The demon looks at Chua, who looks like she's seriously considering taking the "murder" suggestion, but then Chua nods and the demon offers him writing materials.

"Thank you."

Letter to Cam: are there times of day free? 

He relaxes considerably once he has written it. "Anything I can answer for you while I'm here?"

"What's going on with all the people who look alike?" asks Chua, gesturing at the little heap of basement dwellers.

"Different universes have - we think it's more or less 'the person you would have been if you were born that species in that situation?' Not like forks but you tend to find you have a lot in common with them. And then there are also forks."

"We could tell they're not forks," says the demon.

"You said you didn't have a way to oblige daeva to take summons," Chua says.

"I do not have a way to oblige daeva to take summons."

The demon picks up a Hazel wizardry book. "Some things from this world are hard to conjure. Some are not."

"Spells don't all work on daeva, and some only work if they're letting them. If their mind-control spells work on unwilling daeva then you could recruit in Hazel for the thing you want, but I think the crew handling Hazel has decided not to tell wizards about summoning yet lest we get wizard daeva with 1802 ethical sensibilities."

"One of the people who looks like you carries a wand," says the demon.

"Even now you're weaseling as much as you think you can get away with," says Chua disgustedly. "I knew you were up to something and I'm beginning to wonder if you depend on being up to something to live."

"Timothy's in training to be a wizard, yes. So's Minor, the vlog demon, they're brothers. I was not up to anything until you captured Swan and declined to hand him over, then I was 'up to' making sure the trial forensics didn't run across exactly this, and right now I am 'up to' being mildly annoyed to have been brought into existence with loose hair in a windowless room somewhere I can only presume is in your star system."

"You're complaining about your hair?"

"This is Earth," says the demon.

"The fiasco with the arrests had nothing to do with Elf forking."

"On your end; it had everything to do with it on ours. We were not equipped to do spot arrests and competent trials but we offered anyway because you weren't budging on Swan and at any moment someone could have started running trial forensics and noticed Elf forking and we were highly motivated to avoid that.

Elves don't have a nudity taboo but we do have a comparably strong taboo on having loose hair. Please don't fork people again but should you find yourself doing so know that creating them naked is far less - frightening to wake up to - than creating them with hair unbraided."

"I see," says the demon.

"Rossi, you useless idiot," Chua growls to neither of them.

"Perhaps he thought that the information shouldn't be shared with people who might use it and tell demons about it, that being the exact outcome we were so afraid of."

"Who else knows?" asks the demon.

"Cam, the entire population of the planet he holed, those people in my government whose work touched on it, the Hazel teenagers, President Malo. The only daeva to know of it are Cam, Minor, and now you. We haven't been introduced -"

"This is Lilie Ho, the founder of the Ganymede Circle Police," says Chua.

Lilie inclines her head.

"A pleasure."

"I suppose in a way I owe your - duplicate's brother - for alerting me that I did not have to make do with random demons of no particular alliances," snorts Chua.

"I will pass on your compliments, he'll be delighted."

Chua snorts again.

"What ought we expect of the diplomatic incident?" inquires Lilie.

"- what we would like would be reassurance that this will not be shared or repeated, no matter how angry Ms. Chua gets with Elves in the future. If that's forthcoming then we can agree many mistakes have been made on both sides of this meeting of peoples and we'd be happy to move forward with all of them forgiven all around. If that can't be promised, then we have cause for concern."

"Certainly it would be a catastrophe if the anarchy of Hell became aware of this," agrees Lilie. Chua does not contradict her aloud.

"Exactly. Conveniently the Valar have that truth effect of theirs and it can be testified that all parties have every intention of maintaining the secrecy, and then there's no need for more invasive measures to assure it."

"It really should have occurred to me that if this did work the result would be having you in my house," mutters Chua in a voice full of loathing.

"Forgiveness is abstract. What concrete results should we anticipate?" inquires Lilie.