"Not just illegal, it's an automatic life sentence. You could probably find people to do it anyway. There's the recent would-be Dark Lady who used it to make three hundred Muggles slit their children's throats in a blood ritual to make herself immortal, I don't think she'd take much convincing. Look, my world takes 'this is a problem you can solve with the Imperius Curse' about the way your world takes 'this is a problem you can solve by summoning an unbound demon', no one inclined to propose it under even extreme circumstances belongs anywhere near power. If Maitimo'd asked us we would have strongly suggested he get replaced."

"This seems prudent," says Lilie, before Chua can get started.

"The five daeva were selected because they had resisted their circles for a considerable time," says Mirelótë. "They were unlikely to respond and were able to take random summonses - may in fact have been motivated to do so to avoid what I'm led to believe is a very distracting sensation of having hundreds of circles. They are now summoned by immortal people and kept thoroughly away from this star system. Their stories will not be very quelling to any daeva who are afraid of prison in general or Ganymede in particular, to be sure, but they might be to some who fear specifically getting caught. No one will look at a loose binding and think in the course of dealing with some criminal temptation, 'well, I can probably resist a bunch of circles'."

"The fairy's sentence in particular is a travesty."

"As I understand it he currently lives among the people who were so eager to acquit him. If he recidivizes on their own heads be it. We have no grounds for complaint if you keep your circles for him open should he fail to be contained there."

"It's really reassuring that you have such a principled objection to letting people be tortured by daeva in order to achieve political gains, or you might be tempted to hold the Elf thing over their heads."

"Isn't your little brother's manifesto all about how harmless demons are?" sneers Chua.

"Uh, no, it's that demons are like humans, which to those of us who grew up in the late 1700s is not a ringing endorsement."

"Demons are lawless," says Lilie.

"There's no confusion about what happens if this gets leaked to Hell, in any event. It's good this was discovered by an organization like the GCP whose entire mission and directive is to prevent harm to vulnerable people from daeva."

"You don't sound like you actually read my charter," remarks Lilie.

"What is your charter?" asks Mirelótë.

"To bring to account daeva who transgress against the human beings they were summoned to help, and dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," says Lilie.

"They haven't been brought to account," adds Chua.

"They may yet dissuade those given the opportunity from the impulse to do harm," Mirelótë says.

"I can understand having 'human beings' in the charter when you thought you were alone in the multiverse but now it just sounds super xenophobic, you guys should squeeze in a rewrite. Also you punish a lotta crimes not against the summoner."

"I'm not sure this is the time to nitpick," Mirelótë tells him.

"Sure."

"So the plan to break the black hole demon out of Ganymede if we wouldn't give it over, you wouldn't have resorted to anything illegal like mind control or murder for that?" says Chua silkily.

"You're asking me? I didn't even hear about it until Timothy wrote my girlfriend asking for a telepath. Uh, at a guess he might've literally grabbed Cam and teleported him out which is definitely illegal but not exactly mind control or murder? Or tried to explain the problem directly to the summoner if he thought that stood a chance. Or maybe a complicated substitution plot with Polyjuice - like, there are laws Timothy'd break, that doesn't make him a potential murderer."

"I'm asking the people who for whatever reason have been sent to have this conversation."

"Your finding Maitimo personally offensive substantially limited the selection," says Mirelótë.

"He's a slimy, two-faced self-righteous -"

"Rochelle," sighs Lilie.

"He's the worst," he says agreeably. "You can get him to cut it out by being like 'Timothy how about you not lie' but in this case that seems like it'd possibly just make everything worse since then neither of you would be pretending at cordiality. You liked the new ambassador, right? If you don't make any more of 'em you won't have to be around any more of 'em."

"His pretenses hardly improved anything and I doubt he could have failed to notice that I was unmollified by his attempts at charm!"

" - I am pretty sure it coulda been worse. Also consider that when you are yelling at him in front of other people and he is being charming you are not his intended audience, they are? He cares what President Melo thinks of him, they might put a Godspring portal on Mars eventually. If you wanted him to be appallingly rude but totally honest that was a bad way to frame the interaction."

"If - you all -" Chua gestures broadly, "actually wanted the fairy arrested, properly, you can't expect me to believe this is what would be happening."

Shrug. "I have tortured lots of animals to death, personally, I'm not super thrilled by the court ruling."

Mirelótë is carefully neutral about that assertion. "There are a lot of tradeoffs we could choose to make if we wanted it more than we wanted what we'd sacrifice on the way. You could attempt to force us to find it the single most important thing on our priority list. I don't expect from you that you'd threaten innocent people mostly uninvolved with the decisions that have so upset you to get it, but you could."

"I'm not a monster," says Chua. "You persist in thinking of me as a monster for attempting to do my job, which is not interplanetary politics, it is capturing criminal daeva."

"No one thinks you're a monster. They think you're not good enough at your job for the GCP to be an asset in solving the problems the multiverse is going to create."

"Lilie was the first person to guess that multiple circles might succeed where single ones failed," Chua says, pointing across the room at her predecessor. "She is responsible for over a century of better behaved daeva and contained threats and whatever you think of me her legacy deserves respect."

"When no one is making Rochelle do interplanetary politics she is a committed and efficient director," Lilie says.

"Great. So then we should just arrange for her to not need to do that. Ideally by having someone else whose job it is to do that, except I think all the people on your staff who were doing it well have been fired."

Niari is good at the interworld stuff and I think would handle a promotion very gracefully, he tells Ambela.

I'd ask for advice on how to suggest it but Ms. Chua seems extremely sensitive to your stylistic tells.

"I tried having employees talk to you people and they were all variously - suborned, charmed into ceasing to ask questions -" says Chua.