"That'd be nice."

"I will also just snap the binding right now if you ask me to."

"I think I will go eat something from Bar and go to my room and nap. If the time dilation is friendly you might not be inconveniencing me at all to look properly straitlaced."

Nod. "Ambela - nice to properly meet you, incidentally - are the Valar available for arrest excursions?"

"Some of them may be -" She asks.

The Valar are willing to be more interventionist in daeva relations if that's what their Elven advisors think their role should be, but they are not especially inclined to hand people over to human authorities who seem uncertain of whether their prisoners are really people.

She relays this. "Will they settle for the opportunity to verify that we have them in custody like with Cam?"

"I don't know but if they're displeased they're displeased, so be it. Maybe I can invite them to your Taniquetil to discuss it with the Valar if they're upset."

"That would be interesting."

"With my set it'd be a terrible idea. If it'd be a terrible idea with yours I will not do it."

"It's not terrible but I'm not sure it would soothe people from Revelation with no reason to be impressed by the Valar."

"They're - scared. There's a lot more to it than that but - fundamentally they think they are the protectors standing against hostile forces that cannot be reasoned with in defense of the innocent and - there are a lot of human things Elves just wouldn't do but the way Revelation treats daeva isn't really one of them. And the - point of the Valar, if I am to concede that they have one after having orchestrated the murder of my whole set - is to build spaces where people don't have to be scared, and are better for it. I don't know that it'd work, but it might get somewhere."

Are we talking about how horrible Ganymede is because Ganymede is horrible.

(Timothy comes through the door with him, thanks the angel.)

"Yes, that's what we're talking about. I wouldn't have had you see it, honestly."

"I am really glad I did, I want to go back, the people there need me some of them are very lonely."

"It's safe to try sending people to visit ours if you would like to." She scoops up Mingling and hugs him.

Such hugs. "It's a very ugly place and they're not allowed to go near anyone and they're not allowed to hug anyone unless a stranger who has never met them and can't talk to them wants to hug them just because anything's better than being completely alone. They can't talk. They can't sing. They can't write. They can't make new files on the computer. They can't pick out letters on a board. They are not very good people but I think after ten Years in that place I would not be a very good person either."

"The angels and fairies can talk and write, they're not just being gratuitously terrible. And the architecture is unremarkable by human standards."

"They could train their staff to not give demons their souls and then let the demons talk and write. They are too being gratuit- gratuit -"

"They are not being as good as they could possibly be. But apart from the gagging it's nicer than even a low security prison from during my lifetime."

"Well if there are any of those around I'll visit those too."

"Less prison violence seems obviously not worth the 'no human contact' tradeoff to me."

"If there had been any fellow inmates I wanted to hug I could've nodded encouragingly at them. Didn't you think it was precious that the furniture angel got visitors?"

"Oh, it's miles above my world - except the gags, I know people who'd take Azkaban over a gag - but I've known since I was five that I needed to conquer my world. When you have the resources they have you should be able to do more than impress a teenager from 1802."