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"We'd been led to believe that we were arranging a cooperative prisoner exchange so that we could be assured of - assured of is not merely told about - the safe containment of some particularly difficult criminals in exchange for the extradition of a demon principally responsible for damage within your jurisdiction, not that we were dealing with hostile divine forces," says the representative. "By all means clarify if that's not the case."

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"You are dealing with divine forces who are benevolent but possibly hard to shuffle through red tape. Is the complaint that the summoner who has been verified to have summoned a daeva under a binding, the same binding that the daeva has been verified to be under, could actually have a twin who is the summoner of the daeva in question? Can you just conjure for twins of Ambela and confirm that there aren't any?"

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"That question would be much less disingenuous if the criminal we can't verify were not a cosmetic angel."

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"You know the binding the daeva is under. You have no information about the summoner except that she is an Elf. I honestly do not understand what additional information you get from seeing them standing in the same place."

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"You have a point; given the ability to traverse worlds by portal the binding is completely inadequate regardless of who's maintaining it."

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"The binding prohibits traversing worlds by portal or by any other means including ones yet undiscovered."

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"And leaves completely unprotected any nondaeva who might enter Heaven."

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"Yep. Unless you bind everyone in every daeva realm, and possibly even if you did, landing there as an incarnate would very likely be lethal; we aren't setting up any portals to the daeva realms, but we aren't the only form of interdimensional travel around and it's possible that someone will accidentally find themselves in a daeva realm. If they do, there is no conceivable binding on a few hundred criminals which would save them."

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"I see now that we were hasty in agreeing to anything at all."

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"I regret that you feel that way. Should I ask the Valar to stop collecting criminals?"

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"If they'll listen to you."

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"They are likelier to do so if I can convince them that the safety of your world or ours is somehow improved by their letting these people go. I assume you think that is the case; can you explain to me why?"

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"We do frequently manage to catch stubborn daeva by adding circles and our procedures are definitively safe once they're caught."

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"You've done very well with the resources you have. I expect a less disruptive system has a much higher compliance rate, and from the talk you gave me about close calls with snapped bindings you made it very clear that's a serious concern, one our method obviates."

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"We haven't had a close call in fifty years."

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"I'm three thousand years old, so forgive me if that doesn't seem very long."

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"What I mean to say is that the procedures have been changed and it's no longer a serious problem."

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"I understand why you would be reluctant to switch from a method that works to a different one, even if there's every reason to expect it'd work just as well. But it seems possible there have been more close calls than you realized - for example, I followed up on the question someone asked me about activists who looked like me, and there was an unbound demon running around with the activists for a while..."

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"There was?" asks the representative, alarmed.

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"Yeah - I can show you my forensic conjurations or you can do your own, but the demon is named Minor Finis Way, his summoner was in yet another dimension - not mine or yours - and he signed up for a bunch of appointments and hung out for a few days before leaving for Earth, where he went back to his native dimension."

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"Was this one of the children, they might have forgotten to check children, we know daeva sometimes appear to be children but they so seldom do -"

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"Yeah, looks around fifteen. Obviously he was benignly intentioned but if he hadn't been you might have had a problem."

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"Excuse me, I need to send a memo."

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"Of course. We can continue our discussion later."

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He rushes off.

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