"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."

"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?"

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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."

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

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

"If they'll listen to you."

"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?"

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

"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."

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

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

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

"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..."

"There was?" asks the representative, alarmed.

"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."

"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 -"

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

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

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

He rushes off.