"True. I do imagine it was frightening."

"Terrifying.  I asked if anyone else knew and Lilie said 'no' and I said 'that's important to us' and Ms. Chua just said 'I imagine it is', and I wasn't sure - plus, like, now I exist and would have preferred not to." Sigh. "Maybe Lilie'll convince her she can stop gagging demons."

"I'm not sure Lilie thinks very highly of other demons."

"No, but she could confirm that they can't take souls."

"There's that."

"That is the whole ostensible justification for the gagging, as far as I know."

"...having spoken to Melkor I am not certain that it's a completely ridiculous concern that people might be talked into trusting people they begin with a bias against but in generic form that applies just as well to angels and fairies."

"And isn't best handled with gags. By all means don't let them talk at length to their summoners alone lest they get their sympathies, but not letting them communicate anything at all for decades -"

Nod.

"I will ask the interpreters at Ganymede to keep to one or two at a time."

Nod.

Meanwhile:

Kib gets really good computer syncing set up and allows Aydanci out of his sight for thirty seconds. He does not repeat the experiment for two and a half weeks, during which Aydanci is relentlessly quizzed about whether it is possible that anything awful might have happened in those thirty seconds. Aydanci does not report anything concerning about the temporal order of his memories, or anything.

...Kib tentatively lets Aydanci out of his sight for half an hour.

Well, that's progress. 

Nothing bad has happened. Nothing interesting has happened either. It is very weird. He says as much to Kib.

"For me it could still be a holding pattern till my dreams are all in, I dunno what to tell you."

"Are the dreams close?"

"I think a few years out."

"Long time for them to be nice for no reason."

"Have a better guess?"

"Thauron got himself in trouble? But no, not really."

"I'm starting to think you were just plain wrong about computational expense being a thing, too."

"Yeah."

"Either that or this is real and we're just reaaaaaal paranoid. I might actually buy it if I were you, what with the whole opened with a plausible rescue thing."

"And Ruviri, it would have been exceptionally easy to not do Ruviri, I wouldn't even have thought to find that implausible. I've - thought about it. Doesn't make sense there are just two worlds..."

"And door thievery isn't inherently less plausible than a giant snake but come on, this whole -" Gesture. Anxious check of his Aydanci monitor.

"Yeah, exactly. It's just ridiculous and full of plot.

Which, I mean, we would be, wouldn't we, if the war had never happened and we'd found a place like this -"