell daeva to stay safe, and I guess they have a good reason, but having everyone sort of mentally assume that nothing bad that happens to you is really bad since after all you're indestructible is kind of tiring after a while."

He still makes his appearances on Sesame Street Luna; he doesn't explain himself.

Some of his commenters notice the Sesame Street appearance. They think it's cute. There's already an angel character and a fairy character but they're an adult and a Muppet, respectively, so this is sort of groundbreaking.

Everybody likes the Elf architecture.

The African Union GCP liaison sends Maitimo a message: Good news, apparently it's pretty easy to get a new section of the prison set up to just be a straight antimagic zone, they can do without security fairies there if they need to! Chua even said it's all right if the demons aren't gagged there as long as they can't make anything or escape. That should make the handoff way easier and more palatable for your folks.

That's amazing and, yeah, pretty much resolves all our worries. Nice work! Next steps on my end:

Get formal agreement from the Valar that any future daeva they're asked to retrieve go there (should give them a step by step procedure, they work best with those: for example does the GCP want to be notified before a dropoff, and if so who, and in what medium, and how far in advance of the dropoff do you want the notice; should the daeva be notified before being grabbed (presuming they can't flee) and what should be the wording of the notification (this prevents issues like 'the fairy is flying with her pet cat, gets grabbed, cat dies')). Can you help me out with the details for that?

Get formal agreement from relevant local governments that if anyone summons a daeva to get them asylum, they can be permissibly relocated in this manner (this is a much easier sell than 'they should be forced to dismiss the daeva', unsurprisingly) - I don't need anything from you here, I'll send you updates. The relevant jurisdictions are the Vanyar, the Falathrim, the Teleri, the Mithrim, the Iathrim, the Avari, and of course us but I'll have our law through by tomorrow, called someone up to draft it just now.

File court orders for relocation of the five daeva your director wanted originally - I'm expecting their lawyers to object, we'll see how strenuously. I could have the request for a court order in by the filing deadline tonight if there's anything on fire on your end that we can douse with some tangible progress here, or I can tell the lawyers to make it more airtight, submit in a week or two.

The court cannot technically order the Valar to do anything (I know, I know...) but they are very responsive to the argument that they ought to be accountable and so on; I have a friend near Taniquetil who I expect can secure their agreement to abide by the results of 3). If this fails there are probably still some ways to do a transfer once I have a court order.

You should really have your own GCP liaison, maybe one per jurisdiction, but we're shortstaffed; I can put an ad out for you if you want. That'd be who you'd tell. I can pull double duty in the meanwhile, Africa's heavy on long term summonses that are mostly pretty chill and we don't have many incidents. We're fine with giving notices (it's usually impossible but e.g. we sent that vlog demon a notice even before putting out the circles). Airtight in a week or two is better than sloppy tonight, it's not an on-fire emergency since at least they can't run amok in the meantime.